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Ep. 3: Lentil Porridge in the Ceramicus · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

• 0:00
  Yesterday we left a man sitting at a bookstall in Athens, still damp from a
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  shipwreck, holding the second book of Xenophon's Memorabilia and asking where men
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  like Socrates could be found.
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  The bookseller pointed at a stranger passing by and said, "Follow that man."
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  Today we catch up with them.
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  The man who followed is Zeno, of Citium, in Cyprus.
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  Diogenes Laertius, who wrote his Lives of the philosophers centuries later,
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  in the late second century of our era, tells us a little about how Zeno looked.
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  He was thin and very tall, dark in complexion, with his head bent naturally to one
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  side and weak, flabby legs.
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  Someone once called him an Egyptian clematis, a climbing vine,
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  and the nickname stuck in the record.
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  He was about thirty, a merchant by trade, a man of the Phoenician trading world.
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  I imagine he carried himself the way merchants do, upright and careful,
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  someone who knew exactly how much a clean cloak and a steady face were worth in the
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  harbor towns of the Mediterranean.
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  The man he followed was almost his opposite.
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  Crates came from Thebes, and he was a pupil of Diogenes, the Cynic,
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  the one the stories say lived in a jar.
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  The Cynics took their name from the Greek word for dog, and they meant it as a
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  badge.
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  They lived in public, owned almost nothing, and ignored every custom that was only
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  custom.
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  Later tradition says Crates had been a wealthy man and gave his inheritance away.
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  What he kept was a rough cloak, a beggar's leather wallet, and a wooden staff.
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  He was also, the stories say, a hunchback, and famously cheerful about it.
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  Another tradition gives him the nickname Door Opener, because Athenians were glad to
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  have him walk into their houses and settle quarrels.
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  Keep that picture in mind: a poor, bent, smiling man whom people let through
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  their doors.
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  So Zeno becomes his pupil.
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  And here Diogenes Laertius gives us a small, honest note.
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  He says Zeno was in other respects very energetic in his application to philosophy.
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  He had thrown himself into it.
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  But he had a weak spot, and Crates found it quickly.
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  Before the passage itself, we need the place, because the place is half the story.
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  The Ceramicus was the potters' quarter of Athens, and its name comes from the Greek
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  word for potter's clay.
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  It was also one of the main roads, running out from the heart of the city toward the
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  Dipylon Gate and on toward the road to the Academy.
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  I imagine it as loud and gritty.
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  Kilns smoking, workshops open to the street, vendors calling,
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  slaves hauling loads, citizens on their errands, and travelers who had never seen
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  Athens trying to find their way.
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  This was no quiet garden and no shaded walk.
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  It was a stage with no curtain, and everyone was in the audience.
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  Here is what Diogenes Laertius writes, in the translation of C.
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  D.
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  Yonge.
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  I'll read it exactly.
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  "From that time forth he became a pupil of Crates; but though he was in other
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  respects very energetic in his application to philosophy, still he was too modest
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  for the shamelessness of the Cynics.
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  On which account, Crates, wishing to cure him of this false shame,
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  gave him a jar of lentil porridge to carry through the Cerameicus; and when he saw
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  that he was ashamed, and that he endeavoured to hide it, he struck the jar with his
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  staff, and broke it; and, as Zenon fled away, and the lentil porridge ran all down
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  his legs, Crates called after him, 'Why do you run away, my little Phoenician,
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  you have done no harm?'"
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  That's the whole scene, and it takes only a few lines.
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  Let's slow it down.
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  Lentil porridge was poor people's food.
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  Beggars ate it, and so did laborers.
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  Nobody would look twice at a bowl of it in the right hands.
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  But I imagine the problem was exactly whose hands these were.
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  A tall, dark, dignified foreigner, a man who had lately been a person of standing in
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  the trading world, now walking down the busiest road in Athens with a jar of
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  beggar's supper held in front of him.
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  Diogenes Laertius doesn't tell us what Zeno was thinking.
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  I imagine it was something like this: Who is looking at me?
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  What do they take me for?
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  Can I make it look like something else?
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  Because the source says he was ashamed, and that he endeavoured to hide it.
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  I picture the cloak drawn forward, the jar pressed against his side,
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  the eyes fixed on the road ahead, the long careful steps of a man trying to look as
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  if he were carrying nothing at all.
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  And Crates, I imagine, walking beside him, or just behind, watching all of this with
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  great interest.
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  Then the staff comes down.
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  The jar breaks.
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  The porridge runs all down Zeno's legs.
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  I imagine the hot mess soaking his cloak, the clay shards at his feet,
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  a few heads turning, and perhaps a laugh or two from the stalls.
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  It is the exact disaster he had been working so hard to prevent,
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  and it happened in the one place he most wanted to avoid it.
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  And Zeno runs.
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  The text says so plainly, and I think we should be honest about that.
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  There is no calm sage in this scene.
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  There is a mortified man, about thirty years old, running down a public road with
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  soup on his legs.
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  And behind him, Crates calls out, "Why do you run away, my little Phoenician,
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  you have done no harm?"
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  Let me say what I think is going on here, and I want to mark it as my own reading,
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  not the source's.
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  Diogenes Laertius gives us the event and the one sentence.
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  The meaning is for us to work out.
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  Start with the word Crates uses for what he is curing.
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  Yonge translates it as false shame.
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  The Cynics prized a quality they called shamelessness, anaideia in Greek.
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  It doesn't mean cruelty or rudeness, at least not at its best.
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  It means refusing to be ruled by embarrassment over things that are only convention.
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  Zeno, the text says, was too modest for it.
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  He was still a man whose peace depended on strangers approving of him,
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  and Crates, who had given up wealth and comfort and a respectable cloak,
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  could see that chain on him from across the street.
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  So he doesn't lecture.
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  In the Cynic schools, philosophy was something you did with your body,
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  in public, with your pride on the line.
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  Crates arranges the one thing Zeno fears most, which is looking ridiculous in front
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  of everyone, and he arranges it with a broken pot.
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  Then comes the sentence that I think matters most.
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  "You have done no harm."
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  Think about what is actually true in that street.
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  An earthenware jar has broken.
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  Some porridge has ruined a cloak.
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  A few strangers have laughed.
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  Has anyone been injured?
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  No.
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  Has anyone been wronged?
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  No.
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  Has Zeno done anything unjust, or cowardly, or false?
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  Well, he has run away, and Crates is gently pointing even at that.
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  But the real damage, the thing that felt like a wound, was a story told by Zeno's
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  own vanity.
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  The harm was in what he feared people would think.
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  That small idea, I think, is a seed.
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  We'll watch it grow in the weeks ahead.
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  The school that Zeno would eventually found would argue that things like reputation,
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  embarrassment, even wealth and comfort, are not what make a life good or bad.
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  Virtue alone does that, the state of your own character.
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  Later thinkers in this tradition called those other things indifferent.
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  But that is a long way from a street in the potters' quarter,
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  and Zeno doesn't know any of it yet.
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  He only knows his legs are wet and his face is burning.
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  We should also be fair to what came next.
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  Diogenes Laertius says Zeno continued as a pupil of Crates for some time.
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  He even wrote a treatise called the Republic, and some people joked that he had
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  written it on the tail of the dog, which was a jab at its Cynic flavor.
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  But the same source says that eventually he left Crates and studied with other
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  philosophers for twenty years.
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  He didn't stay a Cynic.
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  The school he built later would soften the Cynic edge, and bring back a place for
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  duty, community, and ordinary decency.
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  Where and how he started teaching is a story all its own, and we'll get to that
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  soon.
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  What I admire in this scene is the kindness hidden inside the roughness.
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  Crates could have mocked a man he thought was a fool.
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  Instead, I think, he saw someone worth the trouble of a hard lesson,
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  and he did not leave him alone with it.
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  He calls out, and the name he uses is a warm one: my little Phoenician.
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  It is teasing, and I think it is affection too.
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  And I also admire that the record keeps Zeno's humiliation.
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  Nobody tidied it away.
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  The man whose school would last for centuries began by running down a road with
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  lentils on his legs.
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  I find that comforting, in a quiet way.
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  The first step toward freedom from other people's opinion was taken by a man who
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  cared very much about them, and who had to be shown, with a broken jar,
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  how little they could truly take from him.
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  Somewhere in the Ceramicus that day, I imagine, the kilns kept smoking and the
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  vendors kept calling, and nobody but the two men remembered it.
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  Yet a few centuries later someone thought it worth writing down.
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  That tells me the story held a truth that people kept wanting to carry forward,
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  as carefully as a jar of porridge, and perhaps a little less ashamed of it.
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  That's all for this morning.
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  Be gentle with yourself on the road today.