Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

Cleanthes may have entered Athens under circumstances equally desperate as those of Zeno, the founder of the philosophy to which he would dedicate himself, but their early lives could not have been more different. While Zeno was born into wealth and conflict and was groomed for the life of a trader, Cleanthes came from a small city on the Aegean coast—what is today northwestern Turkey—with nothing but a burgeoning scholarly tradition thanks to Aristotle’s decision to found his first school there less than twenty years before Cleanthes’s birth.

Cleanthes experienced no sudden disaster, no reversal of fortune like the one that brought Zeno to philosophy. He instead arrived in Athens dead broke, with only his reputation as a boxer preceding him. What brought him there we cannot say for certain, but one suspects it was what has always brought poor but bright boys to the big city: opportunity.

With only a few days’ wages in his pocket, Cleanthes began his journey to study and work, but mostly, at the beginning, it seems, to work.

To support himself, he toiled in a number of odd jobs, including as a water-carrier for the many gardens of the city that needed to be watered by hand. He was so commonly seen at night carrying large jugs of water that he earned the nickname “water-boy,” or Phreantles. In Greek, it means “one who draws from the well,” and also conveniently happens to be a pun on the name Cleanthes.

We don’t know how or when he met Zeno, but it seems likely that it was through Crates, under whom Cleanthes also studied. What is interesting is that long after Cleanthes had made a name for himself as a budding philosopher, he kept at his manual labors, studying hard during the day and working harder at night.

When suspicious citizens of Athens thought the middle-aged Cleanthes looked in too fine a condition to be burning the candle at both ends, they hauled him before the court to give an account of how he made a living. Quite readily, he brought forth a gardener for whom he drew water and a woman whose grain he crushed to testify in his defense. Not only would the resourceful Cleanthes be acquitted, but he would also be awarded a hundred drachmas—many times what he had in his pocket on coming to Athens.

The large settlement was a message from the city elders: We could use more folks like this. Centuries later, we still don’t have enough people like him.

There is an unmistakable earnestness in Cleanthes’s work ethic. And why shouldn’t there have been? Philosophy, like life, requires work. And suffers for pretensions.

This event also says something about the outsized role that philosophy had begun to play in Athens. Few care today how Harvard professors can afford the car they drive or what their personal life is like. But in Athens in the third century BC these radical thinkers were more than just public intellectuals. They were stars. Their movements were observed with rapt attention. Their quips passed from person to person the way we might pass along memes in our time.

Even with this fame, Cleanthes not only continued his labors but actively turned down large financial gifts from patrons, including the Macedonian king Antigonus II Gonatas, who wished to help him retire to his studies.

To Cleanthes, labor and philosophy were not rivals. They were two sides of the same coin, pursuits that furthered and enabled each other. In John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Lee, a brilliant mind, well versed in Stoic philosophy, is asked why he demeans himself with the lowly profession of being a servant. He retorts that being a servant is actually the perfect profession for a philosopher: It’s quiet. It’s easy. It lets him study people. It gives him time to think. It is an opportunity, like any other job, for excellence and mastery.

In the elapsing centuries, this idea has fallen out of favor, but it remains a good one. Anything you do well is noble, no matter how humble. And possibly even more admirable if you deliberately forgo status in the pursuit of what you really love.

So it was for Cleanthes. A king once asked him why he still drew water. His answer follows along the same lines:

Is drawing water all I do? What? Do I not dig? What? Do I not water the garden? Or undertake any other labor for the love of philosophy?

Cleanthes loved work and philosophy the same. Indeed, that’s the word the ancients used to describe his industriousness: philoponia—a love of work. Literally, a marrow-deep dedication to honest labor. Not just for money, of course, but also to improve himself.

Arius Didymus, writing at the time of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, explains what Cleanthes believed was at stake in our efforts toward self-improvement: “All human beings have from nature initial impulses for virtue, being like a half-formed iambic verse according to Cleanthes—worthless while half-complete, but worthy once completed.”

What had brought this hardworking man to philosophy in the first place? We’re not sure. Had he known about it from birth, growing up not far from Aristotle? Did one of his wealthy clients hand him a book? As he got older, did he start to want something more out of life? Was it a chance encounter on the street or in the same bookstore as Zeno?

The call to find a deeper meaning in life, to figure out how to live, can come to anyone at any time. Saint Paul received his awakening on the road to Damascus; where Cleanthes’s came from we cannot say. What matters most is whether we respond to the call in the first place—whether we pursue that question until we find its answer, or at least until we find our answer.

However he was prompted, we know that after Cleanthes met Zeno, he became his student and remained so for nineteen years. If he was Zeno’s student until the man’s death in 262 BC, that would mean Cleanthes did not begin his philosophical studies until he was nearly fifty years old. That’s a long, hard life as a water-carrier, a long time to toil in obscurity, before pursuing spiritual and mental greatness.

Perhaps Cleanthes started when he was younger and “graduated” after nineteen years, before moving on to another role inside the burgeoning school that Zeno was building. In any case, he likely got his start in philosophy at a later age than Zeno (who was only four years his elder).

Kierkegaard would later make the distinction between a genius and an apostle. The genius brings new light and work into the world. The genius is the prophet. The creator. The apostle comes next—a mere man (or woman) who communicates and spreads this message. Given Cleanthes’s dedication to Zeno, it seems likely that the two were never contemporaries or peers, but always master and student. Zeno, the prophet. Cleanthes, the apostle of Stoicism.

Certainly, Cleanthes was the kind of student who warms a teacher’s heart. The one who sits and listens. Who isn’t afraid of asking “dumb” questions. Who puts in the work. Who never gets discouraged, even if they pick things up slower than other students.

Over the course of nearly twenty years, Cleanthes must have sat at the Stoa Poikilē for thousands of hours, not only listening to debates and discussions, but with a front-row seat as the early principles of Stoicism were established. He was there as Zeno divided the curriculum of Stoicism into three parts: physics, ethics, and logic. He would have heard Zeno riff on the choice Heracles made between living a life dedicated to pleasure or one according to virtue, the passage in Xenophon’s Memorabilia that Zeno had first heard in the bookshop and had been so transformed by. Cleanthes, like a sponge, soaked in all of this, believing the whole while that he had much to learn, clearly, for no one with a large ego can remain a student for two decades.

Because of his age, and his methodical, workmanlike approach to things, Cleanthes was sometimes ridiculed as a slow learner and referred to by other students as “the donkey.” When so insulted, he liked to reply that being likened to an ass didn’t bother him because, like the pack animal, he was strong enough to carry the intellectual load Zeno saddled his students with. Zeno, on the other hand, picked a more generous analogy: Cleanthes was like a hard waxen tablet that, being difficult to write upon, nevertheless retains well what’s recorded on it.

Slowly, Cleanthes began to make a name for himself—though it’s impossible to know when he first began writing and publishing for himself.

Some of the first attention he got was not positive. The satirical poet Timon of Phlius parodied him as a simpleton poring over lines of written text like a general reviewing his soldiers:

Who is this, who like a ram ranges over the ranks of warriors? A masticator of words, the stone of Assos, a sluggish slab.

In fact, Assos was famed for its rock quarries and its hard white stone that was used to fashion ancient coffins. When a satirist takes aim at you and finds only your love of language to criticize, it probably says something positive about your character.

So it was for Cleanthes. Quiet. Sober. Hardworking. One with his philosophy. And his money.

Money earned with hard labor is not to be spent frivolously, and Cleanthes did not easily part with his wages or the security they provided. Plutarch marveled at Cleanthes’s frugality and his desire to maintain his financial independence. I continue to carry water, he has Cleanthes say, in order not to be a deserter of Zeno’s instruction, nor from philosophy either. It was said that Cleanthes was supporting his teacher, and that Zeno took a portion of his wages as Athenian law prescribed for masters and their slaves. And even with this payment, Zeno joked that Cleanthes was so disciplined that there was enough left over for him “to maintain a second Cleanthes, if he liked.”

It is clear that Cleanthes abhorred debt and luxury, preferring the freedom of a humble life to the slavery of extravagance. The saying in Athens was that no one was more temperate than Zeno, but Cleanthes did more to establish the Stoic image of indifference to pain or discomfort as well as distaste for luxury. His cloak was once blown open by the cold wind to reveal not even a shirt underneath, a feat of asceticism that passersby spontaneously applauded. Cleanthes was said to be so frugal that he recorded Zeno’s teachings on oyster shells and the blade bones of oxen to save on the cost of papyrus. The latter claim is doubtless an exaggeration, for Diogenes records that Cleanthes wrote fifty books, many in multiple volumes, and we know of another seven from other authors. Though one could speculate that he saved on buying papyrus until he could put it to the best of all possible uses—recording wisdom for the generations.

A young Spartan, raised in a culture of hard living and soldiering, once asked Cleanthes if pain was something to be avoided or whether, with the right training and under the right circumstances, it might be considered a good. This was music to Cleanthes’s ear. Quoting the Odyssey, he responded:

You are of good blood, dear child, because of the kind of words you say.

To Cleanthes, suffering—if in pursuit of virtue—was a good and not an evil. And we can see that in his life. He did not shirk from hardship or discomfort. In fact, he almost seems to have sought them out, to the admiration but also the bafflement of his fellow citizens. What mattered, of course, was where this strength of will was directed. To Cleanthes, we should be striving to become strong in those four virtues Zeno had talked about:

Now this force and strength, when it is in things apparent and to be persisted in, is wisdom; when in things to be endured, it is fortitude; when about worthiness, it is justice; and when about choosing or refusing, it is temperance.

In short: Courage. Justice. Moderation. Wisdom.

Cleanthes, the middle-aged “water-boy,” “the donkey,” the slab of Assos rock, a virtual slave to his master Zeno, would slowly come to acquire a reputation as a kind of new Heracles among his fellow citizens. But as the poet Timon was only the first to illustrate, the fate of any exemplary figure is mockery by parasites, just as the great bull is beset by flies.

With this newfound respect came more criticism as well, particularly as the philosophy became more popular. Zeno and Cleanthes and their students were living differently, thinking differently, holding themselves to vastly different standards not just to the population of Athens but even to their fellow seekers of wisdom. While other schools debated behind closed walls or doors, the Stoics had taken philosophy to the streets. This gave them greater impact and almost made them targets.

Cleanthes dealt with his critics like he dealt with all adversity—as an opportunity to practice what he preached. Once while he sat in a theater, the playwright Sositheus attacked him from the stage by declaiming about those “driven by Cleanthes’ folly like dumb herds.” Cleanthes sat stone-faced, and the audience was so astounded by his calmness that they erupted in applause for his self-discipline and drove the playwright from the stage in response. When Sositheus apologized after the show, Cleanthes readily accepted, saying that greater figures than he had suffered worse abuse by poets and that it would be crazy for him to take offense at such a minor slight.

This came as no surprise to those who knew Cleanthes, as he was a man who held himself to the highest of standards. What some called cowardice or overcautiousness, he better defined as conscientiousness, and believed it was the reason he made so few mistakes. It was not uncommon to find him examining the slightest faults with himself or scolding himself out loud as he walked the streets of Athens. When another of Zeno’s students, Aristo of Chios (see “Aristo the Challenger”), heard him do this, he asked who he was talking to, and Cleanthes laughed, saying, “An old man with grey hair and no wits.”

This kind of self-talk was a core practice for Stoics, and it wasn’t always negative. Once Cleanthes overheard a solitary man talking to himself and kindly told him, “You aren’t talking to a bad man.” That is to say that one’s self-talk must be strict, but never abusive. It appears his frugality and work ethic followed along similar lines. He was tough. He was firm. But he hardly relished self-punishment.

The Stoics are underrated for their wit. It was certainly a critical tool for Cleanthes, both in responding to criticism and in disarming those he needed to deliver it to. Speaking to a young man who could not seem to grasp his point, he asked, “Do you see?” Yes, of course, replied the youth. “Why, then,” Cleanthes asked, “don’t I see that you see?” When Cleanthes heard his fellow Stoics complaining about a prominent critic of Stoicism, Arcesilaus, who disagreed with their teachings on the role of duty (kathekon), Cleanthes jumped to his defense, saying that by all accounts Arcesilaus appeared to live a dutiful life. When Arcesilaus heard of Cleanthes’s defense of him, he said, “I’m not easily won by flattery,” to which Cleanthes quipped, “True, but my flattery consists in alleging that your theory is incompatible with your practice.”

Throughout their history, Stoics used this kind of good humor as a way to avoid complaining or blaming and to shine a light on how our everyday actions should be aligned with our words. Plutarch, in his essay How to Tell a Flatterer, tells us that Arcesilaus paid back the respect Cleanthes showed him by banishing a student named Baton from his classroom for composing a put-down rhyme about Cleanthes, and not letting Baton back into his school until he had apologized to its subject. We can imagine that forgiveness came easy to Cleanthes and that he probably read the poem with some delight.

Like his master Zeno, Cleanthes was a man who preferred listening to talking and expected students to do the same. Whereas Zeno said that we were given two ears and one mouth for a reason, Cleanthes preferred to quote from Electra:

Silence, silence, light be thy step.

Indeed, his criticism of the Peripatetics (the followers of Aristotle) was that they were no different from a musical instrument like the lyre, producing beautiful sounds but never able to hear for themselves.

While Cleanthes was a listener and often slow and cautious in his thinking, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a communicator. More and more, Zeno began to rely on his hardworking apostle, especially as the Stoics suffered attacks from rival schools. However difficult it may have been for this penny pincher to splurge on writing materials, we know that several of the prolific Cleanthes’s fifty-some books articulated and explained the Stoic approach to all sorts of topics. Diogenes lists many of his books, but a few stand out:

On Time

On Zeno’s Natural Philosophy (two volumes)

Interpretations of Heraclitus (four volumes)

On Sensation

On Marriage

On Gratitude

On Friendship

On the Thesis That Virtue Is the Same in a Man and a Woman

On Pleasure

On Personal Traits

It is a tragedy of history that all these books are lost.

From the titles alone, we can tell that this man was no stubborn donkey, that his interests were varied and active, and that he had a mind that loved to challenge itself. When he found a topic he liked, he attacked it with vigor, writing multiple volumes on physics, Heraclitus, impulse control, duty, and logic. Nothing interested Cleanthes more than ethics—this man who refused gifts from kings—so it should not surprise us that roughly half of his known works deal specifically with how we should act in the world.

Curiously, what survive directly from Cleanthes’s writings are largely his poetical fragments.* They are filled with beautiful lines that give us glimpses into his unique combination of determination and acceptance. “Fate guides the man who’s willing,” he writes in one short fragment, “drags the unwilling.”

In another, preserved more than three centuries later by Epictetus (and before that by Seneca):

Lead on God and Destiny,

To that Goal fixed for me long ago.

I will follow and not stumble; even if my will

Is weak I will soldier on.

Cleanthes loved the challenge of poetry, believing that the “fettering rules” of the medium allowed him to reach people in a deep and moving way. He offered the analogy of the way that a trumpet focuses our breath into a brilliant sound. This too would be a metaphorical insight that remains central to Stoicism: that obstacles and limitations—if responded to properly—create opportunities for beauty and excellence.

In one short poem, he gives us a powerful definition of what “good” is and should look like:

If you ask what is the nature of the good, listen:

That which is regular, just, holy, pious,

Self-governing, useful, fair, fitting,

Grave, independent, always beneficial,

That feels no fear or grief, profitable, painless,

Helpful, pleasant, safe, friendly,

Held in esteem, agreeing with itself: honourable,

Humble, careful, meek, zealous,

Perennial, blameless, ever-during.

As beautiful as the language there is, what matters more is that these words were a perfect self-portrait of the man. They were words that he lived by . . . and that we must strive to as well.

It was said by Seneca that while we each have the power to live, none possess the power to live long. Cleanthes, the second head of the Stoic school, then must have been blessed by fortune. For he not only lived well, but lived to be exactly one hundred years old, likely the oldest of all the Stoics.

To the end he maintained his humor. When someone mocked him as an old man, he joked that he was ready to go at any time, but considering his good health and the fact that he could still write and read, he might as well wait it out. As he neared his centennial, however, his body began to fail him. At the advice of doctors who were attempting to treat his severely inflamed gums, Cleanthes fasted for two days.

The treatment worked, but that final act of deprivation had clearly shown him something—mostly that it was time to go. When the doctors told him he could resume his normal diet, he replied that he’d gone too far down the road to turn back. And so he died a few days later, fasting into the world beyond.

It would be Diogenes who wrote the best eulogy of the man:

I praise Cleanthes, but praise Hades more,

Who could not bear to see him grown so old.

So gave him rest among the dead,

Who’d drawn such a load of water while alive.