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

Born a member of the equestrian class, in Volsinii, Etruria, during the reign of Tiberius, Musonius Rufus quickly made his reputation as a philosopher and as a teacher. Even in a time and after a long history of brilliant Stoics, Musonius was considered above the rest. Among his contemporaries, he was the “Roman Socrates,” a man of wisdom, courage, self-control, and a marrow-deep commitment to what was right. It was fame that transcended his times, and we find Musonius mentioned admiringly by everyone from Christians like Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria to Marcus Aurelius.

But unlike Seneca and Cicero, who relished their places at the top of the heap of Roman society, Musonius was a far more humble figure. He was not born to the senatorial rank or to great wealth. He did not marry into a well-connected family. He did not seek out fame or power. Nor, it seems, did he think these things were particularly important.

He believed that praise and applause were wastes of time—for both the audience and the philosopher. “When a philosopher,” he said, “is exhorting, persuading, rebuking, or discussing some aspect of philosophy, if the audience pour forth trite and commonplace words of praise in their enthusiasm and unrestraint, if they even shout, if they gesticulate, if they are moved and aroused, and swayed by the charm of his words, by the rhythm of his phrases, and by certain rhetorical repetitions, then you may know that both the speaker and his audience are wasting their time, and that they are not hearing a philosopher speaking but a flute player performing.”

To Musonius, the sign of a successful philosopher was not the loud cheering of supporters. It was silence. Because it meant the audience was actually thinking—it meant they were wrestling with the difficult ideas that the speaker was getting across.

And so we can imagine this Roman Socrates drawing large crowds—not because of his showmanship, but through the reputation of his teachings—who sat in respectful silence, even as he challenged their most deeply held assumptions.

His most provocative belief in first-century Rome? That women deserved an education as much as men. Two of Musonius’s twenty-one surviving lectures (That Women Too Should Study Philosophy and Should Daughters Receive the Same Education as Sons?) come down strongly in favor of treating women well and of their capabilities as philosophers.

This was not a conventional view, but then again, the right thing rarely is.

It should not surprise us that Musonius held it or that he had the courage to argue it at a time when most believed that women were no more than property. A core precept of Stoic training is independent thinking, and here Musonius was illustrating an ability to see what was just, outside the context of his times. “It is not men alone who possess eagerness and a natural inclination towards virtue,” he wrote, “but women also. Women are pleased no less than men by noble and just deeds, and reject the opposite of such actions. Since that is so, why is it appropriate for men to seek out and examine how they might live well, that is, to practice philosophy, but not women.”*

Even his view of marriage was modern, calling for the “perfect companionship and mutual love of husband and wife, both in health and in sickness and under all conditions.” A good marriage, he believed, was one where a couple strove to outdo each other in devotion. He spoke of the kind of “beautiful union” that Brutus and Porcia had, where two souls stick with each other through the adversity of life and inspire each other to greater virtue. What was Musonius’s marriage like? We don’t know—but it would be incredible to think that a man who wrote so movingly about the benefits of this kind of marriage would not be speaking from experience, and more impossible still that Musonius could have endured the adversity he was soon to face without a life partner of courage and virtue.

At the core of Musonius’s teachings was a belief in the importance of hard work and endurance. He was a man cut from the same cloth as Cleanthes, who centuries before had supported his philosophical studies with manual labor. In a lecture entitled What Means of Livelihood Is Appropriate for the Philosopher, Musonius would speak highly of that kind of hard work, believing very little was beneath our dignity, if done well and with the right work ethic.