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Ep. 1: The Shipwreck That Founded a School · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

• 0:00
  Good morning.
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  I'm Julian Vale, and this is The Morning Stoic.
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  Before the day gets going, let's go down to the sea.
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  Picture a merchant ship working its way across the Aegean toward Piraeus,
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  the harbor of Athens.
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  Its hold is packed with one of the most precious things a trader could carry in that
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  world: purple dye, brought all the way from Phoenicia.
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  The man who owns it is a Cypriot named Zeno, from the city of Citium.
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  Somewhere close to the harbor, it is related, the ship is wrecked.
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  The cargo is gone.
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  And Zeno, wet and alone, begins to make his way toward a city where he has no
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  standing at all.
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  I should say plainly how I'm telling this.
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  I'm not a classicist, and I'm not a philosopher.
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  I don't read Greek or Latin.
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  I'm a storyteller leaning on a public domain translation, and everything today comes
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  from Diogenes Laertius, who set down his Life of Zeno long after Zeno lived,
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  gathering what tradition had handed on.
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  So when I say it is related, or as Diogenes tells it, I mean exactly that.
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  This is what the tradition says, not something we can swear to.
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  Here is the passage, from Diogenes Laertius, Life of Zeno, in the public domain
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  translation by C.
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  D.
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  Yonge.
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  "Having purchased a quantity of purple from Phoenicia, he was shipwrecked close to
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  the Piraeus; and when he had made his way from the coast as far as Athens,
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  he sat down by a bookseller's stall, being now about thirty years of age."
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  Notice how little that sentence tells us.
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  No storm, no names, no cry across the water.
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  A purchase, a wreck, a walk, a seat.
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  I imagine the rest: damp clothes drying on the climb up from the coast,
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  the noise of a city that doesn't know him, and then a quiet corner beside a stall of
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  books, because there is nowhere else to be.
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  He is about thirty.
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  A merchant's life has just ended, and nothing has yet begun.
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  Diogenes himself reports another version: some say Zeno was never wrecked at all,
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  but sold all his cargo at Athens and only then turned to philosophy.
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  We don't get to settle that.
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  Both tellings sit in the same book, side by side, and I think that's worth
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  respecting.
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  But the version that was told and retold, the one with salt water in it,
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  is the wreck.
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  So that's the one we'll follow this morning, and we'll keep in mind that it is
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  tradition, handed down.
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  A little background, in my own words, on what was lost in that hold.
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  Purple dye, later called Tyrian purple after the Phoenician city of Tyre,
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  came from the glands of sea snails, the murex, found in the Mediterranean.
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  Phoenician cities were famous for making it.
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  And it took an enormous number of snails.
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  In one early twentieth-century experiment, a chemist processed about 12,000 snails
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  and got only about 1.4 grams of pure dye, often said to be about enough to dye the
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  trim of a single garment.
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  Twelve thousand snails, for the edge of one cloak.
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  The work was famously foul smelling, too, a trade you could find with your nose
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  before you ever saw the dye works.
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  And the finished color was a luxury good, something people wore to show who they
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  were.
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  So a cargo of it was a merchant's fortune packed into a ship.
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  Losing it was not a bad season.
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  It was a real disaster.
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  And a little more background, about the man himself.
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  Diogenes tells us Zeno was the son of Mnaseas, or possibly Demeas,
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  and a native of Citium, on the island of Cyprus.
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  Diogenes describes Citium as a Greek town that had received Phoenician settlers.
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  So Zeno comes from a borderland, where Greek and Phoenician worlds overlapped,
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  and where a young man could very naturally end up trading in Phoenician purple.
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  In Athens, that origin stuck to him.
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  Diogenes records that his first teacher, Crates, a Cynic philosopher,
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  would call him 'my little Phoenician'; we'll get to that story soon.
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  Another philosopher, Polemo, teased him in a sharper way, saying that Zeno slipped
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  in through the garden door, took other men's teachings, and dressed them up in
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  Phoenician clothes.
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  So the man who would found one of Athens' most famous schools was not an Athenian.
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  He was an outsider from the edge of the Greek world, with a foreign cargo behind him
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  and a foreign nickname ahead.
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  Now to the second passage, and it needs careful handling.
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  Diogenes says Zeno studied for twenty years under a series of teachers after he left
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  Crates.
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  And then, he writes, it is related that Zeno said something about the wreck.
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  Diogenes adds that some people attach the remark to the earlier time,
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  when Zeno was still with Crates.
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  So we can't pin down the moment.
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  But the line itself, in Yonge's translation, is this.
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  "I now find that I made a prosperous voyage when I was wrecked."
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  Sit with that for a moment.
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  It is a merchant's sentence.
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  He talks about a voyage, and he calls it prosperous, using the language of cargo and
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  profit.
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  But he is counting a different kind of wealth now.
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  The ship went down, and the purple went with it, and somewhere in the years
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  afterward he looked back and decided that the trip had paid off anyway.
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  I want to be careful here, because I'm not going to tell you that a disaster is
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  secretly a gift.
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  That's too easy, and I don't think the story supports it.
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  The loss was real.
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  The dye was precious, the work behind it was enormous, and no one chooses to lose a
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  fortune.
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  What the tradition gives us is quieter than a lesson.
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  It gives us a man whose career collapsed at about thirty, who had to decide what to
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  do with the rest of his life, and who turned toward books and teachers instead of
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  toward another cargo.
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  If Stoicism has a beginning, it isn't a palace or a lecture hall.
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  It's a collapse that got redirected, and a man who was willing,
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  years later, to call it a good voyage.
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  There is one more thing about this story that I find moving.
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  Zeno never stopped being the outsider.
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  He arrived in Athens with the wrong accent, the wrong origins,
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  and nothing left to sell.
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  And the school he went on to found would be remembered for generations.
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  Later Stoics would include a freed slave and a Roman emperor,
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  people from very different corners of the world.
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  It seems fitting that it all starts with a foreigner, sitting down by a stall
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  because he had nowhere else to go.
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  The name of the school is the last piece of the puzzle, and it doesn't come from a
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  palace, or a king's court, or a grand academy.
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  It comes from a porch.
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  A painted colonnade in the middle of Athens, open to anyone who wanted to walk
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  through.
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  The Greek word for it gives us the name Stoic.
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  That is where we're heading.
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  But first, tomorrow, we go back to that bookseller's stall.
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  Zeno picks up a book, he starts reading, and he asks where men like the ones in it
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  can be found.
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  And the bookseller, glancing up at the street, points out a man walking past,
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  and tells him to follow.
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  I'm Julian Vale.
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  Thank you for starting your morning here.