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Zeno came to Athens to study philosophy, and for twenty years he was a pupil
first of Crates the Cynic, and then of other teachers. At length he set up a
school of his own in the celebrated Stoa Poecile (Painted Colonnade),
so named because it was adorned with frescoes by Polygnotus. There he taught
for nearly sixty years, and voluntarily ended his life when close on a
century old. His life, as Antigonus, King of Macedon, recorded on his tomb,
was consistent with his doctrine—abstemious, frugal, laborious, dutiful. He
was succeeded by Cleanthes, a native of Assos in
Asia
Minor. But the great constructor of the Stoic doctrine, without whom, as
his contemporaries said, there had been no Stoic school at all, was
Chrysippus, a native of Soli or of Tarsus in Cilicia. He wrote at enormous
length, supporting his teachings by an immense erudition, and culling
liberally from the poets to illustrate and enforce his views. Learned and
pedantic, his works had no inherent attraction, and nothing of them but
fragments has been preserved. We know the Stoic doctrine mainly from the
testimony and criticisms of later times.
Like the Epicureans, Zeno and his successors made philosophy primarily a
search for the chief good, a doctrine of practice and morals. But like them
they were impelled to admit a logic and a physics, at least by way of
preliminary basis to their ethics. The relations of the three they
illustrated by various images. Philosophy was like an animal; logic was its
bones and sinews, ethics its flesh, physics its life or soul. Or again,
philosophy was an egg; logic was the shell, ethics the white, physics, the
yolk. Or again, it was a fruitful field; logic was the hedge, ethics the
crop, physics the soil. Or it was a city, well ordered and strongly
fortified, and so on. The images seem somewhat confused, but the general
idea is clear enough. Morality was the essential, the living body, of
philosophy; physics supplied its raw material, or the conditions under which
a moral life could be lived; logic secured that we should use that material
rightly and wisely for the end desired.
A History of Greek Philosophy /
THE STOICS
