Zeno of Citium

Zeno of Citium, from Cyprus, founded Stoicism — so named because he taught in the Stoa Poikile, the 'Painted Porch' of Athens. A merchant turned philosopher (after a shipwreck, the story goes, that cost him everything and gave him philosophy), he built a complete system of logic, physics, and ethics.

Its heart was the teaching that the cosmos is a single rational whole governed by the divine Logos, and that the good life is to live 'in agreement with nature' — that is, with reason — so that virtue alone is good and the passions are to be mastered. His successors, above all Chrysippus, systematised the school.

Citium was a Greek and Phoenician city on Cyprus, and Zeno was later sometimes called 'the Phoenician'. According to the story told by Diogenes Laertius, he came to Athens around 312 BCE and, reading Xenophon's memoirs of Socrates in a bookshop, asked where such men could be found; the bookseller pointed to the passing Crates, and Zeno became his pupil. From the Cynic Crates he learned contempt for convention, and he went on to study with Stilpo of the Megarian school and with Polemo at the Academy before beginning to teach on his own around 300 BCE.

Of his writings only fragments and reports survive. His Republic, an early work showing strong Cynic influence, described an ideal community of the wise without temples, law courts or coinage, and later Stoics were embarrassed by some of its proposals. He divided philosophy into logic, physics and ethics, and taught that knowledge rests on the cognitive impression, which he illustrated, as Cicero reports, with the gestures of an open hand, a curled hand, a closed fist, and a fist gripped by the other hand.

The Athenians honoured him with a golden crown and a public tomb, praising his life as a model for the young, and the Macedonian king Antigonus Gonatas admired him. He died around 262 BCE and was succeeded as head of the school by Cleanthes, whose Hymn to Zeus gives the clearest surviving expression of the founder's vision of a cosmos ruled by reason.