Zeno of Citium: Philosophy, Quotes & Legacy

Biography

Zeno was born around 334 BCE in Citium, a Greek city on the island of Cyprus. The dates of his life are uncertain, and our knowledge of it comes largely from Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, which preserves an anecdotal and partly legendary account. He is said to have been the son of a merchant named Mnaseas, and to have come to Athens as a young man after a shipwreck — or, in another version of the story, as a merchant himself, carrying a cargo of Tyrian purple that was lost at sea. The famous anecdote has Zeno, having lost everything, walking into a bookseller's shop in Athens, picking up Xenophon's Memorabilia of Socrates, and asking where such men as Socrates could be found. The bookseller pointed to Crates of Thebes, the Cynic philosopher, who happened to be passing by — and from that moment, according to the story, Zeno was a philosopher.

Zeno studied under Crates, the most famous Cynic of his day, and the Cynic stamp is visible throughout Stoicism: its austerity, its cosmopolitanism, its contempt for convention, and its insistence that virtue is the only good. But Zeno was not content with the Cynics' rejection of civilization. He also studied under the Megarian logicians, Stilpo and Diodorus Cronus, from whom he took the interest in logic and the theory of propositions that became the Stoic logic, and under the Platonist philosophers Xenocrates and Polemo, from whom he took the interest in systematic ethics and the doctrine of the goods of the soul. The synthesis of these influences — Cynic ethics, Megarian logic, Platonic naturalism — is the foundation of Stoicism.

Around 300 BCE, Zeno began teaching in the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Colonnade on the north side of the Athenian agora, decorated with frescoes of the battle of Marathon. His followers were first called Zenonians, then Stoics, from the stoa where he taught. He taught for almost forty years, and his school became one of the two great philosophical institutions of the Hellenistic world, rivaling the Garden of Epicurus. Zeno was held in enormous respect: the Athenians voted him a golden crown and a public burial in the Ceramicus, and the historian and statesman Antigonus II Gonatas of Macedon was among his admirers. He died around 262 BCE, at an advanced age; the traditional account has him dying by holding his breath after a fall, a detail too neat to be reliable, but consistent with the Stoic ideal of the voluntary death.

Historical Context

Zeno founded his school in the Athens of the early Hellenistic age, in the generation after the death of Aristotle and the conquests of Alexander. The polis — the independent Greek city-state, the political framework of classical philosophy — had been absorbed into the great kingdoms of the successors, and the individual could no longer find identity and security in the citizen body. The philosophical response was a turn inward and outward at once: the new schools of the Hellenistic age — Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, Scepticism — all made the individual's inner state, not the citizen's political condition, the object of ethical inquiry. Where the classical philosophers had asked what the best city is, the Hellenistic philosophers asked how an individual can live well in a world he does not control.

Zeno's answer was radical. The Cynics had answered by rejecting the world: the wise man needs nothing, wants nothing, and lives like a dog. Zeno accepted the Cynic premise that virtue is the only good, but he rejected the conclusion that the wise man must withdraw from the world. The virtuous life can be lived in the world, because virtue is the only thing that matters and the world cannot take it away. This is the double gesture at the heart of Stoicism: an absolute commitment to virtue, combined with an absolute indifference to everything else. In a world of uncertain fortune, the Stoic secures the one thing fortune cannot touch.

Core Ideas

Virtue as the Only Good

Zeno's fundamental doctrine is that virtue is the only good, vice the only evil, and everything else — life, death, health, sickness, pleasure, pain, wealth, poverty — indifferent. The good is what benefits the soul, and the only thing that benefits the soul is virtue; the evil is what harms the soul, and the only thing that harms it is vice. Everything else is between the two: it is "indifferent," neither good nor evil in itself, but a material for the exercise of virtue. This doctrine, shocking to the common sense of the age, is the foundation of everything that follows. It means that happiness cannot be taken from the wise man, because happiness is the activity of virtue, and no fortune can deprive him of that.

Living According to Nature

The Stoic formula for the end of life is "living in agreement with nature." Zeno is reported to have said that the end is "to live consistently," and his successors refined the formula to "living in agreement with nature" — the nature both of the individual human being and of the universe. The two are the same, because human reason is the reason of the universe: the Logos that pervades all things is the same rational principle that governs the human soul. To live virtuously is to live rationally; to live rationally is to live according to nature; and to live according to nature is to be in harmony with the whole.

The Three Disciplines

The Stoic practice, as it developed from the foundation laid by Zeno, is organized into three disciplines, sometimes called the three topoi of Stoic ethics: the discipline of desire, the discipline of action, and the discipline of assent. The discipline of desire trains us to want what is up to us and to accept what is not. The discipline of action trains us to act well in the world, in accordance with our roles and with justice. The discipline of assent trains us to judge accurately, to withhold assent from impressions that would disturb us. Zeno himself did not systematize the practice in this form — that development is due mainly to later Stoics — but the seeds of all three disciplines are present in his doctrine of virtue and the indifferents.

Philosophy

Zeno's philosophy, as the foundation of the Stoic system, is best understood as a deliberate synthesis of the four influences he absorbed. From the Cynics he took the ethics: virtue is the only good, and the wise man is self-sufficient. From the Megarians he took the logic: the study of propositions and inference that became the Stoic logic. From the Platonists he took the framework of a systematic philosophy with a physics, a logic, and an ethics. And from the naturalism of the early Greek tradition — especially Heraclitus, whose doctrine of the Logos he admired — he took the physics: the universe as a rational, ordered whole pervaded by divine fire.

The resulting system has a single point: the happiness of the individual is in the individual's own power, because it depends only on virtue, and virtue depends only on reason. The Stoic philosophy is thus, from its foundation, a philosophy of freedom: the freedom of the inner life from the vicissitudes of fortune. Zeno's own life, by the testimony of his successors, exemplified the doctrine. He was famous for his frugality, his endurance, and his even temper, and the Athenians are said to have admired him above all for living as he taught.

Major Works

None of Zeno's writings survive intact. Diogenes Laertius preserves a list of his works, which included the Republic, the famous and scandalous work in which Zeno pictured a city of the wise without temples, courts, money, or marriage — a work so radical that its full text was apparently suppressed even within the school; the On Life According to Nature, which stated the Stoic definition of the end; the On the Nature of Man, which developed the doctrine of the kinship of reason and nature; and the Protrepticus, an exhortation to philosophy. The fragments of these works, preserved in quotation by later authors, are collected in the modern editions of the Stoic fragments, and they are sufficient to show the outline of Zeno's system even where the detail is lost.

Famous Quotes

The most famous of Zeno's sayings, reported by Diogenes Laertius, is his account of the end of life: "The end may be defined as living in agreement with nature, which is the same as living virtuously." His response to the Cynic question of how the wise man should live is reported as the formula "to live consistently." And his remark on the source of his philosophy is preserved in the anecdote of the shipwreck: on being told that fortune had ruined him, Zeno replied, "You have done well, Fortune, to drive me thus to philosophy" — a saying that condenses the entire Stoic attitude toward adversity.

Related Thinkers

Zeno's successors shaped the school he founded. Cleanthes, his pupil and successor as head of the school, preserved the religious cast of early Stoicism in his Hymn to Zeus. Chrysippus, the third head, systematized the school so thoroughly that it was said that without him the Stoa would not have existed. The Roman Stoics Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius are the authors of the surviving texts that made Stoicism the most influential ancient philosophy of the modern world. And the Cynics, above all Crates and Diogenes, are the background against which Zeno's radical ethics must be read: the Stoics were the Cynics who built a city.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Stoicism" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism)
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Zeno of Citium" (iep.utm.edu/zeno-of-citium)
• Diogenes Laertius. Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book VII. Trans. Pamela Mensch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
• Long, A.A., and D.N. Sedley. The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.