As for everything else, Caveat emptor was his argument. Buyer beware.
“Even if I am not telling you everything,” Diogenes explained, “I am not concealing from you the nature of the gods, or the highest good; yet to know these things would benefit you more than to know that the cheap price of wheat was down.” Is there no better encapsulation of the pragmatic philosophy of this diplomat who had gone to Rome to argue for a reduction of a fine his city likely never intended to pay? Who with one hand dazzled the Romans with speeches while picking their pocket with the other, perhaps telling himself he was preventing Rome from doing the same to Athens? There were competing interests at stake: Athens versus Rome, commercial versus colonial power, paying one’s debts versus fighting an unjust sentence.
Somehow he made it work. He struck a balance of interests and competing loyalties—exactly the role of a diplomat and a political advisor.
He played a similar role settling, in practice, some of the more complicated debates in Stoicism. Aristo had tried to say that we should be indifferent to all things. Diogenes knew that was unrealistic as well. Wealth, he said, was “not merely conducive to achieving pleasure and good health, but essential.” It wasn’t more important than virtue, but it was important—if you could get it. And virtue, according to Cicero’s paraphrasing of his views, “demands life-long steadiness, firmness of purpose and consistency.”
Money made life easier. Virtue, on the other hand, was the work of our life.
Unfortunately, little to none of Diogenes’s writing survives to us, a sad fact given that he was, at least according to the texts that have been discovered entombed in the town destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, one of the most cited authors in the ancient world, even more than Plato and Aristotle.
As Diogenes’s works are lost to us, so too was he lost to the world. We not only don’t know how he died, we’re not even sure when. Cicero says that by 150 BC—only a few years after his mission to Rome—Diogenes was dead. Lucian states that he lived to be eighty. But other sources have him living for another decade or until his student Antipater inherited the mantle.
In any case, this prince of philosophy did not live forever, but his legacy—Stoicism as a political force, and the character he exemplified—was only just beginning. In fact, it would soon conquer the world.
ANTIPATER THE ETHICIST
(An-TIP-uh-ter)
Origin: Tarsus
B. Unknown
D. 129 BC
If Diogenes was the pragmatic politician, then his student Antipater, the next leader of the Stoa, was the real-world ethicist. Practical, yes, but intent on establishing clear principles from which every action must descend.
We don’t know when Antipater of Tarsus was born, or really any details of his early life in Tarsus, only that he succeeded Diogenes of Babylon as head of the Stoa after Diogenes’s death sometime around 142 BC. What is obvious is that Antipater’s worldview was very much defined by the influence of Diogenes and a reaction against his master’s former student, the seductive but amorphous Carneades.
Where Carneades was content to argue contradictory positions on alternating days as he had in Rome, relishing the opportunity his newfound fame offered him to mislead his Athenian audiences at every turn, Antipater became a stickler for truth and honesty. Where Diogenes had brought politics to the realm of philosophy—or philosophy to the realm of real-world politics—Antipater sought to bring the practice of everyday ethics to all facets of life. And as ambitious as his aims were, he brought a humility back to Stoicism too.
No one would find Antipater fighting for the spotlight. He was too busy, as a good philosopher should be, working.
Even the medium through which he made his arguments was relatable and ordinary. Previous Stoics had held forth at the Stoa and in theaters, but Antipater opted out. Instead, he invited friends over for dinner to have long discussions about philosophy. Athenaeus tells us in his book called The Learned Banqueters, written just after the time of Marcus Aurelius, that Antipater was a wonderful storyteller at these gatherings, illustrating his points with powerful anecdotes. While supporters urged him to challenge Carneades’s oratory with bombast of his own, and Carneades attempted to goad him into public debates, Antipater channeled his energy into this dinner-table diplomacy as well as into written works aimed not at triumph over current rivals but to help with the timeless trials of everyday life.
Antipater’s quiet arguments were befitting a man with a fine-tuned sense for ethics, because on the page he could better articulate his views. In these small gatherings he could really connect with an individual, he could get specific, and he could be kind. It also allowed him to see up close the needs, the wants, and the struggles of real people—not just faces beneath the rostrum. Had he been born a couple thousand years later, one could easily imagine him having made a great advice columnist. If Diogenes had been the diplomat and statesman, then we might picture Antipater playing the political ground game, developing relationships, persuading in person, focusing on the individual and improving their lives.
For instance, Antipater was the first Stoic to make strong arguments for marriage and family life, something that had been strangely neglected by earlier philosophers. Zeno had left no natural heirs. Cleanthes had no room in his frugal existence for a wife. Chrysippus tried to be a single parent to his nephews when the need arose, yet he ultimately lived for his work. But Antipater broke new ground for Stoics by speaking passionately on the importance of choosing the right spouse and of raising good children. Try to learn from Socrates’s mistakes, he warned the young men he taught, as he told them another story about Socrates’s wife, who had a disagreeable reputation and a bad temper. If you don’t choose whom to marry wisely, your wisdom—and your happiness—will surely be tested.
To Antipater, a successful city and a successful world could only be built around the keystone of family. Marriage, he said to his students, was “among the primary and most necessary of appropriate actions.” Did Antipater get married himself? Was he a better husband and father than Socrates? The records are scant, but this sentence from his book on marriage sure makes it sound that way: “Moreover, it is the case that he who hasn’t experienced a wedded wife and children has not tasted the truest and genuine goodwill.”
Stoics can love and be loved? Absolutely. Not only can they, but they should, as Antipater clearly did.
Michel Foucault, the twentieth-century French philosopher and social theorist, would credit Antipater for pioneering a new concept of marriage, where two individuals blend their souls and become better for joining together, as opposed to some legal or economic transaction. As Foucault notes, the Stoic oikos, home, is perfected in marriage, creating a “conjugal unit” that can withstand the blows of fate and create a good life.