What was Stoicism to be? What kind of instruction and guidance would it offer? Who would its leaders be?
Thus fell to Chrysippus the thankless but essential role of fighting to protect this ascendant but still fledgling school. When Aristo published his book Against Cleanthes, it was Chrysippus who felt compelled to write a reply. When a philosopher attempted to debate Cleanthes on some minor logical point, it was Chrysippus who jumped in to shout at the man to stop distracting his teacher and that if he wanted to take up the quibble, Chrysippus was ready for it. Not just ready, but ready to win, it seems.
Let no one think that ideas that change the world do so on their own. They must, as a wise scientist would later say, be shoved down people’s throats. Or at least defended and fought for.
Cicero would render a verdict years later of one such conflict, involving the lesser-known but controversial Stoic Herillus. He “has been dismissed for a long time,” Cicero wrote. “No one has directly disputed him since Chrysippus.”
The fighter had settled the matter and sent another early challenger to the dustbin of history.
Seneca would later speak of the importance of reading and studying other philosophies like a spy in the enemy camp. Indeed, we find that the early years of Chrysippus’s career were spent not at the elbow of the living Stoic masters but at the side of Arcesilaus and Lacydes, both of whom headed Plato’s Academy. It’s not that he had conflicting loyalties; it’s that he knew that if Stoicism was to survive, it would have to learn from its more established rivals.
We can picture Chrysippus—the competitor, the racer—wanting desperately to win. He studied the arguments of rival schools, even taking classes in the Platonists’ school so that he could identify weak points in their arguments. He studied the weaknesses of his own arguments to see where Stoicism had to improve.
There is sometimes no better way to strengthen your defense than to learn your opponent’s offense, and this is precisely what a good philosopher does. Today we called this “steel-manning”—you don’t need to cheat by assuming the worst about the ideas you’re arguing against. Instead, you can engage with them seriously and earnestly, winning by merit, not by mischaracterization. And as a fighter, Chrysippus enjoyed the challenge.
We are told that Chrysippus was so confident in his ability to break down competing arguments that he once told Cleanthes he only needed to know what a person’s doctrines were and he would discover the proofs (or, presumably, the refutations) himself.
Where Cleanthes was slow and methodical, and always charitable in his assessment of rivals, Chrysippus was proud and loved intellectual combat. His competitiveness honed in the stadia, it turns out, had transferred right over to the world of philosophy. He would never stoop to cheap tricks—a line that, unfortunately, not all the later Stoics would toe—but he was in it to win.* Because to Chrysippus, philosophy, like life, was a battle. But should be fought fairly.
It’s strange, in that way, to consider the personalities and respective athletic pursuits of teacher and student, master and protégé. Cleanthes, the boxer, was the plodding, enduring one, while Chrysippus, who had excelled in a more solitary sport, was the explosive, aggressive one.
He added to this temperament real skill too. There was a saying popular in his time that if the gods were to take up the science of argument, they would use Chrysippus as their model. Stoicism was lucky to have such a brilliant thinker in its camp. Where Aristo was using his mind to question the orthodoxy in a way that left very little standing, Chrysippus, in defining philosophy as “the cultivation of rightness of reason,” was systematizing all of Stoic teaching.
It’s a timeless but unsung role in the history of countless philosophies, businesses, and even countries: The founding generations have the courage and the brilliance to create something new. It is left to the generations that follow—usually younger, better prepared, and far more pragmatic—to clean up the messes and excesses and contradictions that those founders created in the process.
This job is hardly as glamorous as the founder’s work, or as recognized. It’s not even as rewarding as the work of the apostle, who gets to spread the gospel. But it is in many ways the most important. The history of Stoicism quietly recognizes this and, in fact, immortalizes the truth of it in the most famous line we have from antiquity about Chrysippus: “If there had been no Chrysippus, there would be no Stoa.”
Or rather, we’d likely not be talking about it the same way today.
When Cleanthes died in 230 BC, the forty-nine-year-old Chrysippus became the third leader of the Stoics. His first order of business was not only to clarify the teachings of his predecessors but to popularize them. Whereas Zeno and Cleanthes taught only on the Stoa Poikilē, Chrysippus sought out the larger stage of the Odeon (a concert hall) as well. He was apparently also the first to deliver open-air lectures in the grove of the Lyceum, the school of Aristotle’s followers, the Peripatetics. We can imagine that as a cleaver and a fighter, he enjoyed bringing his message directly into the enemy’s camp.
Where Cleanthes had preferred the power of poetry and often used analogy, metaphor, and meter to convey his truths, Chrysippus insisted in both his teaching and his prose on the precision of logical argument and formal proof. Though renowned for his passion for and acumen in argumentation—it was rare for Chrysippus to simply leave a point to speak for itself, for instance, as he was fond of arguing repeatedly on the same topics—he was equally known for his innovations in the field of logic and for his prodigious literary output. He boasts a body of writings exceeding 705 volumes, some 300 of them tackling the topic of logic. From the titles Diogenes details, we can see nearly two dozen books on the infamous Liar Argument alone. (We won’t believe anything a liar says is true, but can we believe a complete liar when he says that what he’s saying is false? If he’s always lying, it’s not false, but true . . . but then he wouldn’t always be lying.) One of his works, Logical Questions, was even discovered among the entombed papyri at Herculaneum (in a library of the rival Epicurean school that belonged to Philodemus). As Homer was to poetry, one ancient writer said, Chrysippus was to logic.
He also had a passion for literature and poetry in a way that belies his reputation for logic. In one essay, Chrysippus supposedly referenced so many lines from Euripides’s tragic play Medea that people joked he had included every word of it. It was the “Medea of Chrysippus,” they said. In fact, he was so fond of quoting other writers that their voices overshadowed his own in some of his writings. Critics of his books called these quotations “extraneous,” but a better reading is that Chrysippus truly loved sharing and sampling from the great thinkers and playwrights of history, and he would become notorious as a result for his diligent citation of them and other sources whenever they supported his points.
But was he really that different from Cleanthes or the other Stoics? Chrysippus too was humble, a hard worker, and unimpressed with finery. It seems he kept a simple house with only a single servant. According to her, his intellectual marathon meant he kept a steady pace of writing at least five hundred lines per day. He declined invitations, even from kings, because it would have kept him from his work. He rarely left home unless it was to deliver a lecture.
He was reported to shy away from social gatherings and would often remain quiet at the ones he did attend. His servant reported that at drinking parties only his legs would get tipsy, presumably meaning they were the only sign he was enjoying himself. He was once criticized for not joining a throng that attended Aristo’s lectures, to which he simply replied that “if I had cared about the mob, I would not have studied philosophy.”