Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

As Cicero would explain in a speech, “Now why me in particular? Because I knew? Quite possibly the reason [Brutus] called my name was just this: after an achievement similar to my own he called on me rather than another to witness that he was now my rival in glory.”

What’s past is prologue, Shakespeare would say, and so it was with his own life. His need for fame, his tendency to shift with the wind, would dog him to the end. In Caesar’s wake rose young Octavian and Mark Antony. Cicero would again choose the wrong side and, conspicuously, decline to serve in the civil war he helped bring about.

Cicero’s final work, surprisingly, would be on duty. He had never been a man whose career was about duty. Fame. Honor. Proving doubters wrong. That had been his drive. But with his twenty-one-year-old son, Marcus, just completing his first year of philosophical training in Athens, perhaps Cicero wished to instill in his boy a stronger sense of moral purpose than his own ambitious father had in himself. The work premises that Marcus, like Hercules at the crossroads, is being wooed by vice and at risk of forsaking the path of virtue. In response, Cicero took up the Stoic efforts of Diogenes, Antipater, Panaetius (above all), and Posidonius to not only lay down Stoic ethical theory, but give his wayward son the practical precepts he needed to keep him off the road to ruin.

In the work’s dedication, he wrote to Marcus:

Although philosophy offers many problems, both important and useful, that have been fully and carefully discussed by philosophers, those teachings which have been handed down on the subject of moral duties seem to have the widest practical application. For no phase of life, whether public or private, whether in business or in the home, whether one is working on what concerns oneself alone or dealing with another, can be without its moral duty; on the discharge of such duties depends all that is morally right, and on their neglect all that is morally wrong in life.

They are words well written, as was nearly everything Cicero produced. What was missing, it seems, is any personal absorption of them.

In the end, it would be Cicero’s love of rhetoric that would seal his personal fate. He had chided Rutilius Rufus for his brevity in the face of his accusers, saying that rhetoric might have saved him. But walking the plank in 44–43 BC, Cicero delivered fourteen orations against Mark Antony, one of the heirs to Caesar’s power.

It would be one thing if Cicero had, as Cato would have, simply condemned excess and brutality where he saw it. Instead, his Philippics, as the speeches are now known, were a political ploy to play Mark Antony off Octavian, Caesar’s nephew, both with equally authoritarian designs. Cicero was splitting the difference, not standing on principle. And considering his grandiose comparison of his own speeches to those made by Demosthenes more than two hundred years earlier, it’s clear that once again he was motivated more by the limelight than by truth.

The remarks were his undoing. Caesar, though a tyrant, had always shown leniency and good humor—and love for the art of rhetoric. Mark Antony possessed no such gentleness. The Second Triumvirate debated Cicero’s fate for several days, and then, deprived of a trial—as he had deprived his enemies so many years before—the sentence was in: death.

He tried to flee. Then wavered and returned. He contemplated a dramatic suicide like Cato and, shuddering at doing anything so final, struggled on.

Cicero had long talked a big game. He had written about duty; he had admired the great men of history. He had accomplished so much in his life. He had accumulated mansions and honors. He had been to all the right schools. He had held all the right jobs. He had made his name so famous that no one would ever care about his lowly origins again. He was not just a new man, he was, for a period, the man.

But he had compromised much to get there. He had ignored the sterner parts of Stoicism—the parts about self-discipline and moderation (as his chubby visage demonstrates), the duties and the obligations. He had ignored his conscience, in defiance of the oracle, to seek out the cheers of the crowd. If he had followed Posidonius and Zeno better, his life might not have turned out differently, but he would have been steadier. He would have been stronger.

Now, when it counted, there was nothing in him, nothing in his fair-weather personal philosophy that could have helped him stand up in this moment where cruel fate was bearing down on him. He could not rely on the inner citadel that countless Stoics had when they faced death, because he had not built it when he had the chance.

All Cicero could do was hope for mercy.

It did not come. Exhausted, like an animal that’s been chased, he gave up the fight and waited for the killing blow. The assassins caught up with him on a road between Naples and Rome.