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

On one of his voyages before his shipwreck, perhaps inspired by a similar trek that Socrates had made, Zeno consulted an oracle about what he should do to live the best life. The oracle’s response: “To live the best life you should have conversation with the dead.” It must have struck him there in that bookstore, possibly the same one his father had shopped in years before, as he listened to the words of Socrates read aloud and brought to life, that he was doing precisely what the oracle had advised.

Because isn’t that what books are? A way to gain wisdom from those no longer with us?

As the bookseller read from the second book of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Zeno was hearing Socrates’s teachings as they had been conducted in those very streets just a few generations before. The passage that struck him most was “The Choice of Heracles,” itself a story of a hero at a crossroads. In this myth, Heracles is forced to choose between two maidens, one representing virtue and the other vice—one a life of virtuous hard work, the other of laziness. “You must,” Zeno would have heard the character Virtue say, “accustom your body to be the servant of your mind, and train it with toil and sweat.” And then he heard Vice offer a very different choice. “Wait a minute!” she cries. “Don’t you see what a long and hard road to the joy she describes? Come the easy way with me!”

Two roads diverge in the wood, or, rather, in a bookstore in Athens. The Stoic chooses the hard one.

Approaching the bookseller, Zeno asked the question that would change his life: “Where can I find a man like that?” That is: Where can I find my own Socrates? Where can I find someone to study under, as Xenophon had under that wise philosopher? Who can help me with my choice?

If Zeno’s misfortune had been to suffer that terrible shipwreck, his luck was more than made right for having walked into that bookshop, and made doubly good when in that moment, Crates, a well-known Athenian philosopher, happened to be passing by. The bookseller simply extended his hand and pointed.

You could say it was fated. The Stoics of later years certainly would have. The hero had suffered a great loss, and because of it crossed a threshold to find his true teacher. At the same time, it was the choice that Zeno made—to go into the bookstore after his terrible loss, to sit and listen to the bookseller, and, most important, to not be content to leave the words he had heard there at that. No, he wanted more. He demanded more answers, demanded to be taught more, and it’s from that impulse that Stoicism would be formed.

Crates of Thebes, like Zeno, was the son of a wealthy family and heir to a large fortune. From Diogenes Laërtius we learn that after Crates watched a performance of the Tragedy of Telephus—the story of King Telephus, son of Heracles, wounded by Achilles—he gave his money away and moved to Athens to study philosophy. There he became known as the “door-opener,” Diogenes wrote, “the caller to whom all doors fly open” of those eager to learn from the great philosopher.

When the student is ready, the old Zen saying goes, the teacher appears. Crates was exactly what Zeno needed.

One of Crates’s first lessons was intended to cure Zeno of his self-consciousness about his appearance. Sensing that his new pupil was too worried about his social status, Crates assigned him the task of carrying a heavy pot of lentil soup across town. Zeno tried to sneak the pot through town, taking back streets to avoid being seen doing such a humiliating task.* Tracking him down, Crates cracked the pot open with his staff, spilling the soup all over him. Zeno trembled with embarrassment and tried to flee. “Why run away, my little Phoenician?” Crates laughed. “Nothing terrible has befallen you.”

Just because someone has anxieties or self-doubts or was taught the wrong things early in life doesn’t mean they can’t become something great, provided they have the courage (and the mentors) to help them change. With Crates’s tough love, Zeno overcame his self-consciousness to become who he was called to be.

As Zeno left his trading days behind him, he chose a new way of living that balanced study and thought with the needs of a world driven by commerce, conquest, and technology. To Zeno, the purpose of philosophy, of virtue, was to find “a smooth flow of life,” to get to a place where everything we do is in “harmonious accord with each man’s guiding spirit and the will of the one who governs the universe.” To the Greeks, each of us had a daimon, an inner genius or guiding purpose that is connected to the universal nature. Those who live by keeping the individual and universal natures in agreement are happy, Zeno said, and those who don’t are not.