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

This might be difficult, it might be exhausting, he said, but soon enough we forget about the hard labor. The results of doing well, though, “will not disappear as long as you live,” he said. And conversely, even though taking a shortcut or doing something bad may bring a few seconds of relief, “the pleasure will quickly disappear, but the wicked thing will stay with you forever.”

His job, Cato believed, in a tradition begun by Diogenes, was to serve the public good. Not himself. Not expediency. Not his family. But the nation. That’s what real philosophy was about, whether his skeptical great-grandfather or fame-chasing friend Cicero understood it or not.

When Cato was sent on a mission to supervise the annexation of Cyprus—precisely the kind of opportunity Roman politicians liked to use to fill up their personal bank accounts—his conduct was irreproachable. His scrupulous sale of Cypriot treasures showed zero irregularities and raised some seven thousand talents for Roman coffers. The only thing he left unsold was a statue of Zeno, the founder of the philosophy to which he was so committed. There was one loss: his friendship with a man, Munatius Rufus, who resented that Cato refused to let Munatius enrich himself.

These were powerful gestures—countersignals—in an empire obsessed with status and demonstrations of power. In Cato’s case, they were sincere. He was not playacting. He was practicing. His studies of Stoicism had taught him the importance of training, of actively resisting temptation and inoculating oneself from the need for comforts and externals. His forefathers had set down a firm example, and he intended to follow it—from the beginning to the end.

Not all Romans could be Catos, but Cato could represent them. In 63 BC, this austere man was named tribune of the plebs, now a powerful position he was eligible for because of his family’s ancient plebeian origins—giving him the chance to balance the interests of the disenfranchised with those of the elites. Cicero was consul, and though they quickly joined forces in calling for the death penalty for the Catilinarian conspirators, they were not always in agreement. The trial of Murena—an officer in the Third Mithridatic War and later a consul—became a study in contrast between Cato and Cicero, the inflexible Stoic on one side, the more fluid and ambidextrous Academic on the other. Cicero on the defense, Cato for the prosecution. More bluntly, Cicero was defending an obviously guilty man, who had gained his offices through bribery.

Defending the guilty was inconceivable to Cato, even if earlier Stoics like Diogenes had supported it. Murena had done wrong, he had not played fair, and he must be driven from public life. It was the Stoic argument: What’s right is right. Nothing else matters.

Cicero’s argument, which comes to us through his published oratory Pro Murena, is more complex. As always with Cicero, there was both self-interest and ego involved. But mostly, he believed that Murena’s defense was for the good of the state. With Catiline threatening violence against the state, could they really afford to tear themselves apart at the same time? If Murena was convicted and ousted from office, wouldn’t the consulship fall into worse hands? Cicero respected Cato immensely, but it’s impossible to read his arguments and not get the sense that he found the man’s unflinching idealism to be naive. Stoicism was well and good, but not if it was so rigid and inflexible that it put the survival of the government at risk.

Indeed, this would be the continual knock on Cato and on Stoicism to this day: Where does commitment end and obstinance begin? Doesn’t government—and life—require compromise? Aren’t there times when we have to pick the lesser of two evils?

Cato seemed not to be so sure. Or rather, he was sure, and this black-and-whiteness presaged the battles and the destruction that were to come.

As a young boy, Cato had shut down the entreaties of that visiting soldier with quiet, unbreakable defiance. As a politician, he would deploy that same tenacity in a similar fashion. Believing himself to be an essential check on Rome’s accelerating collapse and the abandonment of that mos maiorum beloved by his ancestors, he pioneered a political trick that remains in use: the filibuster. Using his voice and willpower as weapons, Cato effectively preserved the positions of his party by talking, talking, and talking. He was able to single-handedly prevent the delivery of tax collection contracts to corrupt parties and prevent laws that violated the spirit of Rome’s old ways.

At the same time, his inherent conservatism also meant that he resisted necessary change. It is not extreme to say that Cato’s one-man resistance fueled a sense in others that similarly unilateral moves would be necessary. When Caesar became consul, he would imprison Cato so as not to hear his marathon ramblings and so that the business of the state could resume.