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Ep. 4: Why They Are Called Stoics · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

• 0:00
  Twenty years is a long time to be a student.
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  Last time, we left Zeno of Citium running down a street in the Ceramicus with lentil
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  porridge streaming down his legs, and Crates the Cynic calling after him that he'd
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  done no harm.
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  That was only the start of his education.
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  Diogenes Laërtius tells us that Zeno eventually left Crates and studied with other
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  philosophers for twenty years.
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  He names Stilpo and Xenocrates, and says that he is also reported to have studied
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  with Polemo.
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  The accounts are not tidy, and Diogenes himself passes along the details with a lot
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  of 'they say.'
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  So let's pick the story up where we promised.
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  The shipwrecked merchant from Cyprus has become an Athenian fixture.
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  He's no longer young.
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  I won't give you a precise age, because the sources we have don't settle one.
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  He has listened for two decades, and now he does something different.
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  He decides to teach.
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  And the question for a teacher in Athens was always where.
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  Plato had gathered pupils at the Academy, a grove outside the city walls,
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  a private and enclosed place where a philosopher could keep his circle close.
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  Epicurus, a little later, bought a house with a garden, and that walled Garden
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  became the name and the identity of his school.
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  The pattern was clear: a philosopher with a gate, and a gate with a philosopher
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  behind it.
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  Zeno took neither.
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  He chose a porch.
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  A long, open colonnade on the north side of the Agora, the civic square of Athens,
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  where anyone crossing the city could stop and hear him.
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  No gate, no wall, no door to close.
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  I'll say something about why, though that part is my own reading and not Diogenes'.
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  Zeno was a resident foreigner, a metic, from Citium, with Phoenician roots.
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  Foreigners in Athens generally couldn't just buy land or a house without a special
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  grant.
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  So the choice may have been partly necessity.
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  But the sources show a man who preferred to be seen.
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  He had studied under a Cynic who thought nothing of public embarrassment.
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  Teaching in the open was, at the very least, consistent.
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  The porch had a name, or really two.
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  It was built in the fifth century BCE, and it was called the Peisianactium,
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  after the man said to have paid for it.
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  But Athenians called it the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Porch,
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  because of the large painted panels hung along its wall.
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  Diogenes credits the paintings to Polygnotus.
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  Other ancient writers name more painters and describe the subjects: the Battle of
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  Marathon, Theseus against the Amazons, the fall of Troy.
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  It was a hall of Athenian memory, and the city's proudest stories were pinned up in
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  color along one wall.
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  I imagine it on an ordinary morning.
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  Sunlight slanting between the columns and lying in long bars across the stone floor.
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  The murmur of the Agora just behind, traders calling, sandals scuffing,
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  somebody's donkey complaining.
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  And along the wall, the battle scenes, faded a little, watching over everything.
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  Now here is the sentence that gives the porch its weight.
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  Yonge translates Diogenes this way: Zeno "used to walk up and down in the beautiful
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  colonnade which is called the Peisianactium."
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  Diogenes adds that it is also called poikile, from the paintings of Polygnotus.
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  And then he says: "and there he delivered his discourses, wishing to make that spot
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  tranquil; for in the time of the thirty, nearly fourteen hundred of the citizens had
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  been murdered there by them."
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  The Thirty were the oligarchs who ruled Athens in 404 and 403 BCE,
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  installed after the city's defeat by Sparta.
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  Their rule was a reign of terror, with executions, confiscations,
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  and neighbors informing on neighbors.
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  Diogenes says the killing happened at this porch.
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  A caution is needed here, and I want to be plain about it.
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  That figure, nearly fourteen hundred, is Diogenes' tradition.
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  It is not a modern count, and nobody has verified it with excavation or records.
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  Other ancient writers, orators and historians, speak of numbers around fifteen
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  hundred killed under the Thirty across the whole city, so the scale of the horror is
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  not in doubt.
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  But whether that many died at this one colonnade is the report of one writer,
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  working from older stories.
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  And remember when Diogenes was writing.
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  He is generally thought to have lived near the end of the second century of our era,
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  or the early third, some five hundred years after Zeno.
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  We don't have Zeno's complete works.
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  We have titles, fragments, and anecdotes passed along by biographers.
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  So when I say Zeno wished to make that spot tranquil, I am telling you what Diogenes
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  reports, not what Zeno wrote in his own hand.
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  Even so, hold the picture for a moment.
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  A place that had been used for killing.
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  A man who walks back and forth across it, day after day, talking quietly about how
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  to live.
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  He doesn't hold a ceremony or put up a memorial, as far as we're told.
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  He just fills the place with reasoned talk until that is what it is known for.
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  That is a very particular kind of courage, the kind that doesn't look like courage
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  at all.
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  What happened next was almost an accident of naming.
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  Diogenes writes: "Accordingly, for the future, men came thither to hear him,
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  and from this his pupils were called Stoics, and so were his successors also,
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  who had been at first called Zenonians, as Epicurus tells us in his Epistles."
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  Think about what that means.
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  Plato's followers were called Academics, after a place, but also after a founder's
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  long shadow.
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  Epicureans took their name from the man himself.
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  Zeno's followers were first called Zenonians, after him.
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  Then, as Epicurus notes, the name changed, and it changed to the porch.
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  The word is stoa.
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  A philosophy named after a public building, not a person.
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  Diogenes adds a small footnote that I like.
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  He tells us, citing Eratosthenes, in the eighth book of his work on the Old Comedy,
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  that poets who frequented this same colonnade had already been called Stoics before
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  Zeno.
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  The label was sitting there, waiting.
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  Zeno's pupils simply made it, in Diogenes' phrase, more famous.
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  Now, an open porch means a rough classroom.
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  This was no quiet lecture hall.
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  The crowd came from every direction, and one hostile source tells us who.
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  The satirist Timon, who was not a friend to Zeno, wrote that he "collected a vast
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  cloud of beggars."
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  Read that as a jab, and also as a clue to who was listening: the poor,
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  travelers, curious young men, anyone passing through.
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  And at least one king.
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  Antigonus of Macedonia, Diogenes says, would attend his lectures whenever he came to
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  Athens, and kept inviting him to court.
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  Zeno declined, and sent friends in his place.
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  We'll get to more of that rivalry of invitations in another story.
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  And Zeno, by every account, found the crowds a little much.
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  Diogenes says he avoided a throng with great care.
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  He would sit at the end of a bench so that at least one side was safe from jostling.
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  When people pressed in around him, he would point to a wooden railing at the end of
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  the colonnade, near an altar, and say: "That was once in the middle of this place,
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  but it was placed apart because it was in people's way; and now,
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  if you will only withdraw from the middle here, you too will incommode me much
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  less."
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  I find that funny, and a bit tender.
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  The man who made the public porch his school was also a man who wanted a little
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  room.
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  Some of his pupils will get their own stories.
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  One of them, a former boxer, will turn up in a garden at night,
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  and we'll get to that soon.
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  For today, I'll leave them standing in the shade.
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  Before we go, one more line from Diogenes.
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  About the shipwreck that first threw Zeno onto Athenian shores,
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  Diogenes reports that he later said: "I now find that I made a prosperous voyage
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  when I was wrecked."
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  Diogenes admits that people argued about what he meant.
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  Some thought he meant meeting Crates.
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  Others have him say, "Fortune does well in having driven us on philosophy."
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  And some said he was not wrecked at all, but simply sold his cargo and turned to
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  philosophy.
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  We can't settle that.
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  But set that line beside the porch, and something comes into focus.
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  A man loses a cargo and finds a life.
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  A city loses fourteen hundred of its own, if we take the tradition at its word,
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  and a few decades later the same stones hold a quiet conversation about how to live
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  well.
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  Neither story tells us the loss was good.
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  Diogenes never says that, and neither should I.
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  They say only that what's left can still be turned toward something.
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  That's the thing about this school's name.
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  It isn't a person.
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  It's a place that was once terrible, and was made, one slow walk at a time,
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  into somewhere you could stand.
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  Take that with you into the morning.
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  Good day.