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

Politics is a dirty business. It is now and it was then. In Rome, as in the modern world, power attracts ego. It corrupts. It rewards vanity. It disincentivizes responsibility. It is filled, and always will be filled, with liars, cheats, demagogues, and cowards.

Which is why Mark Twain was quite right when he said that “an honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere.” It’s a matter of contrast. Of all the political Stoics, perhaps none shone brighter or stood out more than Publius Rutilius Rufus, who stared down Rome’s corruption with a fierce but quiet honesty that was as rare among his peers as it is today.

His career began as illustriously as one could imagine. He studied philosophy under Panaetius, who had returned to Rome in 138 BC when Rutilius was about twenty. A roving and beloved member of the Scipionic Circle, Rutilius served on Scipio Aemilianus’s staff as a military tribune in the brutal Numantine War in north-central Spain. He was a promising young man in a rapidly growing empire that offered nearly limitless advancement to promising men of his ilk.

While others may have had more glittering personalities, come from better families, or displayed greater ambitions than the somber and severe Rutilius, his presence and conviction were obvious to anyone who saw him. He was well read, well trained, and, as a speaker, according to one witness, “acute and systematic,” though Cicero would disparage his eloquence. His Stoicism was without dispute, with Cicero observing in the same book about Rutilius that the self-sufficiency of his philosophy “was exemplified in him in its firmest and most unswerving form.”

The first hint that Rutilius operated by a different code came in 115 BC when he was defeated for consul by Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, who, like many others before him, had bribed his way into office. It would have been easy, perhaps expected, for Rutilius to have done the same, but he conspicuously declined even though it ensured his defeat. Instead he brought Scaurus up on charges of ambitus—political corruption. Scaurus himself—the corrupt one—would bring the same charges against Rutilius.

Neither trial was conclusive, but it presaged the fight to come.

It was during the Jugurthine War in 109 BC that Rutilius would find himself caught in the crossfire of even more ambitious and unscrupulous political types who had begun to emerge in the struggle for control of Rome’s enormous Republic. One of these was Sulla, a conservative strongman who would come to power through raw force and cruelty. Another was Gaius Marius, who began his military service under Scipio Aemilianus at the same time as Rutilius Rufus. Marius, a novus homo (new man) of equestrian rank, had a brilliant military career that would lead to his holding a record seven consulships, a feat Marius claimed had been foretold by an omen in which an eagle’s nest containing seven young eagles fell into his lap. It was a sign, the seers had said, that he was destined for greatness and to hold power seven times.

For a time, Rutilius and Marius were allies. During this time of army expansion and overhaul, Rufus came to head Rome’s training and deployment strategy for these newly diverse troops. It was said that Marius preferred to fight only with troops trained by Rutilius, because they were the best trained, the most disciplined, and the bravest.

If you want the job done right, there’s no one better to do it than a Stoic. If you want someone to aid you in your crimes and corruption, there’s nobody worse.

Marius, who lived and ate with his troops, and who dropped the property requirement that had previously limited who could serve in the army, was enormously popular with the masses. He was also brutal and merciless. In 101 BC, following his fourth consulship, Marius achieved a dramatic victory over the Germanic Cimbri, in which 120,000 of their fierce troops were slaughtered. Marius was thus heralded as “the third founder of Rome,” but like any figure whose career rested on the whims of the crowd, he was deeply feared by the Roman elite, who wondered what his intentions were.

Rutilius’s first conflict with Marius was simpler: He believed Marius had bribed his way to one of his electoral victories by paying down debts and purchasing votes. Having been on the wrong end of this kind of cheating himself, Rutilius was not the type to take it lightly, even if Marius had done an admirable job keeping the peace. Besides, what was the point of having elections if they were going to be fraudulent? So when Rutilius saw something, he said something—and in the process made an enemy who was not likely to forget this betrayal.

For a time, Rutilius was safe, if only because Marius’s command over the mob was starting to look shaky. A group of angry aristocrats proved too much for even Marius to control. They attacked and murdered one of his former allies, literally ripping the roof off his prison cell, despite Marius’s attempts to protect him. Tensions on all sides now exploded, and since the Senate had never quite trusted Marius, it was time for him to leave town for a while.

Plutarch says it was during his exile that Marius incited Mithridates, king of Pontus and Armenia Minor, to start a war against Rome, which he was certain would ease the Senate’s fears of him and force them to call Rome’s “third founder” back into service once again. It was a time of intrigue and political violence and outright corruption—swinging abruptly from reactionary to deeply conservative political figures—as all times of revolution and unrest are.

Even if he hadn’t tangled with Marius, it was probably inevitable, then, that Rutilius, meticulously honest and ruled by his sense of Stoic duty, would eventually find himself a target. Not only had he gained acclaim for his well-disciplined troops, but he had also begun making reforms to bankruptcy law in the face of rising indebtedness, spearheading an initiative to protect Greeks in Asia Minor from the tax gouging of the publicani, members of the Roman equites.

It’s a populist irony—the strongman comes to power by making impossible and destructive promises to the disenfranchised. Do they actually have any intention of helping these people? Of course not. In fact, they’ll actively stymie any reforms that will actually make the system more fair. All that matters is their iron grip on their ignorant base and the power that comes from it.

We can see Rutilius simply doing his job, following his sense of how, in our self-interest, we must never lose sight of the interests of others. His own practice of Stoic oikeiosis, in service of the public good, put him on a fast track to a major conflict much bigger than himself. Did Rutilius know who he was crossing by deciding to advocate for reforms that came at the expense of the rich? Did it matter that he was earnestly attempting to stop a gross injustice? No. What happened next is a very old trick, the same one that Scaurus used: Accuse the honest man of precisely the opposite of what they’re doing, of the sin you yourself are committing. Use their reputation against them. Muddy the waters. Stain them with lies. Run them out of town by holding them to a standard that if equally applied would mean the corrupt but entrenched interests would never survive.

So it was that Rutilius, who had instigated and presided over the prosecution of various cases of corruption charges himself, was brought up on false charges, accused of extorting the people he was protecting . . . by the people who were actually doing the extorting. It didn’t help that some of his writings had been critical of the people he was accused of stealing from. Still, he seemed almost stunned by the animus of his enemies and the lengths to which they were willing to go. The jury was stacked. Marius operated behind the scenes, pushing the prosecution. How could he not have been involved? The historian Dio Cassius tells us that a man of Rutilius’s “excellence and good repute had been an annoyance” to Marius. Annoyance? He was a mirror. A walking condemnation of everything the corrupt and selfish stood for.

Knowing in his heart that he was innocent, Rutilius declined to defend himself, refusing to call on his own political allies or even utter a word in his defense. Did he think his reputation would save him? Was he trapped by his own dignity? In his work On Oratory, Cicero remarks on how it wasn’t only Rutilius’s silence that condemned him, but in fact none of his defense team raised a voice in opposition to the kangaroo court. At such a staggering failure, Cicero joked that Rutilius’s defense team must have been afraid that if they had gotten worked up and made a spirited defense, they’d get reported to the Stoics. It was Socrates’s strategy: I refuse to dignify the charges. It was Martin Luther: I will not repent. Here I stand. I can do no other.

It was a noble stance, but it allowed his enemies to make quick work of him. The enormous verdict was more than Rutilius—or anyone but the most corrupt officials—could ever pay. His property was seized and he was exiled. No longer could this stickler get in the way of Marius’s looting of Rome, nor could the existence of this ethical man embarrass or show up the rising criminal class.

As he no doubt learned from his teacher, Panaetius, like the pankratist, you must be prepared at all times for the unexpected blows of life—if not to block them, at least to absorb and endure them without whining.

Rutilius’s enemies, in dealing this blow, offered this noble civil servant and military hero one small dignity, and in so doing, all but proved to history his perfect innocence. The false accusers offered their sacrificial victim the opportunity to choose the place of his exile.

Rutilius, with a twinkle in his eye, perhaps, or at least the stone-hard determination of a man who knows he did nothing wrong, chose Smyrna—the very city he had allegedly defrauded. Smyrna, grateful for the reforms and scrupulous honesty of the man who had once governed them, welcomed Rutilius with open arms. They even offered him citizenship. Suetonius tells us that he settled in Smyrna with Opilius Aurelius, “a freedman of an Epicurean, [who] first taught philosophy, afterwards rhetoric, and finally grammar . . . where he lived with him until old age.” Cicero would visit with Rutilius there in 78 BC and call him “a pattern of virtue, of old-time honor, and of wisdom.”

Was Rutilius bitter? It doesn’t appear so. Reports are that he got on with life, and that his fortune grew despite his removal from the circles of power. Gifts from admirers poured in. We are told that a consoling friend attempted to reassure Rutilius that with civil war likely in Rome, in due time all exiles would be allowed back. “What sin have I committed that you should wish me a more unhappy return than departure?” Rutilius replied. “I should much prefer to have my country blush for my exile than weep at my return!”

Better to be missed than to overstay your welcome.

When the state is beyond redemption and helplessly corrupt, the Stoics believed, the wise man will stay away. Confucius, himself a philosopher and an advisor to princes, had said something similar several centuries before. What we know is that Rutilius stayed in Smyrna and wrote his History of Rome in Greek. Hardly broken by the ignominy of what was done to him, he just kept working.

When Rutilius was eventually invited back to Rome by Sulla, who triumphed over Marius and became dictator, the “honor” was politely declined.

Rutilius’s fellow Stoics were livid at the treatment of this honorable man, but in a way it was an important lesson. Doing the right thing could cost a person everything. This was not Plato’s Republic—philosopher kings were not only not desired, they were the enemy of those trying to get rich through the empire. Disgraces had become commonplace. Every major figure of this period would be accused of either electoral or financial corruption.

Unlike Rutilius, almost all of them were guilty.

Why did it seem that the good were punished while the evil got away scot free? It is the way of the world, then and now, sadly. “When good men come to bad ends,” Seneca would write, “when Socrates is forced to die in prison, Rutilius to live in exile, Pompey and Cicero to offer their necks to their own clients, and great Cato, the living image of all the virtues, by falling upon his sword to show that the end had come for himself and for the state at the same time, one cannot help being grieved that Fortune pays her rewards so unjustly.”

Still, who would you rather be? Because there is a cost to cheating, to stealing, to doing the wrong thing—even if society rewards it. Would you rather go out like Rutilius with your head high or live in denial of your own undeniable shame?

As bad as it was, the Stoics of Rutilius’s time had little idea of what the future had in store for them. They could not have known that as bad as what they were witnessing was, it was only, as the writer and podcaster Mike Duncan would describe it two thousand years later, “the storm before the storm.” The Roman Republic’s institutions had been greatly weakened and all that remained was valiant resistance from great and honorable men. How much longer could they hold back the tides? How much longer could they preserve the ethics and political institutions that Greece had brought to Rome?

With Julius Caesar coming, the answer, sadly, was not much longer.

But for a time, Rutilius Rufus had let his light shine. He had been a force for good in the world and had suffered for it. But never, it seems, did he question whether it was worth it. Nor did he harbor any bitterness about his fate. He had looked at himself and the corruption around him and decided that no matter what other people said or did, his job was to be good. He knew, as Marcus Aurelius would remind himself over and over, that all he controlled was his character and his ability to let his true colors shine undiminished. You can lay violent hands on me, Zeno had said, but my mind will remain committed to philosophy.

But Zeno only had to say it. Marcus was never wrongly convicted. He never lost his home. Rutilius believed it, spoke it, and lived it.

It was he who had to stand there as they brought him up on trumped-up charges, as they soiled his reputation, stole his possessions, and sent him far from the country he loved. And yet, under all this pressure, he did not crack. He did not compromise. He did not bend the knee. He refused what must have been the implicit carrot that went along with the legal stick: Drop these pesky objections and we can make you rich and important.

Publius Rutilius Rufus was, uncompromisingly, the last honest man in Rome. It’s an example that calls down to us today, as it did to the brave Stoics of his time and every one of them who came after.