Zeno of Citium

Zeno of Citium

Zeno of Citium founded Stoicism, one of the most influential philosophies the world has ever known, and he did it by teaching in a public colonnade in Athens, the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Porch, from which his school took its name. His own writings are entirely lost, yet the system he laid down has shaped the moral imagination of the West for more than two thousand years: that the goal of life is to live in agreement with nature and reason, that virtue is the only true good and everything else indifferent, and that the cosmos is a single rational and living whole. It became the creed of emperors and of slaves alike.

The corpus, and how the chat handles it. Zeno wrote books, a Republic and treatises on nature, ethics, and the passions, but every one is lost, surviving only in fragments and in the reports of others. This room reads the fullest ancient account, the life and doctrines of Zeno and the Stoa in Book VII of Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, in C. D. Yonge's translation, public domain by way of Project Gutenberg. Like the other rooms for thinkers who left no surviving books, it runs on doxography, the testimony of later writers, and is careful to mark the difference between Zeno himself and the school he founded. Expect citations to Diogenes Laertius, Lives VII.

Life and the founding of the Stoa. Zeno was born around 334 BC in Citium, a city on Cyprus, of Phoenician descent, and began as a merchant. According to the famous story he was shipwrecked near Athens, wandered into a bookshop, was captivated by a reading from Xenophon's memoirs of Socrates, and asked the bookseller where such men were to be found; the bookseller pointed to the Cynic philosopher Crates, who happened to be passing, and Zeno became his pupil. He studied with the Cynics, the Megarians, and the Academy before opening his own school in the Painted Porch, gathering there the disciples, Cleanthes and after him Chrysippus, who would build Stoicism into a complete and rigorous system.

Where to begin. Read Book VII of Diogenes Laertius for the life and the outline of the system, then the great Roman Stoics, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, in whom Zeno's teaching went on living, and Cicero for the fullest ancient exposition of Stoic doctrine.

The system: logic, physics, ethics. Zeno divided philosophy into three parts, which the Stoics liked to compare to an orchard: logic is the protecting wall, physics the trees and the soil, and ethics the fruit. Logic includes the theory of knowledge, founded on the graspable or "cataleptic" impression, the clear perception that compels assent and serves as the criterion of truth. Physics is a materialist pantheism: the whole cosmos is one living and rational being, with God as the active reason, the logos or designing fire, that pervades and orders passive matter; nothing exists but body; and all things unfold by providence and fate. Ethics is the crown of the whole, the art of living well, and the three parts are finally one, for to live rightly is to live according to the very reason that governs the cosmos.

Live according to nature. The center of Stoic ethics, and Zeno's most famous teaching, is that the goal of life, the chief good, is to live in agreement with nature. Because the nature of a human being is reason and the nature of the cosmos is the divine logos, to live according to nature means to live according to reason, and that is to live according to virtue. The chief good, Diogenes Laertius reports of Zeno, is to live according to nature, which is to live according to virtue, for nature leads us to this point. To follow nature is not to indulge appetite but to bring one's own reason into harmony with the reason that orders all things, and to accept one's place within the rational whole.

Virtue is the only good. From this follows the bracing core of the philosophy. Virtue alone is good and vice alone is evil; everything else, health and sickness, wealth and poverty, reputation, pleasure, even life and the loss of it, is in itself indifferent, neither good nor bad, though some indifferent things are naturally to be preferred. Happiness therefore depends wholly on virtue, which lies entirely within our own power, and not at all on the gifts of fortune, which do not. The Stoic sage, perfectly wise and virtuous, is for that reason perfectly happy and perfectly free, serene in poverty, in exile, or in pain, because the one thing that truly matters, the goodness of his own soul, can never be taken from him.

The passions, the sage, and the world-city. The passions, for Zeno, are not natural feelings to be merely moderated but false judgments to be uprooted: fear and grief and craving and inflamed pleasure are all errors of reason, mistaken beliefs that outward things are good or evil. The sage, who has seen that only virtue is good, is free of these disturbances, in a state the Stoics called apatheia, not a cold indifference but the deep tranquility of a reason no longer at war with the world. And because reason is one and the same in all people, Zeno taught in his Republic a daring cosmopolitanism: that all rational beings are fellow citizens of a single world-community, bound not by the walls of separate cities but by the common law of reason.

Reception, and adjacent reading. From the Painted Porch Zeno's philosophy spread across the ancient world and became, with its Roman heirs, perhaps the most widely practiced philosophy of the West, a guide to living that has never fallen out of use and that the present age has eagerly taken up again. Read now, he is the founder of Stoicism, the thinker who taught that the good life is the life lived according to nature and reason, that virtue is enough for happiness, and that the free soul is the one that wants only what reason approves. He learned the primacy of virtue and the care of the soul from the example of Socrates, by way of the Cynic Diogenes and his own teacher Crates, who taught him to despise convention and fortune; he took the cosmic logos, the rational fire that governs all things, from Heraclitus; and the system he founded passed, centuries later, to the Roman Stoics in whom it found its greatest voices, the statesman Seneca, the freed slave Epictetus, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. The Porch where Zeno taught is long gone, but the philosophy that still bears its name is more alive today than it has been in centuries.