Fragments and Sayings

Everything that survives of Zeno of Citium (c. 334–262 BCE), founder of the Stoa: his division of philosophy into logic, physics and ethics, the kataleptic impression, fire and the Logos that runs through the cosmos, the end as living in agreement with nature, his Republic, and the sayings remembered of him. Each fragment is given with the ancient author who preserves it. 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 7.39 They say that philosophical discourse has three parts: one part of it is physics, another ethics, another logic. Zeno of Citium was the first to divide it in this way, in his work On Reason.

Fragment 2. Diogenes Laertius, Lives 7.40 Others put logic first, physics second and ethics third; among these is Zeno, in his On Reason.

Fragment 3. Arrian, Discourses of Epictetus 4.8.12 The principles of the philosopher … which Zeno states: to know the elements of reason, what sort of thing each of them is, how they fit together with one another, and whatever follows from them.

Fragment 4. Arrian, Discourses of Epictetus 1.17.10–11 “And logic is unfruitful” … well, we shall look into that. But even if one were to grant this, it is enough that logic is able to discriminate and examine everything else and, as one might say, to measure and weigh it. Who says this? Only Chrysippus, Zeno and Cleanthes?

Fragment 5. Stobaeus, Eclogues 2.2.12 (p. 22, 12 Wachsmuth) Zeno likened the handbooks of the dialecticians to accurate measures that measure out not wheat or anything else of value, but chaff and dung.

Fragment 6. Plutarch, On Stoic Self-Contradictions 8.2 He (that is, Zeno) used to solve sophisms, and he told his pupils to take up dialectic, since it is able to do this.

Fragment 7. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians 7.228, 7.236; cf. Diogenes Laertius, Lives 7.45 An impression (phantasia) is an imprint in the soul.