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

It was early in life that Chrysippus, the man who would go on to be the third leader of the Stoic school, was introduced to running, a sport that would change his life. Running in the ancient world, as now, is not like other sports. Wrestling is a test of strength and strategy between two evenly matched fighters who are entangled body-to-body. The tossing of a ball or a javelin is a feat of technique and coordination, measured by distance.

But running, particularly endurance running, with its length predetermined and competitors separated by lanes, is as much a battle of one’s mind and body against themselves as it is a competition against anyone or anything else.

What is the connection between philosophy and running? There is none. But between Stoicism, a philosophy of endurance and inner strength—of transcending one’s limits and of measuring oneself against a high internal standard—and distance running?

Here the overlap is profound, particularly for a young man like Chrysippus, born in the port city of Soli, Cilicia, competing for the first time in an Olympic distance race like the dolichos, a three-mile race for which there is no modern equivalent. The dolichos was not a three-mile loop like a modern cross-country course or even a track event like the 5,000 meters, but instead consisted of approximately twenty-four stadium lengths, done almost like wind sprints on a basketball court.

It’s not hard to imagine this Stoic mind forming as its molder, Chrysippus, ran as hard as he could back and forth, back and forth, not only trying to beat the other racers, but trying to convince himself to keep going as he heaved for air and his brain told him to stop. As he jostled for the lead in a pack of runners, he was unconsciously developing the ethical framework that would direct his life and the future of the Stoic school.

“Runners in a race ought to compete and strive to win as hard as they can,” Chrysippus would later say, “but by no means should they trip their competitors or give them a shove. So too in life; it is not wrong to seek after the things useful in life; but to do so while depriving someone else is not just.”

But mostly it would have been on the long training runs by himself through the coastal plains of his homeland of Cilicia, in what is today southern Turkey, that Chrysippus prepared himself for the challenges that life had in store for him and for the feats of intellectual and physical endurance that philosophy would demand.

Indeed, like the other Stoics living in the chaos of a post-Alexandrian world, Chrysippus experienced little peace in his early years. Cilicia was a frequent target of deadly raids. His family had relocated to Soli from nearby Tarsus in response, only to experience a raid of a different kind, when the family’s significant property was confiscated to swell the coffers of one of Alexander’s former generals. As with Zeno, the loss of a fortune became a piece of good fortune, because it drove Chrysippus to philosophy.

It also drove him to Athens. With little in the way of options at home, and likely fearing what a tyrannical regime might come to take next, Chrysippus, like Cleanthes before him, left home in search of something better. For generations, Athens attracted not only the best and the brightest of the Hellenistic world in the pursuit of philosophy, but also the disenfranchised, the bankrupt, and the lost. Chrysippus, like Zeno and Cleanthes before him, was a mix of all of these.

We don’t know exactly when he arrived in the shining city of learning and commerce, but by the time he did, the legacy of Zeno and Cleanthes had been firmly established. Their philosophy and fame had spread throughout the Greek world, and whether Zeno himself was still alive by the time the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Chrysippus arrived in Athens, students would have felt their presence in every conversation, every book and idea they studied.

It is clear that Chrysippus—his name literally means “Golden Horse”—brought with him the energy and attitude of a fresh generation. This energy was packed in a tight package, for we also know that he was of slight stature, based on a statue of him erected by his nephew Aristocreon that once stood just northwest of the Athenian agora near the Stoa Poikilē. Diogenes reports that the statue was small enough to be completely obscured by a horse statue next to it, which led to one later philosopher to make the pun that Chrysippus was “horse-hidden.”

The statue, which stood long enough for Plutarch to write about it in 100 AD, tells us about more than his size. Its inscription read: “Aristocreon dedicates this to his uncle Chrysippus, the cleaver to the Academy’s knots.”

What knots? The criticism that Cleanthes had received from poets and satirists was not because he was not well liked. Stoicism, with its growing popularity, had become a target for critics and skeptics. We can imagine the philosophical schools of Athens at this time—Epicureans, Platonists, and Aristotelians—battling it out like religions, each one claiming to have access to the true god.

Cleanthes had been content to respond with quips or stone-faced silence. When Stoicism was merely the thoughts of Zeno or the teachings of Cleanthes, perhaps this was sufficient. But at some point the school would need to be defended. Its theories would need to be shored up, its doctrines defined and codified. Contradictions—even within the writings of those two first thinkers—would need to be clarified.

And there were also Aristo’s challenges—and the challengers he encouraged—which loomed heavily over the future of Stoicism. There was Dionysius the Renegade, who began as a Stoic and joined a rival school that said life should be about pleasure. There was Herillus, who had studied under Zeno but believed, in opposition to Zeno, that knowledge was more important than virtue. There were all these voices, fighting, questioning, contradicting.

What was Stoicism to be? What kind of instruction and guidance would it offer? Who would its leaders be?

Thus fell to Chrysippus the thankless but essential role of fighting to protect this ascendant but still fledgling school. When Aristo published his book Against Cleanthes, it was Chrysippus who felt compelled to write a reply. When a philosopher attempted to debate Cleanthes on some minor logical point, it was Chrysippus who jumped in to shout at the man to stop distracting his teacher and that if he wanted to take up the quibble, Chrysippus was ready for it. Not just ready, but ready to win, it seems.

Let no one think that ideas that change the world do so on their own. They must, as a wise scientist would later say, be shoved down people’s throats. Or at least defended and fought for.

Cicero would render a verdict years later of one such conflict, involving the lesser-known but controversial Stoic Herillus. He “has been dismissed for a long time,” Cicero wrote. “No one has directly disputed him since Chrysippus.”

The fighter had settled the matter and sent another early challenger to the dustbin of history.

Seneca would later speak of the importance of reading and studying other philosophies like a spy in the enemy camp. Indeed, we find that the early years of Chrysippus’s career were spent not at the elbow of the living Stoic masters but at the side of Arcesilaus and Lacydes, both of whom headed Plato’s Academy. It’s not that he had conflicting loyalties; it’s that he knew that if Stoicism was to survive, it would have to learn from its more established rivals.

We can picture Chrysippus—the competitor, the racer—wanting desperately to win. He studied the arguments of rival schools, even taking classes in the Platonists’ school so that he could identify weak points in their arguments. He studied the weaknesses of his own arguments to see where Stoicism had to improve.

There is sometimes no better way to strengthen your defense than to learn your opponent’s offense, and this is precisely what a good philosopher does. Today we called this “steel-manning”—you don’t need to cheat by assuming the worst about the ideas you’re arguing against. Instead, you can engage with them seriously and earnestly, winning by merit, not by mischaracterization. And as a fighter, Chrysippus enjoyed the challenge.

We are told that Chrysippus was so confident in his ability to break down competing arguments that he once told Cleanthes he only needed to know what a person’s doctrines were and he would discover the proofs (or, presumably, the refutations) himself.

Where Cleanthes was slow and methodical, and always charitable in his assessment of rivals, Chrysippus was proud and loved intellectual combat. His competitiveness honed in the stadia, it turns out, had transferred right over to the world of philosophy. He would never stoop to cheap tricks—a line that, unfortunately, not all the later Stoics would toe—but he was in it to win.* Because to Chrysippus, philosophy, like life, was a battle. But should be fought fairly.

It’s strange, in that way, to consider the personalities and respective athletic pursuits of teacher and student, master and protégé. Cleanthes, the boxer, was the plodding, enduring one, while Chrysippus, who had excelled in a more solitary sport, was the explosive, aggressive one.

He added to this temperament real skill too. There was a saying popular in his time that if the gods were to take up the science of argument, they would use Chrysippus as their model. Stoicism was lucky to have such a brilliant thinker in its camp. Where Aristo was using his mind to question the orthodoxy in a way that left very little standing, Chrysippus, in defining philosophy as “the cultivation of rightness of reason,” was systematizing all of Stoic teaching.

It’s a timeless but unsung role in the history of countless philosophies, businesses, and even countries: The founding generations have the courage and the brilliance to create something new. It is left to the generations that follow—usually younger, better prepared, and far more pragmatic—to clean up the messes and excesses and contradictions that those founders created in the process.

This job is hardly as glamorous as the founder’s work, or as recognized. It’s not even as rewarding as the work of the apostle, who gets to spread the gospel. But it is in many ways the most important. The history of Stoicism quietly recognizes this and, in fact, immortalizes the truth of it in the most famous line we have from antiquity about Chrysippus: “If there had been no Chrysippus, there would be no Stoa.”

Or rather, we’d likely not be talking about it the same way today.

When Cleanthes died in 230 BC, the forty-nine-year-old Chrysippus became the third leader of the Stoics. His first order of business was not only to clarify the teachings of his predecessors but to popularize them. Whereas Zeno and Cleanthes taught only on the Stoa Poikilē, Chrysippus sought out the larger stage of the Odeon (a concert hall) as well. He was apparently also the first to deliver open-air lectures in the grove of the Lyceum, the school of Aristotle’s followers, the Peripatetics. We can imagine that as a cleaver and a fighter, he enjoyed bringing his message directly into the enemy’s camp.

Where Cleanthes had preferred the power of poetry and often used analogy, metaphor, and meter to convey his truths, Chrysippus insisted in both his teaching and his prose on the precision of logical argument and formal proof. Though renowned for his passion for and acumen in argumentation—it was rare for Chrysippus to simply leave a point to speak for itself, for instance, as he was fond of arguing repeatedly on the same topics—he was equally known for his innovations in the field of logic and for his prodigious literary output. He boasts a body of writings exceeding 705 volumes, some 300 of them tackling the topic of logic. From the titles Diogenes details, we can see nearly two dozen books on the infamous Liar Argument alone. (We won’t believe anything a liar says is true, but can we believe a complete liar when he says that what he’s saying is false? If he’s always lying, it’s not false, but true . . . but then he wouldn’t always be lying.) One of his works, Logical Questions, was even discovered among the entombed papyri at Herculaneum (in a library of the rival Epicurean school that belonged to Philodemus). As Homer was to poetry, one ancient writer said, Chrysippus was to logic.

He also had a passion for literature and poetry in a way that belies his reputation for logic. In one essay, Chrysippus supposedly referenced so many lines from Euripides’s tragic play Medea that people joked he had included every word of it. It was the “Medea of Chrysippus,” they said. In fact, he was so fond of quoting other writers that their voices overshadowed his own in some of his writings. Critics of his books called these quotations “extraneous,” but a better reading is that Chrysippus truly loved sharing and sampling from the great thinkers and playwrights of history, and he would become notorious as a result for his diligent citation of them and other sources whenever they supported his points.

But was he really that different from Cleanthes or the other Stoics? Chrysippus too was humble, a hard worker, and unimpressed with finery. It seems he kept a simple house with only a single servant. According to her, his intellectual marathon meant he kept a steady pace of writing at least five hundred lines per day. He declined invitations, even from kings, because it would have kept him from his work. He rarely left home unless it was to deliver a lecture.

He was reported to shy away from social gatherings and would often remain quiet at the ones he did attend. His servant reported that at drinking parties only his legs would get tipsy, presumably meaning they were the only sign he was enjoying himself. He was once criticized for not joining a throng that attended Aristo’s lectures, to which he simply replied that “if I had cared about the mob, I would not have studied philosophy.”

It’s not that Chrysippus forsook all pleasures and all money; it’s that he was suspicious of wanting, lusting for anything. A wise man can make use of whatever comes his way, he said, but is in want of nothing. “On the other hand,” he said, “nothing is needed by the fool for he does not understand how to use anything but he is in want of everything.”

There is no better definition of a Stoic: to have but not want, to enjoy without needing.

From this belief came freedom and independence for Chrysippus. He never sold his work or charged for his advice, out of a wish not to cheapen philosophy. He didn’t borrow or lend money. Diogenes notes that not a single one of Chrysippus’s books was dedicated to a king. Some contemporaries saw this as arrogant, but it was actually evidence of his self-sufficiency. Unlike Zeno and Cleanthes, who had taken money from kings, Chrysippus was not interested in patronage. If you accept money from a king, he said, then you must humor him.

He didn’t take the money . . . which meant nobody could tell him what to do.

Chrysippus’s independence of thought, his love of high-minded principles, and his intellectual zeal were clearly virtues, but like anything, they can be taken to excess. The smarter we are, the easier it is to fall in love with our own voice, and our own thoughts. The cost of this is not just pride, but the quality of our message. Epictetus, whose students struggled to make sense of Chrysippus’s writings some three centuries later, would say, “When someone puts on airs about their ability to understand and interpret the works of Chrysippus, tell yourself that if Chrysippus hadn’t written so obscurely they’d have nothing to brag about.”

Since most of Chrysippus’s legendary output is lost to us, except for about five hundred small excerpts gleaned from other writers, it’s hard to know how bad a writer he really was. It says something that despite these purported faults, his insights have endured—and remained widespread even after his death.

As dedicated as he was to his work, Chrysippus was also a loving family man. He sent for his sister’s sons, Aristocreon and Philocrates, and took them into his home and oversaw their education. He was particularly close to Aristocreon, to whom he dedicated at least three dozen of his books. Aristocreon returned the favor not only with the statue and inscription over his burial site, but also by writing a book commemorating him.

Yet even as a father figure, Chrysippus’s competitive nature was evident. A mother once asked him who she ought to entrust her son’s education to. He answered that there was obviously no better teacher than himself . . . because if there were, he’d be studying with them himself.

For all his disputes with Aristo (who believed that only ethics mattered), they were in more agreement than they thought. Plutarch tells us that everything Chrysippus wrote was for “no other purpose than the differentiation of good and bad things.” Virtuous living was the end-all, be-all for them both.

As mentioned earlier, as a runner, Chrysippus had developed a philosophy of good sportsmanship. He knew that even as athletes are competing with each other, and want desperately to triumph over the rest, there remains an essential brotherhood between everyone participating—from the best to the worst. Tad Brennan, the classics scholar, calls it, appropriately, Chrysippus’s “no-shoving model” of behavior, a model rooted in our relatedness to each other. It was not his only contribution in this regard. Another of Chrysippus’s ethical breakthroughs was to develop the Stoic idea of sympatheia, built on Zeno’s belief that we all belong to one common community, which encourages us to meditate on the interconnectedness of all persons and our shared citizenship in the cosmos.

If only the jostling rivalries of the early Stoics could have reflected this idea a little better. If they could have realized that there was no “winning” since they were already on the same team, since they already agreed on the big things, imagine how much trouble they would have spared themselves. What a better example they would have set for us today.

Ironically, it was only from the skeptical Platonist Carneades, who, as you will see, would become the greatest thorn in the side of the Stoics long after his death, that Chrysippus received one of his best compliments, for not only did Carneades believe that without Chrysippus there would be no Stoa, he also claimed that “had Chrysippus not existed, I would not have existed.” The truest words are often spoken in jest.

While Chrysippus’s work might endure eternal ly—and his face would even be minted on coins in his native land decades after his death—the man knew that he himself could not.

It was after a lecture one night at the Odeon that a bunch of his students invited Chrysippus out for a drink. After drinking some undiluted sweet wine, he was struck by a dizzy spell and died five days later at the age of seventy-three.

If this is how Chrysippus truly died, it would confirm the image of him as a man who took himself and his work seriously, and in the end died after taking the rare evening off from writing and thinking. It may be true, and if so, rather uninteresting.

The other reports of Chrysippus’s death are more tantalizing, for they add another dimension to the man and to the image of the supposedly joyless Stoic stereotype. In one recounting, Chrysippus was sitting on his porch when a lonely donkey wandered by and began to eat from his garden. Chrysippus found the sight inexplicably funny and began to laugh and laugh. “Give the ass some wine to wash down the figs,” he cried out to the owner, and then laughed even harder, until he literally died.

And so, if true, it would be Stoicism’s second founder who passed away not in the heat of debate or in a sprint of writing—which he had spent so much of his life doing—but from good humor and the enjoyment of a simple pleasure.

Not a bad way to go.