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

We are told that Chrysippus was so confident in his ability to break down competing arguments that he once told Cleanthes he only needed to know what a person’s doctrines were and he would discover the proofs (or, presumably, the refutations) himself.

Where Cleanthes was slow and methodical, and always charitable in his assessment of rivals, Chrysippus was proud and loved intellectual combat. His competitiveness honed in the stadia, it turns out, had transferred right over to the world of philosophy. He would never stoop to cheap tricks—a line that, unfortunately, not all the later Stoics would toe—but he was in it to win.* Because to Chrysippus, philosophy, like life, was a battle. But should be fought fairly.

It’s strange, in that way, to consider the personalities and respective athletic pursuits of teacher and student, master and protégé. Cleanthes, the boxer, was the plodding, enduring one, while Chrysippus, who had excelled in a more solitary sport, was the explosive, aggressive one.

He added to this temperament real skill too. There was a saying popular in his time that if the gods were to take up the science of argument, they would use Chrysippus as their model. Stoicism was lucky to have such a brilliant thinker in its camp. Where Aristo was using his mind to question the orthodoxy in a way that left very little standing, Chrysippus, in defining philosophy as “the cultivation of rightness of reason,” was systematizing all of Stoic teaching.

It’s a timeless but unsung role in the history of countless philosophies, businesses, and even countries: The founding generations have the courage and the brilliance to create something new. It is left to the generations that follow—usually younger, better prepared, and far more pragmatic—to clean up the messes and excesses and contradictions that those founders created in the process.

This job is hardly as glamorous as the founder’s work, or as recognized. It’s not even as rewarding as the work of the apostle, who gets to spread the gospel. But it is in many ways the most important. The history of Stoicism quietly recognizes this and, in fact, immortalizes the truth of it in the most famous line we have from antiquity about Chrysippus: “If there had been no Chrysippus, there would be no Stoa.”

Or rather, we’d likely not be talking about it the same way today.

When Cleanthes died in 230 BC, the forty-nine-year-old Chrysippus became the third leader of the Stoics. His first order of business was not only to clarify the teachings of his predecessors but to popularize them. Whereas Zeno and Cleanthes taught only on the Stoa Poikilē, Chrysippus sought out the larger stage of the Odeon (a concert hall) as well. He was apparently also the first to deliver open-air lectures in the grove of the Lyceum, the school of Aristotle’s followers, the Peripatetics. We can imagine that as a cleaver and a fighter, he enjoyed bringing his message directly into the enemy’s camp.

Where Cleanthes had preferred the power of poetry and often used analogy, metaphor, and meter to convey his truths, Chrysippus insisted in both his teaching and his prose on the precision of logical argument and formal proof. Though renowned for his passion for and acumen in argumentation—it was rare for Chrysippus to simply leave a point to speak for itself, for instance, as he was fond of arguing repeatedly on the same topics—he was equally known for his innovations in the field of logic and for his prodigious literary output. He boasts a body of writings exceeding 705 volumes, some 300 of them tackling the topic of logic. From the titles Diogenes details, we can see nearly two dozen books on the infamous Liar Argument alone. (We won’t believe anything a liar says is true, but can we believe a complete liar when he says that what he’s saying is false? If he’s always lying, it’s not false, but true . . . but then he wouldn’t always be lying.) One of his works, Logical Questions, was even discovered among the entombed papyri at Herculaneum (in a library of the rival Epicurean school that belonged to Philodemus). As Homer was to poetry, one ancient writer said, Chrysippus was to logic.

He also had a passion for literature and poetry in a way that belies his reputation for logic. In one essay, Chrysippus supposedly referenced so many lines from Euripides’s tragic play Medea that people joked he had included every word of it. It was the “Medea of Chrysippus,” they said. In fact, he was so fond of quoting other writers that their voices overshadowed his own in some of his writings. Critics of his books called these quotations “extraneous,” but a better reading is that Chrysippus truly loved sharing and sampling from the great thinkers and playwrights of history, and he would become notorious as a result for his diligent citation of them and other sources whenever they supported his points.