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Ep. 2: Follow That Man · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

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  Yesterday we left Zeno sitting at a bookseller's stall in Athens.
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  A stranger in a city that wasn't his, with time on his hands and no plan for what
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  came next.
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  Today, he reaches out and picks up a scroll.
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  The year is somewhere around 312 or 311 BCE.
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  Athens answers to Macedonian power now, and its old democracy has lost most of its
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  swagger.
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  But the city is still where the Mediterranean comes to buy ideas.
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  Philosophers teach in the gymnasia and under the colonnades.
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  And in the market district, the booksellers keep their wares for anyone with a few
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  coins and a curious mind.
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  I imagine the stall the way a morning traveler might see it.
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  Rolls of papyrus leaning in baskets and slotted into shelves,
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  their ends curling.
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  A fine film of dust over everything, because Athens is dry and the street is busy.
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  The faint smell of reed pens and old glue.
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  And a bookseller who has seen a thousand idle browsers and can tell,
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  within a minute, which ones are going to buy.
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  One detail matters here.
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  In the ancient world, reading was often something you did out loud,
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  or at least under your breath.
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  A scroll was not a quiet private thing the way a paperback is on a train.
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  So a man reading at a stall was, in a small way, performing.
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  His murmuring drew in whoever was standing nearby.
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  That's worth remembering, because what happens next begins with a man reading,
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  and someone else overhearing.
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  Our source is Diogenes Laërtius, who wrote his Lives of the philosophers centuries
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  after Zeno.
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  We're reading him in the translation by C.
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  D.
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  Yonge, from Project Gutenberg.
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  Diogenes tells us Zeno was about thirty years old, and then he gives us this.
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  Quote.
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  "And as he took up the second book of Xenophon's Memorabilia and began to read it,
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  he was delighted with it, and asked where such men as were described in that book
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  lived; and as Crates happened very seasonably to pass at the moment,
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  the bookseller pointed him out, and said, 'Follow that man.'"
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  End quote.
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  That's the whole scene.
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  A scroll, a question, a man walking past, and four words.
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  Let's look at what Zeno was holding.
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  Xenophon's Memorabilia is a collection of memories of Socrates,
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  written by a man who had known him.
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  And it is not the Socrates you may have met in Plato, the one who soars into
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  theories about forms and the soul.
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  Xenophon's Socrates is practical.
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  He is the man you might actually have bumped into on an Athenian street,
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  and he talks about how to live.
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  Diogenes only says Zeno took up the second book, and I can't tell you which page he
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  opened.
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  But that second book begins with Socrates teaching self mastery.
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  How to stay in command of your appetites.
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  How to bear hunger, and tiredness, and cold.
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  It includes the parable of Heracles at the crossroads, a story Xenophon says
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  Socrates took from the teacher Prodicus.
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  Two women meet the young hero where the road divides.
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  One offers the easy way, and the other offers a harder road with no decoration on
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  it, and Heracles has to choose.
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  The same book goes on to talk about duty to family, about brothers,
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  and about how to find friends and keep them.
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  Now notice what Zeno does not ask.
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  He doesn't ask for more books.
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  He doesn't ask for the theory behind it, or who wrote the best commentary.
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  Diogenes says he asked where such men as were described in that book lived.
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  Where do they live.
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  Present tense.
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  Socrates had been dead for nearly a century by then.
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  He was executed in 399 BCE.
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  So the question carries a little ache in it.
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  Zeno has found a picture of a way of life that moves him, and he wants to know if
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  anyone still lives it.
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  Not whether it can be argued.
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  Whether it can be found, walking about, in this very city.
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  That's my reading of the moment, and I want to be clear it's my own.
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  Diogenes gives us the question, not the feeling behind it.
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  But I think the question tells us what kind of man Zeno was,
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  even at thirty, with his whole fortune in doubt.
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  And here I should be honest about the sources, because the ancient accounts don't
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  agree on how Zeno came to philosophy.
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  Diogenes reports another tradition, from a writer called Demetrius of Magnesia.
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  In that version, Zeno's father was a merchant who often traveled to Athens,
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  and he brought Socratic books home to Citium for his son to read while Zeno was
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  still a boy.
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  If that's true, Zeno didn't meet Socrates for the first time at a stall.
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  He arrived in Athens already a reader.
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  Diogenes also passes on a story from two other writers, Hecaton and Apollonius of
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  Tyre.
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  They say Zeno consulted the oracle and asked what he ought to do to live in the most
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  excellent manner.
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  The god answered that he ought to, quote, "become of the same complexion as the
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  dead."
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  End quote.
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  And Zeno took that to mean he should immerse himself in the books of the ancients.
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  So we have a sudden meeting at a stall, a boyhood among Socratic scrolls,
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  and an oracle's riddle.
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  Diogenes sets them down side by side, and I'm not going to pretend I can choose
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  between them.
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  Maybe they fit together.
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  A man steeped in old books, told by a god to read the dead,
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  finds that the dead are not enough.
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  He wants to see one of them alive.
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  Which brings us to the man walking past.
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  Diogenes says Crates happened very seasonably to pass at that moment.
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  Seasonably, in Yonge's word, as in the right time of year.
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  It is the kind of luck that makes a story feel arranged, and I'll leave it to you
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  whether it was luck.
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  Crates came from Thebes, and he was a Cynic, a follower of the school that stripped
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  life down to what is needed.
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  His line of teaching runs back through Diogenes of Sinope, and through Antisthenes,
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  to Socrates himself.
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  And Crates had paid a price to belong to it.
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  He came from a family with money, and he gave the money away.
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  Then he took to the streets of Athens in a rough cloak, with a beggar's leather
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  pouch and a staff.
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  You might expect a grim figure.
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  By every account, he was not.
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  He was described as hunchbacked, and he was deliberately poor,
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  and yet he was famous for his good cheer.
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  The Athenians called him the Door Opener, because he was welcome in their houses.
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  People let him in when there was a family quarrel, and he helped them make peace.
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  A man with nothing to prove, and nothing to hide, and nothing to sell.
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  I imagine the bookseller looking up from his shelves at the sound of Zeno's reading,
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  and then glancing past him, to the street.
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  And I imagine him seeing in the same moment the scroll in the stranger's hands,
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  and the man in rags going by.
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  That instant connection, between a dead Socrates in ink and a living Cynic in a
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  coarse cloak, is the bookseller's own, and it's a remarkable one.
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  He doesn't give a lecture.
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  He doesn't say anything about schools of thought.
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  He says, "Follow that man."
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  And Diogenes tells us that from that time forth Zeno became a pupil of Crates.
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  What happened once he caught up with him is a story all its own,
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  and a memorable one.
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  We'll get to that soon.
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  For now, I want to stay with the shape of what we've seen.
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  Stoicism, as the ancient accounts tell it, did not begin in a lecture room.
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  It began when a man who had lost his cargo, and perhaps his plans,
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  sat reading about how Socrates lived, and asked where he could see it done.
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  The answer was not another scroll.
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  It was a person walking down the street.
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  I want to be honest about the cost, too.
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  Crates's way of life was extreme, and it was not for everyone.
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  Diogenes tells us that Zeno did not stay with Crates forever.
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  In time, he left, and studied with other philosophers.
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  But the first step had been taken in the market, on the strength of a living
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  example.
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  I find something steadying in that.
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  Ideas matter, and ink matters.
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  But Zeno could have bought the whole second book and kept it on a shelf.
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  What changed his life was asking where the people were.
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  Somewhere in that dusty stall, a scroll was set down half read,
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  and a man stood up and went out into the light, behind a stranger in a rough cloak.
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  That's the story for this morning.
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  Tomorrow, we'll catch up with them.