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.
PANAETIUS THE CONNECTOR
(Pan-EYE-tee-us)
Origin: Rhodes
B. 185 BC
D. 109 BC
Stoicism was born in Athens, but it came of age and to power in Rome, a story that mirrors the life of Panaetius of Rhodes, who would become one of Stoicism’s great ambassadors to the world. We know that in 155 BC, Diogenes and his diplomatic mission had successfully introduced Stoicism to the growing empire, which would absorb the philosophy into its DNA. But it actually may have made a brief appearance thirteen years earlier when Crates of Mallus, a Stoic philosopher from Pergamum, was sent on his own mission to Rome to protect his country’s interests in the Macedonian Wars.
Breaking his leg in a fall, Crates spent months recuperating and discoursing on philosophy with small audiences of Romans. As it happens, Panaetius’s father was in Rome on his own diplomatic mission at the same time as Crates’s convalescence. Did he attend his lectures? Bring home copies of the discourses that had spread through Rome in the form of poems and commentaries? Or did he bring his son with him on one trip and send him to see Crates directly?
Soon enough, the young Panaetius was a student of Crates back in Pergamum, the future diplomat and connector having been introduced to philosophy through a fortuitous diplomatic connection.
We don’t know much about Panaetius’s studies under this early Stoic, but clearly they were designed to prepare him to follow in his father’s footsteps and into the track that Diogenes and Antipater had set for future Stoics: serving the public good. In 155 BC, Panaetius was appointed to the position of sacrificial priest at Poseidon Hippios in Lindos. It would be the first of the many public roles he would serve in his active life.
Whatever he learned on this job, it became clear to Panaetius that he needed more formal education as well. He eventually made his way to Athens to study under Diogenes, now world-famous after his own diplomatic mission to Rome, and Diogenes’s protégé, Antipater. It’s as if Panaetius returned to get his PhD in philosophy—this second phase of education in Athens would last roughly five years—and then went right back to the real world once more, where he got to work applying what he’d learned at the highest levels of influence and power in Rome.
Learn. Apply. Learn. Apply. Learn. Apply. This is the Stoic way.
During his time in Athens with Diogenes, Panaetius met a fellow student of Diogenes named Gaius Laelius, with whom he would continue to study. Through Laelius and then later, on a naval contingent, Panaetius met and served with Scipio Aemilianus, one of Rome’s great generals, an adopted son of one of its most powerful families and a lover of Greek thought and literature.
Back in Rome, these three men then formed a kind of philosophical club—known to historians today as the Scipionic Circle—that would meet in Scipio’s enormous houses to discuss and debate the Stoic philosophy they all pursued. Scipio footed the bill, Panaetius provided the intellectual nourishment. Many others joined them in these discussions and were shaped by them. Not unlike the way that the expat scene in France after the First World War nurtured the careers of Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald, or how a company like PayPal would give the world Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman and Elon Musk, the Scipionic Circle became a kind of breeding ground for influential Stoics and a generation of leaders. Publius Rutilius Rufus, who defied Rome’s culture of corruption and who you will meet in the next chapter, was often present. The historian Polybius was too.
It was a form of influence and access that neither Panaetius’s father, nor his teachers, Crates and Diogenes, could have imagined possible. Scipio, with time and with Rome’s growth, became the most powerful man in the Greek world. The kings of Greece now answered to him and to Rome as vassals, while Panaetius served as a kind of translator and advisor and confidant.
Some historians today debate just how often the Scipionic Circle met and how direct its influence was. But there was little of this doubt about its significance in the ancient world. Velleius Paterculus records in his History of Rome that Scipio “kept constantly with him, at home and in the field, two men of eminent genius, Polybius and Panaetius.” He describes Scipio as being deeply devoted to the art of war and peace, saying that he was constantly “engaged in the pursuit of arms or his studies, he was either training his body by exposing it to dangers or his mind by learning.”
Cicero, who was fascinated by stories of Panaetius, sprinkled his dialogues with scenes and anecdotes from these meetings. Later writers like Plutarch not only had no doubts about the Circle, but tell us of the kind of quiet political influence Panaetius managed to exert. In Moralia: Precepts of Statecraft, Plutarch writes that “it is a fine thing also, when we gain advantage from the friendship of great men, to turn it to the welfare of our community, as Polybius and Panaetius, through Scipio’s goodwill towards them, conferred great benefits upon their native States.”
This is what Panaetius had trained for—directing policy and shaping powerful decisions that affected millions of people.
Where Zeno was a founding genius and Chrysippus was the cleaver to the Academy’s knots, while Aristo favored absolutism over pragmatic direction and Antipater moved in the opposite direction of trying to lay out rules for everyday life, Panaetius was a kind of weaver—tying Stoic and Roman ethical perspectives together, introducing philosophical consideration to Rome’s elite with one hand, subtly directing them to protect and service the interests of his distant homeland with the other. Effectively, the Stoa had a supremely well-placed and practical ambassador in Rome.
The timing could not have been more essential.
It’s not hard to detect a provincialism in the early Stoics. Zeno insisted on his hometown being inscribed next to his name on a building he had paid to restore. Cleanthes’s frugal lifestyle had little room for travel, let alone concern for international affairs. Even Diogenes had quickly returned to Athens after his trip to Rome. These were not attitudes well fitted to a global empire.