Zeno of Citium and the Founding of Stoicism (c. 300 BC)

Zeno of Citium founded Stoicism in Athens around 300 BC, when he began teaching in the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Stoa beside the city’s marketplace. His school taught that virtue is the only real good and that people should live in agreement with nature and reason. Stoicism went on to shape Greek and Roman thought for five centuries, inspiring figures such as Seneca and the emperor Marcus Aurelius, and it remains one of the most widely read ancient philosophies today.

Background: Athens after Alexander

By the late 4th century BC Athens had lost its political independence. After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, his generals fought for control of his empire, and Athens was ruled in turn by Macedonian-backed regimes. The great days of the democracy were over, but the city remained the intellectual centre of the Greek world.

Several schools competed there. Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum were well established. Epicurus opened his Garden around 306 BC, teaching that pleasure, understood as freedom from pain and anxiety, is the goal of life. The Cynics, followers of Diogenes of Sinope, rejected social conventions and lived in deliberate poverty.

In an uncertain world of shifting kingdoms, these new philosophies offered individuals a guide to living well regardless of politics. Stoicism became the most successful of them.

Zeno’s life

Zeno was born around 334 BC in Citium (modern Larnaca) on Cyprus, a city with a large Phoenician population. Ancient writers sometimes called him “the Phoenician”. Most of what is known about his life comes from Diogenes Laertius, who wrote several centuries later and mixed reliable information with anecdotes.

According to that account, Zeno was a merchant, perhaps trading in purple dye, who was shipwrecked near the Athenian port of Piraeus around 312 BC. In a bookshop he read the second book of Xenophon’s memoirs of Socrates and asked where men like Socrates could be found. The bookseller pointed to the Cynic Crates of Thebes, who was passing by, and Zeno became his pupil.

Zeno later studied with other teachers, including Stilpo of the Megarian school and Polemo, head of the Academy. This broad training helps explain why Stoicism combined Cynic ethics with careful attention to logic and the study of nature.

The school in the Painted Stoa

Around 301–300 BC Zeno began teaching in the Stoa Poikile. A stoa was a long covered colonnade open to the public. The Painted Stoa, built in the 460s BC on the north side of the Agora, was famous for its large paintings, including a scene of the Battle of Marathon, painted by leading artists of the day such as Polygnotus and Micon.

Teaching in such a public place was unusual. Zeno did not own a private property for his school, as Plato and Epicurus did. His followers were first called Zenonians and later Stoics, “the people of the Stoa”. Archaeologists from the American School of Classical Studies have excavated part of the Painted Stoa’s foundations since the early 1980s. The building itself is lost; the two-storey Stoa of Attalos, rebuilt in the 1950s on the east side of the same Agora, gives a good idea of what such halls looked like.

Zeno was known for his simple life, short temper with flatterers and terse way of speaking. He wrote many works, including a Republic describing an ideal community of wise people, but none survives complete.

What Zeno taught

Zeno divided philosophy into three parts: logic, physics and ethics. Later Stoics compared them to an egg or an orchard, in which each part supports the others.

Ethics. The goal of life, Zeno said, is to live “in agreement with nature”. For humans this means living according to reason, which is our nature. Virtue, meaning wisdom, justice, courage and self-control, is the only true good. Health, wealth and reputation are “indifferent”: some are preferable to others, but they do not make a person happy or unhappy.

The passions. Zeno held that destructive emotions such as fear, craving and distress come from mistaken judgements about what is good or bad. A wise person, who judges correctly, is free from them.

Physics. The Stoics believed the universe is a single living whole ordered by a divine, rational principle, the logos, which they identified with God, fate and nature. Everything happens according to this order.

Logic. Zeno also taught theories of knowledge and language. His successors, especially Chrysippus, developed a system of propositional logic that modern scholars regard as one of the great achievements of ancient thought.

Successors and the spread of Stoicism

Zeno died around 262 BC. Diogenes Laertius records that Athens honoured him with a golden crown and a public tomb in the Kerameikos cemetery. The Macedonian king Antigonus II Gonatas admired him and invited him to his court; Zeno declined and sent his pupil Persaeus instead.

Leadership of the school passed to Cleanthes of Assos, author of the Hymn to Zeus, and then to Chrysippus of Soli (c. 279–206 BC). Chrysippus wrote hundreds of works and systematised Stoic doctrine so thoroughly that later writers treated him as its second founder.

In the 2nd century BC Panaetius of Rhodes and Posidonius of Apamea adapted Stoicism for Roman audiences. It appealed to the Roman elite, with its emphasis on duty, endurance and public service. Under the Empire, Seneca (c. 4 BC–AD 65), the former slave Epictetus (c. AD 50–135) and Marcus Aurelius (emperor AD 161–180) wrote the Stoic texts most read today. Marcus wrote his private Meditations partly while campaigning during the Marcomannic Wars.

Myths and facts

Myth: Stoics aimed to feel nothing. The modern word “stoic” suggests suppressing emotion. Ancient Stoics wanted to be free of passions based on false judgements, but they accepted “good feelings” such as joy and caution, and they valued friendship and family affection.

Myth: Zeno founded Stoicism on his own. Zeno created the school, but much of what is now called Stoic doctrine was worked out by Cleanthes and above all Chrysippus.

Fact: two Zenos. Zeno of Citium should not be confused with Zeno of Elea, the earlier philosopher famous for his paradoxes of motion.

Legacy

Stoic ideas about a universal reason shared by all people influenced the concept of natural law, Roman jurists and early Christian writers. In the late 16th century the Flemish scholar Justus Lipsius revived Stoicism as “Neostoicism”, and its ethics influenced thinkers from Montaigne to Spinoza.

In the 20th century the psychologists Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck acknowledged Stoic, especially Epictetus’s, ideas as an influence on cognitive therapies, which focus on how beliefs shape emotions. Popular books on Stoicism have made it one of the best-known ancient philosophies of the 21st century.

Timeline

• c. 334 BC: Zeno is born at Citium on Cyprus.
• c. 312 BC: According to tradition, Zeno is shipwrecked near Piraeus and becomes a pupil of Crates.
• c. 301–300 BC: Zeno begins teaching in the Stoa Poikile in Athens.
• c. 262 BC: Zeno dies; Cleanthes becomes head of the school.
• c. 230 BC: Chrysippus succeeds Cleanthes and systematises Stoic doctrine.
• AD 62–65: Seneca writes his Letters to Lucilius.
• c. AD 170–180: Marcus Aurelius writes the Meditations.

Why it matters

Zeno turned a mix of Cynic, Socratic and Academic ideas into a complete philosophy of life that lasted for centuries. Its core message, that our happiness depends on our own judgements and character rather than on fortune, has proved one of the most enduring ideas of the ancient world.