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They were tough. They knew that life was tough. They knew that a fragile person would not survive. They also knew, back in the days of ancient Rome, that life was fragile—that even tough people could be cut down by disease or events or a tyrant.
So yeah, there was gruffness to the Stoics. A wariness of getting too close or too attached, lest your heart be broken by fortune.
But does that mean the Stoics were unfeeling? Utterly disconnected? Harsh and invulnerable? Hardly. In his fascinating biography of Marcus Aurelius (grab it from the Painted Porch here), Donald Robertson takes pains to note a virtue exhibited by Marcus Aurelius' incredible mother, Lucilla—what he refers to as her "natural affection." While the mothers of many emperors before him were ambitious and cruel, Lucilla was kind and generous and genuinely loved by her own children. Marcus, Donald writes, "came to agree with Fronto (his rhetoric teacher) that generally speaking, 'those among us who are called Patricians are rather deficient' in precisely this quality." Both Marcus and Fronto, Donald points out, use the philostogia, which Paul would use in the Bible, when he said that Christians were to "be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love."
The Stoics loved and were loved. They honored their parents. They played with their children. Philostogia is exactly how one would describe Cato's relationship to his brother (who lived very differently than he did), just as it could describe Marcus' with his stepbrother Lucius Verus (who was also quite different). The Stoics were kind. They cared about people—and not just people they were related to, but all humankind.
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