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

Justice is the knowledge of apportioning each person and situation what is due. Under this banner Stoics placed piety (giving gods their due), kindness, good fellowship, and fair dealing.

Bravery is the knowledge of what is terrible and what isn’t and what is neither. This included perseverance, intrepidness, greatheartedness, stoutheartedness, and, one of Arius’s most favored virtuous qualities—one he illustrated well in his own life—philoponia, or industriousness.

In contrast to these four virtues, stupidity, lack of restraint, injustice, and cowardice are all the lack of this knowledge. It’s an idea that matches up well with another set of categories Arius attempted to organize the world into, which he claimed came from Zeno. There are only two types of people in this world, he wrote, wise people and fools, or the worthwhile and the worthless. Worthless fools lack the knowledge that the wise use in the pursuit of virtue. It’s black and white without much room for the gray of the world. One is tempted, for instance, to ask Arius which of the four virtues a person falls under—and whether it’s the wise or the foolish—who murders young princes who might someday be rivals. Justice? Wisdom? Or is there perhaps another unlisted category entitled political expediency?

Certainly Zeno never said anything about that.

The point for Arius, though, was that while we have the natural ability to exhibit these virtues, it is in fact an active practice of cultivating and refining them that makes a person wise and good. At the core of it, he felt that living a virtuous life was about achieving a “disposition of the soul in harmony with itself concerning one’s whole life.”

Did he get there himself? We can’t know. Did he and Athenodorus get Octavian—a man who took on absolute power and all the corruptive pressures that come along with it—a bit closer to virtue? Yes.

Augustus was nowhere near perfect, but he was not Nero. The sources show a man who got better over time, certainly not the rule among leaders or human beings, particularly those with absolute power. He seemed to earnestly strive to be great, to be in control of himself, and to live by those cardinal virtues. When, near the end of his life, Augustus remarked that he had inherited a Rome of brick but left the world an empire of marble, he was not wrong. Buildings stand to this day that are a testament to that hard work, and by extension to the philosopher who exhorted him to follow that path.

Could he have done this without the lessons of his teachers and their philosophy? Can anyone? No. We need guidance and we need to love the process of getting better, the Stoics believed, or we will regress to the level of everyone else. Close to Arius’s heart, Octavian was the epitome of philoponia—and seemed to genuinely love to toil on behalf of the good of everyone.

Few men and women who have had the royal life—or power and success—thrust upon them can have that said about them. Because few, then and now, put in the work.

“None of the worthless are industrious,” Arius wrote. “For industriousness is a disposition able to accomplish unhesitatingly what is befitting through toil, and none of the worthless are unhesitating with regard to toil.” Augustus worked hard—no one could accuse him of using the throne for rest. Nor is there any evidence that his teachers were, as Seneca would later be charged, corrupted by their proximity and access to power.

Would the mos maiorum and the libertas of Cato’s Republic have been preferable to this new Augustan age? Almost certainly. Imperial power is good for no one, least of all the person wielding it. But by 27 BC, when Octavian became Augustus, a return to the old ways was no longer in the control of Arius or Athenodorus. All they could do was make the best of what they faced—and mold their charge into the best man they could.

As Arius would write, like Panaetius before him, we each have our own implanted gifts (aphormai), resources that can lead us to virtue. Our personalities suit us differently to different paths of ethical development. We all have different launching points, but these inborn tools together with hard effort will get us to where we want to go.

We must focus on the task at hand, and waste not a moment on the tasks that are not ours. We must have courage. We must be fair. We must check our emotions. We must, above all, be wise.

This is what Arius and Athenodorus attempted to live and attempted to teach. It made them trusted advisors, at the highest level, and helped shape what would become Pax Romana. Their guidance—the proximity of Stoicism to the throne—not only shaped Augustus and then Seneca, but would inspire the philosopher king himself, Marcus Aurelius.

They would also, in the end, for all their power and influence, teach Marcus and us a lesson in humility and mortality. As Marcus wrote, summing up what was then an ancient era: