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

On a fateful day late in the fourth century BC, the Phoenician merchant Zeno set sail on the Mediterranean with a cargo full of Tyrian purple dye. Prized by the wealthy and by royalty who dressed themselves in clothes colored with it, the rare dye was painstakingly extracted by slaves from the blood of sea snails and dried in the sun until it was, as one ancient historian said, “worth its weight in silver.” Zeno’s family trade was in one of the most valuable goods in the ancient world, and as it is for many entrepreneurs, their business was on the line every day.

No one knows what caused the wreck. Was it a storm? Pirates? Human error? Does it matter? Zeno lost everything—ship and cargo—in a time before insurance and venture capital. It was an irreplaceable fortune. Yet the unlucky merchant would later rejoice in his loss, claiming, “I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered shipwreck.” For it was the shipwreck that sent Zeno to Athens, on the path to creating what would become Stoic philosophy.

There are, like the origin stories of all prophets, some conflicting accounts of Zeno’s early life, and his shipwreck is no exception. One account claims that Zeno was in Athens already when he learned of his cargo’s demise and said, “Well done, Fortune, to drive me thus to philosophy!” Still others hold that he had already sold the cargo in Athens when he took up the pursuit of philosophy. It’s also quite possible that he had been sent to the city by his parents to avoid the terrible war between Alexander the Great’s successors that ravaged his homeland. In fact, some ancient sources report that he possessed an estate and maritime investments worth many millions at the time of his arrival in Athens. Yet another source records that Zeno arrived in 312 BC, at the age of twenty-two, the very year that his birthplace was razed and its king was killed by an invader.

Of all the possible origins for a philosophy of resiliency and self-discipline, as well as indifference to suffering and misfortune, an unexpected disaster rings the most true—whether or not it fully wiped out Zeno and his family financially. A shipwreck might just as easily have driven Zeno to an ordinary life as a land-based merchant, or, depriving him of his family, it could have driven him to drink or destitution. Instead, it was something he used—it was a call he decided to answer, spurring him to a new life and a new way of being.

This ability to adapt was a survival trait well suited to the times. The world of Zeno’s boyhood was one of chaos. In 333 BC, the year after he was born in Kition, a Greek city on the island of Cyprus, Alexander the Great liberated the country from two centuries of Persian rule. From then on, Zeno’s home was a valuable chess piece on this shifting board of broken empires, one that changed hands many times.

His father, Mnaeseas, was forced to literally navigate this chaos, as he traveled the seas in the family trade. There would have been blockades to run, bribes to pay, and enemy lines to avoid as he sailed from Cyprus to Sidon, Sidon to Tyre, Tyre to the Piraeus, the great port city outside Athens, and back again. Yet he seems to have been a loving father who made sure to bring home many books to his son, including those about Socrates.

It was likely never a question of whether Zeno would enter the family trade and follow his father to the sea, trading Phoenician dye, dreaming of adventure and riches. We’re told he was tall and lean, and that his dark complexion and bearing earned him the epithet “an Egyptian Vine.” In his later years, he would be described as thick-legged, flabby, and weak—attributes that caused him some awkwardness and social shyness as he aged and adjusted to life on land.

For all the uncertainty of the conditions of Zeno’s arrival in Athens, we know what the city was like when he arrived. Athens was a bustling commercial center with twenty-one thousand citizens, half as many foreign nationals, and a staggeringly large slave population, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The entire city was turned toward business, ruled by literate elites whose success and education allowed them time to explore and debate ideas that we are still talking about today. It was fertile ground for the awakening that was to come for Zeno. In fact, we even know exactly where this awakening happened—a surprisingly modern place: a bookstore.

One day, Zeno found himself taking a break from the fray of business, browsing titles in a bookshop, looking for something to read, when he learned that a talk had been scheduled for that day. Taking his seat, he listened to the bookseller read a medley of works about Socrates, the philosopher who had been put to death in Athens a century before and whose ideas Zeno’s father had introduced him to as a boy.