The Life Of Chrysippus "The Fighter" From Lives Of The Stoics

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2:05Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

2:48Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Chrysippus is one of the more interesting of the Stoics because he was this force in his time, incredibly forceful, and he supposedly wrote 700 books. Most of them don't survive. How great a loss that is, we can't say. Epictetus once joked, some student was bragging about having read all of Chrysippus' works, which were known then to be tough reads. And he said, you know, if Chrysippus was a better writer, you'd have less to be proud of. But that doesn't mean Chrysippus wasn't a smart guy. He was an incredibly smart guy and incredibly important in the evolution of stoicism.

3:37And then you may have heard me talk about this before, but his death was particularly interesting and certainly contradicts one of the images that we have of the Stoics, which is actually why I wrote Lives of the Stoics, right? What the Stoics said and who they were is supposed to be in alignment, but it's not necessarily so. Just like you and I are talking about striving to be Stoic, but then when the rubber meets the road, maybe we don't always live up to it as much as we would like, or in all the ways that people might expect. And so we can learn from what the Stoics have written, but we can also learn from how the Stoics lived.

4:15And we can learn about the art of living from how these men and women lived their lives. And so in today's episode, I'm bringing you an excerpt from Lives of the Stoics, my chapter on Chrysippus. I call him Chrysippus the fighter. Cleanthes was literally the fighter. He was trained in boxing, which you read about in that chapter. But in this chapter, we talk about the more verbal and intellectual fighter that was Chrysippus. And I think you're going to find it really, really interesting. So this is me reading the audiobook chapter of Lives of the Stoics, The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius.

4:52I did this in collaboration with the one and only Steve Hanselman, who did the translations on the Daily Stoic. He did the translations for this book, pulled together the research on this book, and I did the writing and the reading of the audiobook. So check out Lives of the Stoics if you haven't, or just sit back now and listen to the life of Chrysippus the Fighter.

5:26Chrysippus the Fighter. Born 279 BC, died 206 BC, origin solely. It was early in life that Chrysippus, the man who would go on to be the third leader of the Stoic school, was introduced to running, a sport that would change his life. Running in the ancient world as now is not like other sports. Wrestling is a test of strength and strategy between two evenly matched fighters who are entangled body to body. The tossing of a ball or a javelin is a feat of technique and coordination measured by distance. But running, particularly endurance running, with its length predetermined and its competitors separated by lanes, is as much a battle of one's mind and body against themselves as it is a competition against anyone or anything else.

6:22What is the connection between philosophy and running? There is none, but between stoicism of philosophy of endurance and inner strength, of transcending one's limits and of measuring oneself against a high internal standard and distance running. Here, the overlap is profound, particularly for a young man like Chrysippus, born in the port city of Soli Solicia, competing for the first time in an Olympic distance race like the Dolichus, a three-mile race for which there is no modern equivalent. The Dolichus was not a three-mile loop like a modern cross-country course or even a track event like the 5 ,000 meters, but instead consisted of approximately 24 stadium lengths done almost like wind sprints on a basketball court.

7:12It's not hard to imagine this stoic mind forming as its molder Chrysippus ran as hard as he could back and forth, back and forth, not only trying to beat the other racers but trying to convince himself to keep going as he heaved for air and his brain told him to stop as he jostled for the lead in a pack of runners as he was unconsciously developing the ethical framework that would direct his life and the future of the Stoic school. Runners in a race ought to compete and strive to win as hard as they can, Chrysippus would later say, but by no means should they trip their competitors or give them a shove.

7:48So too in life, it is not wrong to seek after the things useful in life, but to do so while depriving someone else is not just. But mostly it would have been on the long training runs by himself through the coastal plains of his homeland of Cilicia, in what is today southern Turkey, that Chrysippus prepared himself for the challenges that life had in store for him and for the feats of intellectual and physical endurance that philosophy would demand. Indeed, like the other Stoics living in the chaos of a post-Alexandrian world, Chrysippus experienced little peace in his early years. His homeland was a frequent target of deadly raids.

8:30His family relocated to nearby Tarsus in response, only to experience a raid of a different kind when the family's significant property was confiscated to swell the coffers of one of Alexander's former generals. As was Zeno, the loss of a fortune became a piece of good fortune because it drove Chrysippus to philosophy. It also drove him to Athens. With little in the way of options at home and likely fearing what a tyrannical regime might come to take next, Chrysippus, like Cleanthes before him, left home in search of something better. For generations, Athens attracted not only the best and the brightest of the Hellenistic world in the pursuit of philosophy, but also the disenfranchised, the bankrupt, and the lost.

9:16Chrysippus, like Zeno's and Cleanthes before him, was a mix of all of these. We don't know exactly when he arrived in the shining city of learning and commerce, but by the time he did, the legacy of Zeno and Cleanthes had been firmly established. Their philosophy and fame had spread throughout the Greek world, and whether Zeno was still alive by the time the 17 or 18-year-old Chrysippus arrived in Athens, students would have felt their presence in every conversation, every book, and idea they studied. It is clear that Chrysippus, his name literally means golden horse, brought with him the energy and attitude of a fresh generation.

9:54This energy was packed in a tight package, for we know that he was of slight stature based on a statue of him erected by his nephew that once stood northwest of the Athenian Agora near the Stoa Pochile. Diogenes reports that the statue was small enough to be completely obscured by a horse statue next to it, which led to one later philosopher to make the pun that Chrysippus was horse-hidden. The statue, which stood long enough for Plutarch to write about it in 100 AD, tells us about more than his size. Its inscription read, This statue is dedicated to his uncle Chrysippus, the cleaver to the academy's knots.

11:04What-nots? When Stoicism was merely the thoughts of Zeno or the teachings of Cleanthes, perhaps this was sufficient. But at some point, the school would need to be defended. Its theories would need to be shored up, its doctrines defined and codified. Contradictions, even within the writings of those first two thinkers, would need to be clarified. And there were also Aristo's challenges and the challengers he encouraged, which loomed heavily over the future of Stoicism. There was Dionysus the renegade who began as a Stoic and joined a rival school that said life should be about pleasure. There was Horelius who had studied under Zeno but believed in opposition to Zeno that knowledge was more important than virtue.

11:48There were all these voices fighting, questioning, contradicting. What was Stoicism to be? What kind of instruction and guidance would it offer? Who would its leaders be? Thus fell to Chrysippus the thankless but essential role of fighting to protect this ascendant but still fledgling school. When Aristo published his book against Cleanthes, it was Chrysippus who felt compelled to write a reply. When a philosopher attempted to debate Cleanthes on some minor logical point, it was Chrysippus who jumped in to shout at the man to stop distracting his teacher, and that if he wanted to take up the quibble, Chrysippus was ready for it.

12:26not just ready, but ready to win, it seems. Let no one think that ideas that change the world do so on their own. They must, as a wise scientist would later say, be shoved down people's throats, or at least defended and fought for. Cicero would render a verdict years later on one such conflict involving the lesser known but controversial Stoic Herilus. He has been dismissed for a long time, Cicero wrote, no one has directly disputed him since Chrysippus. The fighter had settled the matter and sent another early challenger to the dustbin of history. Seneca would later speak of the importance of reading and studying other philosophies like a spy in the enemy camp.

13:10Indeed, we find that the early years of Chrysippus's career were spent not at the elbow of the living stoic masters, but at the side of the heads of Plato's academy. It's not that he had conflicting loyalties, it's that he knew that if Stoicism was to survive, it would have to learn from its more established rivals. We can picture Chrysippus, the competitor, the racer, wanting desperately to win. He studied the arguments of rival schools, even taking classes in the Platonist school so he could identify weak points in their arguments. He studied the weaknesses of his own arguments to see where Stoicism had to improve.

13:46There is sometimes no better way to strengthen your defense than to learn your opponent's offense. And this is precisely what a good philosopher does. Today, we call this steel manning. You don't cheat by assuming the worst about the ideas you're arguing against. Instead, you engage with them seriously and earnestly, winning by merit, not by mischaracterization. And as a fighter, Chrysippus enjoyed the challenge. We're told that Chrysippus was so confident in his ability to break down competing arguments that he once told Cleanthes he needed only to know a person's doctrines were and he would discover the proofs or presumably the refutations himself.

14:26Where 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 unfortunately not all the Stoics would later toe, but he was in it to win. We can imagine too that he probably didn't approve of Zeno's trick on Aristo because to Chrysippus, philosophy like life was a battle, but it should be fought fairly. It's strange in that way to consider the personalities and respective athletic pursuits of a teacher and a student master and protege.

15:09Cleanthes, the boxer, was the plotting, 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.

15:46It'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.

16:29If there had been no Chrysippus, it reads, there would have been no or rather we would likely not be talking about it the same way today.

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17:21When Cleanthes died in 230 BC, the 49-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 pochile, 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. We can imagine that as a cleaver and as 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 teachings and his prose on the precision of logical argument and formal proof.

18:12Though 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 and 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 alone tackling the topic of logic. From the titles Diogenes Details, we can see nearly two dozen books on the infamous liar argument alone. You can't believe anything a liar says is true, goes the argument, but can we believe a complete liar when he says that what he is saying is false.

18:54If he's always lying, it's not false, but true, but then he wouldn't always be lying. One of his work's logical questions was even discovered among the entombed papyri at Herculaneum in a library of a rival Epicurean. As Homer was to poetry, one ancient writer wrote, 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' tragic play Medea that people joked that 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.

19:39Critics 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. 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 500 lines a day.

20:15He 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 that 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 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.

20:55A 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 to not cheapen philosophy. He didn't borrow or lend money. Diogonese notes that not a single one of Chrysippus' books was dedicated to a king. Some contemporaries saw this as arrogant, but it was actually evidence of his self-sufficiency.

21:36Unlike 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' 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' writing 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.

22:28Since most of Chrysippus' legendary output is lost to us, except for about 500 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 remain 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 and took them into his home and oversaw his education. He was particularly close to one of them, Aristocreon, to whom he dedicated at least three dozen of his books. And this nephew would return the favor not only with the statue and inscription over his burial site, but also by writing a book commemorating him.

23:13Yet even as a father figure Chrysippus' 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 more in 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. As mentioned earlier, as a runner, Chrysippus had developed a philosophy of good sportsmanship.

23:52He 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 classic scholar, calls it appropriately Chrysippus' no-shoving model of behavior, a model rooted in our own relatedness to each other. It was not his only contribution in this regard. Another of Chrysippus' ethical breakthroughs was to develop the stoic idea of sympathia 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.

24:35If only the jostling rivalries of the early Stokes could have reflected this idea a little better. If they could have realized there was no winning since they were all 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 claimed that had Chrysippus not existed, I would not have existed.

25:16The truest words are often spoken in jest. While Chrysippus's work might endure internally and his face would even be minted on coins in his native land decades after his death, the man knew that he himself would 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 73. If this is how Chrysippus truly died, it would confirm the image of a man who took himself and his work seriously and in the end died after taking the rare evening off from writing and thinking.

25:55It may be true, and if so, rather uninteresting. The other reports of Chrysippus' 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 till 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 enjoyment of a simple pleasure, which is not a bad way to go.

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