Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Philosophical norms and political attachments: Cicero and Seneca 427
in which the emperor, who wrote his meditations while on military
campaign, depicts all the events of life as meaningless movements, like
“crazed mice running for shelter” (M.Ant. VII.3). Isn’t this too much
detachment, in a man who has to make decisions for the good of his
country? Doesn’t one have to think that a good decision makes a
large difference, in order to be sufficiently invested in the entire process
of leadership or even citizenship?
The Stoics were not just talking into the air, as so many intellectuals
have the habit of doing. They were, in some central cases, prominent
political actors, playing leading roles in the Roman Republic and Empire.
It should be revealing, then, to investigate the relationship between
their careers and their philosophical thought, asking how they understood
their commitments to Rome and her politics, and whether they
managed to organize their emotional lives in a way consistent with
that understanding. The three whose careers seem particularly worth
exploring are, in chronological order, Cicero (106 –43 B.C.E.), the
great orator and statesman of the waning days of the Roman Republic;
Seneca (ca. 4–65 C.E.), regent of the Empire during the youth of Nero,
and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121–180 C.E.), who ruled as emperor
for the last twenty years of his life. All get high marks from history for
rectitude and decency, and all at least tried to steer Rome on a just
course. Both Cicero and Seneca lost their lives for their attempts to
stop what they plausibly took to be disastrous political tendencies –
the one assassinated by the henchmen of Marc Antony, the other ordered
to commit suicide for his role in a plot against the emperor
Nero, whose regent and advisor he had previously been.
This essay will investigate the complex relationship between emotion-theory
and emotional life in two of these three politicians. I shall
say nothing more about Marcus: he left only a very abstract work of
Stoic meditation, which does not connect its observations about the
personality to concrete political events, so it is very hard to go further
in assessing the relationship between theory and real life in his case. I
shall focus, instead, on the other two, about whose lives much is
known, and who left some evidence of their own emotions about specific
events of their time. Cicero, I shall argue, is ultimately inconsistent:
he endorses the Stoic view in his philosophical works, but in his personal
correspondence (which fortunately survives in large quantity) and his
political speeches he expresses deep emotions concerning Rome and her
future, emotions that he never seems at all eager to disown. I shall try to
make sense of this inconsistency, asking what Stoicism really meant in