Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​That the Republic is indeed his work is stated also by Chrysippus in his On the Republic. He has also discussed erotic matters at the beginning of the work entitled The Art of Love; furthermore, he writes similar things in the Discourses. Things of this sort are found in Cassius, but also in Isidorus the rhetorician of Pergamum; who also says that the passages ill-spoken of among the Stoics were excised from the books by Athenodorus the Stoic, who had been entrusted with the library in Pergamum; and that they were afterwards restored, when Athenodorus was caught and ran into danger. So much, then, concerning his rejected works.

​There have been eight Zenons: the first was the Eleatic, of whom we shall speak; the second was this man himself; the third, a Rhodian, who wrote a local history in one book; the fourth, a historian, who wrote Pyrrhus' campaign into Italy and Sicily, and also an epitome of the deeds performed by both the Romans and the Carthaginians; the fifth, a disciple of Chrysippus, who wrote few books but left behind a very great number of disciples; the sixth, a physician of the school of Herophilus, capable in comprehension but lacking vigour in writing; the seventh, a grammarian, whose epigrams among other things are extant; the eighth, a Sidonian by race, an Epicurean philosopher, clear both in conceiving and in expounding.

​The disciples of Zeno were many, and of renown was Persaeus, son of Demetrius, of Citium, whom some describe as his pupil, but others as a slave, one of those sent to him by Antigonus for copying books; he was also the tutor of Antigonus' son Halcyoneus. Wishing once to put him to the test, Antigonus had it falsely reported to him that his estates had been seized by the enemy; and when he looked gloomy, "Do you see," he said, "that wealth is not an indifferent thing?" His books are handed down as follows: On Kingship. Spartan Constitution. On Marriage. On Impiety. Thyestes. On Erotic Matters. Exhortations. Discourses. Maxims, in four books. Memoirs. Against Plato's Laws, in seven books.

​Aristo of Chios, son of Miltiades, who introduced indifference; Herillus of Carthage, who called knowledge the end; Dionysius, who went over to pleasure—for on account of severe ophthalmia he shrank from continuing to say that pain is an indifferent thing; he was a native of Heraclea; Sphaerus of the Bosporus; Cleanthes of Assos, son of Phanias, who succeeded to the school, whom Zeno used to compare to hard-wax tablets, which are inscribed with difficulty, but preserve what has been written. Sphaerus also attended Cleanthes' lectures after the death of Zeno; and we shall speak of him in the chapter On Cleanthes.

​There were also these disciples of Zeno, as Hippobotus says: Philonides of Thebes, Callippus of Corinth, Posidonius of Alexandria, Athenodorus of Soli, and Zeno of Sidon. It seemed good to me to speak of all the Stoic doctrines collectively in the life of Zeno, because he became the founder of the school. There are indeed many works written by him beforehand, in which he spoke as none of the other Stoics did. The doctrines held in common are as follows; and let them be stated summarily, just as we are accustomed to do in the case of the others.

​They say that philosophical discourse is tripartite; for one part of it is physical, another ethical, and another logical. It was Zeno of Citium who first divided it in this manner in On Reason, and Chrysippus in the first book of On Reason and in the first of his Physics, and Apollodorus and Syllus in the first book of their Introductions to Doctrines, and Eudromus in his Elementary Ethics, and Diogenes the Babylonian and Posidonius. These parts Apollodorus calls "topics" (topoi), Chrysippus and Eudromus "species" (eide), and others "genera" (gene).