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

“Shame on the age and on its principles!” Cicero called as he demanded the execution of his enemy. Catiline, who was in the audience for this harangue, meekly attempted to reply. He was no match for such a brilliant speaker. All he could do was fall back on the tropes of Rome’s elitism. He pointed out that Cicero came from no great family. He questioned the credibility of a self-made man.

It didn’t work.

So he fled—to the army he had in waiting, proving beyond a doubt that Cicero was right. Catiline was a traitor and a rebel. But how serious the threat actually was remains in doubt. Contemporaries and historians alike suspect that Cicero, always looking for power and the spotlight, may have significantly exaggerated the peril of the nation—for personal gain.

The Senate, trusting in Cicero, bestowed on him nearly dictatorial powers to put down the threat. The Republic and Cicero himself, like many empires believing they faced an existential threat to their institutions, warped under the pressure. Cato, the Stoic, urged Cicero to exact the full measure of the law from these criminals. It was only just, he said.

Cicero had absolute power in his hands. He hesitated, but not for moral reasons. He was, as always, thinking of his reputation. His wife, Terentia, proved an unexpected but decisive vote, interpreting a sacrifice that had frightened some others as a sign that her husband must wield the power that had been given to him.

The conspirators were put to death without trial by his order, and thousands more in their supporting armies died. In thanks, the Senate would bestow on him the title of “Father of His Country,” but the extreme measures and the lives touched by so many deaths would hang over him for the rest of his life—and indeed, all of history.

What remained untouched through the ordeal was Cicero’s sense of his own destiny and greatness. Plutarch tells us that within days, Cicero began a campaign to burnish his accomplishments. “One couldn’t attend a Senate or public meeting,” Plutarch wrote, “nor any session of the courts, without having to listen to the endless repetitions. . . . This unpleasing habit of his clung to him like fate.” No amount of credit or praise was enough.

Cicero enshrined what he believed to be his own magnificence in writing as well. He tried to induce Posidonius to cover his consulship in his great fifty-two-volume history. When Posidonius declined, Cicero wrote a letter “the size of a book” to Pompey in 62 BC on the subject of his own achievements. Pompey acknowledged it with no more than a shrug. Cicero was undeterred—he was convinced he had saved the country. History, he thought, was in his debt.

The historian H. J. Haskell captures the contradictions in Cicero’s character well. He was talented, he was brilliant, he was steeped in the wisest philosophy of every school, and yet “he was too sensitive, too vain, too dominated by personal feeling, too open to impression, to become a great leader of men. At times he saw both sides of public questions too vividly to enable him to make up his mind, close it to all doubts, and drive ahead. At other times, when his hatreds became engaged—and he was a fierce hater—he would plunge forward recklessly.”

Cicero knew what the Stoics warned of the passions

, but he did little work on reining in his own. And so, time and time again, they would come back to cause exactly the kind of suffering that the Stoics since the days of Zeno had been warning against.

Like the figures in Posidonius’s writings, Cicero would get nearly everything he wanted . . . and come to regret it.

Cicero’s consulship and brief moment of crisis leadership were the high-water mark of his life. It would be a staggered series of downhill declines from there. The country moved on, and as the oracle had predicted, the gratitude of the crowd was not enduring. Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus would form their Triumvirate in 60 BC, creating a front of enemies opposed to Cicero. The next consul, in 58 BC, turned openly against Cicero, passing a proscription against him for having condemned citizens to death without a trial. Cicero had to flee Rome in exile, while his property was destroyed.

It was Seneca who observed how quickly time and fate would afflict on Cicero “everything that a victorious Catiline would have done.” In fact, his banishment was repealed a year later, but still, change—or dissolution—was in the air.