Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday & Stephen Hanselman

Author:Ryan Holiday & Stephen Hanselman [Holiday, Ryan & Hanselman, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

ATHENODORUS CANANITES

THE KINGMAKER

(Ah-thee-na-DOOR-us Kah-na-KNEE-tays)

Origin: Tarsus

B. 74 BC

D. 7 AD

The Roman Republic bled out alongside Cato and Cicero. What emerged was the Roman Empire, a new political order that was all about power, increasingly concentrated in a single man. Not Caesar, but a Caesar—the title each successor bore for the next three hundred years. The first was Octavian, Caesar’s nephew. He would begin the process of despotism slowly, refusing every title and power along the way, only to very cleverly usurp them all as his own over time.

One might think that Stoicism, having been born in the cradle of democratic Athens and then nursed for centuries against the backdrop of Alexander’s warring generals, before finally coming of age in Rome’s great Republic, would have trouble in this brave new world.

This is incorrect.

The Stoics were nothing if not resilient, and so it came to be that the new emperor’s closest advisors were Stoics.

It makes sense. At the core of Stoicism is the acceptance of what we cannot change. Cato had given his life to defend the Republic and he had lost. Brutus had not only failed in his attempt to restore liberty to Rome, but had plunged the country into a second civil war. Now a new state had been created and peace had returned, and the Stoics who survived believed it was their obligation to serve this state and ensure it remained the same—and so they set out, as best they could, to mold young Octavian into Augustus Caesar, the emperor.

The first Stoic to occupy that role in Octavian’s life was Athenodorus Cananites, another Tarsian Stoic, born in Canana, in what is today southeastern Turkey, not far from the birthplace of Stoics like Chrysippus and Antipater. Athenodorus studied under Posidonius at his school in Rhodes and then later lived in Athens, where he experimented with oceanographic study like his teacher. He was later a correspondent of Cicero’s, and gave Cicero much of the research on Panaetius that would go into his masterwork On Duties.

After completing his philosophical education under Posidonius, Athenodorus traveled widely as a lecturer, reaching as far as Petra and Egypt, along with other major cities in the Mediterranean, before assuming the role of young Octavian’s teacher in Apollonia, on the coast of modern Albania. It was here that this famous and widely respected teacher, who was not quite thirty years old, became not only Octavian’s tutor but his very close friend. When Caesar was murdered in 44 BC, Octavian returned to Rome as the nineteen-year-old named heir. Athenodorus followed closely behind, charged with developing the kind of mind required for supreme leadership.

Octavian was bright but by no means an easy student. He was deeply superstitious, a trait that would have been repulsive to a rational Stoic . . . and hardly a virtue in a king. We get a sense of Athenodorus’s teaching style—and his calm Stoic demeanor—by way of a ghost story he would have almost certainly passed along to his Caesar. Renting a large mansion in

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