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

If Diogenes was the pragmatic politician, then his student Antipater, the next leader of the Stoa, was the real-world ethicist. Practical, yes, but intent on establishing clear principles from which every action must descend.

We don’t know when Antipater of Tarsus was born, or really any details of his early life in Tarsus, only that he succeeded Diogenes of Babylon as head of the Stoa after Diogenes’s death sometime around 142 BC. What is obvious is that Antipater’s worldview was very much defined by the influence of Diogenes and a reaction against his master’s former student, the seductive but amorphous Carneades.

Where Carneades was content to argue contradictory positions on alternating days as he had in Rome, relishing the opportunity his newfound fame offered him to mislead his Athenian audiences at every turn, Antipater became a stickler for truth and honesty. Where Diogenes had brought politics to the realm of philosophy—or philosophy to the realm of real-world politics—Antipater sought to bring the practice of everyday ethics to all facets of life. And as ambitious as his aims were, he brought a humility back to Stoicism too.

No one would find Antipater fighting for the spotlight. He was too busy, as a good philosopher should be, working.

Even the medium through which he made his arguments was relatable and ordinary. Previous Stoics had held forth at the Stoa and in theaters, but Antipater opted out. Instead, he invited friends over for dinner to have long discussions about philosophy. Athenaeus tells us in his book called The Learned Banqueters, written just after the time of Marcus Aurelius, that Antipater was a wonderful storyteller at these gatherings, illustrating his points with powerful anecdotes. While supporters urged him to challenge Carneades’s oratory with bombast of his own, and Carneades attempted to goad him into public debates, Antipater channeled his energy into this dinner-table diplomacy as well as into written works aimed not at triumph over current rivals but to help with the timeless trials of everyday life.

Antipater’s quiet arguments were befitting a man with a fine-tuned sense for ethics, because on the page he could better articulate his views. In these small gatherings he could really connect with an individual, he could get specific, and he could be kind. It also allowed him to see up close the needs, the wants, and the struggles of real people—not just faces beneath the rostrum. Had he been born a couple thousand years later, one could easily imagine him having made a great advice columnist. If Diogenes had been the diplomat and statesman, then we might picture Antipater playing the political ground game, developing relationships, persuading in person, focusing on the individual and improving their lives.

For instance, Antipater was the first Stoic to make strong arguments for marriage and family life, something that had been strangely neglected by earlier philosophers. Zeno had left no natural heirs. Cleanthes had no room in his frugal existence for a wife. Chrysippus tried to be a single parent to his nephews when the need arose, yet he ultimately lived for his work. But Antipater broke new ground for Stoics by speaking passionately on the importance of choosing the right spouse and of raising good children. Try to learn from Socrates’s mistakes, he warned the young men he taught, as he told them another story about Socrates’s wife, who had a disagreeable reputation and a bad temper. If you don’t choose whom to marry wisely, your wisdom—and your happiness—will surely be tested.

To Antipater, a successful city and a successful world could only be built around the keystone of family. Marriage, he said to his students, was “among the primary and most necessary of appropriate actions.” Did Antipater get married himself? Was he a better husband and father than Socrates? The records are scant, but this sentence from his book on marriage sure makes it sound that way: “Moreover, it is the case that he who hasn’t experienced a wedded wife and children has not tasted the truest and genuine goodwill.”

Stoics can love and be loved? Absolutely. Not only can they, but they should, as Antipater clearly did.

Michel Foucault, the twentieth-century French philosopher and social theorist, would credit Antipater for pioneering a new concept of marriage, where two individuals blend their souls and become better for joining together, as opposed to some legal or economic transaction. As Foucault notes, the Stoic oikos, home, is perfected in marriage, creating a “conjugal unit” that can withstand the blows of fate and create a good life.

It was an important and humanizing shift for a philosophy that was previously focused on maintaining the boundaries of indifference when it came to everyday life. As Diogenes Laërtius wrote, the Stoics came to approve “also of honoring parents and brothers in the second place next after the gods. They further maintain that parental affection for children is natural to the good, but not to the bad.” It was thinking that would not only transform Stoic philosophy and then Roman life but be absorbed into Christianity and the very world we live in today.

Is that not the job of an ethicist? And far more important than winning debates?

Many early Stoics had held that all sins and wrongs were equal. To be away from home, went the argument, is to be absent—whether you’re one mile or a hundred miles distant. But of course this is ridiculous. Being outside is not the same as being gone, just as murder is not the same as a lie, even if both are far from ethical. Similarly, the lie of omission that Antipater’s teacher Diogenes argued for in his Caveat emptor, or the misdirection of a diplomat trying to shore up peaceful relations, is not the same as a tyrant who manufactures a pretense for war at the cost of many lives.

Antipater was the major force in moving the Stoics in this commonsense direction. He loosened the absolutism of being either all virtuous or vicious. He stopped minimizing the “indifferent” things of daily life—whom we marry, how we dress, what we eat—and brought ethics to the forefront of the philosopher’s concern, so that philosophy could be a productive life practice. A guide to living. An operating system.

And again, we can imagine him modeling these very things at his dinner parties and in his daily life, just as Zeno had first modeled the way of the sage to Cleanthes long before.

Not that Antipater was the first Stoic to care about practical ethics. Chrysippus had used his experience in sports to suggest a “no shoving” principle—the idea that we should never cheat or resort to foul play in order to win. Antipater not only took it further, but proposed that ethical behavior—or even sportsmanship—was itself a kind of craft that required real work and effort. For him, the human being in action is better understood as an archer. We train and practice. We draw back the arrow and aim it to the best of our abilities. But we know full well that despite our training and our aim, many factors outside our control will influence where the arrow hits the target—or if it falls short entirely.

This is what the pursuit of virtue is in real life. We study. We train until things become second nature. The moment arrives. We commit. We hold up what’s right as our target. We take action. But much happens after that—much of it not remotely up to us. Which is why we know that our true worth doesn’t reside in whether or not we get a bull’s-eye.

In the real world, we miss. Sometimes by a lot. But we have to keep trying. The more we work on it the better we get. The more shots we take, the more times we’ll hit the target and the more good we’ll do.

It’s hard to overstate, again, just what a big breakthrough this ethical model is. Just as Diogenes realized that philosophy would have to enter public life, Antipater made sure to bring it into private life too. He tried to help solve for the real situations that humans face: Who should we marry? Is work or family more important? What rules should govern a transaction between two people where the law is not clear? Should we be honest even if it will cost us money? How do we treat those less fortunate than us? Does society owe anything to the poor or the unlucky?

Monks would later argue about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. Today, philosophers debate whether we’re living in a computer simulation or how to respond to the so-called “trolley problem.” But the truth is that you will never have to pull a lever to stop a trolley from running over one person or five. You have no way of knowing whether this life is real or an illusion. We do have, however, just as the citizens of Athens had, real concerns and decisions to make on a daily basis. And how these decisions are made in the polis affects the larger cosmopolis.

That Stoic idea of oikeiosis—that we share something and our interests are naturally connected to those of our fellow humans—was as pressing in the ancient world as it is today. Should we donate some of our income to charity? Is it fair for some people to have more money and resources than others? Doesn’t everyone have the right to be happy and to live with dignity?

Let us go back to that debate between Diogenes and Antipater about selling grain or a piece of property. Diogenes is right that the demands of commerce make full transparency unrealistic. But Antipater’s concern is nuanced and important—finding the balance between acting justly and crippling, self-defeating moralism. There is obviously a tension between self-interest and the interests of others, but are we not, at least in a way, all on the same team? As fellow citizens? As fellow believers in justice? The man who fails to disclose faulty sanitation in a home he is selling may be helping his family’s fortune, but it might come at the direct expense of another family’s health and well-being. How is that fair? And doesn’t the suffering of that family come at the cost of the success of the city, of the state of which you are also a part?

What’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee and vice versa, Marcus Aurelius would later say. It was an insight he drew straight from the life and work of Antipater.

Antipater believed that our affinity for the common good was our primary obligation. Cicero preserved his argument: “It is your duty to consider the interests of your fellow-men and to serve society; you were brought into the world under these conditions and have these inborn principles which you are in duty bound to obey and follow, that your interest shall be the interest of the community and conversely that the interest of the community shall be your interest.” Diogenes—who had no problem stiffing the Romans—believed that the individual’s good came first, arguing, as we saw, that knowing everything about your own moral state means more than protecting what others should find out on their own. Diogenes said, sure, stay within the bounds of what the law requires, but you don’t have to do any more than that for others when it comes to business. Professor Malcolm Schofield explained Antipater’s views in this way—that just as we shouldn’t commit violence against one another, we shouldn’t commit injustice against one another, and that we should treat others’ interests as not alien from our own.

How far was Antipater willing to take these arguments? How radically did they affect his politics? It is interesting to see that one of Antipater’s students and a prominent Roman teacher, Gaius Blossius, would become involved in the Gracchus affair, a controversial plot that sought to redistribute some of Rome’s land to its poorest citizens. Tiberius Gracchus would be assassinated for this revolutionary idea, and Blossius, questioned by the Senate for being Gracchus’s teacher and mentor, barely escaped with his life. Antipater was a very old man by this point, but one suspects he might have smiled at the thought of his student looking after the interests of the have-nots. Certainly he would have agreed that vast income inequality was an issue a Stoic in political service would need to address. Perhaps he even raised a toast to Blossius at one of his quiet dinner parties after hearing he survived the inquiry of the consuls. Even Diogenes, had he still been around, would have at least admired the political brilliance of Gracchus’s populism.

What’s interesting is that Antipater thought that most of these ethical questions were pretty straightforward. His formula for virtue was “in choosing continually and unswervingly the things which are according to nature, and rejecting those contrary to nature.” It was about making sure that our self-interest didn’t override the inner compass each of us is born with.

You gotta do the right thing. Whoever you are, whatever you’re doing. Whether you’re Panaetius, whom we’ll meet next, on the world stage or the ordinary citizen in the privacy of your own home.

Antipater died in 129 BC. The fear is that a highly ethical person living in an unethical world or an ardent dogmatist, as Antipater was once described by Cicero, would become bitter in old age. It’s hard to protect this kind of spirit, and over a long enough life, it often does break, and the wound it leaves quite easily becomes infected.

Not so with Antipater. Plutarch records that his last words were of gratitude. “They say,” he writes, “that Antipater of Tarsus, when he was in like manner near his end and was enumerating the blessings of his life, did not forget to mention his prosperous voyage from home [in Cilicia] to Athens, just as though he thought that every gift of a benevolent Fortune called for great gratitude, and kept it to the last in his memory, which is the most secure storehouse of blessings for a man.”

And so the generations marched forward, a little better armed in the pursuit of virtue than they were before Antipater walked the earth for his brief allotment of time.