Lives of the Stoics 105
pher" ... 28. In fact he surpassed everyone in this form of virtue and
in gravity and, Yes by Zeus! in blessedness. For he died at the age of
ninety-eight, free of disease and healthy to the end. But Persaeus says
in his Ethical Studies that he died at the age of seventy-two and that he
came to Athens at the age of twenty-two. And Apollonius says that he
headed his school for fifty-eight years. This is how he died: on leaving
his school he stumbled and broke his toe; he struck the earth with his
hand and uttered the line from the Niobe/ "I am coming. Why do you
call me?" and immediately died by suffocating himself.
- ... Demetrius of Magnesia says in his Men of the Same Name that
his father Mnaseas often came to Athens as a merchant and brought back
many Socratic books to Zeno when he was still a boy; hence, he got a
good training while still in his homeland. 32. And that is how he came
to Athens and joined Crates .... They say that he swore by the caper,
as Socrates did by the dog.
But some people, including the followers of Cassius the sceptic, criticize
Zeno for many things, and first of all they say that he claimed, at the
beginning of his Republic, that general culture was useless; and second
that he said that all those who are not virtuous are hostile and enemies
and slaves and alien to each other, parents to children and brothers to
brothers relatives to relatives. 33. Again, in the Republic he claimed
that only virtuous men are citizens and friends and relatives and free
men, so that, in the eyes of the Stoics, parents and children are enemies,
since they are not wise. Similarly, in his Republic he takes the position
that wives are [held] in common and at about line 200 [he holds] that
they do not build temples or law courts or gymnasia in their cities. He
writes as follows about coinage: "they do not think that one should
produce coinage either for the sake of exchange or for the sake of foreign
travel." And he orders that men and women should wear the same clothes
and that no part [of the body] should be hidden. 34. In his work On the
Republic Chrysippus says that the Republic is [indeed] by Zeno. And he
wrote about erotic matters at the beginning of the book entitled Art of
Sexual Love; but he also writes similar things in the Diatribes.
That is the sort of thing [one finds] in Cassius, and also in [the works
of] the rhetor Isidor of Pergamum; he also says that the parts criticized
by the Stoics were excised by Athenodorus the Stoic who was entrusted
with the library in Pergamum; then they were restored when Athenodorus
was exposed and put in jeopardy. So much about the passages of his
work which have been marked as spurious ....
- There were many students of Zeno, but the well-known ones
- Of Timotheus, 787 Page.
