It was a noble stance, but it allowed his enemies to make quick work of him. The enormous verdict was more than Rutilius—or anyone but the most corrupt officials—could ever pay. His property was seized and he was exiled. No longer could this stickler get in the way of Marius’s looting of Rome, nor could the existence of this ethical man embarrass or show up the rising criminal class.
As he no doubt learned from his teacher, Panaetius, like the pankratist, you must be prepared at all times for the unexpected blows of life—if not to block them, at least to absorb and endure them without whining.
Rutilius’s enemies, in dealing this blow, offered this noble civil servant and military hero one small dignity, and in so doing, all but proved to history his perfect innocence. The false accusers offered their sacrificial victim the opportunity to choose the place of his exile.
Rutilius, with a twinkle in his eye, perhaps, or at least the stone-hard determination of a man who knows he did nothing wrong, chose Smyrna—the very city he had allegedly defrauded. Smyrna, grateful for the reforms and scrupulous honesty of the man who had once governed them, welcomed Rutilius with open arms. They even offered him citizenship. Suetonius tells us that he settled in Smyrna with Opilius Aurelius, “a freedman of an Epicurean, [who] first taught philosophy, afterwards rhetoric, and finally grammar . . . where he lived with him until old age.” Cicero would visit with Rutilius there in 78 BC and call him “a pattern of virtue, of old-time honor, and of wisdom.”
Was Rutilius bitter? It doesn’t appear so. Reports are that he got on with life, and that his fortune grew despite his removal from the circles of power. Gifts from admirers poured in. We are told that a consoling friend attempted to reassure Rutilius that with civil war likely in Rome, in due time all exiles would be allowed back. “What sin have I committed that you should wish me a more unhappy return than departure?” Rutilius replied. “I should much prefer to have my country blush for my exile than weep at my return!”
Better to be missed than to overstay your welcome.
When the state is beyond redemption and helplessly corrupt, the Stoics believed, the wise man will stay away. Confucius, himself a philosopher and an advisor to princes, had said something similar several centuries before. What we know is that Rutilius stayed in Smyrna and wrote his History of Rome in Greek. Hardly broken by the ignominy of what was done to him, he just kept working.
When Rutilius was eventually invited back to Rome by Sulla, who triumphed over Marius and became dictator, the “honor” was politely declined.
Rutilius’s fellow Stoics were livid at the treatment of this honorable man, but in a way it was an important lesson. Doing the right thing could cost a person everything. This was not Plato’s Republic—philosopher kings were not only not desired, they were the enemy of those trying to get rich through the empire. Disgraces had become commonplace. Every major figure of this period would be accused of either electoral or financial corruption.
Unlike Rutilius, almost all of them were guilty.
Why did it seem that the good were punished while the evil got away scot free? It is the way of the world, then and now, sadly. “When good men come to bad ends,” Seneca would write, “when Socrates is forced to die in prison, Rutilius to live in exile, Pompey and Cicero to offer their necks to their own clients, and great Cato, the living image of all the virtues, by falling upon his sword to show that the end had come for himself and for the state at the same time, one cannot help being grieved that Fortune pays her rewards so unjustly.”
Still, who would you rather be? Because there is a cost to cheating, to stealing, to doing the wrong thing—even if society rewards it. Would you rather go out like Rutilius with your head high or live in denial of your own undeniable shame?
As bad as it was, the Stoics of Rutilius’s time had little idea of what the future had in store for them. They could not have known that as bad as what they were witnessing was, it was only, as the writer and podcaster Mike Duncan would describe it two thousand years later, “the storm before the storm.” The Roman Republic’s institutions had been greatly weakened and all that remained was valiant resistance from great and honorable men. How much longer could they hold back the tides? How much longer could they preserve the ethics and political institutions that Greece had brought to Rome?
With Julius Caesar coming, the answer, sadly, was not much longer.
But for a time, Rutilius Rufus had let his light shine. He had been a force for good in the world and had suffered for it. But never, it seems, did he question whether it was worth it. Nor did he harbor any bitterness about his fate. He had looked at himself and the corruption around him and decided that no matter what other people said or did, his job was to be good. He knew, as Marcus Aurelius would remind himself over and over, that all he controlled was his character and his ability to let his true colors shine undiminished. You can lay violent hands on me, Zeno had said, but my mind will remain committed to philosophy.
But Zeno only had to say it. Marcus was never wrongly convicted. He never lost his home. Rutilius believed it, spoke it, and lived it.
It was he who had to stand there as they brought him up on trumped-up charges, as they soiled his reputation, stole his possessions, and sent him far from the country he loved. And yet, under all this pressure, he did not crack. He did not compromise. He did not bend the knee. He refused what must have been the implicit carrot that went along with the legal stick: Drop these pesky objections and we can make you rich and important.
Publius Rutilius Rufus was, uncompromisingly, the last honest man in Rome. It’s an example that calls down to us today, as it did to the brave Stoics of his time and every one of them who came after.
POSIDONIUS THE GENIUS
(Po-si-DOUGH-knee-us)
Origin: Apamea, Syria
B. 135 BC
D. 51 BC
Posidonius of Apamea was yet another Stoic born into a prominent family in a time of anxious abundance. The year of his birth, 135 BC, in what is now Syria, marked the beginning of political turmoil that in a sense continues to this day. But for Posidonius, it was the same kind of formative incubation in uncertainty that had created Zeno and Cleanthes before him.
Perhaps these are the ideal conditions in which Stoicism emerges: a homeland lacking strong leadership and buffeted by powerful outside forces; a ringside seat to the perils of excess and greed. It was all an early lesson that in an unpredictable world, the only thing we can really manage is ourselves—and that the space between our ears is the only territory we can conquer in any kind of certain and enduring way.
In any case, Posidonius would later recall with disapproval that the abundance of Syria in those days made its people “free from the bother of the necessities of life, and so were forever meeting for a continual life of feasting and their gymnasia turned into baths.” He wrote of the “drunken ambition” of the local tyrants. Things were good, but good times rarely make for great people, or great governments.
Ultimately, he voted with his feet as many of the other early Stoics did, leaving his birthplace at eighteen or twenty years old for Athens.