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Ep. 5: Cleanthes Draws Water at Night · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

• 0:00
  Last time, we left Zeno's students standing in the shade of the painted colonnade.
• 0:05
  I said that one of them, a former boxer, would turn up in a garden at night.
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  So this morning we leave the shade and go looking for him.
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  The man's name was Cleanthes.
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  He came from Assos, on the coast of the Troad, and his father was called Phanias.
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  Diogenes Laërtius, who wrote about the philosophers some five centuries after these
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  men were gone, says Cleanthes began as a boxer, and he cites an earlier writer,
• 0:33
  Antisthenes, in a book called Successions.
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  That's about all we're told of his first career.
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  But hold the image for a moment.
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  A fighter's hands and shoulders, walking into a city of talkers.
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  He came to Athens, Diogenes says, with only four drachmas in his pocket.
• 0:51
  And he adds a little qualifier there: as some people say.
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  So it's a tradition, not a receipt.
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  But it fits everything else we're told.
• 1:01
  This was a poor man who wanted to study philosophy in a city where philosophy,
• 1:06
  like most things, had to be paid for with time, and time had to be paid for with
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  money.
• 1:14
  He found Zeno, the shipwrecked merchant from Cyprus who taught under the colonnade,
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  and he attached himself to him.
• 1:21
  Diogenes says he devoted himself to philosophy in a most noble manner and held to
• 1:27
  the same doctrines as his master.
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  He stayed nineteen years.
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  And when Zeno was gone, it was Cleanthes who took over the school.
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  But that's the ending.
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  Let's go back to the beginning, and to the night.
• 1:42
  Here is the sentence from Diogenes Laërtius, in the translation of C.
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  D.
• 1:47
  Yonge.
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  "He used to draw water in the gardens by night, and by day he used to exercise
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  himself in philosophical discussions; on which account he was called Phreantles."
• 2:00
  Phreantles.
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  Yonge's note explains the word: it comes from the Greek for a well,
• 2:06
  and the Greek for drawing water.
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  So it's something like the well drawer.
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  A nickname, and I'd guess not a kind one, at least at first.
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  It names the man by the least philosophical thing about him.
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  Now, Diogenes tells us only the bare fact.
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  The details of the scene are mine, and I'll mark them as I go.
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  I imagine the gardens outside the busy part of the city, dark and cold,
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  with the smell of wet earth.
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  I imagine the creak of a well sweep, a long pole swinging a bucket down into the
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  dark and up again.
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  I imagine cold water slopping over a hand that once knew how to hit another man for
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  a living, and now spends its strength on lettuce beds and rows of beans.
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  Bucket after bucket, until the plants have had enough, or the night has.
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  Diogenes also mentions a second job.
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  There was a woman who sold meal, and Cleanthes prepared the meal in her
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  establishment.
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  So we have a gardener's wells and a meal seller's grain.
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  Two employers, two kinds of tired.
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  And all of it so that by day he could sit at Zeno's feet and think.
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  Think about what that does to a philosophy lesson.
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  Most of the pupils around him, I'd guess, went home at night to supper and sleep.
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  Cleanthes went to work.
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  He heard the arguments about nature and virtue in the morning,
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  and then he spent the evening carrying them around on his back.
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  The city noticed him.
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  Athenians called him Phreantles, and Diogenes says he was also called a second
• 3:47
  Heracles, the hero of the labors.
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  Again, I don't know the tone.
• 3:53
  Admiring, mocking, probably both, the way a neighborhood talks about someone it
• 3:58
  can't quite place.
• 4:00
  And then comes the part of the story I like best, because it has a courtroom in it.
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  Diogenes says Cleanthes was once brought before a court of justice and made to
• 4:11
  explain what his sources of income were, since he kept himself in such good
• 4:15
  condition.
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  Picture the problem from the magistrates' side.
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  Here is a strong, healthy man who spends his days talking philosophy and has no
• 4:25
  visible means of support.
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  In their eyes, I imagine, that looks suspicious.
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  I understand that Athens was a city that expected its citizens to be able to account
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  for themselves, though I'll leave the legal details to people who know them.
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  So what does Cleanthes do?
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  He doesn't make a speech about the dignity of thought.
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  He calls his witnesses.
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  One is the gardener whose garden he drew water in.
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  The other is the woman, the meal seller, in whose shop he prepared the meal.
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  That's his whole defense: two people who can say, he works for us,
• 5:02
  and he works hard.
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  The judges of the Areopagus, Diogenes says, admired him.
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  They voted that ten minae should be given to him.
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  That's real money, to a man who arrived with four drachmas.
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  And here's the turn.
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  Zeno forbade him to accept it.
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  Think about that, and about what kind of teacher it takes.
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  The money was offered by the city, honestly, for admiration,
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  not for a favor.
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  And the teacher says no.
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  I'll say plainly that this is my interpretation, because Diogenes gives no reason.
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  But the story seems to want the independence kept whole.
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  A philosopher who has been paid by the state has, in some small way,
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  been bought.
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  Cleanthes was to go on being the man who paid his own way.
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  Diogenes also tells us that Zeno required him to bring an obol as a kind of tribute,
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  a small coin from his earnings.
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  And once, Cleanthes carried one of those coins out into the middle of a company of
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  friends.
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  He said, in Yonge's wording, that Cleanthes could maintain even another Cleanthes if
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  he were to choose, but that others, who have plenty of means to support themselves,
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  seek necessaries from others, although they only study philosophy in a very lazy
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  manner.
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  It's a bit of a boast.
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  A tired man's boast, which is perhaps the only kind worth hearing.
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  There's one more scene I want to place.
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  Diogenes says that a man named Antigonus, who was a pupil of Cleanthes,
• 6:37
  once asked him why he drew water.
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  Most readers take this to be the king of Macedon, Antigonus Gonatas,
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  who admired Zeno and sent for him.
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  But the story doesn't say, so let me hold that lightly.
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  Whoever he was, he looked at this strong man and asked him why he was doing such
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  work.
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  And here is the answer, again in Yonge's translation.
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  "Do I do nothing beyond drawing water?
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  Do I not also dig, and do I not water the land, and do all sorts of things for the
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  sake of philosophy?"
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  Read it slowly.
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  He isn't apologizing for the buckets.
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  He isn't saying, forgive me, I'd rather be reading.
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  He says: look at all the things I do.
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  Drawing, digging, watering.
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  And then, at the end of the list, the words that change the list.
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  For the sake of philosophy.
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  The labor isn't what stands between him and his studies.
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  In his own account, it's part of them.
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  The sources add small pieces that fit the picture.
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  Diogenes says that, having no money for paper, Cleanthes wrote down what he heard
• 7:52
  from Zeno on oyster shells and on the shoulder blades of oxen.
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  Imagine the notes of the future head of a school, scratched on the leftovers of a
• 8:01
  kitchen and a butcher's yard.
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  And there's an anecdote from a writer named Demetrius of Magnesia,
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  about a gust of wind that blew his cloak aside while he was escorting some young men
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  to a spectacle, and revealed he had nothing on underneath.
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  The Athenians, we're told, applauded him.
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  Not a bad outcome, for a man caught with nothing to hide.
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  And I should be honest about the other side of him.
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  The satirist Timon wrote a joke at his expense, comparing him to a slow,
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  heavy ram, and Diogenes himself says Cleanthes was not well endowed by nature and
• 8:38
  was slow in his intellect.
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  Cleanthes took teasing patiently.
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  There's a famous story about one such jibe, and we'll get to that soon.
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  When he blamed himself, he did it bluntly.
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  He once called himself, in Yonge's words, "An old man who has grey hair,
• 8:55
  but no brains."
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  A man who says that about himself is either very humble or very tired,
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  and I suspect, with Cleanthes, it was a little of each.
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  So what do the passage and the life say, together?
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  I'll say this is my own reading, not Diogenes's.
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  It's easy to picture philosophy as something for people with leisure: a gentleman's
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  conversation, a clever argument under a painted roof.
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  And a good deal of it was.
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  But Zeno's school, in the story of its first great follower,
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  didn't live only in the arguments.
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  It lived in a back that ached and a pair of hands that had gone cold on the well
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  rope.
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  Cleanthes wasn't the quickest mind the Stoa ever had, and the ancient sources don't
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  pretend he was.
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  His successor Chrysippus, we'll meet him in a few days, was the brilliant one.
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  But Zeno chose the slow man, the one who'd been tested in the dark.
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  I think that tells us what the school valued, or at least what it wanted to be seen
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  valuing: steadiness, a life that matches the words, and a refusal to be carried by
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  anyone else's purse.
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  Somewhere tonight, a long time ago, a bucket goes down into a well.
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  It comes up heavy.
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  The water is poured out, and the plants drink, and a man who will one day lead a
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  school walks back for the next one.
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  In a few hours, it will be morning, and he'll go and listen to Zeno.
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  Next time, we'll follow him to the lecture, and meet the name that was thrown at him
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  there.
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  For today, I'll leave him at the well.