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Ep. 7: Chrysippus Writes Seven Hundred Books · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

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  Last time, we left Cleanthes in the Athenian dark, the old boxer who drew water by
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  night and was happy to be called an ass, so long as the ass was the only animal
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  strong enough to carry what Zeno loaded on him.
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  At the end of that story I mentioned a younger man at the Stoa.
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  Quick, brilliant, restless.
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  A man who argued with his teacher, and who would build the whole school into a
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  system through hundreds of books.
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  I said we'd get to that soon.
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  This morning, we get to him.
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  His name is Chrysippus.
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  Diogenes Laertius tells us that Chrysippus was the son of Apollonius,
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  and a native of either Soli or Tarsus, in Cilicia.
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  Diogenes is honest enough to give us both cities, quoting a writer named Alexander,
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  and he doesn't choose.
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  So we won't either.
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  What he does tell us is stranger and more useful.
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  Before Chrysippus was a philosopher, he practised running as a public runner.
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  A distance man, a man of training and breath and the long stretch of road.
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  And how did the runner end up in a philosophy school?
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  Diogenes passes along one report, from a writer named Hecaton.
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  Hecaton says Chrysippus first applied himself to philosophy when his patrimony had
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  been confiscated, and seized for the royal treasury.
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  That's all the source says.
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  A family property taken, and a young man with nothing left to inherit but his own
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  mind.
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  Whether that was the true hinge of his life, I can't tell you.
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  But I imagine it.
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  A young man in Athens, no estate behind him, no safety, looking for something that
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  couldn't be confiscated.
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  That would fit the school he joined.
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  Diogenes says he became a pupil of Cleanthes.
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  Diocles and most authors, he adds, say Zeno or Cleanthes, and the details are a
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  little tangled.
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  But the pairing that matters is plain enough.
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  The slow, patient, grey haired water carrier on one side.
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  On the other, a lean runner with a mind like a blade.
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  Diogenes calls Chrysippus a man of great natural ability, and of great acuteness in
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  every way.
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  So acute, in fact, that on many points he dissented from Zeno,
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  and from Cleanthes too.
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  And then comes a line I love.
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  He often used to tell Cleanthes that he only wanted to be instructed in the dogmas
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  of the school, and that he would discover the demonstrations for himself.
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  Sit with that for a moment.
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  Give me the conclusions, he says, and I'll find the proofs on my own.
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  It's the voice of a young man who is certainly gifted, and a little hard to be
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  around.
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  I imagine Cleanthes, who had spent nineteen years carrying Zeno's burdens,
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  hearing that from a pupil who had barely unpacked.
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  And I imagine him taking it the way he took the word ass.
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  Slowly.
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  Without much fuss.
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  But the arguments were real.
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  Diogenes says that whenever Chrysippus opposed Cleanthes with any vehemence,
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  he always repented.
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  And he had a way of saying so, borrowing a line from Euripides and bending it to
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  fit.
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  Here it is, in Yonge's words.
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  "In most respects I am a happy man, Excepting where Cleanthes is concerned;
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  For in that matter I am far from fortunate."
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  It's a joke, and it's an apology, and it's a confession, all in three lines.
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  A man who can't stop fighting with his teacher, and who knows it,
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  and who is sorry each time, and who does it again.
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  Then Diogenes gives us the moment that tells us what the quarrel was really made of.
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  Chrysippus once saw a dialectician pressing hard on Cleanthes,
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  throwing sophistical fallacies at him.
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  Cleanthes was not the quickest logician in Athens.
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  Timon had mocked him for it, and Diogenes admits he was slow.
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  Chrysippus stepped in.
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  "Cease to drag that old man from more important business, and propose these
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  questions to us who are young."
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  There it is.
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  He might spar with Cleanthes himself, but he would not let a stranger do it.
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  That's loyalty, and I'd call it a kind of love, though that word is mine and not
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  Diogenes'.
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  The man who wanted to discover every proof for himself still knew whose water he was
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  drinking.
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  Now to the passage for this morning, and to the room where I imagine it happened.
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  Not a scene Diogenes describes, so call it my picture.
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  A table, a lamp, and rolls of papyrus stacked and leaning, and Chrysippus working
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  through a third version of an argument he's already written twice.
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  Here is what Diogenes says, in Yonge's translation.
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  "He was industrious beyond all other men; as is plain from his writings; for he
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  wrote more than seven hundred and five books."
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  Seven hundred and five.
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  Sit with that number.
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  And Diogenes explains how.
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  Chrysippus often wrote several books on the same subject, wishing to put down
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  everything that occurred to him, constantly correcting his previous assertions,
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  and using a great abundance of testimonies.
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  Diocles reports that an old woman who lived with him used to say he wrote five
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  hundred lines every day.
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  The runner, I think, never stopped running.
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  He'd just moved the track onto paper.
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  But the same Diogenes is not only admiring.
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  He says, plainly, "But though he was so eminently able in matter,
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  he was not perfect in style."
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  A great mind, and a clumsy pen.
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  And there's a story that shows it.
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  In one book, Chrysippus quoted very nearly the whole of Euripides' Medeia.
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  Someone picked up the roll, and was asked what he was holding,
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  and answered, "The Medeia of Chrysippus."
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  That brings us to the jab.
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  Apollodorus the Athenian, in a work called Collection of Dogmas,
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  wanted to argue that Epicurus, who wrote out of his own head,
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  without quotations, had produced far more than all the books of Chrysippus.
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  And so he wrote, and Diogenes says he gives his exact words.
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  "For if any one were to take away from the books of Chrysippus all the passages
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  which he quotes from other authors, his paper would be left empty."
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  It's a good line.
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  It's meant to sting.
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  But notice who is speaking.
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  Apollodorus was an Epicurean, a partisan of the rival school,
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  and his whole point was that Epicurus was the more original mind.
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  So this is a rival's jab, not a neutral verdict.
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  I'd hold it the way you'd hold one team's report on another team's game.
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  It may catch something true.
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  Chrysippus did quote heavily.
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  But Chrysippus was not doing it to hide an empty page.
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  He was building a system, and a system needs its evidence laid out on the table.
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  Though that last part is my own reading, not Diogenes'.
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  Around that tireless pen, Diogenes gathers a few sayings.
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  Some admirers claimed that if there were dialectic among the gods,
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  it would be no different from the dialectic of Chrysippus.
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  And there's a couplet people repeated, "For if Chrysippus had not lived and taught,
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  The Stoic school would surely have been naught."
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  That's popular praise, not a measured judgment, but it tells us how he was seen.
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  He was also not a grand figure to look at.
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  Diogenes says he was slight in person, and that his statue in the Ceramicus was
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  nearly hidden by an equestrian statue beside it.
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  Carneades, no friend of the Stoics, called him Cryxippus, a pun on hiding,
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  and on a horse.
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  A philosopher almost covered up by a bronze horse.
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  When a man reproached him for skipping the lectures of Ariston,
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  who was drawing a crowd, Chrysippus answered, "If I had attended to the multitude I
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  should not have been a philosopher."
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  He could also be, let's be honest, a bit sure of himself.
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  When a man asked him to whom he should entrust his son, Chrysippus said,
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  "To me, for if I thought that there was any one better than myself,
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  I would have gone to him to teach me philosophy."
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  At drinking parties, Diogenes says, he behaved quietly, but his legs moved about,
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  so that a female slave once remarked, "It is only the legs of Chrysippus that are
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  drunk."
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  Even at rest, the runner's legs kept going.
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  How did it end?
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  Diogenes gives two accounts, and I'll give you both, and leave them unchosen.
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  Hermippus says that one day, teaching in the Odeion, Chrysippus was invited by his
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  pupils to a sacrifice.
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  He drank some sweet unmixed wine, was seized with giddiness,
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  and died five days later, at seventy three.
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  Others say he died of a fit of immoderate laughter, after seeing an ass eating figs,
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  and telling his old woman to give the ass unmixed wine to wash them down.
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  Two endings, one earnest, one absurd.
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  Diogenes doesn't settle it, and neither will I.
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  So what do the life and the passage say together?
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  A school begins with a man who walks and talks, Zeno, and is held together by a man
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  who endures, Cleanthes.
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  And then it needs the one who writes everything down, tests it,
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  rewrites it, and quotes everyone who might help.
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  A rival called that paper empty.
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  But a school that has to survive its founders needs someone willing to fill seven
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  hundred and five rolls, even if the prose is not perfect.
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  And remember what he said about himself in that Euripides line.
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  Happy in nearly everything, except where Cleanthes was concerned.
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  The great system builder knew he owed a debt to the slow old man he argued with.
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  That, to me, is the most Stoic thing in the story.
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  Not the number of books, but the repenting, and the stepping in to defend the old
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  man.
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  Today's passages come from C.
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  D.
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  Yonge's translation of Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers,
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  on Project Gutenberg, number 57342.
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  Next time, we leave Athens, and move to Rome, where a different kind of man opens
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  his letters with a ledger of lost hours.
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  Good morning.