Fragments, Hymn to Zeus and Sayings

The fragments of Cleanthes of Assos (c. 330–230 BCE), Zeno's successor as head of the Stoa: the Hymn to Zeus (fragment 48), the sun as the ruling part of the cosmos, tension (tonos), the soul and its survival, virtue that cannot be lost, and the sayings of the water-carrier who studied by night. Text of the fragments from A. C. Pearson, The Fragments of Zeno and Cleanthes (Cambridge, 1891), numbered as there; Pearson's commentary is not included. New English translation, with the Greek and Latin beside it; not yet reviewed by a scholar.

Fragment 1. Diogenes Laertius, Lives 7.41 But Cleanthes says there are six parts [of philosophy]: dialectic, rhetoric, ethics, politics, physics, theology.

Fragment 2. Epictetus, Discourses 1.17.11 Logic is what discriminates and examines everything else and, as one might say, measures and weighs it. Who says so? Only Chrysippus and Zeno and Cleanthes?

Fragment 3. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians 7.228; 7.372; 8.400; Outlines of Pyrrhonism 2.70 Math. 7.228: (The “impression”), about which they at once fell into disagreement. For Cleanthes (understood) the impression as one made by depression and projection, like the impression made in wax by signet rings. — Math. 7.372: For if the presentation (phantasia) is an impression in the soul, either it is an impression by projection and depression, as the followers of Cleanthes hold, or it comes about by mere alteration … — Math. 8.400: Cleanthes understanding it in the strict sense, as the impression conceived with depression and projection. — Pyrrh. 2.70: Since, then, the soul and the ruling part (hegemonikon) is breath (pneuma), or something of finer parts than breath, as they say, no one will be able to conceive an impression in it, either by projection and depression, as we see with seals, or by the fabulous “alterative” kind.

Fragment 4. Plutarch [Aëtius], Opinions of the Philosophers 4.11 The Stoics say: when a man is born, he has the ruling part (hegemonikon) of his soul like a sheet of papyrus ready (or: in working order) for writing; on this he inscribes each one of his conceptions.

Fragment 5. Olympiodorus, Commentary on Plato's Gorgias (see Zeno frag. 12); Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory 2.17.41 Olympiodorus: Cleanthes, then, says that an art is a disposition (hexis) that accomplishes everything by a method (literally, “by a road”). — Quintilian: For if, as Cleanthes held, an art is a power that achieves its effects by a path, that is, by method …