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

But was he really that different from Cleanthes or the other Stoics? Chrysippus too was humble, a hard worker, and unimpressed with finery. It seems he kept a simple house with only a single servant. According to her, his intellectual marathon meant he kept a steady pace of writing at least five hundred lines per day. He declined invitations, even from kings, because it would have kept him from his work. He rarely left home unless it was to deliver a lecture.

He was reported to shy away from social gatherings and would often remain quiet at the ones he did attend. His servant reported that at drinking parties only his legs would get tipsy, presumably meaning they were the only sign he was enjoying himself. He was once criticized for not joining a throng that attended Aristo’s lectures, to which he simply replied that “if I had cared about the mob, I would not have studied philosophy.”

It’s not that Chrysippus forsook all pleasures and all money; it’s that he was suspicious of wanting, lusting for anything. A wise man can make use of whatever comes his way, he said, but is in want of nothing. “On the other hand,” he said, “nothing is needed by the fool for he does not understand how to use anything but he is in want of everything.”

There is no better definition of a Stoic: to have but not want, to enjoy without needing.

From this belief came freedom and independence for Chrysippus. He never sold his work or charged for his advice, out of a wish not to cheapen philosophy. He didn’t borrow or lend money. Diogenes notes that not a single one of Chrysippus’s books was dedicated to a king. Some contemporaries saw this as arrogant, but it was actually evidence of his self-sufficiency. Unlike Zeno and Cleanthes, who had taken money from kings, Chrysippus was not interested in patronage. If you accept money from a king, he said, then you must humor him.

He didn’t take the money . . . which meant nobody could tell him what to do.

Chrysippus’s independence of thought, his love of high-minded principles, and his intellectual zeal were clearly virtues, but like anything, they can be taken to excess. The smarter we are, the easier it is to fall in love with our own voice, and our own thoughts. The cost of this is not just pride, but the quality of our message. Epictetus, whose students struggled to make sense of Chrysippus’s writings some three centuries later, would say, “When someone puts on airs about their ability to understand and interpret the works of Chrysippus, tell yourself that if Chrysippus hadn’t written so obscurely they’d have nothing to brag about.”

Since most of Chrysippus’s legendary output is lost to us, except for about five hundred small excerpts gleaned from other writers, it’s hard to know how bad a writer he really was. It says something that despite these purported faults, his insights have endured—and remained widespread even after his death.

As dedicated as he was to his work, Chrysippus was also a loving family man. He sent for his sister’s sons, Aristocreon and Philocrates, and took them into his home and oversaw their education. He was particularly close to Aristocreon, to whom he dedicated at least three dozen of his books. Aristocreon returned the favor not only with the statue and inscription over his burial site, but also by writing a book commemorating him.

Yet even as a father figure, Chrysippus’s competitive nature was evident. A mother once asked him who she ought to entrust her son’s education to. He answered that there was obviously no better teacher than himself . . . because if there were, he’d be studying with them himself.

For all his disputes with Aristo (who believed that only ethics mattered), they were in more agreement than they thought. Plutarch tells us that everything Chrysippus wrote was for “no other purpose than the differentiation of good and bad things.” Virtuous living was the end-all, be-all for them both.

As mentioned earlier, as a runner, Chrysippus had developed a philosophy of good sportsmanship. He knew that even as athletes are competing with each other, and want desperately to triumph over the rest, there remains an essential brotherhood between everyone participating—from the best to the worst. Tad Brennan, the classics scholar, calls it, appropriately, Chrysippus’s “no-shoving model” of behavior, a model rooted in our relatedness to each other. It was not his only contribution in this regard. Another of Chrysippus’s ethical breakthroughs was to develop the Stoic idea of sympatheia, built on Zeno’s belief that we all belong to one common community, which encourages us to meditate on the interconnectedness of all persons and our shared citizenship in the cosmos.