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

If only the jostling rivalries of the early Stoics could have reflected this idea a little better. If they could have realized that there was no “winning” since they were already on the same team, since they already agreed on the big things, imagine how much trouble they would have spared themselves. What a better example they would have set for us today.

Ironically, it was only from the skeptical Platonist Carneades, who, as you will see, would become the greatest thorn in the side of the Stoics long after his death, that Chrysippus received one of his best compliments, for not only did Carneades believe that without Chrysippus there would be no Stoa, he also claimed that “had Chrysippus not existed, I would not have existed.” The truest words are often spoken in jest.

While Chrysippus’s work might endure eternal ly—and his face would even be minted on coins in his native land decades after his death—the man knew that he himself could not.

It was after a lecture one night at the Odeon that a bunch of his students invited Chrysippus out for a drink. After drinking some undiluted sweet wine, he was struck by a dizzy spell and died five days later at the age of seventy-three.

If this is how Chrysippus truly died, it would confirm the image of him as a man who took himself and his work seriously, and in the end died after taking the rare evening off from writing and thinking. It may be true, and if so, rather uninteresting.

The other reports of Chrysippus’s death are more tantalizing, for they add another dimension to the man and to the image of the supposedly joyless Stoic stereotype. In one recounting, Chrysippus was sitting on his porch when a lonely donkey wandered by and began to eat from his garden. Chrysippus found the sight inexplicably funny and began to laugh and laugh. “Give the ass some wine to wash down the figs,” he cried out to the owner, and then laughed even harder, until he literally died.

And so, if true, it would be Stoicism’s second founder who passed away not in the heat of debate or in a sprint of writing—which he had spent so much of his life doing—but from good humor and the enjoyment of a simple pleasure.

Not a bad way to go.

ZENO THE MAINTAINER (ZEE-No)

Origin: Tarsus

B. Unknown

D. 190–180 BC?

At the turn of the second century BC, Stoicism was a hundred years old. Zeno’s teachings had passed to Cleanthes and then Chrysippus. They had survived the provocations and doubters and attacks from other schools.

But now what? Who would be next?

One of the central beliefs of Stoicism is the idea that history is cyclical. That the same thing happens again and again and again. We are not so special, they would say. We are interchangeable pieces, role players in a play that has been playing since the beginning of time.

Very little makes this clearer than the fact that the next leader of Stoicism, starting a new century, would in a way be starting us back at the beginning. For he too was named Zeno.

After Chrysippus’s successful consolidation of the school, the choice of who would take up the mantle after him was his to make. As Chrysippus’s family had originated in Tarsus and he had risen to such acclaim, he must have drawn the interest of many fellow Tarsians. One of these Tarsian students, Dioscurides, about whom little is known except that Chrysippus had dedicated at least six works to him that spanned twenty-one volumes, was the presumptive heir. But Dioscurides was likely too old or infirm, or perhaps he died.

He did, however, have a son, and that son was Zeno of Tarsus. We hear from the Christian writer Eusebius that this second Zeno didn’t put too much stock in the idea of reincarnation:

It is held by the Stoic philosophers that the universal substance changes into fire, as into a seed, and coming back again, from this completes its organization, such as it was before. And this is the doctrine which was accepted by the first and oldest leaders of the sect, Zeno, and Cleanthes, and Chrysippus. For the Zeno who was the disciple and successor of Chrysippus in the School is said to have doubted about the conflagration of the universe.

Perhaps it was too on the nose for him. But we should not draw from this doubt or disagreement that he was another Aristo. He was, most likely, not a revolutionary or a disruptor. He was not even an ardent defender. But he may have been exactly what the philosophy needed at that time—a maintainer, an administrator, just agreeable enough to calm things down and then become established. Sometimes history—just like life—calls for a fighter, then sometimes it calls for someone with a steady bearing, an even hand, and a calming presence. Sometimes a moment calls for a star; sometimes it calls for something humbler.