It’s not that Chrysippus forsook all pleasures and all money; it’s that he was suspicious of wanting, lusting for anything. A wise man can make use of whatever comes his way, he said, but is in want of nothing. “On the other hand,” he said, “nothing is needed by the fool for he does not understand how to use anything but he is in want of everything.”
There is no better definition of a Stoic: to have but not want, to enjoy without needing.
From this belief came freedom and independence for Chrysippus. He never sold his work or charged for his advice, out of a wish not to cheapen philosophy. He didn’t borrow or lend money. Diogenes notes that not a single one of Chrysippus’s books was dedicated to a king. Some contemporaries saw this as arrogant, but it was actually evidence of his self-sufficiency. Unlike Zeno and Cleanthes, who had taken money from kings, Chrysippus was not interested in patronage. If you accept money from a king, he said, then you must humor him.
He didn’t take the money . . . which meant nobody could tell him what to do.
Chrysippus’s independence of thought, his love of high-minded principles, and his intellectual zeal were clearly virtues, but like anything, they can be taken to excess. The smarter we are, the easier it is to fall in love with our own voice, and our own thoughts. The cost of this is not just pride, but the quality of our message. Epictetus, whose students struggled to make sense of Chrysippus’s writings some three centuries later, would say, “When someone puts on airs about their ability to understand and interpret the works of Chrysippus, tell yourself that if Chrysippus hadn’t written so obscurely they’d have nothing to brag about.”
Since most of Chrysippus’s legendary output is lost to us, except for about five hundred small excerpts gleaned from other writers, it’s hard to know how bad a writer he really was. It says something that despite these purported faults, his insights have endured—and remained widespread even after his death.
As dedicated as he was to his work, Chrysippus was also a loving family man. He sent for his sister’s sons, Aristocreon and Philocrates, and took them into his home and oversaw their education. He was particularly close to Aristocreon, to whom he dedicated at least three dozen of his books. Aristocreon returned the favor not only with the statue and inscription over his burial site, but also by writing a book commemorating him.
Yet even as a father figure, Chrysippus’s competitive nature was evident. A mother once asked him who she ought to entrust her son’s education to. He answered that there was obviously no better teacher than himself . . . because if there were, he’d be studying with them himself.
For all his disputes with Aristo (who believed that only ethics mattered), they were in more agreement than they thought. Plutarch tells us that everything Chrysippus wrote was for “no other purpose than the differentiation of good and bad things.” Virtuous living was the end-all, be-all for them both.
As mentioned earlier, as a runner, Chrysippus had developed a philosophy of good sportsmanship. He knew that even as athletes are competing with each other, and want desperately to triumph over the rest, there remains an essential brotherhood between everyone participating—from the best to the worst. Tad Brennan, the classics scholar, calls it, appropriately, Chrysippus’s “no-shoving model” of behavior, a model rooted in our relatedness to each other. It was not his only contribution in this regard. Another of Chrysippus’s ethical breakthroughs was to develop the Stoic idea of sympatheia, built on Zeno’s belief that we all belong to one common community, which encourages us to meditate on the interconnectedness of all persons and our shared citizenship in the cosmos.
If only the jostling rivalries of the early Stoics could have reflected this idea a little better. If they could have realized that there was no “winning” since they were already on the same team, since they already agreed on the big things, imagine how much trouble they would have spared themselves. What a better example they would have set for us today.
Ironically, it was only from the skeptical Platonist Carneades, who, as you will see, would become the greatest thorn in the side of the Stoics long after his death, that Chrysippus received one of his best compliments, for not only did Carneades believe that without Chrysippus there would be no Stoa, he also claimed that “had Chrysippus not existed, I would not have existed.” The truest words are often spoken in jest.
While Chrysippus’s work might endure eternal ly—and his face would even be minted on coins in his native land decades after his death—the man knew that he himself could not.
It was after a lecture one night at the Odeon that a bunch of his students invited Chrysippus out for a drink. After drinking some undiluted sweet wine, he was struck by a dizzy spell and died five days later at the age of seventy-three.
If this is how Chrysippus truly died, it would confirm the image of him as a man who took himself and his work seriously, and in the end died after taking the rare evening off from writing and thinking. It may be true, and if so, rather uninteresting.
The other reports of Chrysippus’s death are more tantalizing, for they add another dimension to the man and to the image of the supposedly joyless Stoic stereotype. In one recounting, Chrysippus was sitting on his porch when a lonely donkey wandered by and began to eat from his garden. Chrysippus found the sight inexplicably funny and began to laugh and laugh. “Give the ass some wine to wash down the figs,” he cried out to the owner, and then laughed even harder, until he literally died.
And so, if true, it would be Stoicism’s second founder who passed away not in the heat of debate or in a sprint of writing—which he had spent so much of his life doing—but from good humor and the enjoyment of a simple pleasure.
Not a bad way to go.
ZENO THE MAINTAINER
(ZEE-No)
Origin: Tarsus
B. Unknown
D. 190–180 BC?
At the turn of the second century BC, Stoicism was a hundred years old. Zeno’s teachings had passed to Cleanthes and then Chrysippus. They had survived the provocations and doubters and attacks from other schools.
But now what? Who would be next?
One of the central beliefs of Stoicism is the idea that history is cyclical. That the same thing happens again and again and again. We are not so special, they would say. We are interchangeable pieces, role players in a play that has been playing since the beginning of time.
Very little makes this clearer than the fact that the next leader of Stoicism, starting a new century, would in a way be starting us back at the beginning. For he too was named Zeno.
After Chrysippus’s successful consolidation of the school, the choice of who would take up the mantle after him was his to make. As Chrysippus’s family had originated in Tarsus and he had risen to such acclaim, he must have drawn the interest of many fellow Tarsians. One of these Tarsian students, Dioscurides, about whom little is known except that Chrysippus had dedicated at least six works to him that spanned twenty-one volumes, was the presumptive heir. But Dioscurides was likely too old or infirm, or perhaps he died.