The Life Of Zeno The Prophet

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1:30Welcome 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.

2:10Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I was just talking about this. I just recorded an episode of the podcast with Martha Nausbaum, who's a great translator and scholar on the Stoics. And we were talking about how, you know, what the Stoics said was one thing, but how they actually lived was another. Like, who were they? How did they apply these ideas, right? It's one thing to say, you know, don't be overcome by your emotions. And then you look at someone like Cicero and he loses a child. How could he not be affected by that? And was he affected by that?

2:45Do we misunderstand him when the Stoics say, don't be overwhelmed by your emotions, that they mean feel it to a certain degree, right? By actually looking at who the Stoics were, we get a better understanding of what they said. Conversely, we understand where they were just saying things and then whether they lived up to them. This is something obviously I think about a lot myself. It's easy to write about these ideas, but living them is what's hard. That's obviously the idea behind Lives of the Stoics, the art of living from Zeno to Marx and Reelists, which is a book I wrote with my collaborator, Steve Hanselman, a couple years ago.

3:22And I wanted to bring you a chunk of that book today because it starts us at the start of Stoicism with Zeno, who I call Zeno the prophet, the founder of Stoicism. You wonder why it's called Stoicism and not Zenoism? Well, we'll get into that in the chapter, but basically it's because Stoicism starts on the Stoapokile, the painted porch, also the name of my bookstore. That's where Zeno taught. And I think to his credit, but also to the credit of the school, it wasn't about celebrating the one dude. It was about celebrating the ideas that happened on that porch. And I'm going to bring you today my essay, my biography of Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism.

4:06We're going to go all the way back to Greece, the time of Alexander the Great, and we're going to start where Stoicism started. So you can check out Lives of the Stoics anywhere books are sold. We've got signed copies in the Daily Stoic store and here at the Painted Porch, the modern Stoa po 'kile, if you will. And I hope you enjoy this episode and enjoy learning a little bit more about Zeno.

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5:20Zeno, the prophet, born 334 BC, died 262 BC, origin, Cydion, Cyprus. The story of Stoicism begins fittingly in misfortune. On a fateful day in the 4th century BC, the Phoenician merchant Zeno set sail on the Mediterranean with a cargo full of Tyrian purple dye.

6:09Zeno's family's 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. And 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 a shipwreck that sent Zeno to Athens and on the path to creating what would become Stoic philosophy.

6:52There 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.

7:36Yet another source records that Zeno arrived in 312 BC at the age of 22, the very year that his birthplace was raised and its king was killed by an invader. Of all the possible origins for a philosophy of resilience 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 would have driven him to drink or destitution. Instead, it was something he used.

8:16It was a call he had 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 Kidion, 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 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 Sadan, Sadan to Tira, Tira to Perias, the great port city outside Athens, and back again.

9:11He 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 adventures and riches. We are 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.

9:54Athens was a bustling commercial center with 21 ,000 citizens, half as many foreign nationals, and a staggeringly large slave population which numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The entire city was turned towards 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 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.

10:35when he learned that a talk had been scheduled for the 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. On one of his voyages before his shipwreck, perhaps inspired by a similar trek that Socrates had made, Zeno consulted an oracle about what he should do to live the best life. The oracle's response, to live the best life you should have conversation with the dead. It must have struck him there in that bookstore, possibly the same one his father had shopped in years before, as he listened to the words of Socrates read aloud and brought to life that he was doing precisely what the oracle had advised.

11:22Because isn't that what books are? A way to gain wisdom from those no longer with us? As the bookseller read from the second book of Xenophon's Memorabilia, Zeno was hearing Socrates' teachings as they had been conducted in those very streets just a few generations before. The passage that struck him most was the choice of Hercules, itself a story about a hero at a crossroads. In this myth, Hercules is forced to choose between two maidens, one representing virtue and the other vice, one a life of virtuous hard work and the other of laziness. You must, Zeno would have heard the character of virtue say, accustom your body to be the servant of your mind and train it with toil and sweat.

12:02And then he heard Vice offer a very different choice. Wait a minute, she cries. Don't you see what a long and hard road to the joy she describes? Come the easy way with me. The two roads diverge in the wood or rather in a bookstore in Athens, the stoic chooses the hard one. Approaching the bookseller, Zeno asked the question that would change his life. Where can I find a man like that? That is, where can I find my own Socrates? where can I find someone to study under as Xenophon had under that wise philosopher who can help me with my choice? If Zeno's misfortune had been to suffer that terrible shipwreck, his luck was more than made right for having walked into that bookshop and made doubly good when in that moment, Crates, a well-known Athenian philosopher, happened to be passing by.

12:52the bookseller simply extended his hand and pointed. You could say it was faded. The later Stoics certainly would have agreed. The hero had suffered a great loss, and because of it, crossed a threshold to find his true teachers. At the same time, it was a choice that Zeno made, to go into the bookstore after his terrible loss, to sit and listen to the bookseller. Most important, not to be content to leave the words he had heard there at that. No, he wanted more. He demanded more answers, demanded to be taught more, and it's from that impulse that Stoicism would be formed. Crates of Thebes, like Zeno, was the son of a wealthy family and heir to a large fortune.

13:34From Diogonese Laertes, we learn that after Crates watched a performance of the tragedy of Telephys, the story of King Telephys, son of Hercules, wounded by Achilles, he gave his money away and moved to Athens to study philosophy. There he became known as the door opener, Diogenes wrote, the caller to whom all doors fly open of those eager to learn from the great philosopher. When the student is ready, the old Zen saying goes, the teacher appears. Kratis was exactly what Zeno needed. One of Kratis' first lessons was intended to cure Zeno of his self-consciousness about his appearance, sensing that his new pupil was too worried about his social status, Crates assigned him the task of carrying a heavy pot of lentil soup across town.

14:22Zeno tried to sneak the pot through town, taking back streets to avoid being seen, doing such a humiliating task. Lentils then were seen as a food eaten only by poor people. This was undoubtedly an attempt to challenge his snobbish self-identity. Tracking him down, Crates cracked the pot open with his staff spilling the soup all over him. Zeno trembled with embarrassment and tried to flee. Why run away, my little Phoenician, Kratis laughed. Nothing terrible has befallen you. Just because someone has anxieties or self-doubt or was taught the wrong things early in life doesn't mean they can't become something great, provided they have the courage and the mentors to help them change.

15:03With Kratis' tough love, Zeno overcame his self-consciousness to become who he was called to be.

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16:51As Zeno left his trading days behind him, he chose a new way of living that balanced study and thought with the needs of a world driven by commerce, conquest, and technology. To Zeno, the purpose of philosophy of virtue was to find a smooth flow of life, to get to a place where everything we do is in harmonious accord with each man's guiding spirit and the will of the one who governs the universe. To the Greeks, each of us had a daemon, an inner genius or guiding purpose that is connected to the universal nature. Those who live by keeping the individual and the universal natures in agreement are happy, Zeno said, and those who don't are not.

17:34In an effort to reach this harmony, Zeno lived a simple life, not at all that different from that of his rival Epicurus, who began his school just a few years before Zeno struck out on his own. His diet mostly consisted of bread and honey and the occasional glass of wine. He lived with roommates and rarely hired servants. Even when he was sick, he refused attempts to spoil him or change his meager diet. He thought, a later Stoic would say, that someone who once experiences gourmet cuisine would want it all the time, inasmuch as the pleasure associated with drinking and eating creates in us a desire for more food and drink.

18:12As part of the simple life, Zeno kept to himself, preferring a close circle of friends to large gatherings, and would famously later slip away from a party thrown by King Antigonus, and also rebuff invitations to visit the king's court. He made his points quickly and shook his head at needless rhetorical flourishes. He was also clever and funny, making a habit to ask strangers for money so as to deter others from asking him the same question. There is no indication that his early wealth in any way spoiled him or inflated his baseline sense of comfort. If anything, losing it had proved to him that money was not to be prized and mattered very little.

18:53It became almost a proverb in Athens when someone was describing a sober, frugal, and disciplined person to say, he is more temperate than Zeno the philosopher. After his studies with Crates and the Mejuron philosopher Stilpo, Zeno began to teach as well, fittingly for a former merchant in the Agora itself. There, amid the shops where people bought and sold their wares, Zeno discussed with them the true value of things. In this literal marketplace of ideas, he offered them something he believed vital, an engaged philosophy of life that could help people find peace in an often turbulent world. Of the three kinds of life, the contemplative, the active, and the rational, Diogenes would write, the Stoics declare that we should choose the latter because a rational being is expressly produced by nature for contemplation and action.

19:46Zeno learned to be a creative kind of instructor, pitching his wares, as it were, alongside so many other merchants. At a dinner with a man who was known for eating so much so quickly that there was little left for his guests, Zeno grabbed an entire tray of fish and made as if he was going to eat it all himself. Catching his host's surprised eye, he said, what then think you must those who live with you suffer if you can't endure my gluttony for a single day? When one student attracted too many admirers, Zeno ordered him to shave his head to keep them away. When a different rich and handsome student from Rhodes begged Zeno for instruction, no doubt reminding himself at that age, he assigned him a seat on a dusty bench, knowing it would dirty the boys' clothes.

20:32Later, he sent him to rub shoulders with the city's beggars, much the way that Crates had sent him through the city carrying soup. But unlike Zeno, who had endured his humiliations and learned from them, This student simply left. Zeno believed that conceitedness was the primary obstacle to learning, and in this instance, he was proven correct. Zeno would eventually move to what became known as the Stoic pochile, literally painted porch. Erected in the 5th century BC, the ruins are still visible today, some 2 ,500 years later. The painted porch was where Zeno and his disciples gathered for discussion.

21:12While his followers were briefly called Xenonians, it is the final credit to Zeno's humility and the universality of his teachings that the philosophical school he founded didn't ultimately carry his name. Instead, we know it today as Stoicism, an homage to its unique origins. Is it not also fitting that the ancient Stoics chose a porch as their namesake and their home? It was not a bell tower or a stage, not a windowless lecture hall. it was an inviting, accessible structure, a place for contemplation, reflection, and most of all, friendship and discussion. It was said that Zeno had little patience for idlers or big egos on his porch.

21:54He wanted his students to be attentive and aware. And those who came to him with an inflated sense of their own self-worth either quickly lost it or were sent away. But for those who were ready and willing, the porch was a place to learn and be taught. Sadly, none of his works survived to us, not even his most important work, Republic, which masterfully rebutted the arguments of Plato's book by the same name. What we know of it comes via summaries from people who read it. From them, we learned that the early Stoics were remarkably utopian. Much of that would be discarded later by more pragmatic Stoics, but still Zeno's early thinking set a tone that rings true today, namely that we should consider all men to be of one community and one polity, and that we should have a common life and order common to us all, and even as a herd that feeds together and shares the pasturage of a common field.

22:48Zeno also wrote well-known essays on education, on human nature, on duty, on emotions, on law, on the logos, and even one tantalizingly titled Homeric Problems. What could of the whole world be about? How wonderful would it be to read Zeno's recollections of Kratos? Alas, all we have of these writings is the occasional fragment or quote. Even these scraps are enough to teach plenty. The goal of life is to live in harmony with nature, we are told he wrote in On Human Nature, which means to live according to virtue because nature leads us to virtue. Zeno is also credited with originating the expression that man was given two ears and only one mouth for a reason.

23:31He supposedly said that there was nothing more unbecoming for a person than to put on errors, and that doing so was even less tolerable for the young. Better to trip with the feet, he once said, than with the tongue. He was also the first to express the four virtues of Stoicism, courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. He held these traits to be inseparable yet distinct and different from one another. We don't know where or when Zeno first put his big four in writing, but we can feel its impact for they appear in the works and decisions of nearly every other Stoic that came after him. Unlike many prophets, Zeno was respected and admired in his own time.

24:09There was no persecution, no angering of the authorities. He was given the keys to the city walls of Athens, awarded a golden crown and a bronze statue in his own lifetime. Yet for all the adoration Athens heaped on him and the adoration he gave in return, Zeno knew that home mattered. After donating money from the restoration of some important baths in Athens. He specifically requested that of Kittion be inscribed on the building next to his name. He may have been a citizen of the world, an expat who loved his adopted Athens, where he would live for half a century, but he didn't want anyone to forget where he came from.

24:46For all his clever quips, the only thing Zeno ever really cared about, what he tried to teach about, was truth. Perception, he said, stretching out his fingers, is a thing like this, meaning expansive and large. Closing his fingers together a bit, he would say, ascent, meaning to form a conception about something is like this. Now, closing his hands to a fist, he called that comprehension. And finally, wrapping one hand around another, he called this combination knowledge. This full combination, he said, was possessed only by the wise. In his studies with living teachers like Crates and his conversations with the dead, that chance encounter with Socrates' teaching that the Oracle had predicted, Zeno danced with wisdom.

25:28He explored it in the Agora with his students. He had thought deeply on long walks and tested it in debates. His own journey toward wisdom was a long one, some 50 years from that shipwreck until his death. It was defined not by some single epiphany or discovery, but instead by hard work. He inched his way there through years of study and training, as we all must. Well-being is realized by small steps, he would say, looking back, but it is truly no small thing. As with many philosophers, accounts of Zeno's death stretch our credulity, but teach a lesson nonetheless. At age 72, leaving the porch one day, he tripped and quite painfully broke his finger.

26:09Sprawled on the ground, he seems to have decided that the incident was a sign and that his number was up. Punching the ground, he quoted a line from Timotheus, a musician and poet from the century before him. I come of my own accord, Lord, why then call me? And then Zeno held his breath until he passed from this life.

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