Greek Texts & Translations

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.

We have ourselves mentioned the manner of Zeno's death in the Pammetros (a collection of poems in various metres) :

The story goes that Zeno of Citium after enduring many hardships by reason of old age was set free, some say by ceasing to take food; others say that once when he had tripped he beat with his hand upon the earth and cried, "I come of my own accord; why then call me?" ^note

For there are some who hold this to have been the manner of his death.

So much then concerning his death.

Demetrius the Magnesian, in his work on Men of the Same Name, says of him : his father, Mnaseas, being a merchant often went to Athens and brought away many books about Socrates for Zeno while still a boy. 7.1.32 Hence he had been well trained even before he left his native place. And thus it came about that on his arrival at Athens he attached himself to Crates. And it seems, he adds, that, when the rest were at a loss how to express their views, Zeno framed a definition of the end. They say that he was in the habit of swearing by "capers" just as Socrates used to swear by "the dog." Some there are, and among them Cassius the Sceptic and his disciples, who accuse Zeno at length. Their first count is that in the beginning of his Republic he pronounced the ordinary education useless : the next is that he applies to all men who are not virtuous the opprobrious epithets of foemen, enemies, slaves, and aliens to one another, parents to children, brothers to brothers, friends to friends.