Zeno of Citium

Introduction

Zeno of Citium is the founder of Stoicism. His original works are entirely lost; the surviving information about his life and teaching comes from later sources, principally Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (third century CE), which preserves an extensive biographical and doxographical account. What can be reconstructed shows a philosopher who synthesized elements of Cynicism, Megaric logic, and the Socratic tradition into a comprehensive philosophical system that would, through his successors Cleanthes and Chrysippus, become the dominant intellectual movement of the Hellenistic world.

Zeno was not a Greek by birth. He was Phoenician, from the city of Citium on Cyprus, and the surviving anecdotes preserve a self-deprecating awareness of his foreign accent and physical appearance. The fact that the philosopher most associated with the ancient ideal of imperturbable Greek wisdom was a Cypriot Phoenician with an accent is one of the more interesting facts about the Greek philosophical tradition.

Life

The canonical account, drawn from Diogenes Laertius (himself drawing on earlier sources now lost), is that Zeno came to Athens around 312 BCE as a merchant in the family business, was shipwrecked off the coast of Piraeus, and lost his cargo (variously reported as purple dye or silk). Stranded in Athens with limited resources, he wandered into a bookshop and read aloud from the second book of Xenophon's Memorabilia, the Socratic dialogues. Asked by the shopkeeper where one could find such men, the bookseller pointed to Crates of Thebes, the leading Cynic of the city, who happened to be passing. Zeno followed Crates and became his student.

The shipwreck story is suspiciously well-shaped — Zeno himself reportedly said the shipwreck had been the most successful voyage of his life — and may reflect a later moralizing tradition. What is clearer is that Zeno studied for over a decade across the major schools of late-fourth-century Athens: with the Cynic Crates, with the Megaric logicians Stilpo and Diodorus Cronus, and with the Academic Platonists Polemo and Xenocrates. The synthesis of these influences shaped the system he eventually developed.

Around 300 BCE Zeno began teaching publicly at the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Porch, a covered colonnade on the north side of the Athenian agora decorated with murals of mythological and historical scenes. The choice of a public porch rather than a private school (Plato's Academy was a private estate; Aristotle's Lyceum a public gymnasium) was significant: Stoicism began as a school open to anyone who would listen, and the name Stoic literally means one who frequents the Stoa. He taught for nearly four decades.

Zeno was widely respected in Athens. The Athenian assembly voted him a public crown and free meals in the Prytaneum (the highest civic honor), and after his death erected a public tomb at the Cerameicus. He never took Athenian citizenship, preferring to remain officially a Citian and reportedly declining citizenship offered by the city. He died around 262 BCE, in his early seventies. Diogenes Laertius reports several variant accounts of the death, the most picturesque being that he tripped leaving the school, took the injury as a sign that nature was calling him home, and held his breath until he died — a Stoic suicide read by the later tradition as appropriately self-determined.

The problem he worked on

Zeno's project, drawing on Crates's Cynic insistence that virtue alone matters and Megaric and Platonic technical resources, was the construction of a comprehensive philosophical system organized around the claim that the good life requires bringing one's life into agreement with nature. The slogan that came to define the school — life in agreement with nature — is attributed to Zeno himself, though the surviving sources disagree on whether the original formulation was Zeno's or Cleanthes's elaboration.

The system Zeno developed had three integrated parts: logic (the theory of correct reasoning and the criterion of truth), physics (the theory of the cosmos as a rationally ordered whole), and ethics (the theory of how a rational agent should live within such a cosmos). The three parts were not separable; the ethical conclusion (live in agreement with nature) depended on the physical claim (that nature is rationally ordered by cosmic logos), which in turn depended on logical analysis (of what we can and cannot know). The integration of the three parts — logic, physics, ethics as the three branches of a single philosophy — became the structural pattern of Stoic teaching for centuries.

Contributions

The founding doctrines of Stoicism

The core Stoic doctrines crystallized under Zeno and were developed in technical detail by Cleanthes and especially Chrysippus. The list, attributable to Zeno in some form:

• The cosmos is a single rational living being, ordered throughout by logos.
• Virtue is the only good; vice the only evil; everything else (life, health, wealth, reputation, friendship) is indifferent but may be appropriately preferred or dispreferred.
• The wise person is free from passion (apatheia), all passions being mistaken judgments about what genuinely matters.
• Right action is action in accordance with nature — with the rational nature of the cosmos and the rational nature distinctive of human beings.
• All rational beings are members of a single cosmic community (the doctrine that would become Stoic cosmopolitanism).

The integration of the three parts

The Stoic system as Zeno transmitted it integrated logic, physics, and ethics so tightly that the school's later teachers used the metaphor of an animal (the bones are logic, the flesh is ethics, the soul is physics) or an orchard (the wall is logic, the trees are physics, the fruit is ethics) to convey the relation. The architectural commitment shaped the later Stoa: a serious Stoic was expected to engage all three parts, not just the ethical doctrines.

The Republic

Zeno wrote a Republic, now lost, that imagined a radically egalitarian cosmopolitan community of the wise: no temples, no courts, no money, no gendered dress, no marriage as a legal institution, no distinct classes of citizens. The work scandalized later readers, including some within the Stoic tradition; the prevailing interpretation in classical scholarship is that the Republic described an ideal community of fully virtuous people in which the institutions of normal politics would be unnecessary. The work's reception has been contested for two millennia, with Cynic-friendly readers treating it as serious political philosophy and more conservative Stoics treating it as a youthful excess from before Zeno's maturity.

The Stoic theory of impressions

Zeno developed (drawing on Megaric logic) an account of how knowledge is acquired through kataleptic impressions — impressions that, when correctly received, grasp their object so firmly that they could not have come from anything else. The criterion of truth is the cataleptic impression assented to by a rational mind. The theory became one of the most-attacked Stoic doctrines (the Academic Skeptics under Arcesilaus and Carneades organized their entire attack on Stoicism around it) and one of the most carefully defended (especially by Chrysippus).

Key works

Zeno's writings are entirely lost. Diogenes Laertius preserves a list of approximately twenty titles, including:

• Republic (the cosmopolitan utopia)
• On the Nature of Man
• On Impulse, or On Human Nature
• On Passions
• On Duty
• On Law
• On Greek Education
• On the Universe
• On Signs
• Memorabilia of Crates

What survives are reports and quotations in Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, and the Stoic anthology compiled in late antiquity by Stobaeus. The standard scholarly collection is von Arnim's Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (1903–1905), which collects the fragments of Zeno along with those of Cleanthes and Chrysippus.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Crates of Thebes (the Cynic; the most-cited single influence in the biographical tradition); Stilpo of Megara and Diodorus Cronus (the Megaric logicians); Polemo and Xenocrates of the Old Academy; the Socratic tradition (transmitted through Xenophon's Memorabilia, the text that reportedly began his philosophical career); Heraclitus (the Pre-Socratic whose cosmology of logos and eternal fire Zeno integrated into Stoic physics).

Influenced: Cleanthes (his immediate successor as head of the school, ~331–232 BCE, the author of the surviving Hymn to Zeus); Chrysippus (~279–206 BCE, the great systematizer of the Stoa; the saying if Chrysippus had not lived, there would have been no Stoa indicates his consolidating role); the entire later Stoic tradition through Panaetius, Posidonius, Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius; the broader Hellenistic philosophical conversation, in which the Stoic position was one of the two or three central reference points for centuries.

Reception

Zeno's contemporary reception in Athens was exceptionally favorable. The civic honors, the establishment of the school in the public Stoa, the broad respect across philosophical schools — all suggest a figure of considerable public standing. The school he founded became the dominant philosophical movement of the Hellenistic world within a generation of his death.

The reception of Zeno himself (as distinct from the school he founded) has always been mediated by the loss of his writings. He survives in the canon as a name attached to the founding doctrines and to a handful of vivid biographical anecdotes. Modern scholarship reconstructs his thought from the fragments and from inferences about which Stoic doctrines must trace to him rather than to his successors. The standard scholarly work is John Sellars's Stoicism (2006), A.A. Long's collected essays Stoic Studies (1996), and the fragments collection in Long and Sedley's The Hellenistic Philosophers (1987).

Continuing engagement

Contemporary scholarship on early Stoicism, including Zeno specifically, is anchored by Long and Sedley's The Hellenistic Philosophers, by Brad Inwood and Lloyd Gerson's Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings (1997), by the Cambridge Companion volumes (especially the Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, 2003), and by the regular Symposium Hellenisticum conferences. Active scholarly questions concern the attribution of specific doctrines to Zeno versus to Cleanthes or Chrysippus, the seriousness and meaning of the lost Republic, the relation of Zeno's thought to Cynicism, and the question of how much of the technical Stoic logic should be credited to him rather than to Chrysippus.

Further reading

• Stoicism — the tradition he founded
• Epictetus — the later Roman teacher
• Marcus Aurelius — the imperial practitioner
• Seneca — the Roman statesman-philosopher
• Logos — the cosmic structure his physics rests on
• Heraclitus — the Pre-Socratic whose doctrines he integrated

The founder of the Stoa. Most of the writings lost; the school he started ran for centuries.