Zeno

And the Stoics too say that certain things were written by Zeno the first, which they do not readily permit the disciples to read, unless they have first given proof whether they philosophize genuinely.

And Zeno the Stoic, taking from Plato, and Plato from the barbarian philosophy, says that all good men are friends of one another.

And Zeno too, the founder of the Stoic school, says, in his book On the Republic, that one ought neither to make temples nor images;

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

And if you take delight in living with Greeks too, keep company with Socrates, with Zeno;

Plato said those things, Zeno said them, Chrysippus and Posidonius and a vast army of our school, so many and such men.

Hence arose that which Zeno named proegmenon, and on the contrary that which he named apoproegmenon, since he used, in a copious language, words yet made and new — which is not granted to us in this poor language;

'For as,' said he, 'no one in a royal court says that the king himself is, as it were, brought forward to dignity — for that is proegmenon — but those who are in some honour, whose rank comes nearest, so as to be second to the royal pre-eminence, so in life it is not those things which are in the first place, but those which hold the second place, that are named proegmena, that is, \"brought forward\";

As though, forsooth, he had learned this from Zeno — not to be in pain when he was in pain!

Zeno, however — to come now, Balbus, to your school — holds that the natural law is divine, and that it has the power of commanding what is right and forbidding the contrary.

Arcesilas pressed Zeno, since he himself said that all things that appeared to the senses were false, while Zeno said some appearances were false, not all;

Zeno, indeed, not only stung with abuse those of his own time — Apollodorus, Sillis, and the rest — but even said that Socrates himself, the parent of philosophy, was, using a Latin word, an Attic buffoon, and never called Chrysippus anything but Chrysippa.

Their chief, both in authority and in antiquity, the Socratic Aristippus, did not hesitate to call pain the highest evil.

For when you deny altogether that to be an evil which seems to me dreadful, I am caught, and long to know how that which I should reckon most wretched is not even an evil.

To this definition it is rightly added by Zeno that that opinion of a present evil be fresh.

Neither of these was strongly defended before Zeno;

Noble was the school of the Megarians, of which, as I see it written, the chief was Xenophanes, whom I just now named, then Parmenides and Zeno following him (and so by these they were called the Eleatic philosophers), afterward Euclides, a pupil of Socrates, of Megara, from whom those same were called Megarians, who said that that alone is good which is one and like and the same always;

was nothing then accomplished, that they were investigated, after Arcesilas — carping, as is supposed, at Zeno, who was finding nothing new but emending his predecessors by a change of words — while he wished to undermine Zeno's definitions, attempted to spread darkness over the clearest things?

475-491) decided that Emphyteusis was a contract sui generis, distinct from both locatio and venditio, and requiring for its validity, at least where the parties contracted themselves out of the rules generally applicable, to be reduced to writing, Cod.

’ Quae cum Zeno didicisset a nostris, ut in actionibus praescribi solet, de eadem re dixit alio modo, De Finibus, 5, 19.

A plaintiff whose intentio claimed less than he was entitled to was allowed by Zeno to obtain the full amount without instituting a new action, Inst.

In short, Zeno, defining the soul as a breath sown together with the body, instructs us in this manner:

these draw its origin from one quarter, those draw its departure off to another — according as either the prestige of Plato, or the vigour of Zeno, or the steadiness of Aristotle, or the stupor of Epicurus, or the gloom of Heraclitus, or the frenzy of Empedocles has persuaded them.

But it is divided into parts — now into two by Plato, now into three by Zeno, now into five and into six by Panaetius, into seven by Soranus, even into eight in the school of Chrysippus, even into nine in that of Apollophanes;

For Zeno defines this as the maker, who formed all things in their disposition;

If I contend on the score of modesty — behold, Pythagoras among the Thurians, Zeno among the Prienians, aim at tyranny:

Zeno of Elea, when asked by Dionysius what philosophy could offer, having answered, "Contempt of death," and being exposed unmoved to the tyrant's scourges, sealed his sentence to the death.

But Carneades, ignorant of no part of philosophy, and, as I learned from those who had heard him and especially from the Epicurean Zeno, who, though he dissented from him very greatly, yet admired him beyond all others, was of an incredible faculty and … " But why does Mnesarchus fret, why does Antipater fight it out with Carneades in so many volumes?

Polemo, now, Zeno and Arcesilas had attended assiduously.

And in these things, roughly, consisted the whole change and disagreement of Zeno from his predecessors.

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.

And Zeno the philosopher too wrote upon both the Iliad and the Odyssey, and about the Margites as well;

1 "Why then," says he, "did your Zeno, when he had promised someone five hundred denarii as a loan and had himself found him too little fit, persevere, though his friends advised him not to give, in lending it, because he had promised?

I shall not bring forward to you Socrates, Chrysippus, Zeno and the rest, great men indeed, indeed the greater because in the praise of the ancients envy does not stand in the way.

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.

When the wreck of his ship was announced, our own Zeno, hearing that all his goods had gone to the bottom, said:

For I think she would even bring a suit of ejectment against you, if she had any power of speech, on the ground that I had chosen to live with her—I who now praise Zeno, who, when he had lost everything in a shipwreck, uttered nothing ignoble, but said, "Well done, fortune, you are driving us into the threadbare cloak";

Yet that thin air will not bring it about that a man should listen to Zeno, or to Arcesilaus, or to Theophrastus, nor will the thick air make him seek victory at Nemea rather than at the Isthmus.

The Emperor Zeno however pronounces it repugnant to natural justice for one man to be molested for the debts of another.

For how could one surpass Gorgias, who dared to assert that nothing exists of the things that are, or Zeno, who ventured to prove the same things as possible and again as impossible, or Melissus who, although things in nature are infinite in number, made it his task to find proofs that the whole is one!

as I can tell you that Pythodorus son of Isolochus, and Callias, son of Calliades, became through that of Zeno;

Yes, said Zeno.

By all means, said Zeno.

Pythodorus said that Zeno answered with a smile:

Do we not know that the Eleatic Palamedes (Zeno) has such an art of speaking that the same things appear to his hearers to be alike and unlike, one and many, stationary and in motion?

he is a stranger from Elea, one of the followers of Parmenides and Zeno, and a real philosopher.

That Homer had one slave, Plato three, Zeno none—he with whom began the rigid and manly wisdom of the Stoics—is well enough agreed.

for, as Zeno says, even in the mind of the wise man, although the wound has healed, the scar remains.

Surely your own Stoics declare:

"The wise man will approach public affairs, unless something prevents him.

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