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

The line in Rome was that “we can’t all be Catos.” Meaning that few had his sheer, inhuman constancy and courage. But another way to look at that expression might be that we won’t all achieve towering fame. Philosophers in modern times speak of the concept of “moral luck”—how the time we were born and the situations we find ourselves in determine how heroic we’ll turn out to be.

Lucius Annaeus Cornutus turns out to be such a Stoic—not a Cato or an Agrippinus, but an ordinary man in extraordinary times who did the best he could. Born around 20 AD in Libya, Cornutus was a Phoenician like the Stoic founder Zeno, but his life’s impact was much closer to that of the second Zeno than the first. He ultimately came to Rome through the auspices of Seneca’s family—hence the name Annaeus—very likely through his brother Mela, as Cornutus taught his son Lucan.

With a wide grasp of diverse topics, including orthography, theology, grammar, rhetoric, linguistics, logic, physics, and ethics, Cornutus was an imposing figure. His reputation was such that Emperor Claudius took his advice and introduced a new letter to the Roman alphabet (the digamma, which looked like an f and made a w sound) in 48 AD. We can’t all be Catos, all our accomplishments are ephemeral, but introducing a new letter to the alphabet is pretty cool.

It must have been strange for Seneca’s family to see a Stoic like Cornutus thrive in Rome under the same emperor who had driven their beloved son and brother so far away from them. In any case, Cornutus seemed mostly to keep his head down, and down inside his books. His friend the poet Persius wrote fondly of “spending long days . . . and plucking the early evenings” with Cornutus, working and relaxing together in “seriousness at a restrained table.” They were, he said, “in harmony with a fixed bond and are guided by one star.” It’s a beautiful image and one worth remembering anytime you hear that the Stoics were without joy or friendship or fun.

In 62 AD, Persius died tragically young and Cornutus inherited from him an enormous library, including the full seven hundred volumes of Chrysippus’s books, as well as a great deal of money. Cornutus returned the money to his friend’s sisters, saying that the books were more than enough.

But it was impossible, by the time Nero came along, for even the most innocent and bookish philosophers to avoid offending the sensitive emperor. Caesar had had a sense of humor. Augustus loved the arts. Rome was a long way from living under such an emperor. When editing some of the late Persius’s poems, Cornutus took pains to change a line that compared Nero’s ears to those of a donkey. It was a compromise that Agrippinus would never have considered. Cornutus believed he had no choice.

The trouble with appeasement is that it never works. Nero soon found something else to be offended by. Dio Cassius tells us that Nero, like his stepfather, had sought out Cornutus’s advice, specifically about an epic history he planned to write about Rome. As Nero grandiosely explained, he planned to tell Rome’s narrative across four hundred volumes. Cornutus advised that this was far too many. One of Nero’s henchmen demanded an explanation—hadn’t Chrysippus written more than that? Didn’t Cornutus own them himself? How could he say such a thing? It’s not a fair comparison, Cornutus replied, for the Stoics wrote to “help the conduct of men’s lives.”

Perhaps Cornutus knew how this remark would land, or perhaps he said it with an academic’s ignorance of the subtleties of the art of courtiership, but the result was the same regardless. We are told Nero had to restrain himself from having this impudent philosopher executed on the spot.

He decided on banishment instead.

Where and when Cornutus was sent—to an island unnamed by Dio Cassius, somewhere between 66 and 68 AD—and ultimately what happened to Cornutus is lost to the historical record. His resistance to tyranny was hardly as heroic as that of Cato or the conspirators who plotted against Nero, and his ability to navigate the fraught politics of his time was certainly less impressive than Seneca’s, but his fate helped make a small contribution to the rising Stoic opposition.

The egregiousness of Nero’s overreaction to such a minor slight helped galvanize the plans of Thrasea and Lucan, Cornutus’s former student. We can’t place the events perfectly, but if Seneca was still around when Cornutus and Nero clashed, it must have weighed heavily on him. Here his own student was banishing his nephew’s teacher, just as Attalus had been driven off in his own childhood. It was one thing for Nero to eliminate his own family members, but now he was attacking a member of Seneca’s extended relations.

To anyone watching, it was clear that Nero’s sanity was getting harder and harder not to doubt.

Meanwhile, Cornutus drifted off into obscurity, not unlike Rutilius Rufus, far from home but at the same time blissfully removed from the carnage of a country tearing itself to pieces.