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

Hardship, he believed, was simply a part of life. “In order to support more easily and more cheerfully those hardships which we may expect to suffer in behalf of virtue and goodness,” he said, “it is useful to recall what hardships people will endure for unworthy ends. Thus for example consider what intemperate lovers undergo for the sake of evil desires, and how much exertion others expend for the sake of making profit, and how much suffering those who are pursuing fame endure, and bear in mind that all of these people submit to all kinds of toil and hardship voluntarily.”

So if we’re going to suffer, ought we not suffer in a way that gets us somewhere worth going?

Suffer and endure toward virtue—that’s the core of Musonius’s teachings. As he said, “And yet would not anyone admit how much better it is, instead of exerting oneself to win someone else’s wife, to exert oneself to discipline one’s desires; instead of enduring hardships for the sake of money, to train oneself to want little; instead of giving oneself trouble about getting notoriety, to give oneself trouble how not to thirst for notoriety; instead of trying to find a way to injure an envied person, to inquire how not to envy anyone; and instead of slaving, as sycophants do, to win false friends, to undergo suffering in order to possess true friends?”

It is fitting that he would write and speak so much on this topic, because he—like many of the Stoics—would find that life had challenges and hardships in store.

Musonius’s first brush with trouble came from his association with the Stoic Opposition, including Gaius Rubellius Plautus, for whom Nero’s paranoid delusions made him a marked man. It was Musonius who would accompany Plautus into exile to Syria in 60 AD. It was Musonius’s first brush with the capriciousness of fate, and by no means his last.

Musonius would advise his dear friend “to have courage and await death,” and was likely there when Plautus fell to Nero’s angry sword. Musonius was allowed to return to Rome, briefly, but in 65 AD when the fallout from the Pisonian conspiracy claimed Seneca, Musonius was banished by Nero to the desolate island of Gyara.

It was there that Musonius sat, some seven hundred miles from home, wondering if he would need to follow his own advice and courageously wait for death.

Why didn’t he kill himself? As he had suggested to Thrasea? He had reminded Thrasea that there is no reason to choose a heavier misfortune if we can make do with the one in front of us. We can train ourselves to be satisfied with the difficulties fortune has chosen to give us. Besides, Musonius believed he still had living to do. “One who by living is of use to many,” he said, “has not the right to choose to die unless by dying he may be of use to more.”

So he lived and studied—as we must—as long as it was in his control to keep doing so well and for the greater good.

Gyara is a very dry, harsh island that today is unpopulated, but Musonius seized every opportunity he could to live by his teachings and to be of use to people around him.* According to one source, he discovered an underground spring on the island, earning him the eternal gratitude of his fellow residents, most of whom were also political exiles. It’s clear that he believed that exile was not an evil or a hardship, but merely a kind of test—a chance to move closer to virtue if one so chose. So he did, rededicating himself to teaching and writing, playing advisor to the philosophers and dignitaries who visited him from across the Mediterranean.

A testament to Musonius’s growing fame and the inspirational example he cast in those dark times is seen in the fictional letters of a man named Apollonius of Tyana. In one exchange, Apollonius says he dreams of boldly rescuing Musonius from Gyara. Musonius writes back to say that he won’t need it, because a true man undertakes to prove his own innocence and therefore has control of his own liberation. Apollonius replies that he worries that Musonius will die like Socrates. Musonius has no intention of going so quietly. “Socrates died because he was not prepared to defend himself,” he supposedly says, “but I will.”

Another exchange captures Musonius’s fighting spirit. We are told that Demetrius the Cynic—who had been with Thrasea during his last moments—encountered Musonius, bound in chains and digging with a pickaxe on a chain gang for one of Nero’s canals. “Does it pain you, Demetrius,” Musonius was said to reply, “if I dig the Isthmus for the sake of Greece? What would you have felt if you had seen me playing the lyre like Nero?” The dates on this encounter make it hard to trust, as the canal was being constructed during the time of his confinement to Gyara, but these stories nonetheless give us an insight into the reputation of Musonius’s character.