Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Zeno was the son of Mnaseas or Demeas, of Citium in Cyprus, a small Greek town that had received Phoenician settlers. He had his neck bent to one side, as Timotheus of Athens says in his work On Lives. Apollonius of Tyre also says that he was thin, rather tall, and dark-skinned—whence someone called him an "Egyptian vine-twig," as Chrysippus says in the first book of his Proverbs—and that he had thick calves, flabby, and weak. On this account Persaeus says in his Symposiastic Memorabilia that he declined most dinner parties. They say he delighted in fresh figs and sunbathing.

​He attended the lectures of Crates, as mentioned before; then they say he heard Stilpo as well, and Xenocrates for ten years, as Timocrates says in his Dion, and Polemo too. But Hecato and Apollonius of Tyre in the first book of his work on Zeno say that, when he consulted the oracle as to what he should do to live the best life, the god replied that he should "take on the complexion of the dead"; whence, comprehending this, he read the writings of the ancients. He then met Crates in the following manner. Having traded in purple dye from Phoenicia, he was shipwrecked near the Piraeus. Going up to Athens, being then thirty years old, he sat down by a bookseller. As the latter was reading aloud the second book of Xenophon's Memorabilia, Zeno was delighted and asked where such men might be found.

​Just then Crates passed by at a fitting moment, and the bookseller, pointing him out, said: "Follow that man." From then on he listened to Crates, being otherwise vigorous with respect to philosophy, but modest with regard to Cynic shamelessness. Hence Crates, wishing to cure him of this as well, gave him a pot of lentil soup to carry through the Ceramicus. When he saw him feeling ashamed and trying to hide it, Crates struck and shattered the pot with his staff; and as Zeno fled with the soup running down his legs, Crates said: "Why flee, little Phoenician? Nothing terrible has befallen you."

​For a time, then, he listened to Crates; and when he wrote his Republic, some said in jest that he had written it on the dog's tail. Besides the Republic, he also wrote the following works: On the Life According to Nature; On Impulse, or On the Nature of Man; On Passions; On Duty; On Law; On Greek Education; On Sight; On the Whole; On Signs; Pythagorean Studies; Universal Principles; On Diction; Homeric Problems, in five books; On Poetic Hearing. There are also by him: An Art (of Rhetoric); Solutions; Refutations, in two books; Memorabilia of Crates; Ethics. Such are his books. Later, however, he parted company with Crates and heard the aforementioned teachers for twenty years; so that they say he exclaimed: "Now that I have been shipwrecked, I have made a prosperous voyage." Others say he uttered this in reference to Crates;

​while others say that, while residing in Athens, he heard of the shipwreck and said: "Fortune does well in driving us into philosophy." Some say that, after disposing of his cargo at Athens, he then turned to philosophy. Walking back and forth in the Stoa Poikile, which was also called the Peisianactian, and called "Poikile" (Painted) from the painting of Polygnotus, he delivered his discourses, wishing also to make the place frequented by few people; for under the Thirty Tyrants, fourteen hundred of the citizens had been put to death in it. People thereafter came to hear him, and on this account they were named Stoics, as were those who followed him likewise, having formerly been called Zenonians, as Epicurus too says in his Letters. Furthermore, the poets who spent their time in it had formerly been called Stoics, as Eratosthenes says in the eighth book of On the Ancient Comedy, who also made the name even more widespread.