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Did Rome’s Greatest Orator Live Up to His Own Ideals?

Cicero denouncing Catiline in the Roman Senate
Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?
How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Who was Cicero? Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) has been hailed as Rome’s greatest orator. Lawyer, statesman, philosopher, and master of prose, he shaped not only the Latin language but the ideals of rhetoric, public service, and civic education for centuries to come. More than any other Roman, he sought to unite wisdom with eloquence.

But can someone understand virtue without consistently practising it? Cicero wrote brilliantly about virtue, duty, and the public good, yet struggled with ambition, anxiety, and political compromise. Admired by saints, humanists, and the American Founding Fathers, he remains one of the most influential—and most contradictory—figures in Western intellectual history.

A Frail Body for a Formidable Mind

Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in Arpinum, around 60 miles south of Rome, into a wealthy equestrian family. His cognomen, or personal surname, derives from the Latin for ‘chickpea’ (cicer), by which his ancestors may have prospered. He lived through a time of great civil unrest, famously decrying, O tempora, O mores (‘Oh the times, oh the customs’). Despite his frail and sickly constitution, he served in the army in 89–88 BCE, notably under Pompey’s father, Pompeius Strabo. But what he lacked in virility and nobility he more than made up in study and oratory. 

In 87 BCE, Philo of Larissa, the last undisputed scholarch of Plato’s Academy, arrived in Rome, and Cicero came to sit at his feet—later opining that, if Zeus were to speak, it would be in none other than the language of Plato. He studied law under Quintus Mucius Scaevola, who founded the study of law as a systematic discipline. Scaevola also served as Pontifex Maximus (High Priest of Rome) before falling victim to the power struggle between Marius and Sulla. In 82 BCE, he was murdered in the Temple of the Vestal Virgins. 

Cicero began practising the law in around 83–81 BCE and, in 80, made his reputation on the back of his brilliant defence of Sextus Roscius against a fabricated charge of patricide. In 79, partly on account of his health, he travelled to Greece, Asia, and Rhodes, meeting with several leading philosophers, including Antiochus of Ascalon in Athens. While in Greece, he asked the oracle at Delphi how he might attain the greatest glory. The pythoness (priestess of Apollo) replied, ‘By making your own genius and not the opinion of the people the guide of your life.’ 

Pater Patriae

In the next period, Cicero climbed the cursus honorum, or ‘ladder of offices’, holding each office at or near the youngest possible age: quaestor in 75 BCE, aedile in 69, praetor in 66, and consul in 63. He became consul at the age of just forty-two, making him the youngest non-patrician to serve in the office in the five-hundred-year history of the Republic. 

As quaestor in western Sicily, Cicero seemed so formidable that the locals asked him to prosecute Gaius Verres, who, as governor, had plundered the province. He fought the case with such aplomb that he came to be regarded as the greatest orator in Rome. While in Sicily, he took it upon himself to rediscover the forgotten tomb of Archimedes, which he described as surmounted by a sphere and cylinder. He then chided the Syracusans for leaving it to a man from Arpinum to remember their most illustrious citizen. 

As praetor, Cicero made his first great speech in the Senate, arguing that Pompey should be given the command of the campaign against Mithradates VI, King of Pontus. But the crowning glory of his political career came during his consulship, when, by the force of his four Catiline Orations, he exposed and crushed Catiline’s conspiracy to overthrow the Republic. He had five of the conspirators executed and announced their deaths to a cheering crowd with the single word, Vixerunt (‘They lived’). For ‘saving the Republic’, as he liked to boast, he received the honorific Pater Patriae (‘Father of the Fatherland’) from his ally Cato the Younger, but lived forever after in fear of reprisal for having put Roman citizens to death without trial.

Exile and Return

In 62 BCE, Cicero added a large townhouse on the Palatine Hill to his portfolio of properties. The house, which he described as ‘in sight of nearly the whole city’ (in conspectu prope totius urbis), had belonged to Rome’s richest citizen, Crassus, and cost him 3.5 million sesterces. 

When Julius Caesar pressed him to join his alliance with Pompey and Crassus—the First Triumvirate—Cicero refused, believing that their arrangement undermined the Republic. He also declined Caesar’s offer of a place on his staff in Gaul, leaving himself exposed to the many enemies that his sharp tongue had made. 

When Publius Clodius Pulcher became tribune in 58 BCE, he passed a law, with retroactive effect, to exile any official who had executed a Roman citizen without trial. The law was squarely aimed at Cicero. He fled to Greece while Clodius’ supporters ransacked his house on the Palatine and his villas at Formiae and Tusculum. 

Writing to his friend Atticus, he lamented:

I say this deliberately—that no one was ever afflicted with so heavy a calamity, that no one had ever greater cause to wish for death; while I have let slip the time when I might have sought it most creditably. Henceforth death can never heal, it can only end my sorrow.

It is difficult to imagine Socrates—or indeed Cato—ever saying such a thing. In his Life of Cicero, Plutarch put his finger on the discrepancy between the man and his learning: 

He was become so poor-spirited, so humiliated and dejected by his misfortunes, as none could have expected in a man who had devoted so much of his life to study and learning… But the desire for glory has great power in washing the tinctures of philosophy out of the souls of men.

In the event, Cicero’s exile lasted little more than a year. In 57 BCE, he was recalled by the Senate, with Clodius casting the single vote against the motion. He was met by cheering crowds all the way from Brundisium (modern-day Brindisi) to the Capitol, and his destroyed properties were rebuilt at public expense.

Caesar and Civil War

He took to opposing Cæsar, but this only drove Cæsar closer to Pompey and Crassus. So he swallowed his principles and made a show of supporting the triumvirs, before quietly withdrawing into his library. In 53 BCE, the year that Crassus died, he freed Marcus Tullius Tiro ‘to be our friend instead of our slave’, and it is Tiro who, after his death, collected his letters and speeches for publication. In 51 BCE, Tiro, himself a prolific writer, accompanied him to Cilicia (in modern-day Turkey) after he reluctantly accepted the governorship of the province. He restored calm and order to the entire region, repulsing Parthian incursions, suppressing brigands, and stemming corruption. He stopped in Rhodes and Athens on the return to Rome, where the Senate granted him a supplicatio, or period of public thanksgiving—instead of the full-blown triumph that he had been hoping for.

Only six days after Cicero’s return to Rome, Cæsar crossed the Rubicon into Italy, thereby declaring war on the Senate. Cicero hesitated in picking between putative tyrants, but in the end crossed the Adriatic to join Pompey’s camp. After Pompey’s defeat to Cæsar at Pharsalus, Cato offered him the command of the Pompeian forces, but he preferred to return to the Eternal City to be pardoned by Cæsar. 

He had divorced Terentia in 51, and in 46 or 45 wedded a wealthy girl called Publilia, who had been his ward, and who jealoused the great love that he bore for his daughter Tullia. The marriage did not withstand Tullia’s sudden death in 45, with Cicero writing to Atticus that he had ‘lost the one thing that bound me to life’. For solace, Cicero went to Atticus, and in his library mined the Greek philosophers, especially Crantor, to write his Consolatio. Sadly, the Consolatio has largely been lost, as has Crantor’s On Grief, which, according to Panætius, deserved to be learnt by heart.

The Philippics and Death

Cicero was not a party to Cæsar’s assassination in 44, although Brutus did call out his name upon raising his blood-stained dagger, beseeching him to ‘restore the Republic’. He later wrote to one of the conspirators, ‘How I wish that you had invited me to that most glorious banquet on the Ides of March.’

Mark Antony, as consul, leader of the Caesarian faction, and unofficial executor of Cæsar’s public will, began throwing his weight around. Cicero, who had been hoping to restore the Republic, responded by playing the young Octavian, Cæsar’s grandnephew, adopted son, and heir, against Antony. More than that, he overtly and vehemently attacked Antony in a series of speeches which he referred to as the Philippics, after the speeches delivered by Demosthenes to rouse the Athenians into fighting Philip II of Macedon. But this strategy failed when Octavian and Antony reconciled and joined forces with Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate.

Estimating that Cæsar had been undone by his clemency, the Second Triumvirate brought back the ruthless proscription, the legally sanctioned murder of opponents and rivals. The proscription also served to fund the Triumvirate’s war, the so-called Liberators’ Civil War, against Brutus and Cassius, who were finally defeated at the Battle of Philippi in 42. When Antony put Cicero at the head of the proscription list, Octavian tried to have him removed, but did not insist or prevail. Also on the list were Cicero’s son, brother, and nephew. The Triumvirate, in the words of Plutarch, ‘let their anger and fury take from them the sense of humanity, and demonstrated that no beast is more savage than man, when possessed with power answerable to his rage.’ 

On 7 December 43, Cicero, betrayed by a freedman of his brother, was intercepted near his villa at Formiæ, travelling down to the coast in a bid to escape to Greece.

He literally bowed to his assassins, extending his neck out of his litter to ease their task.

After killing him, they hacked off his head and hands so that Antony could have them displayed on the Rostra in the fashion of Marius and Sulla. According to the historian Cassius Dio, Antony’s wife Fulvia took up Cicero’s severed head, pulled out his tongue, and jabbed it repeatedly with her hairpin.

Cicero’s brother and nephew were also murdered, but his son, who was then in Greece, escaped unscathed.

Twelve years later, in 31, Cicero the Younger took part in the Battle of Actium, in which Octavian defeated Antony; and in 30, he had the satisfaction, as consul, of announcing Antony’s suicide to the Senate. 

Many years later, Octavian, now Augustus, chanced upon one of his grandsons reading a book by Cicero. The boy tried to hide the book in his gown, but the emperor took it from him and stood a long time leafing through its pages. Finally, he handed it back, saying, ‘My child, this was a learned man, and a lover of his country.’

Cicero as Philosopher

Was Cicero a Stoic, as is sometimes claimed? The answer, as with all things Cicero, is complicated. He studied, at various times in his life, under philosophers from all four major schools: Academic Skeptic, Peripatetic, Stoic, and Epicurean. But he saw himself primarily as a statesman, and his philosophical output, prolific though it is, mostly owes to those periods in which he was unable to partake in the cut and thrust of politics.

Cicero subordinated philosophy to public life because he believed that the purpose of philosophy is to enlighten political action, not least by encouraging virtue in political actors and the population at large. (He even subordinated philosophy to rhetoric, arguing, in essence, that an orator is a philosopher with the benefit of style.) Thus, his overarching project outside of immediate politics was to bring Greek philosophy to a Roman audience by writing expository works in Latin and, to a lesser extent, translating Greek texts into Latin. By coining Latin equivalences for specialised Greek terms, he enriched the Latin language and endowed it with an abstract vocabulary which is at the root of modern English words such as appetite, essence, humanity, individual, infinity, image, instance, moral, notion, property, quality, quantity, science, species, temperance, and vacuum.

In epistemology (theory of knowledge), Cicero favoured the Academic Skeptics, which afforded him the fluidity and flexibility to practise law, and, in politics, to privilege conciliation and expediency over principle or dogma. In his writings, he often imitated Plato in adopting the dialogue form, in which each speaker represents a different philosophical outlook and the reader is left to make up his or her own mind. For example, in On the Nature of the Gods, he pits an Epicurean spokesman and a Stoic spokesman against the Academic Skeptic Gaius Aurelius Cotta. Similarly, in On Ends, he expounds and critiques, in dialogue form, the central tenets of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and the Platonism of Antiochus of Ascalon. (The ubiquitous Lorem ipsum placeholder text, used to demonstrate the visual form of a template or typeface without imputing meaning, is a corrupted extract of On Ends.)

But Cicero felt that such relativism and amoralism would not do for the Senate and People of Rome, so that when it came to the spheres of ethics and political philosophy, he turned instead to the Peripatetics and especially to the Stoics, who emphasized virtue and offered positive doctrines.

Stoic or not, books such as On the Nature of the Gods, On Ends, On Duties, and Stoic Paradoxes make Cicero one of our most important sources on ancient Stoicism.

Cicero as Rhetorician

At the age of just sixteen or seventeen, Cicero wrote a handbook of rhetoric entitled On Invention, which in later life he dismissed as youthful work. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, On Invention became the standard textbook of rhetoric, alongside the anonymous Rhetoric for Herennius, which also came to be attributed to Cicero.

Although practical in scope, On Invention opens with a preface in which Cicero reflects upon the relationship between dialectic and rhetoric, concluding from the height of his teenage years that ‘wisdom without eloquence has been of little benefit to states, but eloquence without wisdom has for the most part been a great hindrance and never an advantage’. Until recently, everyone who was anyone would have read this.

Cicero’s mature works on rhetoric, On the Orator, Brutus, and Orator were little known until the Renaissance. Eloquence, he argued in these works, is not merely a gift of language but the culmination of a broad education. The ideal orator has a good grasp of philosophy, history, literature, and law, and speaks not merely to persuade but to guide the state.

His ideal of the educated citizen-orator shaped Western education for centuries. Rhetoric formed one of the three subjects of the trivium, alongside grammar and logic, and generations of students learnt to think, write, and speak by reading Cicero.

The rediscovery of his letters by Petrarch in 1345 sparked a search for other lost classical texts that helped kindle the Renaissance. Later, his writings profoundly influenced Enlightenment thinkers and the American Founding Fathers. John Locke, for instance, owned no fewer than nine editions of On Duties.

His influence endured well into the twentieth century, and it was not until the 1960s that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge dropped the matriculation (entry) requirement for an O level in Latin.

Did Cicero Live Up to His Own Ideals?

In an age that often prizes confidence over judgement and persuasion over truth, Cicero’s ideal of the orator as a philosopher and statesman remains as relevant as ever. But how well did he himself live up to that ideal?

Cicero had studied under and corresponded with the greatest minds of his day and written countless books on oratory and philosophy. Yet he seemed quite unable to control his passions, seeking always after fame and fortune, and coping poorly with adversity and hardship. Clearly, he did not need to have so many villas. His villa at Tusculum did not need to have two exercise areas. And these exercise areas did not need to be called the Academy and the Lyceum. Such grandeur, and his boastfulness, debased him, his learning, and his achievements.

The extraordinary oratory that had made him also unmade him. He loved to make an impression, so that he spoke more, and more forcefully, than he needed to, and often fell to attacking the person rather than the problem. As a result, he had not just adversaries but enemies.

In mitigation of the man, he lived through troubled times. The Roman Republic was collapsing around him, and political moderation had become almost impossible. His repeated reversals, compromises, and hesitations were not always signs of weakness, but sometimes the price of trying to preserve a constitutional order that others had already abandoned.

As a novus homo, or self-made man, he might also have harboured a deep-seated inferiority complex, explaining his need for achievement and affirmation.

Seneca once observed that Cato seemed more virtuous than wise. The converse might be said of Cicero: he could seem more wise than virtuous.

Unlike Cato, Cicero may not have met the standard of a Stoic sage. But for all his failings, the people loved him, because they knew him, at heart, to be a good man.

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Hate Noise? You Might Be a Genius

My silent writing retreat
Where I Wrote The German Greeks, surrounded by all the right sounds.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation. —Thomas Keating

I am excruciatingly sensitive to noise. I always carry earplugs and sometimes fantasise about living in the middle of the woods or on top of a hill. If I were browsing property listings, the first word I’d search for would be ‘secluded’. Is the problem with me—or with the world?

As a misophone (‘hater of sounds’), I’m in pretty good company. Kant hated noise, as did Proust, Kafka, and Darwin—and even, ironically, Wagner. Kant is said to have moved lodgings on account of a crowing rooster, while Proust lined his bedroom with cork.

Among all the great thinkers, none hated noise more openly or fervently than Arthur Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer and the Noisy Seamstress

In August 1821, while living in Berlin, the 33-year-old Schopenhauer had an altercation with a neighbour, the 47-year-old seamstress Caroline Louise Marquet. On that day, he was enraged by the noise of three women talking in the private anteroom to his apartment. When he demanded that they leave, two of the women complied but Marquet refused.

Later, Marquet claimed that Schopenhauer kicked and punched her and threw her down the stairs, leaving her paralysed on the right side and unable to work. He countered that he had only pushed her, and that she fell to the ground on purpose so that she could sue him.

Following a six-year legal battle ending in May 1827, he was made to pay her medical expenses along with a maintenance allowance of 60 thalers per annum for the rest of her life. On the day she died in 1842, the great philosopher of compassion recorded in his ledger, in Latin, Obit anus, abit onus (‘The crone dies, the burden is lifted’). Moral of the story: Don’t make noise around philosophers.

Schopenhauer built his pessimistic philosophy on that of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who lived all his life in Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad). Although gregarious and fond of laughter, Kant needed absolute quiet to write. In May 1784, he penned a letter to the police superintendent to complain about the ‘stentorian singing of prayers by the hypocritical inmates of the jail’ (in the Iliad, the Greek herald Stentor had a voice as loud ‘as fifty voices of other men’). He was offended not merely by the noise but also by the insincerity of the prayers, which were offered, he thought, simply to appear God-fearing to the jailor.

Schopenhauer on Noise

In his essay On Din and Noise (1851), Schopenhauer rails hardest not against the nattering of women but the cracking of whips in narrow resounding streets (the nineteenth-century equivalent of revving motorbikes, or those fart-can cars with modified exhausts): ‘Hammering, the barking of dogs, and the screaming of children are abominable; but it is only [his emphasis] the cracking of a whip that is the true murderer of thought.’ To him, the cracking of whips was all the more unbearable for being unnecessary and, worse than unnecessary, useless.

He goes on to link noise intolerance (misophonia, ‘the hatred of sound’) with intellect and creativity:

Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will smile at [my predicament], because they are not sensitive to noise; it is precisely these people, however, who are not sensitive to argument, thought, poetry, or art, in short, to any kind of intellectual impression: a fact to be assigned to the coarse quality and strong texture of their brain tissues.

The Difference Between Sound and Noise

But not every sound is noise. The difference between sound and noise is not merely one of acoustics but also of perception. The sounds of nature, I find, are almost always more tolerable than those of man. Years ago, I toured Copenhagen Zoo—the only thing open on a Monday—and noted that the most disturbing cries came not from the animals but from the human children.

I enjoy birdsong, the burbling of a stream, or waves lapping or breaking on a shore, but not, say, an air conditioner humming (unless it is very hot outside), children crying, or people shouting or talking without saying anything useful, interesting, or amusing. If I believe that something is important, meaningful, or beautiful, the sound that it makes is much less likely to constitute noise. Noise, then, is whatever I don’t think is worth hearing. In the final analysis, it is whatever dissipates rather than concentrates my energies.

For Schopenhauer, genius is precisely this: the ability of the mind to remain focused on a single point and object. But as soon as a focused mind is interrupted or distracted, it is no better than an ordinary mind. It is, says Schopenhauer, as with a large diamond, which, if shattered, loses most of its value; or as with an army, which, if dispersed, loses most of its power.

It is not merely a matter of genius but also of happiness. For anyone who has experienced it, deep concentration is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Aristotle famously conceived of God, the traditional fount of all reason, as a mind that turns blissfully upon itself. In contrast, people who are too frightened to put two and two together, or too dense to do so, use noise to occupy and numb their minds.

The Stoic Answer: Can We Rise Above the Noise?

Unlike Schopenhauer, the Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE) sought not to eliminate noise but to rise above it. In his Letters to Lucilius, he claims to be living above a bustling Roman bathhouse, and paints a vivid picture of the soundscape: the grunts of the weightlifter, the slaps and pummelling of the masseur, the splashing of the enthusiast who bombs into the pool, the ceaseless chatter of the hair-plucker who makes his victims yell… ‘So picture to yourself the assortment of sounds, which are strong enough to make me hate my very powers of hearing!’

Despite the din, Seneca remains able to read and write, assuring Lucilius that ‘this racket means no more to me than the sound of waves or falling water.’

Still, he recognises that some noises are worse than others. Intermittent noises, he says, are more upsetting than steady ones. Spoken words are more distracting than mere sounds, in that they demand our attention: compared to speech, even the saw-sharpener is easier to bear. 

Yet Seneca is able to force his mind to concentrate and ‘keep it from straying to things outside itself’. More than that, he sees this as a test of his Stoicism, mental fortitude, and even virtue. Ultimately, he reasons, noise only disturbs us insofar as it resonates with our own emotional turmoil. If our mind is still, no amount of noise can unsettle it; but if our mind is angry or fearful, or burning with greed or envy, no amount of silence can still it: ‘For of what benefit is a quiet quarter or neighbourhood if our emotions are in an uproar?’

We tend to associate sleeping with resting. But unless we are able to still our mind by the use of reason, the night merely changes the form of our worries. Real tranquillity, in contrast, ‘is the state reached by a rational mind when it is at rest.’

I think there is a lot of truth in that. When overwhelmed by noise, I find it helpful to ask myself, ‘Is my annoyance more to do with me or my prejudices than with the noise itself?’ But I would contest that even if we are able to concentrate in a din, our concentration is less profound or complete than it would otherwise have been, and more wearing too.

Seneca concedes that, having tested ourselves, it is simpler to avoid the uproar, or block it out, just as Odysseus blocked his ears and had his men row faster to get past the Sirens. According to lore, the Sirens were fated to die if someone ever escaped their singing, and after Odysseus were never again seen or heard.

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The Exiled Stoic Who Taught Epictetus

Musonius teaching
Be prepared to laugh. Musonius could be severe and hilarious in the same breath—a combination that made him one of antiquity’s most admired teachers.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

If Stoicism has a forgotten hero, it is Musonius Rufus.

Today, the names of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius are familiar to millions. But in antiquity, many regarded Musonius as the greatest Stoic teacher of them all. His lectures attracted students from across the Roman world, foremost among them Epictetus.

Unlike Seneca, Musonius wrote no polished essays. His philosophy was not intended for libraries but for life. He taught in public, argued fearlessly, endured repeated exile, and demonstrated by his example that philosophy is not something merely to discuss, but something to live.

For Musonius, philosophy was not an escape from ordinary life but a preparation for it. It taught people how to eat, work, marry, raise children, endure hardship, and come to terms with death. His school, he liked to say, was not some concert hall, where people came to be amused and entertained, but a hospital, where they came, in trepidation, to be treated.

Yet there was nothing gloomy about him. Though uncompromising in his principles, he possessed a wonderfully dry wit. When a man with a long beard claimed to be a philosopher, Musonius replied that he could see the beard—but not the philosopher.

Beginnings

Gaius Musonius Rufus (c. 25–c. 100 CE) was born in Etruria into a family of Roman equestrians.

As a young man, he went about inquiring into the health of people’s souls, suggesting that his sympathies then lay more with the Cynics than with the Stoics.

He later established himself in Rome as one of the most celebrated Stoic teachers of the age.

When, in 60 CE, the paranoid Nero banished Rubellius Plautus, a Stoic and distant cousin of Nero, Musonius followed his friend to Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and only returned to Rome after Plautus’ death in 62.

Second and Third Exiles

When, in 65, Nero learnt of the Pisonian conspiracy, led by the senator Gaius Calpurnius Piso, to have him overthrown, he condemned nineteen people to death, including Seneca. Though not involved in the plot, Musonius was banished to the barren island of Gyaros, the Alcatraz of the Mediterranean.

Exile, however, seemed to weigh lightly upon him, even on Gyaros, and one of his surviving lectures is entitled, Why Exile Is Not an Evil.

Exile, he says, does not deprive us of water, earth, air, or the sun and stars. Nor does it deprive us of human companionship. But by removing us from luxurious living, it can cure our bodies and souls of many ills.

More significantly, exile does not prevent us from caring for our real needs and acquiring virtue. On the contrary, it provides us with more leisure in which to study and do good deeds.

Resourceful people are resourceful wherever they find themselves. Those who lack resourcefulness have vice, and not exile, to blame for their miseries. Ergo, it is vice, and not exile, that we should fear.

Musonius returned to Rome in 68, in the reign of Galba. In 70, in the reign of Vespasian, he accused and obtained the conviction of Egnatius Celer, who, despite calling himself a Stoic, had colluded with Nero in condemning the Stoic Barea Soranius and his daughter Servilia to death.

When, in 71, Vespasian banished all philosophers from Rome, his reputation rode so high that he was tolerated to remain—before being banished all the same into his third and longest exile, this time in Syria.

He returned to Rome in 79, in the reign of Titus, and died around 100 CE.

The Teacher of Philosophy

Musonius exerted an important influence on his two most famous pupils, Epictetus and the polymath Dio Chrysostom (‘Dio the Golden-Mouthed’).

To separate the wheat from the chaff, he would often turn would-be students away, explaining to the young Epictetus that ‘the more one pushes the intelligent person away from the life he was born for, the more he inclines towards it.’

His school, he insisted, was no place for clever performances. People came not to be entertained but to be cured. Because treatment can sometimes be painful, students might expect to suffer a bit. He measured the success of his lectures not by the applause that they received but by the shock and silence that they provoked.

He quoted Homer after Odysseus had related the length of his labours:

Thus he spoke, and they all stayed softly in silence,
And they were held by a magic spell in the shadowy hall.

Epictetus records Musonius saying:

Am I to sit down and tell you clever slogans and sayings so that you praise me as you leave, even though the shoulder is no better than it was, the head still hurts, and the abscess and fistula remain? Do young men leave home for these reasons and leave behind their parents, friends, kinfolk, and property so that they may yell ‘hooray’ when you utter witticisms? Did Socrates do this, or Zeno, or Cleanthes?

Musonius could be severe. By Epictetus’ own account, he once rebuked him for overlooking the omission in a syllogism (formal logical argument). Epictetus sought to excuse himself, saying, ‘It’s not like I burnt down the Capitol’—to which Musonius replied, ‘Idiot, the omission here is the Capitol.’

Nothing worthwhile, he insisted, is acquired without pain. But if we think that the path of virtue is too arduous, let us consider the alternatives and how much more trouble people put up with for the sake of gain or how many ills they suffer for the sake of fame, even though these things are worthless.

Practical Philosophy

Insofar as we know, Musonius did not work on anything for publication. However, two of his students wrote down his sayings and opinions. The Discourses, collected by a certain Lucius, form the basis of the 21 short lectures preserved in Stobaeus. But a second work, by one Pollio, has been lost except for fragments.

All in all, there remain 31 fragments (preserved in Stobaeus, Epictetus, and Aulus Gellius), as well as the 21 lectures, which altogether fit comfortably within 80 or so pages.

Musonius’ lectures are full of practical, everyday advice aimed at instilling virtue and include a lecture on home furnishings and even a lecture on hair. Men, he advised, ought to grow a beard on the grounds that the beard is the mark of manhood, on a par with a cock’s comb or a lion’s mane.

Besides facial hair, Musonius advocated a vegetarian diet (preferably raw and unprepared), plain clothing, and shelter of a kind that offers little more than the protection afforded by a cave.

He once gave a thousand sesterces to a man claiming to be a philosopher. When his friends protested that the fellow was a charlatan, he let him keep the not-inconsiderable sum, explaining that money was exactly what he deserved.

To do philosophy, said Musonius, is to reason correctly, and to reason correctly is to act correctly. The person who does philosophy thereby takes care of his country, family, and friends—in a word, everybody.

The person who does not do philosophy, even if he be a doctor, lawyer, or some such, is thoughtless, and thoughtlessness is very near to insanity.

Even if one rules only oneself, no one is more kingly than a philosopher or more fit to rule, because one cannot rule others unless one first rules oneself.

Musonius was not merely a teacher of Stoicism. He showed what a Stoic looked like.

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Did Rome’s Richest Man Live Up to His Philosophy?

The Death of Seneca
According to Tacitus, Seneca modelled his death on that of Socrates, discussing philosophy with his friends.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Few philosophers have lived a life as dramatic or conflicted as Seneca’s. The emperor Nero made him the richest man in the Roman Empire before ordering him to commit suicide.

Today, Seneca is our most important primary source on ancient Stoicism, followed by Epictetus, Musonius Rufus, and Marcus Aurelius.

Stoicism has exerted a profound influence on the history of ideas, shaping the thought of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Adam Smith, and J. S. Mill. In mental health, it inspired what has become the world’s most widely practised form of psychotherapy: cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).

The Teacher’s Pet

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was probably born in 4 BCE, the same year as Jesus, in Corduba (modern-day Córdoba), Hispania.

His father, Seneca the Elder (Lucius Annaeus Seneca Maior), was a Roman equestrian who wrote books on rhetoric and Roman history. His elder brother Novatus, better known as Gallio, became a senator, and his younger brother Mela was the father of the poet Lucan.

Seneca was raised in Rome. His tutors included Attalus the Stoic, Sotion, and Papirius Fabianus. He so admired Attalus that he ‘practically laid siege to his classroom’. He was ‘the first to arrive and the last to leave’ and often left with the desire to be poor.

He suffered from poor health—possibly tuberculosis on a background of asthma—and, from his mid-twenties, spent several years convalescing in Alexandria, where he lived with his mother’s sister and her husband, Gaius Galerius, the governor of Egypt.

The three sailed back to Rome in 32, but Galerius perished in a shipwreck.

These early experiences of illness and uncertainty may help to explain Seneca’s lifelong preoccupation with adversity, mortality, and the best use of life.

Exile on Corsica

A few years after his return, Seneca was elected quaestor, making him a senator.

According to the historian Cassius Dio (d. c. 235 CE), Seneca, ‘who was superior in wisdom to all the Romans of his day and to many others as well,’ spoke so eloquently in the Senate that the emperor Caligula ordered his execution, only to stay the order after being told that he was in any case terminally ill.

In 41, the throne passed to Caligula’s uncle Claudius, and the new empress Messalina, seeking to eliminate a potential rival, accused Caligula’s sister Julia Livilla of adultery with Seneca. The Senate sentenced Seneca to death, but Claudius commuted the sentence to exile on Corsica.

On Corsica, Seneca wrote the Consolation to Polybius, a letter purporting to comfort Polybius, Claudius’ literary secretary, on the death of his brother, but more likely intended to flatter the emperor in the hope of being recalled from exile.

Tutor and Adviser to Nero

In 49, following the downfall of Messalina, Agrippina the Younger, a sister of Caligula and Julia Livilla, married her uncle Claudius, and had Seneca recalled to tutor her twelve-year-old son, Nero.

When the lad acceded to the throne in 54, Seneca became his adviser and, alongside the praetorian prefect Sextus Afranius Burrus, provided good government during the first five, relatively benign, years of his reign, the so-called quinquennium Neronis.

In 58, the senator Publius Suilius Rufus, who had been close to Claudius, began attacking Seneca with a series of accusations centred upon his rapid rise to fabulous wealth. ‘By what kind of wisdom or maxims of philosophy,’ he inveighed, ‘has Seneca within four years of royal favour amassed three hundred million sesterces?’ In response, Seneca prosecuted Suilius, who was banished to the Balearic Islands.

The charge has echoed down the centuries. How could a Stoic philosopher preach simplicity while becoming the richest man in Rome?

In 59, Nero had Agrippina murdered, and Seneca wrote the self-exculpatory speech that he delivered to the Senate, a speech so artful that the senators moved to congratulate the emperor upon his own mother’s murder.

Downfall and Suicide

But now the tide would turn against our man.

After the death of Burrus in 62, Seneca lost whatever remained of his restraining influence over Nero. Having read the runes, he twice petitioned to retire, once in 62 and again in 64, but Nero refused to cut him loose. Still, he contrived to spend almost all his time on his country estates, working, among others, on his Letters to Lucilius.

His prolonged absences from court may have stoked Nero’s suspicions. When, in 65, the Pisonian conspiracy to overthrow Nero came to light, the emperor condemned a first wave of nineteen people to death, among them Seneca and his nephew Lucan.

By the end of the year, Seneca, his two brothers, and the twenty-five-year-old Lucan had all four been made to commit suicide.

According to the historian Tacitus (d. 120 CE), Seneca modelled his death on that of Socrates, discussing philosophy with his friends and chiding them for their outbursts of emotion.

He slit one vein, and then another, and then a few more, but would not bleed enough to die. Now in considerable pain, he took some hemlock, but this too failed to do the deed. At last, to dilate his veins and ease the pain, he immersed himself in a hot bath and finally suffocated to death.

His wife Pompeia Paulina, whom he had married in later life, attempted to share his fate, but Nero ordered that she be rescued and bandaged up.

Legacy

Seneca had seen the writing on the wall, which is why he worked so assiduously in his final years, seeking, through the Letters, to make himself as immortal as any mortal can be.

Even his carefully staged suicide may have been a part of that immortality project. Tacitus hints as much when, having related Seneca’s last words to his friends, he writes, ‘After these and some similar remarks, which might have been meant for a wider audience…’

Upon his death, Seneca’s works were instantly popular and, according to Quintilian, were ‘in the hands of every young man’. Seneca has been read by most everyone since, including the ‘French Seneca’, Michel de Montaigne, who modelled his Essays upon the Letters.

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The Slave Who Inspired an Emperor

Epictetus the slave and Marcus Aurelius the emperor
Epictetus inspired not one but two of Rome’s greatest emperors: Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

A biography of the Roman slave who rose into one of the leading Stoic philosophers, inspired an emperor, and shaped modern psychotherapy.

Stoic philosophy has exerted a profound influence on the history of ideas, inspiring thinkers as diverse as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Adam Smith, and J. S. Mill.

Its influence extends far beyond philosophy. In the field of mental health, Stoicism inspired what has become the most widely practised form of talking treatment, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Aaron Beck (d. 2021), the father of CBT, wrote that ‘the philosophical origins of cognitive therapy can be traced back to the Stoic philosophers.’

Epictetus, together with Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Musonius Rufus, is one of our principal sources on Stoicism. But whereas Marcus Aurelius ruled the greatest empire on earth, and Seneca rose into the wealthiest man in that empire, Epictetus began as a slave.

Yet his teachings came to shape an emperor, influence Christian and Islamic thought, inspire the founders of modern psychotherapy, and guide millions in the face of hardship and adversity.

So, how did a mere slave achieve all this?

Life as a Slave

Epictetus (c. 50–c. 135 CE) was born into slavery at Hierapolis, in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). His name, in Greek, means something like ‘Acquired One’.

He spent his youth in Rome as a slave to Epaphroditus, a wealthy freedman and secretary to Nero. In 68, Epaphroditus assisted Nero in committing suicide (since Nero could not bring himself to plunge the dagger), with the deluded emperor lamenting, Qualis artifex pereo [‘What an artist dies in me!’].

In those early years, Epictetus, though a slave, discovered philosophy, and even managed to study under the charismatic Stoic Musonius Rufus. Musonius taught that philosophy is not merely something to be discussed but something to be lived—a lesson that Epictetus never forgot.

It is also around this time that he developed a disability, which may have owed to rheumatoid arthritis, although the Christian theologian Origen claims that it was his master who injured him.

One day, according to a famous anecdote, Epaphroditus lost his temper and grabbed Epictetus by the leg. He twisted it so forcefully that Epictetus warned him that it would break. When it snapped, Epictetus did not wince or cry, but calmly said, ‘Did I not tell you that it would break?’

Some time after Nero’s death, by virtue of his education or the dignity which it conferred upon him, Epictetus gained his civil freedom, having already acquired the far greater freedom of the mind.

Now a freedman, he taught philosophy in Rome.

Exile and the School at Nicopolis

When, in 94, Domitian banished all philosophers from the capital, Epictetus settled in Nicopolis, in Epirus, Greece, where he established a school and remained for the rest of his life.

Students travelled from across the Roman Empire to hear him speak. Among them was the young Arrian of Nicomedia, whose notes would preserve Epictetus’ teachings for posterity.

Like Musonius, Epictetus concentrated on ethics, arguing that physics and logic—the other two branches of ancient philosophy—ought to be in the service of practical action:

What do I care if matter is made up of atoms, indivisibles, or fire and earth? Isn’t it enough to know the nature of good and evil, the limits of desire and aversion, and of choice and refusal…?

The purpose of philosophy, he argued, is not to speculate about the stars but to learn how to live, ‘to practise how to remove from one’s life sighs and sorrow, grief and disappointment, and cries of “Alas!” and “Poor me!”’ This is largely a matter of according our will to the world, ‘so that nothing happens contrary to our wishes, and, conversely, nothing fails to happen that we want to happen.’

Hadrian, the future emperor, held Epictetus in the highest regard, and visited him, a former slave, in Nicopolis.

Epictetus’ Lamp

Epictetus did not marry or have children, despite urging these things upon others.

When he rebuked his friend and student Demonax for not marrying, Demonax sarcastically replied, ‘Very well, then, will you give me one of your daughters for a wife?’

However, in his retirement, Epictetus did, out of necessity, adopt the infant child of a friend, and raised him with the help of a woman.

His own needs remained remarkably modest. One day, the iron lamp by which he wrote was stolen. Reasoning that one can lose only what one has, he replaced it with a lamp of clay—which, after his death, was purchased at a great price by an admirer with no sense of irony.

The Discourses and Encheiridion

Epictetus wrote nothing himself. His teachings were recorded as the Discourses (or Diatribai) by his pupil Arrian of Nicomedia, also known for his account of the campaigns of Alexander the Great, written in a very different style.

In a prefatory note, Arrian writes: ‘Whatever I used to hear him say I wrote down, word for word, as best I could…’

He also claims that the Discourses ‘have somehow, without my knowledge or intention, fallen into the public’s hands.’

Such, in any case, is the public story. It is possible that Epictetus wrote the rather polished Discourses himself, with Arrian’s claimed authorship serving as a literary device to create an impression of spontaneity.

Whatever their precise origin, the Discourses remain unique in ancient philosophy. Rather than polished treatises, they preserve the atmosphere of a living classroom, with Epictetus questioning, teasing, rebuking… and constantly bringing philosophy back to the business of living.

Of the original eight books, only four have come down to us, and we also have the more portable Encheiridion, which is a digest of the Discourses—the word encheiridion [Greek, en+ kheir, literally, ‘in hand’]meaning something like ‘to have at hand’, originally with reference to a dagger or knife.

From Emperors to Modern Psychology

According to Origen, by the third century Epictetus’ renown exceeded that of Plato:

Plato is only found in the hands of those reputed to be philologists. By contrast, Epictetus is admired by ordinary people who have the desire to be benefited and who perceive improvement from his writings.

His influence spread far beyond the pagan world. In the ninth century, al-Kindi, the ‘Father of Arab Philosophy’, wrote a Device for Dispelling Sorrows which appears to have been influenced by Stoicism—for instance, in the contention that sorrow arises from thwarted desire, or that it is more a matter of convention than of nature.

In a striking analogy, which also features in the Encheiridion, al-Kindi compares life to a landfall during a much longer sea voyage back to our homeland, and warns us, as Epictetus did, not to get so caught up by the fruits and flowers as to forget about the ship.

Epictetus also left a lasting mark on modern psychology. In the first major work on rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT), the forerunner of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), Albert Ellis (d. 2007) framed his project with a line from the Encheiridion: ‘Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them.’

The US fighter pilot James Stockdale (d. 2005) credited Epictetus with helping him survive more than seven years of imprisonment and torture in Vietnam, including four years in solitary confinement in a 3′ by 9′ concrete, windowless cell.

When his A-4 Skyhawk was shot down over North Vietnam, Stockdale remembered thinking to himself as he parachuted towards the jungle: ‘I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus!’

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