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

It was Shakespeare, the great observer of the Stoics, who would say—in his most Stoic play no less—that the good we do in life is easily forgotten, but the evil we do lives on and on.

Perhaps no Stoic philosopher illustrates this principle more than Diotimus, of whom so little is known. We don’t know when he was born. We’re not sure when or how he died. We know only of a few of his beliefs: for instance, that the chief end in life was well-being, and that the pursuit of virtue was how we got it.

Who did he study under? We’re not sure about that either. Sources suggest that he knew Posidonius, but that’s it. How was he introduced to philosophy? Who were his parents? Who were his students? How did he help them? How did he live? What acts of kindness did he perform? What honors did he decline?

Again, we know nothing of any of this. He is a cipher to us.

All we really know about him is from a single act of indisputable malice, one that has baffled historians and students of Stoicism for more than two thousand years. It’s an act that seems so pointless, so petty, and so comically at odds with the teachings of the philosophy that Diotimus claimed to adhere to, that it almost sounds made up.

Sometime around the turn of the first century BC, as the philosophies of Epicurus enjoyed a resurgence in Athens amid the rising splendor and power of Rome, Diotimus sat down and forged more than fifty “licentious letters” intended to slander the reputation of the founder of that rival school. Indeed, he went much further than that. Diotimus portrayed Epicurus as some kind of depraved maniac—a reputation that Epicurus has struggled to completely shed even to this day—in order to bolster his arguments against the philosophy.

Part of the motivation was no doubt self-defense. The Epicurean school at this time was ascendant, and under the leadership of the prolific Apollodorus, who in addition to writing some four hundred books was nicknamed “the Garden Tyrant.” We are told by Diogenes Laërtius that Apollodorus had taken to smearing Chrysippus, claiming that the Stoic had filled his books with quotes he had stolen from others. Such slander of the Stoa’s great fighter would need to be addressed.

Diotimus chose to respond to slander with slander. He decided to commit a crime worse than what Apollodorus was falsely alleging against Chrysippus.

For a school that prized logic and truth as much as virtuous behavior, Diotimus’s actions would have been inexcusable. Even if Epicureanism was now posing some kind of existential threat to Stoicism, it hardly justifies the commission of literary fraud. “If it is not right, do not do it,” Marcus Aurelius would write in his encapsulation of Stoic doctrine, “if it is not true, do not say it.” The Stoic is supposed to be beyond grudges, beyond revenge, beyond petty competition or the need to win arguments. Certainly, they’re not supposed to do anything—let alone lie and mislead—out of spite. Somewhere, somehow, Diotimus went astray.

And to what end? To discredit a school that also earnestly sought to lead its students toward the good life?

It would be, then, Diotimus’s sole contribution to the history of Stoicism, making himself a cautionary tale. He proved that the Stoics were hardly perfect, and that no matter how much training or reading we have done, a snap decision made in the moment can undo all of it.

What might Rutilius Rufus have thought, to know that at roughly the time he was being brought up on false charges by his political enemies, another Stoic was hard at work posthumously framing Epicurus? But such is life and history—complicated, contradictory, and often disappointing.

Athenaeus, citing Demetrius of Magnesia, says that Zeno of Sidon, who succeeded Apollodorus as head of the Epicurean school, tracked Diotimus down and filed suit against him. The court sided with Zeno of Sidon and sentenced Diotimus to death, which is a rather extreme form of justice—and certainly not one Rome would have countenanced.

While it’s unlikely that the death penalty would have been given for something as common as slander, there can be no doubt that a strong fine and exile from Athens were imposed. And greater than that, a personal shame.

This is the mistake we make. We fight fire with fire and end up burning ourselves. Nobody remembers who started it and our scars stay forever, if we even manage to survive the conflagration. When we are angry, it’s almost always better to wait and do nothing. And as far as our enemies go, if possible, we ought to let them destroy themselves.

Diotimus’s infamy stained his fellow Stoics to enough of an extent, for example, that it prompted Posidonius to write what was certainly a more measured book against Diotimus’s accuser, Zeno of Sidon, than he might have otherwise intended. It’s not as if such an honorable man would have defended Diotimus’s forgeries. Instead, it’s likely that he needed to shift the focus away from the student and toward the school, clarifying what Stoicism’s actual objections to the teachings of Epicurus were. Did Posidonius apologize for Diotimus? Did he disavow the man’s despicable tactics? Did he correct Apollodorus’s own slander against Chrysippus? One hopes, but does not know.

Still, it remains interesting that we have no record of any of the Stoics disavowing Diotimus’s crime, at the time or in the generations after. Seneca, who writes expansively on all sorts of philosophers and their behaviors, and about the Epicureans more than eighty times across his surviving works, never once mentions this incident and the sad failing of his own school.

Perhaps the desperation of the intra-academic squabble hit too close to home.

It has never been easy to understand the bitterness of disputes between classical scholars, Samuel Johnson once observed. “Small things make mean men proud,” he said, “and vanity catches small occasions; or that all contrariety of opinion, even in those that can defend it no longer, makes proud men angry; there is often found in commentaries a spontaneous strain of invective and contempt, more eager and venomous than is vented by the most furious controvertist in politics against those whom he is hired to defame.”

He could not have captured the folly of Diotimus better. Nor could Shakespeare’s funeral oration of Caesar be any more apt. For in that play, the once-Stoic Brutus’s single deed—the assassination of Julius Caesar—would come to overwhelm and obscure everything else the man would do in his life. And so it went for Diotimus, a philosopher who may well have had many interesting and profound things to say about the pursuit of moral perfection and well-being, but instead is known to us only for his evil and vengeful decision to attempt to destroy the reputation of the founder of his rivals’ school.