We are now in a position to return to Apollonius’ Life of Zeno. Diogenes, on the authority of Apollonius, records an exchange of letters between Zeno and King Antigonus of Macedonia (7.7–9). There is no good reason to reject out of hand the king’s interest in Zeno, though it does recall a bit too neatly Alexander the Great’s interest in the Cynic Diogenes. What provokes more suspicion is the unctuous tone of the king’s letter, inviting Zeno to visit him, and the bland and condescending tone of Zeno’s response, wherein he declines the invitation on grounds of age. Nothing could be further from Cynic asperity and frankness. We can be virtually certain that the correspondence is a fabricated and rather unconvincing attempt to give Zeno a polish and social standing that were quite at odds with a Cynic demeanor.12 As to Zeno’s Athenian honors, while they were presumably genuine, the eulogistic decree proposing them was not prompted by an outpouring of democratic love of Zeno; it was moved by the Macedonian king’s agent at Athens (7.12 and 15). It would be naïve to think that philosophy at Athens was immune to influence from political power brokers.
Evidence both to acknowledge and to play down the influence of Crates comes from the sections I have marked B and I and C and L in my analytical summary. This material, as I mentioned, raises two large and overlapping questions: Who were Zeno’s philosophical teachers and how did Zeno come to be interested in philosophy?
Diogenes starts the life (7.2) by reminding his readers that he has already told them Zeno was a student of Crates. He continues, with an evasive “they say,” to report that Zeno “attended the lectures of Stilpo and Xenocrates for ten years, according to Timotheus in his Dion; and those of Polemon as well.”13 After describing how Zeno first encountered Crates, composed his Republic under Crates’ influence, and experienced other teachers, Diogenes writes: “He finally left Crates and studied with the above-mentioned men for twenty years” (7.5). The ten-year/twenty-year inconsistency does not inspire confidence in Diogenes’ authorial control. Moreover, chronology excludes the possibility that Zeno had actual contact with the Platonist Xenocrates as well as his successor Polemon.
Crates, Stilpo, and Polemon might seem a sufficiently varied bunch to give Zeno as broad an education as any budding ancient philosopher could want. But near the end of the life Diogenes reports, on the authority of Hippobotus (one of the earliest sources), that Zeno studied dialectic with Diodorus Cronus (7.25), and only after that training, as if it were a necessary qualification, proceeded to Polemon. All of this, apart from the misinformation about Xenocrates, could be true. What we know, or think we know, of Zeno’s philosophy from elsewhere could seem to authenticate it. Unfortunately Diogenes himself says little to corroborate the details beyond the close and initial association with Crates, supplemented by Zeno’s interest in dialectical disputes and sophisms (7.16 and 25). Apart from his detailed excursus on Zeno’s Republic, which confirms the Cynic connection so pointedly, Diogenes is largely reticent in the biographical part of the life about Zeno’s specific contributions to Stoic doctrine.
How did Zeno come to be interested in philosophy in the first place? On this theme the life is even more uncertain. Sections B, C, and N yield three accounts.
The first account is this: on the authority of the coeval Hecaton and Apollonius, roughly of Cicero’s age, we are told (7.2):
when he [Zeno] consulted an oracle about what he should do to live the best life, the god replied that he should have intercourse with the dead. Grasping the oracle’s meaning, he read the works of the ancients.
Diogenes tells nothing about the chronology and location of Zeno’s oracular consultation. We are left to guess whether it occurred when Zeno was a youth in Cyprus or after he reached mainland Greece. Mysterious though the passage is, there can be little doubt about its implicit meaning: Zeno is represented, just like Socrates in Plato’s Apology, as someone whose life-changing moment was an oracular response. In addition, Zeno interpreted the oracle, we are to understand, as an injunction to study works that could tell him about Socrates.
The Socratic connection, though only implicit in this first account, is made definite in Diogenes’ next paragraph. There, however, instead of giving an elucidation of the oracle, Diogenes writes:
He [Zeno] became a student of Crates under the following circumstances. Transporting a cargo of purple dye from Phoenicia to the Piraeus, he was shipwrecked. On reaching Athens (he was then a man of thirty), he sat down in a bookseller’s shop. [3] The bookseller was reading aloud the second book of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, and Zeno was so pleased that he asked where such men could be found. At that very moment, fortunately, Crates happened to be walking past. Pointing him out, the bookseller said, “Follow him.” From then on he studied with Crates, proving in other respects well suited for philosophy, though he was bashful about adopting Cynic shamelessness. Hence Crates, who wanted to cure him of this, gave him a pot of lentil soup to carry through the Cerameicus. And when he saw that Zeno was ashamed and tried to keep it hidden, he struck the pot with his cane and broke it. As Zeno was running away, the soup streaming down his legs, Crates said, “Why run away, my little Phoenician? Nothing terrible has happened to you.”
Xenophon’s Memorabilia, on this second account, gave Zeno a fortuitous literary introduction to Socrates at a time when he was already a traveling salesman. The main point of this nicely embellished story is not to connect Zeno with Socrates but to explain how he became Crates’ student. We should notice, though, that while the account is generally positive about Zeno’s association with Crates, it is careful to exempt Zeno from Cynic “shamelessness.”
We should now jump ahead to section N, noting its curious position after the epigrams on Zeno’s death:
Demetrius of Magnesia, in Men of the Same Name, says that Zeno’s father, Mnaseas, being a trader, came often to Athens and brought home many books about Socrates for Zeno, who was still a boy. [32] Thus even in his native place he got good training; and then, on reaching Athens, he attached himself to Crates. And it seems, he adds, that when the
This third story of Zeno’s conversion to philosophy neatly reconciles the two earlier accounts. We now learn that Zeno was in fact devoted to Socrates long before he reached Athens. Hence his encounter with Crates was not fortuitous but deliberate. But, as the second account also proposes, Zeno attached himself to Crates as a means to gain access to Socrates. To emphasize the hallowed Socrates as Zeno’s primary allegiance, this third account tells us that Zeno aped Socrates, who used to swear “by the dog” in adopting a special oath as his trademark.
These three accounts are mutually consistent, more or less, but their emphases differ strikingly. The first account, the oracular story, hints strongly at Socrates and omits Crates. The second and third accounts connect Zeno with both Crates and with Socrates, but with differences of emphasis. The second account gives us a lively and largely positive portrait of Zeno’s encounters with Crates.14 The third account, focusing more strongly on Zeno’s Socratic connections, is entirely factual and dispassionate.
No source for the second account is mentioned, but I think we can be fairly sure that Diogenes did not get it from Hecaton and Apollonius, who were his sources for the oracular account. I take it that both these authors, writing at around the time of Cicero, were eager to play up Zeno’s Socratic connections and to play down his early Cynic phase. Cynicism, of course, was a Socratic movement in many of its ideas and prescriptions. In the Roman Empire, as we know from the works of Seneca and Epictetus, Stoic philosophers were happy to acknowledge Cynic aspects of Stoicism. That phase of philosophical history, however, long postdates Diogenes’ sources.
The second account is not only the fullest but is also, in light of its circumstantial detail, probably the earliest—which is not to say that it is historically exact.15 Was Zeno really, as this account claims, a Cy
priot dye merchant, who suffered shipwreck? We are left guessing about the exact sequence of events. For after digressing to Zeno’s publications, Diogenes returns to the shipwreck:
He [Zeno] finally left Crates and studied with the above-mentioned men [i.e., Stilpo, Xenocrates, and Polemon] for twenty years. Hence he is reported to have said, “I had a good voyage when I was shipwrecked.” Others, however, claim that Zeno said this in reference to his time with Crates. [5] Some say he was spending time in Athens when he heard that his ship was wrecked, and he said, “Fortune does well to drive me to philosophy.” But others say that it was after he had disposed of his wares in Athens that he turned his attention to philosophy.
The chronology is again wildly inaccurate, making Zeno more than fifty years old when he finished studying with other philosophers. As to the discrepant accounts of Zeno’s turn to philosophy after shipwreck, what lies behind them is probably a Hellenistic liking for romantic stories about the conversion of a worldly figure to an ascetic lifestyle rather than anything genuinely historical.
The mercantile and shipwreck stories are completely absent from section N, the third account. Now it is not Zeno but his father who is the merchant. This account, the authority for which is the first-century BC source Demetrius of Magnesia, reads like a further attempt to play down both the Cynic and the salesman connections in favor of Zeno as earnest schoolboy, dedicated to Socrates from his early days. This emollient account, like the first one, was probably current some two hundred years after Zeno’s death.
Attempts to detach the mature Zeno from his Cynic origins mark Diogenes’ life intermittently throughout, but in the end they fail to dislodge the impression that Zeno’s encounter with Crates was the most decisive moment in his life. Much of the anecdotal material and many of Zeno’s apothegms would be completely at home in Diogenes’ biographies of the Cynics. Zeno has the Cynic Diogenes’ gift for repartee, the cutting rejoinder, and the mockery of pomp and circumstance, and he too, though less drastically, practiced poverty. The chief difference between Diogenes and Zeno, in Diogenes Laertius’ two lives, is stylistic and professional. Diogenes was a showman, using shock tactics as his teaching method and flourishing in the limelight. Zeno, temperamentally scholastic and unsociable, became the professor who grafted Cynic challenges to conventional values onto a comprehensive philosophy of universal and human nature.
Diogenes’ biography of Zeno is an amalgam of fact, hearsay, and fantasy. Which predominates? Fact, in my opinion, is to the fore in the historicity of Zeno’s formative encounter with Crates (however it came about), in the influence of Socrates and the Megarians Stilpo and Diodorus, and in the final testimony concerning Zeno’s Republic. Fantasy emerges in the sanitized passages derived from Apollonius, where Zeno loses his Cynic pedigree and becomes rather pompous and boring. As for the anecdotes and apothegms, so typical of Diogenes’ predilections, while some derive from reminiscences of Zeno recorded by his contemporary followers, many of them are interchangeable with other figures from other lives. The latter are only the stuff of a Reader’s Digest Zeno, a Stoic without the qualities to inspire the real Stoa.
Zeno must have been a lot more interesting and brilliant than Diogenes Laertius makes him out to be. He was not charismatic perhaps, like Epicurus, but challenging, witty, and sufficiently Socratic to stamp that exemplary name on the Stoic tradition ever after. Unlike Socrates, Zeno did write books, but they were probably short and pithy. Much of his contemporary impact was oral. While Zeno’s writings have left only scanty marks on Diogenes’ treatment of his life, Diogenes has left us our fullest record of Zeno’s Cynic Republic. In relegating it to an excursus, Diogenes reflects the worries of later Stoics about their founder’s respectability, but he did not suppress mention of it, and for that we should be especially grateful.
1 For details see Malcolm Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Kathy L. Gaca, The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Diogenes’ outline (7.33–34) of the contents of Zeno’s Republic is mild meat compared with sexual details recorded elsewhere (see Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism 3.245–46 and Against the Mathematicians 11.190–91. Diogenes’ qualms in writing about sex are on view when he alludes to the similar theories of Chrysippus (7.187–88).
2 David Hahm finds in Zeno’s supposed letter to King Antigonus (7.8–9) “a thinly disguised outline of the Stoic theory of education and moral development.” This text, however, is probably a first-century BC fabrication. David E. Hahm, “Zeno Before and After Stoicism,” in The Philosophy of Zeno, ed. T. Scaltsas and A. S. Mason (Larnaka, Cyprus: Municipality of Larnaka/Pierides Foundation, 2002), 29–56.
3 I. G. Kidd tabulates the occurrences of Stoic philosophers and their books in the doxographical section of the life. I. G. Kidd, “Zeno’s Oral Teaching and the Stimulating Uncertainty of His Doctrines,” in Scaltsas and Mason, The Philosopher of Zeno, 351–64.
4 One of our manuscripts lists the names of twenty Stoics subsequent to Chrysippus, but that is not sufficient reason for thinking that Diogenes composed their lives.
5 Numenius, cited by Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica 14.728a.
6 David Hahm dissects the episodes and sources with far greater detail and precision than I can offer here. I chiefly differ from him in finding Diogenes’ Zeno more strongly marked overall by Cynic traits in spite of the efforts of his later Stoic sources to pin that aspersion primarily on Ariston. David E. Hahm, “Diogenes Laertius VII: On the Stoics,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, II.36.6, ed. Wolfgang Haase and Hildegard Temporini (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992), 4076–182.
7 Apart from Diogenes’ citations here, Apollonius is known only from mention of him by the geographer Strabo (16.2.4) as writing an account of Zeno and the philosophers of his school “somewhat before my time.” This gives Apollonius an approximate floruit of 50 BC. Apollonius himself was clearly a strong Stoic sympathizer but probably not an actual teacher of Stoicism.
8 On Philodemus’ work and the prudish worries that it registers about Zeno’s Republic, see Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City, 9–10.
9 Full discussion in Jaap Mansfeld, “Diogenes Laertius on Stoic Philosophy,” Elenchos 7 (1986): 295–382.
10 Caizzi makes a convincing case for the view that Cynicism was a major part of the image that Zeno sought to convey. F. Decleva Caizzi, “The Porch and the Garden: Early Hellenistic Images of the Philosophical Life,” in Images and Ideologies: Self-Definition in the Hellenistic World, ed. A. W. Bulloch et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 303–29.
11 See Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City, for details.
12 In his letter to King Antigonus, Zeno describes himself as eighty years old. To give a semblance of authenticity to the letter, Apollonius greatly exaggerated Zeno’s age at death (DL 7.28).
13 Timotheus was an Athenian author; Diogenes cites his On Lives at 7.1. Stilpo (DL 2.113–20), a Megarian philosopher, is represented by Diogenes as very close to Crates, while Polemon (DL 4.16–20) headed the Platonic Academy for many years. Diogenes does not mention Zeno in his life of Polemon, but he attests to Zeno’s close associations with Megarian philosophers, including not only Stilpo and Diodorus, mentioned in this life, but also Alexinus, in his life of the Megarian Euclides (2.109–10).
14 As if to emphasize the decisive influence of Crates, Diogenes inserts his list of Zeno’s writings (7.4), starting with the Republic and climaxing with Recollections of Crates, at the point when Zeno is about to leave Crates for the other teachers.
15 I conjecture that it derives ultimately from the pen of Antigonus of Carystus, who was close to Zeno in date, and wrote about the lives of several early Hellenistic philosophers.
Skeptics in Diogenes Laertius
James Allen
Modern historians of philosophy recognize two forms of ancient Skeptic
ism, Academic and Pyrrhonian. The former took root in the Academy, Plato’s school, under the leadership of Arcesilaus, the fifth philosopher to succeed the founder as its leader (or “scholarch”), and was the dominant tendency in the school until its dissolution in the first century BC.1 Pyrrhonism took its name from Pyrrho of Elis, an older contemporary of Arcesilaus, but there is good reason to suspect that the school came into existence, or was revived, by Aenesidemus of Cnossus, a onetime member of the Academy who was active in the first century BC, a good two centuries after Pyrrho’s death (though one would never guess this from Diogenes’ few mentions of Aenesidemus in his account of Pyrrho and Pyrrhonism). If this is right, the members of the later Pyrrhonist movement looked to Pyrrho for inspiration rather than being able to trace a line of succession back to him. It flourished well into the Christian era and is known to us principally through Sextus Empiricus, likely active in the late second century AD, much of whose substantial philosophical oeuvre has survived.
Arcesilaus’ contemporaries saw a resemblance between him and Pyrrho, as witness Ariston of Chios, a Stoic who quipped that Arcesilaus was a hybrid, with “Plato in front, Pyrrho behind, Diodorus in the middle” (4.33).2 Diogenes Laertius, however, treats the two forms separately. In his fanciful scheme dividing philosophers into two successions, the Ionian begins with Anaximander, the pupil of Thales, and the Italian begins with Pythagoras. He places Socrates in the Ionic tradition (1.13–15), and discusses Arcesilaus and succeeding Academics, who are likewise viewed as part of this tradition, in Book 4, which takes up the story (begun in Book 2) of Socrates and his successors. The whole of Book 3 is devoted to Plato, the most eminent of all Socrates’ pupils.
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers Page 84
