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

He was beheaded, his head, hands, and tongue soon impaled on display at the Forum and Mark Antony’s house.

“Cicero is dead.”

That’s how Shakespeare rendered the sudden fall of this great man. It was abrupt, violent, and final.

One of Caesar’s soldiers, Gaius Asinius Pollio, would write one of the most insightful epitaphs for Cicero:

Would that he had been able to endure prosperity with more self-control, and adversity with more fortitude. . . . He invited enmity with greater spirit than he fought it.

Indeed.

CATO THE YOUNGER, ROME’S IRON MAN (KAY-toe)

Origin: Rome

B. 95 BC

D. 46 BC

Every few generations—or perhaps, every few centuries—a man is born with an iron constitution that consists of harder stuff than even his hardiest peers. These are the figures who come to us as myths and legends.

My God, we think, how did they do it?Where did that strength come from? Will we ever see a person like that again?

Marcus Porcius Cato was one of these men. Even in his own time it was a common expression: “We can’t all be Catos.”

This superiority was almost in his blood. He was born in 95 BC to a family that, despite its early plebeian origins, was, by his birth, firmly entrenched in Rome’s aristocracy. His great-grandfather, Cato the Elder, began his career as a military tribune and rose through the ranks as quaestor, aedile, praetor, all the way to consul in 195 BC, all the while earning a fortune in agriculture and making his name fighting for the ancestral customs (mos maiorum) against the modernizing influences of an ascendant empire. Ironically, the one influence most important to Cato that his great-grandfather fought most stridently against with his conservative zeal was philosophy. It was he, after all, who had wanted to throw the Athenian philosophers from Diogenes’s diplomatic mission out of Rome in 155 BC.

How perfect it was that his great-grandson, known as Cato the Younger, would become a famous philosopher, though we should note that Cato the Younger was no Carneades or Chrysippus. There would be no clever dialectics for him. He was cut from a different cloth than even a genius like Posidonius. Nearly every Stoic before and after was in part famous for what they said and wrote. Alone among them, Cato would achieve towering fame not for his words, but for what he did and for who he was. It was only on the pages of his life that he laid down his beliefs as a monument for all time, earning fame greater than any of his ancestors or his philosophical influences.

Not that you would have expected it at first.

As with Cleanthes before him and Winston Churchill nearly two thousand years after him, Cato’s early school days were underwhelming. His tutor, Sarpedon, found him obedient and diligent, but thought he “was sluggish of comprehension and slow.” There were flashes of brilliance—what Cato did understand stuck in his mind like it had been carved into stone. He was disruptive—not behaviorally (one struggles to imagine this disciplined boy ever acting out), but with his imperious and intense demeanor. He demanded an explanation for every task that was assigned to him, and luckily, his tutor chose to encourage this commitment to logic rather than beat it out of his young charge.

Physical force would have never worked on Cato anyway. There is a story about a powerful soldier visiting Cato’s home to argue over some citizenship issue during his childhood. When the determined soldier asked Cato to take up his cause with his uncle, who was serving as his guardian as well as tribune of the plebs, Cato ignored him. The soldier, disliking Cato’s lack of deference, attempted to frighten him. Cato, only four years old, stared back, unmoved. Next thing he knew, the soldier was holding him by the feet over a balcony. Cato remained not only unafraid, but wordless and unblinking, and the soldier, realizing he had been beaten, set the boy down, saying that if Rome were filled with such men he’d never convince anyone. It was the first of a lifetime of battles of political will for Cato, and also a preview of the lengths his frustrated opponents would be forced to go to if they were ever to best him.

It was clear that beneath this determination, there was also an intense, almost radical commitment to justice and liberty. He did not stand for bullying, even in childhood games, and would step in to defend younger boys from older ones. Once after visiting the house of Sulla, Cato asked his tutor why so many people were there paying homage and offering favors—was Sulla really this popular? Sarpedon explained that Sulla received these honors not because he was loved but because he was feared. “Why then didn’t you give me a sword,” he said, “so I could free my country from slavery?!”