Greek Texts & Translations

According to Hippobotus he forgathered with Diodorus, with whom he worked hard at dialectic. And when he was already making progress, he would enter Polemo's school : so far from all selfconceit was he. In consequence Polemo is said to have addressed him thus : "You slip in, Zeno, by the garden door - I'm quite aware of it - you filch my doctrines and give them a Phoenician make-up." A dialectician once showed him seven logical forms concerned with the sophism known as "The Reaper," and Zeno asked him how much he wanted for them. Being told a hundred drachmas, he promptly paid two hundred : to such lengths would he go in his love of learning. They say too that he first introduced the word Duty and wrote a treatise on the subject. It is said, moreover, that he corrected Hesiod's lines thus:

He is best of all men who follows good advice: good too is he who finds out all things for himself. ^note

The reason he gave for this was that the man capable of giving a proper hearing to what is said and profiting by it was superior to him who discovers everything himself. For the one had merely a right apprehension, the other in obeying good counsel superadded conduct.

When he was asked why he, though so austere, relaxed at a drinking-party, he said, "Lupins too are bitter, but when they are soaked become sweet." Hecato too in the second book of his Anecdotes says that he indulged freely at such gatherings. And he would say, "Better to trip with the feet than with the tongue." "Well-being is attained by little and little, and nevertheless it is no little thing itself." [Others attribute this ^note to Socrates.]

He showed the utmost endurance, and the greatest frugality ; the food he used required no fire to dress, and the cloak he wore was thin. Hence it was said of him :

The cold of winter and the ceaseless rain

Come powerless against him : weak the dart

Of the fierce summer sun or racking pain

To bend that iron frame. He stands apart

Unspoiled by public feast and jollity :

Patient, unwearied night and day doth he

Cling to his studies of philosophy.

Nay more : the comic poets by their very jests at his expense praised him without intending it. Thus Philemon says in a play, Philosophers :

This man adopts a new philosophy.

He teaches to go hungry : yet he gets

Disciples. One sole loaf of bread his food ;

His best dessert dried figs ; water his drink.

Others attribute these lines to Poseidippus.

By this time he had almost become a proverb. At all events, "More temperate than Zeno the philosopher" was a current saying about him. Poseidippus also writes in his Men Transported :

So that for ten whole days

More temperate than Zeno's self he seemed.

And in very truth in this species of virtue and in dignity he surpassed all mankind, ay, and in happiness ; for he was ninety-eight when he died and had enjoyed good health without an ailment to the last. Persaeus, however, in his ethical lectures makes him die at the age of seventy-two, having come to Athens at the age of twenty-two. But Apollonius says that he presided over the school for fifty-eight years. The manner of his death was as follows. As he was leaving the school he tripped and fell, breaking a toe. Striking the ground with his fist, he quoted the line from the Niobe ^note:

I come, I come, why dost thou call for me?

and died on the spot through holding his breath.

The Athenians buried him in the Ceramicus and honoured him in the decrees already cited above, adding their testimony of his goodness. Here is the epitaph composed for him by Antipater of Sidon ^note:

Here lies great Zeno, dear to Citium, who scaled high Olympus, though he piled not Pelion on Ossa, nor toiled at the labours of Heracles, but this was the path he found out to the stars - the way of temperance alone.

Here too is another by Zenodotus the Stoic, a pupil of Diogenes ^note:

Thou madest self-sufficiency thy rule,

Eschewing haughty wealth, O godlike Zeno,

With aspect grave and hoary brow serene.

A manly doctrine thine: and by thy prudence

With much toil thou didst found a great new school,

Chaste parent of unfearing liberty.

And if thy native country was Phoenicia,

What need to slight thee? came not Cadmus thence,

Who gave to Greece her books and art of writing?

And Athenaeus the epigrammatist speaks of all the Stoics in common as follows ^note: O ye who've learnt the doctrines of the Porch

And have committed to your books divine

The best of human learning, teaching men

That the mind's virtue is the only good !

She only it is who keeps the lives of men

And cities, - safer than high gates and walls.

But those who place their happiness in pleasure

Are led by the least worthy of the Muses.