As should we.
In any case, the passing of history sorted it all out. Aristo’s work, and his questions, though quickly stamped out by the Stoics who came after him, would make a great impression on the young Marcus Aurelius. At age twenty-five, a generation or two after Seneca, Marcus found himself reading Aristo and was so shaken by the challenge of Aristo’s questions that he couldn’t sleep and had to step away from them. Instead of seeing a heretic, all he saw was someone urging him not to memorize but to practice and train until virtue became second nature. As he wrote to his rhetoric teacher, Fronto:
Just now Aristo’s writings are delighting and tormenting me at the same time. When they teach virtue, of course they delight me; but when they show how far my own character falls short of those models of virtue, your pupil blushes sadly often, and is angry with himself because, at twenty-five, he has absorbed in his heart nothing as yet of good opinion and pure reason. And so I pay the penalty, I am angry and sad, I envy other men, I fast. The prisoner at present of these cares, every day I put off the task of writing till the next.
In short, forget the precepts. Don’t pore over rules. Just do it.
Marcus knew the history of his school quite well. And he knew that all dogmatic disputes come to naught in the end. It all disappears. It becomes dust or legend, or less than that. Quotations of quotations from books that were lost to time.
All that remains, Aristo would have said, is how we lived our lives, how close we came to virtue in the moments that mattered.
CHRYSIPPUS THE FIGHTER
(Cry-SIP-us)
Origin: Soli
B. 279 BC
D. 206 BC
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 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.
What is the connection between philosophy and running? There is none. But between Stoicism, a 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, Cilicia, competing for the first time in an Olympic distance race like the dolichos, a three-mile race for which there is no modern equivalent. The dolichos 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 twenty-four stadium lengths, done almost like wind sprints on a basketball court.
It’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, 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. So 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. Cilicia was a frequent target of deadly raids. His family had relocated to Soli from 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 with 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. Chrysippus, like Zeno 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 himself was still alive by the time the seventeen- or eighteen-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. This energy was packed in a tight package, for we also know that he was of slight stature, based on a statue of him erected by his nephew Aristocreon that once stood just northwest of the Athenian agora near the Stoa Poikilē. 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: “Aristocreon dedicates this to his uncle Chrysippus, the cleaver to the Academy’s knots.”
What knots? The criticism that Cleanthes had received from poets and satirists was not because he was not well liked. Stoicism, with its growing popularity, had become a target for critics and skeptics. We can imagine the philosophical schools of Athens at this time—Epicureans, Platonists, and Aristotelians—battling it out like religions, each one claiming to have access to the true god.
Cleanthes had been content to respond with quips or stone-faced silence. 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 two first 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 Dionysius the Renegade, who began as a Stoic and joined a rival school that said life should be about pleasure. There was Herillus, who had studied under Zeno but believed, in opposition to Zeno, that knowledge was more important than virtue. There were all these voices, fighting, questioning, contradicting.