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Ep. 6: The Ass Who Could Carry Zeno's Burdens · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

• 0:00
  When we left Cleanthes, he was standing at a garden well in Athens,
• 0:05
  the last bucket hauled up, the sky going grey over the walls.
• 0:10
  His night's work was done.
• 0:12
  He had a sore back, a few coins, and somewhere to be.
• 0:17
  Today we follow him into the daylight, to the place where a name was waiting for
• 0:22
  him.
• 0:24
  The place is the Painted Colonnade, the Stoa Poikile, a long covered walk beside the
• 0:30
  Athenian marketplace.
• 0:32
  Diogenes Laertius tells us that Zeno of Citium used to walk up and down there,
• 0:38
  teaching, and that the Stoics took their name from the spot.
• 0:42
  I imagine the late morning light slanting under the roof, the painted walls behind,
• 0:48
  the scuff of sandals on stone.
• 0:50
  Around Zeno, I imagine young men in clean, fine tunics, quick with their hands and
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  quicker with their tongues.
• 0:58
  Zeno himself, by Diogenes' account, was a man of stern, frowning face,
• 1:04
  who corrected people briefly and from a distance.
• 1:08
  And then Cleanthes walks in.
• 1:11
  He came from Assos, in the Troad, on the coast of Asia Minor,
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  and he was the son of Phanias.
• 1:16
  Diogenes says he was originally a boxer, citing a writer named Antisthenes,
• 1:21
  and that he reached Athens with only four drachmas, as some people say.
• 1:25
  I imagine the contrast.
• 1:28
  Among those smooth young men, a broad man with a boxer's shoulders and hands
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  hardened by buckets and digging, who had not slept, and who stood a little heavily
• 1:37
  at the edge of the crowd, listening to every word.
• 1:41
  Diogenes is honest about him, and I want to be honest too.
• 1:45
  He praises his industry, then writes this: "he was not well endowed by nature,
• 1:52
  and was very slow in his intellect."
• 1:55
  That is a hard sentence to write about the man who would one day lead the school.
• 2:01
  And a school like Zeno's was a place of argument.
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  Questions were thrown, traps were set, and the young men who could answer fastest
• 2:10
  were admired.
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  Cleanthes was not one of them.
• 2:14
  He thought slowly, he spoke slowly, and he held on to what he learned the way a
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  boxer holds a stance.
• 2:22
  According to the tradition, his fellow pupils laughed at him for it,
• 2:27
  and they gave him a name.
• 2:28
  They were not the only ones.
• 2:30
  A satirist named Timon, who wrote verses mocking the philosophers of his day,
• 2:35
  took a famous passage of Homer and turned it on Cleanthes.
• 2:39
  In Homer, a ram strides ahead of the flock.
• 2:43
  Timon asks, in Diogenes' Yonge translation: "What stately ram thus measures o'er the
• 2:49
  ground, and master of the flock surveys them round?"
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  Then comes the answer, and it is no ram at all.
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  It is a "citizen of Assos," "dull and cold," "Fond of long words."
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  Timon was a mocker by trade, so I would read that as a rival's jab,
• 3:08
  not a measurement.
• 3:10
  But the jab shows what people could say about Cleanthes in the open.
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  And Diogenes tells us what he did with it.
• 3:17
  He writes that when Cleanthes was ridiculed by his fellow pupils,
• 3:21
  he used to bear it patiently.
• 3:24
  Now think about what an ass was to an Athenian.
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  Not a racehorse, not a war horse.
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  A pack animal.
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  Slow, plain, stubborn, forever being loaded.
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  To call a man an ass was to call him dull and heavy, and a little ridiculous.
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  I imagine the word being tossed across the colonnade by a clever young man,
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  and the laughter that followed it, and the heads turning to see how the boxer would
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  take it.
• 3:54
  Diogenes doesn't give us the scene.
• 3:56
  He gives us the answer.
• 3:59
  Here it is, in Yonge's translation: "He did not even object to the name when he was
• 4:04
  called an ass; but only said that he was the only animal able to bear the burdens
• 4:09
  which Zeno put upon him."
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  No anger.
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  No denial.
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  No speech about his own cleverness.
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  He took the name, turned it over once, and handed it back with a different meaning.
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  Yes, I am an ass.
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  And I am the only one here who can carry what Zeno loads on me.
• 4:34
  Diogenes keeps other answers of his, and they have the same flavor.
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  Once, when someone reproached him as a coward, he said, "That is the reason why I
• 4:45
  make but few mistakes."
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  When he was asked about his hard life compared with the rich young men,
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  he said that while they were playing at ball, he was "earning money by digging hard
• 4:57
  and barren ground."
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  He was not a man who tried to win the argument.
• 5:02
  He told the plain truth about where he stood, and let it sit there.
• 5:07
  There is one more story, and it is my favorite.
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  A poet named Sositheus was in the theatre, and Cleanthes was in the audience.
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  Sositheus spoke a line from the stage: "Men whom the folly of Cleanthes urges."
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  The whole theatre could hear it.
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  And Cleanthes, Diogenes says, continued in the same attitude.
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  He did not stand, he did not shout, he did not even shift in his seat.
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  The audience was so struck that they applauded Cleanthes, and they drove Sositheus
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  away.
• 5:42
  Later the poet was sorry, and Cleanthes answered him gently.
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  In Diogenes' account, he said that it would be absurd for him to be angry at a
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  chance attack, when Dionysus and Heracles had to bear being ridiculed by the poets
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  without anger.
• 5:59
  I will say it in my own words, since it is a paraphrase: if gods can sit through the
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  jokes, a pupil from Assos can sit through one more.
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  So what was the burden?
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  This part is my reading, not Diogenes', so take it as mine.
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  I don't think it was cleverness.
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  Zeno was not asking his pupils to out talk each other.
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  He was asking them to live in agreement with nature, as the Stoics would put it,
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  to be steady, to want little, and to let their actions match their words.
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  That is heavy, and it does not get lighter with practice.
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  It is the kind of weight that breaks a showy animal in a week,
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  and an ass carries it all day.
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  Diogenes gives us a small detail that fits this.
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  Zeno, he says, used to accustom Cleanthes to labor, and required him to bring an
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  obol as tribute from what he earned.
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  The burdens were real ones, in coins and sore muscles and hours without sleep.
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  The joke about the ass was a joke about the actual load.
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  I also want to be honest about the part that doesn't fit neatly.
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  Cleanthes was not gentle with everyone.
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  Diogenes tells us that he very often blamed himself, and that once Ariston overheard
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  him and asked, "Who is it that you are reproaching?"
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  And Cleanthes said, "An old man who has grey hair, but no brains."
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  That is humor, but it is also a man who held himself to a hard standard,
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  harder than any rival could.
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  The calm in the colonnade was not softness.
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  It was discipline, aimed first inward.
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  And the story did not end with the laughter.
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  Diogenes says that Cleanthes was a pupil of Zeno for nineteen years,
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  and that though Zeno had many other disciples of high reputation,
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  it was Cleanthes who succeeded him as head of the school.
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  The traditional dating puts that around 262 BC.
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  The slow man, the dull man, the ass, held the school together after its founder was
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  gone.
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  Somewhere in that school, in the next generation, was a pupil who was nothing like
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  him.
• 8:15
  Quick, brilliant, restless, a man who would argue with his own teacher and then
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  regret it.
• 8:22
  He would turn the Stoic school into a system, and he wrote a staggering number of
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  books.
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  We'll get to that soon.
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  For now, I would leave you with Cleanthes at the end of a long day.
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  I imagine the colonnade emptying, the clever young men drifting off to dinners and
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  laughter, and one broad figure walking the other way, toward the gardens and the
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  wells, where another night of water was waiting.
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  Not hurt, not hurrying, and not pretending to be a horse.
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  Carrying what he had agreed to carry, and, as far as Diogenes can tell us,
• 8:58
  quietly content with the name.