Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

Just now Aristo’s writings are delighting and tormenting me at the same time. When they teach virtue, of course they delight me; but when they show how far my own character falls short of those models of virtue, your pupil blushes sadly often, and is angry with himself because, at twenty-five, he has absorbed in his heart nothing as yet of good opinion and pure reason. And so I pay the penalty, I am angry and sad, I envy other men, I fast. The prisoner at present of these cares, every day I put off the task of writing till the next.

In short, forget the precepts. Don’t pore over rules. Just do it.

Marcus knew the history of his school quite well. And he knew that all dogmatic disputes come to naught in the end. It all disappears. It becomes dust or legend, or less than that. Quotations of quotations from books that were lost to time.

All that remains, Aristo would have said, is how we lived our lives, how close we came to virtue in the moments that mattered.

CHRYSIPPUS THE FIGHTER (Cry-SIP-us)

Origin: Soli

B. 279 BC

D. 206 BC

It was early in life that Chrysippus, the man who would go on to be the third leader of the Stoic school, was introduced to running, a sport that would change his life. Running in the ancient world, as now, is not like other sports. Wrestling is a test of strength and strategy between two evenly matched fighters who are entangled body-to-body. The tossing of a ball or a javelin is a feat of technique and coordination, measured by distance.

But running, particularly endurance running, with its length predetermined and competitors separated by lanes, is as much a battle of one’s mind and body against themselves as it is a competition against anyone or anything else.

What is the connection between philosophy and running? There is none. But between Stoicism, a philosophy of endurance and inner strength—of transcending one’s limits and of measuring oneself against a high internal standard—and distance running?

Here the overlap is profound, particularly for a young man like Chrysippus, born in the port city of Soli, Cilicia, competing for the first time in an Olympic distance race like the dolichos, a three-mile race for which there is no modern equivalent. The dolichos was not a three-mile loop like a modern cross-country course or even a track event like the 5,000 meters, but instead consisted of approximately twenty-four stadium lengths, done almost like wind sprints on a basketball court.

It’s not hard to imagine this Stoic mind forming as its molder, Chrysippus, ran as hard as he could back and forth, back and forth, not only trying to beat the other racers, but trying to convince himself to keep going as he heaved for air and his brain told him to stop. As he jostled for the lead in a pack of runners, he was unconsciously developing the ethical framework that would direct his life and the future of the Stoic school.

“Runners in a race ought to compete and strive to win as hard as they can,” Chrysippus would later say, “but by no means should they trip their competitors or give them a shove. So too in life; it is not wrong to seek after the things useful in life; but to do so while depriving someone else is not just.”

But mostly it would have been on the long training runs by himself through the coastal plains of his homeland of Cilicia, in what is today southern Turkey, that Chrysippus prepared himself for the challenges that life had in store for him and for the feats of intellectual and physical endurance that philosophy would demand.

Indeed, like the other Stoics living in the chaos of a post-Alexandrian world, Chrysippus experienced little peace in his early years. Cilicia was a frequent target of deadly raids. His family had relocated to Soli from nearby Tarsus in response, only to experience a raid of a different kind, when the family’s significant property was confiscated to swell the coffers of one of Alexander’s former generals. As with Zeno, the loss of a fortune became a piece of good fortune, because it drove Chrysippus to philosophy.

It also drove him to Athens. With little in the way of options at home, and likely fearing what a tyrannical regime might come to take next, Chrysippus, like Cleanthes before him, left home in search of something better. For generations, Athens attracted not only the best and the brightest of the Hellenistic world in the pursuit of philosophy, but also the disenfranchised, the bankrupt, and the lost. Chrysippus, like Zeno and Cleanthes before him, was a mix of all of these.