discipline—not an abstract system of thought, but an attitude
to life. Partly for historical reasons, it is this Romanized
Stoicism that has most influenced later generations. Indeed,
the application of the adjective “stoic” to a person who
shows strength and courage in misfortune probably owes
more to the aristocratic Roman value system than it does to
Greek philosophers.
Stoicism in its later form was a system inspired as much
by individuals as by texts or doctrines. One of its most
distinguished adherents was Marcus Cato (known as Cato the
Younger to distinguish him from his great-grandfather,
prominent a century earlier). A senator of renowned rectitude
when Julius Caesar marched on Rome in 49 B.C., Cato sided
with Caesar’s rival Pompey in defense of the legitimate
government. When it was clear that Caesar would triumph,
Cato chose not to survive the Republic, killing himself after
the battle of Munda in 46. Within a century he had become an
emblem of Stoic resistance to tyranny. Under Nero he was
immortalized by the poet Lucan and praised in a laudatory
biography by the senator Thrasea Paetus, whose own
resistance to Nero cost him his life. Thrasea’s son-in-law,
Helvidius Priscus, played a similar role—and came to a
similar end—under Vespasian. Thrasea and Helvidius in
their turn served as role models to second-century aristocrats
like Marcus’s mentors Rusticus, Maximus, and Severus.
Marcus himself pays tribute to them (and to Cato) in
Meditations 1.14.