ZENO OF CITIUM

(b. Citium, Cyprus, ca. 335 b.c.;d. Athens, 263 b.c.)

Philosophy.

Cyprus was colonized by Greeks, but had many Phoenician inhabitants. Zeno’s father was a merchant called Mnaseas, perhaps a Greek version of the Phoenician Manasse or Menahem; Zeno is commonly referred to as “the Phoneician” by ancient writers. His education, however, was Greek; he studied in Athens and eventually set up his own school there. The most important of his teachers were Polemo, then head of Plato’s Academy; Stilpo the Megarian; and Crates the Cynic. He was well soaked in the Greek tradition of Philosophy; and his own style of philosophizing, although strikingly original,shows clear traces of the influence of Heraclitus,Socrates,Plato, and Aristotle.

Zeno established his own school about 300 b.c., perhaps in deliberate opposition to the school of Epicurs, which had recently been founded. He taught in the Stoa Poikile, or “Painted Colon-nade”; and the name “Stoics” supplanted “Zenonians” for his pupils. At the end of his life he was given public honors by the Athenians. The head-ship of the school passed first to Cleanthes of Assos,and the to Chrysippus of Soli: the individual contributions of the three to the school’s doctrine are hard to disentangle, in the absence of any complete writings, and this article does not attempt the task. The school survived until at least a.d. 260.

The main emphasis of Stoic teaching was moral. Zeno preached a morality that could claim to be an interpretation of the message of Socrates. The peculiarity of his doctrine is his refusal to allow that there is anything good but the virtuous state of a man’s soul,coupled with an “all or nothing” definition of virtue. Virtue is wisdom: the wise man is wholly good, and everything he does is good, whereas the rest of the world and all its doings are sunk in iniquity. The wisdom that constitutes virtue includes an understanding of natureindeed, that is its most important component, since the wise man’s goal is “to live in accordance with nature.” A particular physics, a particular interpretation of the physical universe and man’s place in it, is an essential part of Stoicism, just as the atomic world picture was an essential part of the rival Epicurean doctrine.

The Stoic world picture was the lineal descendant of Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s De caelo, with some features of the Platonic-Aristotelian cosmology exaggerated or changed, perhaps in conscious opposition to Epicurus. It was a picture of the cosmos as a single material continuum. Outside the cosmos there is void space: this was a modification of Aristotelian doctrine, according to which there is nothing whatever outside the cosmos, not even void space.

The cosmos is regarded as a single whole substance. It is held together by an unexplained natural tendency of matter to contract upon its own center. Thus Aristotle’s cosmology is altered in two respects. The center toward which matter tends to move is its own center, the center of the cosmic body, where as in Aristotle’s system it is the center of the universe; second, all matter in the Stoic system, including the two light, centrifugal elements of the Aristotelian cosmology, air and fire, tends toward the center. These two elements, according to the Stoics, are less heavy than earth and water; and for that reason they tend to stay outside the central spheres composed of the heavy elements. They are also characterized as the active elements: together they make up pneunza, which permeates the whole cosmos and sets up a tension (??????) in it. The elements are not chemically differentiated but are defined by the tension set up by these motions. In whatever region of the cosmic body, itself nothing but an undifferentiated medium, there is a strong motion toward the center, we can say that that is an earthy region; wherever there is a strong tendency to resist the centripetal motion, we can say there is fire; and so on.

Recent interpreters of Stoic physics (J. Christensen and S. Samburksy) have pointed out its similarity to a field theory. The whole cosmos is a field wihtin which various motions occur, and within it one field can be distinguished from another according to the motions that occur there. The nature of the tension thus set up determines the properties possessed by the region in question. The Stoics lacked a language with which this idea could be expressed coherently, however, and their retention of expressions appropriate to a metaphysics of “substance” led to many paradoxes. In particular, since any region of the universe, in their theory, may contain motions of many different kinds; and since it is these motions that produce identifable characters or “bodies,” they had to say that many bodies could coexist in the same region. They were widely criticized in antiquity for this theory of “total mixture.” (??????? ??? ?????)

Since the cosmos is a single continuous field, motions in one part of it may affect those in any other part: the Stoics used the term “sympathy” for this feature. Certain peculiarities of Stoicism follow from it. Astrology and divination, for example, are thus given a rationale; and they receive more emphasis than in any previous philosophical system. Moreover, the interconnection of all events in the cosmic continuum is referred to as fate. From an ideally complete description of the structure of the cosmos up to a given time,one can theoretically predict all subsequent events: all that happens is in accordance with fate. With regard to human actions, the Stoics held the position that since the individual’s state of mind enters into the conditions that determine an action, human “freedom” is preserved despite the doctrine of universal fate (their Peripatetic opponents replied that in that case, a stone that is dropped also falls “freely” ; and the distinction between “free” and “forced” is lost).

The active elements in the cosmos are also referred to collectively as “God.” By this designation the Stoics attributed many characteristics to the cosmos. It is ever-living, in the sense that it will never cease to exist, although it undergoes the cyclical transformations described below. It is rational: that is, the structure of the cosmos is patterned on principles that the human mind, being endowed with reason (?????)can recognize. (The divine (?????)that permeates and directs the Stoic cosmos is referred to in the famous opening words of St. John’s gospel.) Moreover, the structure of the cosmos, being determined by divine reason, is good. The Stoics exploited the argument from design to the full, and found evidences of divine craftsmanship everywhere in nature. Stoic ethics and physics are thus in full accord with one another: the good life for man is to be an assenting part of the cosmos, “to live in accordance with nature.”

Periodically the cosmos loses all its differentiation and is wholly consumed by and assimilated to the divine fiery pneuma After this ???????????, the cosmos is formed again. Since the structure is determined by the divine pneuma, which remains constant throughout the conflagration, the structure of the reborn cosmos is identical in every detail with that of the previous one; and every event is repeated in every cycle.

In logic the Stoics made important innovations (perhaps, however, these should be attributed not to Zeno but to Chrysippus). Aristotle’s logic of predication was adapted to his view of science as demonstrating the connections between the properties of substances. The basic entities of Stoic philosophy are not substances but motions or events. Its logic, correspondingly, is a logic of properties of substances. The basic entities of Stoic philosophy are not substances but motions or events. It logic, correspondingly, is a logic of propositions. The Stoics worked out five “indemonstrable” inference patterns, and tested the validity of other schemata by trying to reduce them to these five. They used ordinal numbers to stand for propositions, thus: “If the first, then the second; but the first therefore, the second.” “If the first, then the second; but not the second, therefore, not the first.” We may conjecture that there is some connection between this development of the logic of inference and the growth of experimental science in the Alexandrian schools, beginning in the third century B.C.

As a moral system, Stoicism had a wide acceptance in the Roman republic and the empire, Marcus Aurelius being the most notable follower. The physical system, however, soon became contaminated with elements of Platonism and Aristotelianism; Stoic ideas occur frequently but rather unsystematically in the work of Galen, the Neoplatonists, and the Peripatetic commentators. The unified and consistent world picture worked out by Zeno, which was in fact a remarkable achievement, lost its clear outlines and merged with the general amalgam of Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, and Christianity that dominatedn the intellectual centers of late antiquity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There is no complete work by Zeno or any other of the old Stoics extant. The standard collection of fragments is J.von Arnim, Stoicorum veterun fragmenta, 4 vols (Leipzig, 1905-1924). There is an ancient life of Zeno and other Stoics in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, VII, text and trans. by R. D. Hicks in the Loeb Classical Library (London, 1953).

The fullest modern account of Stoicism is Max Pohlenz, Die Stoa, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1959). Johnny Christensen, An Essay on the Unity of Stoic Philosophy (Copenhagen, 1962) gives a short, original and highly stimulating summary. S. Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics (London, 1959), translates selected texts into English and gives a comprehensive account of the cosmology, not altogether free from anachronism. The most important books on the logic are Benson, Mates, Stoic Logic (Berkeley, 1953), and Michael Frede,Die stoische Logik (Göttingen, 1974). For epistemology and ethics, also see A. A. Long, ed., Essays on Stoic Philosophy (London, 1970). There is a recent monograph on Zeno, by Andreas Graeser, Zenon von Kition (Berlin, 1975).

David J. Furley