Just because someone has anxieties or self-doubts or was taught the wrong things early in life doesn’t mean they can’t become something great, provided they have the courage (and the mentors) to help them change. With Crates’s tough love, Zeno overcame his self-consciousness to become who he was called to be.
As Zeno left his trading days behind him, he chose a new way of living that balanced study and thought with the needs of a world driven by commerce, conquest, and technology. To Zeno, the purpose of philosophy, of virtue, was to find “a smooth flow of life,” to get to a place where everything we do is in “harmonious accord with each man’s guiding spirit and the will of the one who governs the universe.” To the Greeks, each of us had a daimon, an inner genius or guiding purpose that is connected to the universal nature. Those who live by keeping the individual and universal natures in agreement are happy, Zeno said, and those who don’t are not.
In an effort to reach this harmony, Zeno lived a simple life, not all that different from that of his rival Epicurus, who began his school just a few years before Zeno struck out on his own. His diet mostly consisted of bread and honey and the occasional glass of wine. He lived with roommates and rarely hired servants. Even when he was sick, he refused attempts to spoil him or change his meager diet. “He thought,” a later Stoic would say, “that someone who once experiences gourmet cuisine would want it all the time, inasmuch as the pleasure associated with drinking and eating creates in us a desire for more food and drink.”
As part of the simple life, Zeno kept to himself, preferring a close circle of friends to large social gatherings, and would later famously slip away from a party thrown by King Antigonus (and rebuff invitations to visit the king’s court). He made his points quickly and shook his head at needless rhetorical flourishes. He was also clever and funny, making a habit to ask strangers for money, so as to deter others from asking him the same question. There is no indication that his early life of ease and wealth in any way spoiled him or inflated his baseline sense of comfort. If anything, losing it had proved to him that money was not to be prized and mattered very little. It became almost a proverb in Athens, when someone was describing a sober, frugal, and disciplined person, to say, “He is more temperate than Zeno the philosopher!”
After his studies with Crates and the Megarian philosopher Stilpo, Zeno began to teach as well—fittingly for a former merchant, in the agora itself. There, amid the shops where people bought and sold their wares, Zeno discussed with them the true value of things. In this literal marketplace of ideas, he offered to them something he believed vital—an engaged philosophy of life that could help people find peace in an often turbulent world. “Of the three kinds of life, the contemplative, the active, and the rational,” Diogenes would write, the Stoics “declare that we should choose the latter, because a rational being is expressly produced by nature for contemplation and action.”
Zeno learned to be a creative kind of instructor, pitching his wares, as it were, alongside so many other merchants. At a dinner with a man who was known for eating so much so quickly that there was little left for his guests, Zeno grabbed an entire tray of fish and made as if he was going to eat it all himself. Catching his host’s surprised eye, he said, “What then, think you, must those who live with you suffer, if you can’t endure my gluttony for a single day?”
When one young student attracted too many admirers, Zeno ordered him to shave his head to keep them away. When a different rich and handsome student from Rhodes begged Zeno for instruction—no doubt reminding him of himself at that age—he assigned him a seat on a dusty bench, knowing it would dirty the boy’s clothes. Later, he sent him to rub shoulders with the city’s beggars, much the way Crates had sent him through the city carrying soup. But unlike Zeno, who had endured his humiliations and learned from them, this student simply left. Zeno believed that conceitedness was the primary obstacle to learning, and in this instance he was proven correct.
Zeno would eventually move to what became known as the Stoa Poikilē, literally “painted porch.” Erected in the fifth century BC (the ruins are still visible some twenty-five hundred years later), the painted porch was where Zeno and his disciples gathered for discussion. While his followers were briefly called Zenonians, it is the final credit to Zeno’s humility and the universality of his teachings that the philosophical school he founded didn’t ultimately carry his name. Instead, we know it today as Stoicism, an homage to its unique origins.
Is it not also fitting that the ancient Stoics chose a porch as their namesake and their home? It was not a bell tower or a stage, nor a windowless lecture hall. It was an inviting, accessible structure, a place for contemplation, reflection, and, most of all, friendship and discussion.
It was said that Zeno had little patience for idlers or big egos on his porch. He wanted his students to be attentive and aware. And those who came to him with an inflated sense of their own self-worth either quickly lost it or were sent away. But for those who were ready and willing, the porch was a place to learn and be taught.
Sadly, none of his works survive to us, not even his most important work, Republic, which masterfully rebutted the arguments of Plato’s book of the same name. What we know of it comes via summaries from people who read it. From them, we learn that the early Stoics were remarkably utopian. Much of that would be discarded by later, more pragmatic Stoics, but still Zeno’s early thinking set a tone that rings true today, namely that we “should consider all men to be of one community and one polity, and that we should have a common life and an order common to us all, even as a herd that feeds together and shares the pasturage of a common field.”
Zeno also wrote well-known essays on education, on human nature, on duty, on emotions, on law, on the logos, and even one tantalizingly titled Homeric Problems. What could Of the Whole World be about? How wonderful would it be to read Zeno’s Recollections of Crates? Alas, all we have of these writings is the occasional fragment or quote.
Even these scraps are enough to teach plenty. “The goal of life is to live in harmony with nature,” we are told he wrote in On Human Nature, “which means to live according to virtue, because nature leads us to virtue.” Zeno is also credited with originating the expression that man was given two ears and only one mouth for a reason. He supposedly said that there was nothing more unbecoming for a person than to put on airs, and that doing so was even less tolerable for the young. “Better to trip with the feet,” he once said, “than with the tongue.”
He was also the first to express the four virtues of Stoicism: courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. He held these traits “to be inseparable but yet distinct and different from one another.” We don’t know where or when Zeno first put this “Big Four” in writing, but we can feel its impact—for they appear in the works and the decisions of nearly every Stoic that came after him.
Unlike many prophets, Zeno was respected and admired in his own time. There was no persecution. No angering of the authorities. He was given the keys to the city walls of Athens, awarded a golden crown and a bronze statue in his own lifetime.
Yet for all the adoration Athens heaped on him and the adoration he gave in return, Zeno knew that home mattered. After donating money for the restoration of some important baths in Athens, he specifically requested that “of Kition” be inscribed on the building next to his name. He may have been a citizen of the world, an expat who loved his adopted Athens where he would live for half a century, but he didn’t want anyone to forget where he came from.