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

Cleanthes may have entered Athens under circumstances equally desperate as those of Zeno, the founder of the philosophy to which he would dedicate himself, but their early lives could not have been more different. While Zeno was born into wealth and conflict and was groomed for the life of a trader, Cleanthes came from a small city on the Aegean coast—what is today northwestern Turkey—with nothing but a burgeoning scholarly tradition thanks to Aristotle’s decision to found his first school there less than twenty years before Cleanthes’s birth.

Cleanthes experienced no sudden disaster, no reversal of fortune like the one that brought Zeno to philosophy. He instead arrived in Athens dead broke, with only his reputation as a boxer preceding him. What brought him there we cannot say for certain, but one suspects it was what has always brought poor but bright boys to the big city: opportunity.

With only a few days’ wages in his pocket, Cleanthes began his journey to study and work, but mostly, at the beginning, it seems, to work.

To support himself, he toiled in a number of odd jobs, including as a water-carrier for the many gardens of the city that needed to be watered by hand. He was so commonly seen at night carrying large jugs of water that he earned the nickname “water-boy,” or Phreantles. In Greek, it means “one who draws from the well,” and also conveniently happens to be a pun on the name Cleanthes.

We don’t know how or when he met Zeno, but it seems likely that it was through Crates, under whom Cleanthes also studied. What is interesting is that long after Cleanthes had made a name for himself as a budding philosopher, he kept at his manual labors, studying hard during the day and working harder at night.

When suspicious citizens of Athens thought the middle-aged Cleanthes looked in too fine a condition to be burning the candle at both ends, they hauled him before the court to give an account of how he made a living. Quite readily, he brought forth a gardener for whom he drew water and a woman whose grain he crushed to testify in his defense. Not only would the resourceful Cleanthes be acquitted, but he would also be awarded a hundred drachmas—many times what he had in his pocket on coming to Athens.

The large settlement was a message from the city elders: We could use more folks like this. Centuries later, we still don’t have enough people like him.

There is an unmistakable earnestness in Cleanthes’s work ethic. And why shouldn’t there have been? Philosophy, like life, requires work. And suffers for pretensions.

This event also says something about the outsized role that philosophy had begun to play in Athens. Few care today how Harvard professors can afford the car they drive or what their personal life is like. But in Athens in the third century BC these radical thinkers were more than just public intellectuals. They were stars. Their movements were observed with rapt attention. Their quips passed from person to person the way we might pass along memes in our time.

Even with this fame, Cleanthes not only continued his labors but actively turned down large financial gifts from patrons, including the Macedonian king Antigonus II Gonatas, who wished to help him retire to his studies.

To Cleanthes, labor and philosophy were not rivals. They were two sides of the same coin, pursuits that furthered and enabled each other. In John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Lee, a brilliant mind, well versed in Stoic philosophy, is asked why he demeans himself with the lowly profession of being a servant. He retorts that being a servant is actually the perfect profession for a philosopher: It’s quiet. It’s easy. It lets him study people. It gives him time to think. It is an opportunity, like any other job, for excellence and mastery.

In the elapsing centuries, this idea has fallen out of favor, but it remains a good one. Anything you do well is noble, no matter how humble. And possibly even more admirable if you deliberately forgo status in the pursuit of what you really love.

So it was for Cleanthes. A king once asked him why he still drew water. His answer follows along the same lines:

Is drawing water all I do? What? Do I not dig? What? Do I not water the garden? Or undertake any other labor for the love of philosophy?

Cleanthes loved work and philosophy the same. Indeed, that’s the word the ancients used to describe his industriousness: philoponia—a love of work. Literally, a marrow-deep dedication to honest labor. Not just for money, of course, but also to improve himself.

Arius Didymus, writing at the time of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, explains what Cleanthes believed was at stake in our efforts toward self-improvement: “All human beings have from nature initial impulses for virtue, being like a half-formed iambic verse according to Cleanthes—worthless while half-complete, but worthy once completed.”