Zeno of Citium

Zeno was a Phoenician merchant from Citium, a town on Cyprus. Somewhere around his thirtieth year, the story goes, he was shipwrecked near Athens and lost a cargo of purple dye — a fortune. Wandering the city, he sat down in a bookshop and heard the bookseller reading Xenophon's recollections of Socrates. Zeno asked where a man like that could be found. The bookseller pointed at Crates, a Cynic philosopher who happened to be passing, and said: follow him.

He did. For years Zeno studied with Crates and with the other schools of Athens — the Cynics' indifference to comfort and reputation, the logicians' rigor, the Academy's breadth. Around 300 BC he began teaching in his own right, not in a private garden like Epicurus but in the middle of the city, on the Stoa Poikile — the Painted Porch overlooking the marketplace. His students were called the men of the porch: the Stoics.

What he taught was startlingly simple at its core: the only true good is virtue — good character and good judgment — and the only true evil is its absence. Everything else people chase or flee, money, status, health, even life itself, is material to work with, not the measure of a life. Athens, a city not easily impressed, honored the foreigner with a golden crown and a public tomb; the decree said his life had matched his teaching. Looking back on the shipwreck that brought him to philosophy, Zeno liked to say it had been his most profitable voyage.