Zeno of Citium

Greek philosopher

• Born: c. 335 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Citium (now Larnaca), Cyprus
• Died: c. 263 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Athens, Greece

Zeno founded Stoicism, the leading Hellenistic school of philosophy. Though not the school’s greatest thinker, he created its unified, systematic teaching and guided it to prominence.

Early Life

While a full biography of Zeno of Citium (ZEE-noh of SIHSH-ee-uhm) cannot be written from the anecdotes and sayings collected in late antiquity, principally available in the work of Diogenes Laertius, much can be learned from a critical reading of them. Diogenes quotes the honorific inscription that dates Zeno’s death as well as the statement of Zeno’s disciple Persaeus of Citium that the master lived to be seventy-two, which dates his birth.

Nevertheless, there is no information about his childhood; even the name of his mother no longer survives. Mnaseas, his father, has a name ambiguously meaningful both in Phoenician (equivalent to the Hebrew Manasseh, “one causing to forget”) and in Greek (“mindful,” a strong opposition). Mnaseas, contemporary with Citium’s last Phoenician king, under whom the town was besieged and burned by Ptolemy Soter of Egypt in 312 b.c.e., may have initiated the family’s break from Phoenician ways and turn to Greek and philosophical culture: The name he gave his son has no Semitic meaning but refers to the Greek god Zeus and was celebrated in a famous syncretic hymn by Zeno’s disciple Cleanthes.

In one story, Mnaseas brought many books by Socratic writers back from Athens for Zeno. In another story, Zeno himself, shipwrecked on a commercial trip to Athens, consoled himself in a bookstore with Xenophon’s Apomnēmoneumata (c. 381-355 b.c.e.; Memorabilia of Socrates) and rushed to follow the Cynic philosopher Crates of Thebes, when Crates was pointed out as a living Socratic teacher. Persaeus said that Zeno was twenty-two when he came to Athens; he never seems to have left. His arrival would have been in 311, the year after Citium fell to Ptolemy.

The failure of the records to mention close relationships with his parents or others may be significant: Stoicism was to teach, as Cynicism had, individual self-sufficiency and rational discipline of the emotions. Socrates exemplified this philosophy: Personally ugly but desirable, ethically committed but unwilling to be called a teacher or to write anything, sealing his commitment to philosophy with his death at the hands of democratic Athens, Socrates was publicized by his followers, including Plato and Xenophon, and became the personal inspiration of all the fourth century schools of philosophy. Plato’s Academy was almost a formal alternative to the city-state that had killed its greatest thinker, and Aristotle’s Lyceum was modeled on it. The Cynics, on the other hand, avoided institutional encumbrances, living and teaching in public to a scandalous degree: Their name means “doglike.” In a symbolic story, Zeno, soon after he became Crates’ follower, modestly covered his teacher and Crates’ student-bride Hipparchia with a cloak as they consummated their “dog-wedding” in public in the Stoa Poecile. Cynics, including the young Zeno, maintained the ill-dressed, voluntarily poor, and combatively questioning, even anti-intellectual stance they claimed to derive from Socrates’ teachings.

Zeno’s Cynic period culminated before 300 in the publication of his most notorious book, Politeia (the Republic), a short work denouncing then current methods of education and calling for a city of wise men and women without temples, courts, or gymnasiums, with the god Eros to be honored by friendship and polymorphous, unrestricted sex. Zeno also studied and perhaps enrolled in the Academy (studying Plato’s dialogues, dialectical method, and metaphysics—including incorporeal ideas as causes for physical events, which he rejected) and followed the dialectical teachers Diodorus Cronus and Stilpo, who arrived from Megara about 307. Their advanced modal logic, however, proved a form of determinism that Zeno found unacceptable. By about 300, Zeno, in his early thirties, was able to declare his independence from other teachers and begin his regular strolls up and down the Stoa Poecile with his own students.

Life’s Work

The professional career of a philosopher is rich not so much in public as in internal events, and Zeno’s development is hard to follow in the absence of extensive or datable writings. Politeia came early, and it was widely enough quoted that a dozen or more of the extant fragments of his writings can be identified as belonging to it; none of the other twenty-four titles of his canon allows for as definite a reconstruction. He was a powerful teacher, famous for an epistemological demonstration in which he closed one extended hand by stages and then steadied the fist with his other hand while he named the corresponding stages of knowledge: “An impression is like this; assent is like this; cognitive grasp is like this; and science is like this; and only the wise man has it.”

He established, for all Stoics except his unorthodox pupil Aristo of Chios, the three-part division of philosophy into logic (philosophy of language and meaning), physics (philosophy of nature—including theology, since spirit as breath and logos as creative word are bodies and also divine), and ethics (the famous division of things into good, bad, and indifferent; the development of the Cynic’s “life according to nature” as the only virtuous and happy way of life). To a degree not approached by Plato, by Aristotle, or by his contemporaries the Cynics, Megarians, Epicureans, and Skeptics, Zeno made of these subjects a single, unified whole, giving priority neither to metaphysics—as with Plato and Aristotle—nor to ethics—as with the Epicureans.

The system was seen as dogmatic, and debate with Stoicism played a large part in the Academy’s move into skepticism from the 270’s. The dogmatic system was not perfected by Zeno himself: He left his logic rudimentary, to be developed by his successor’s successor, Chrysippus. Among other changes, later Stoics softened the antisocial side of his ethics toward a propriety more acceptable to dignified Roman adherents such as the Gracchi, Seneca the Younger, and Marcus Aurelius.

Zeno was remembered for his pithy comments about and to his students; these observations were perhaps made more pointed by his Phoenician accent and manners, which he never tried to overcome. During his thirty-nine years leading the school, his oval face hardened into the philosophic persona visible in surviving portraits. It is not a handsome face: The forehead recedes, the frown lines are pronounced, the expression seems severe or even morose; the neck bends forward, and Diogenes says that it crooked also to one side, adding that Zeno was rather tall, thin but flabby, and dark-complected. Self-control was the main attribute he projected. He lived on bread, water, and “a little wine of good bouquet”—coming from a commercial family, he seems never to have been really in want—avoiding dinners and drinking parties except when his pupil and patron, the Macedonian prince Antigonus Gonatas, the future king of Macedon, insisted. Zeno is said to have had a weak constitution—justifying his abstemiousness—but also to have been in good health until his death, which was voluntary and in response to a trivial fall that he took as a divine sign. As for his pleasures, they included green figs and sunbaths and boy slave-prostitutes, whom he “used sparingly.” He did, to be sure, state in Politeia that Eros is a god of constructive political friendship, and he is recorded to have been in love with Chremonides, later the instigator of Athens’s last, ill-starred war against the dominion of Macedon.

Zeno’s school had a different sort of corporate existence from the more settled Academy, Lyceum, and Epicurean “Garden.” The Academy and Lyceum were technically sodalities of the Muses and Apollo, meeting in public gymnasiums (religiously consecrated exercise grounds particularly used by Athenian ephebes in their compulsory military and civic-religious training). The Epicurean “Garden” was Epicurus’s private house and garden, later inherited by the school’s leaders. Zeno, barred as a foreigner from owning property and perhaps drawn to the Stoa Poecile from his studies with Crates, chose that public facility for his lessons. The Stoa Poecile was a sizable building (accommodating meetings of at least five hundred people) on the northwest corner of the Athenian civic center (Agora), with an open colonnade facing south across the Agora toward the Acropolis temple complex. The structure was roofed, with walls on three sides hung with paintings (hence the name Poikile, “decorated”), by Polygnotus and other masters, of great historical and mythic battles, which often suggested reason defeating emotion. It was fitting that this should be the scene for what amounted to a radical shift of the city from historical, civic excellence to philosophy. Because the building did not belong to them in any sense, the Stoics (as they came to be called in preference to “Zenoneans”) must have done their administrative and library work elsewhere. In Zeno’s time, given his Cynic background, administration must have been slight, though books were always important to this scholarly sect.

One sort of student was easy to find at the Stoa Poecile: The years after 307 marked the end of the compulsory ephebeia, and eighteen- to twenty-year-olds would have found themselves drawn to public lounging areas such as the Stoa Poecile. As a philosophical organization, however, the Stoa was formidably professional, and Zeno seems, according to remarks such as his threat to charge passersby for listening, to have discouraged random crowds. Most of his known disciples came from abroad—including non-Greek places such as Citium, Zeno’s own home—drawn, as Zeno had been, by published books and Athens’s educational reputation. The most illustrious of these people was Antigonus Gonatas, who was in Athens as overlord but who thought of himself as a Stoic and employed Zeno’s fellow Citiote (housemate) and disciple Persaeus as a tutor for his son and even as a general. Of the more modest sort were Persaeus himself (sometimes rumored to have been Zeno’s slave); Cleanthes of Assos, who made a living at the waterworks so as to be in Athens to hear Zeno lecture and who inherited Zeno’s position as leader of the school; Aristo of Chios, who set up a rival school teaching ethics; and Sphaerus, the specialist in definition who advised Sparta’s revolutionary, land-reforming king, Cleomenes III.

Significance

Athens, during Zeno of Citium’s fifty years there, passed through upheavals that largely left him untouched: Demetrius Eukairos, the philosopher-tyrant, was succeeded by a rivalry of democrats (who initially illegalized philosophy schools), oligarchs, and moderates, while the port of Piraeus was constantly garrisoned by Macedon. Historian William Scott Ferguson counts seven changes of government and four of constitution, three bloody uprisings, and four sieges during this period—with Zeno, though the teacher of a major warlord, never taking any prominent part. The turmoil may already have had for him the unreal quality it acquires in retrospect; the impassive Stoic (and stoic) remains.

Zeno did influence Hellenistic politics, however, contributing some enlightenment to what would in any case have been despotisms. He did not solve all the questions he addressed but left the school with room for future development over several generations: Forward-looking, even arrogant, thinkers liked the dynamic and the sense that human action is cosmically purposeful and significant, though Epicureans and Skeptics demurred. The detailed contributions of the Stoic thought that Zeno either began or left for great successors to begin are great. Finally, Athens honored him after his death with statues in the Academy and Lyceum, a public tomb, and a resolution praising him as a teacher of virtue and temperance who had lived the morality he taught.

Bibliography

Arnold, E. Vernon. Roman Stoicism: Being Lectures on the History of the Stoic Philosophy with Special Reference to Its Development Within the Roman Empire. Reprint. New York: Humanities Press, 1958. Contains a fourteen page essay on Zeno in English, and the book—in spite of its title—is a classic treatment of Greek Stoicism in a religious context that was deemphasized in later English philosophical treatments. The chronology needs to be revised in the light of later works.

Camp, John M. The Athenian Agora: Excavations in the Heart of Classical Athens. 1986. Rev. ed. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992. Photographs and discussion of the Stoa Poecile, where excavation began in 1981, in the context of extended archaeological presentation of the city center. A good background for the narratives of Ferguson, Tarn, and Walbank (see below).

Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Translated by R. D. Hicks. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. The main source of information on Zeno. Includes symbolic anecdotes and apothegms in the same relation to Zeno as the Gospels are to Jesus. Hicks’s terminology is not always philosophically sophisticated and should be compared to that of Long and Sedley (see below).

Dudley, Donald R. A History of Cynicism from Diogenes to the Sixth Century A.D. 1937. Reprint. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1998. The most vivid historical presentation in English of the philosophical environment in which Zeno studied. This edition includes a foreword and bibliography by Miriam Griffin.

Ferguson, William Scott. Hellenistic Athens: An Historical Essay. 1911. Reprint. Chicago: Ares, 1974. A classic narrative, hardly superseded though others have improved the chronology and updated the bibliography. Chapters 2 through 4 constitute the history of Athens in Zeno’s time and pointedly end with his death. In the absence of a modern biography of Zeno, this work and Tarn’s study (below) are the two most extensive substitutes.

Hunt, Harold Arthur Kinross. A Physical Interpretation of the Universe: The Doctrines of Zeno the Stoic. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 1976. Though philosophically and historically naïve, this is the only English monograph on Zeno. Not a biography, it presents 105 of the fragments of his teaching in acceptable translations, with commentary and a limited bibliography.

Long, A. A., and D. N. Sedley. Translations of the Principal Sources, with Philosophical Commentary.Vol. 1 in The Hellenistic Philosophers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. The results of a generation’s study of Stoicism are presented in the central 280 pages. Philosophically illuminating, not concentrating on the philosophers’ personality or history. Contains a good glossary of technical terms, lists of philosophers and ancient sources, and a panorama of Athens showing the locations of the schools. Short bibliography.

Richter, Gisela M. A. The Portraits of the Greeks. 3 vols. London: Phaidon Press, 1965. Volume 2 presents the known ancient portraits of Zeno (except for a group of carved gems) and supports the author’s detailed description of Zeno’s physiognomy, which, absent further data, must stand for his character to some extent.

Sandbach, F. H. The Stoics. 2d ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994. The short opening chapter mentions most of the data. The volume is competent, though not as vivid as that of Dudley (above; whose coverage it does not duplicate).

Sedley, David. “The School: From Zeno to Arius Didymus.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, edited by Brad Inwood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. A solid chapter on the beginnings of the Stoic school. Places Zeno in the context of his times and later chapters address his influence throughout time.

Tarn, William Woodthorpe. Antigonos Gonatas. 1913. Reprint. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1969. A classic biography by an admirer of Alexander the Great and Hellenism, fitting Antigonus into the mold of adventurous, enlightened prince and featuring Zeno as one of his teachers and a member of his circle. Chronology and bibliography to be supplemented from Walbank (below).

Walbank, F. W., A. E. Astin, M. W. Frederiksen, and R. M. Ogilvie, eds. The Hellenistic World. Vol. 7 in The Cambridge Ancient History. 2d ed. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984. A useful, long chapter on the period of Antigonus places Zeno’s adopted home in perspective with his princely student. Includes chronological improvements on Tarn’s and Ferguson’s works. Chronological chart, immense bibliography.