Cleanthes

And Zeno of Citium, who began the Stoic school, becomes a pupil of Crates.

Cleanthes, living in agreement with nature;

Wherefore Cleanthes too, in the second book On Pleasure, says that Socrates taught at every turn that the same man is both just and happy, and cursed the first man who divided the just from the advantageous, as having done an impious thing;

Cleanthes could not have been the very copy of Zeno if he had merely heard him;

And let us so address Jupiter, by whose helm this whole mass is steered, as our Cleanthes addresses him in most eloquent verses, which I am permitted to render into our own tongue after the example of Cicero, a most eloquent man.

11. "Lead me, O Father and Lord of the lofty sky, wherever you have pleased; there is no delay in obeying. I am here, ready. Suppose I were unwilling, I shall follow groaning, and shall suffer as a base man what I might have done as a good one. The Fates lead the willing, the unwilling they drag."

Cleanthes, again, who studied under Zeno together with the one I just named, at one time says the world itself is a god, at another gives this name to the mind and soul of the whole of nature, at another judges that the uttermost and highest heat, poured round about on every side, embracing and enclosing all things on the outside, which is called ether, is most surely a god;

This indeed Cleanthes shows by these arguments also — how great a force of heat is in every body:

Our own Cleanthes, indeed, said that the notions of the gods are formed in the minds of men from four causes.

When his fellow-pupil Cleanthes asked him what reasoning had drawn him from his opinion, he answered:

Did that which Alcibiades grieved at not consist of evils and vices of the mind?

There are those who think the one office of the consoler is to show that the evil is not an evil at all, as it pleases Cleanthes;

Who does not set this philosopher before Cleanthes, Chrysippus, and the rest of the later age, who, compared with him, seem to me of the fifth class?

What of Chrysippus — in how many matters does he disagree with his own teacher Cleanthes?

Cleanthes, who is as it were a Stoic of the greater clans, the pupil of Zeno, thinks that the sun rules and holds power over things:

you will be ashamed, I say, of that picture which Cleanthes used to paint quite aptly in words.

Although Cleanthes wrote an art of rhetoric, and Chrysippus too, but in such a way that, if anyone should long to be struck dumb, he need read nothing else.

"Although," says he, "what he received be not a benefit, yet he himself is ungrateful, because he would not have repaid it, even if he had received it.

1 Cleanthes uses an example of this sort:

’ Cleanthes too holds that the resemblance of parents in their children answers not only in the lineaments of the body but also in the marks of the soul — that is, in the mirror, namely, of character and of disposition and of the passions — and that the soul takes on likeness and unlikeness along with the body.

Whence, I ask you, do we answer the likeness of the soul too to our parents in our talents, according to the testimony of Cleanthes, if we are not also brought out from the soul's seed?

and who now praise Cleanthes, who drew water from the well for hire, by which he both kept himself alive and paid wages to his teachers.

For if this is truly connected—‘If you were born at the rising of the Dog-star, you will not die at sea’—and the first member in the connection, ‘You were born at the rising of the Dog-star,’ is necessary (for all true statements about the past are necessary, as it pleases Chrysippus, dissenting from his master Cleanthes, because they are unchangeable and the past cannot turn from true into false):

" Cleanthes of Pedasus, the philosopher of the Stoa, shows not a poetic theogony, but a true theology.

So that I formerly used to marvel at those of the philosophers who left their own fatherlands, with no one compelling them, and chose to live among others, and that too while declaring that one ought to honour one's fatherland and to hold it of the greatest account, and that to engage in public affairs and to take part in politics is for man according to nature.

In short, I ask whether Cleanthes and Chrysippus and Zeno lived by their own precepts.

Eager and prepared, I follow Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus—and yet not one of them entered public life, and not one of them failed to urge it on others.

Cleanthes gathers all these into spirit, which he affirms to be the permeator of the universe.