Zeno was a Phoenician, born at Citium, in Cyprus, at some. time during the latter half of the
fourth century B.C. It seems probable that his family were engaged in commerce, and that
business interests were what first took him to Athens. When there, however, he became anxious
to study philosophy. The views of the Cynics were more congenial to him than those of any
other school, but he was something of an eclectic. The followers of Plato accused him of
plagiarizing the Academy. Socrates was the chief saint of the Stoics throughout their history;
his attitude at the time of his trial, his refusal to escape, his calmness in the face of death, and
his contention that the perpetrator of injustice injures himself more than his victim, all fitted in
perfectly with Stoic teaching. So did his indifference to heat and cold, his plainness in matters
of food and dress, and his complete independence of all bodily comforts. But the Stoics never
took over Plato's doctrine of ideas, and most of them rejected his arguments for immortality.
Only the later Stoics followed him in regarding the soul as immaterial; the earlier Stoics agreed
with Heraclitus in the view that the soul is composed of material fire. Verbally, this doctrine is
also to be found in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, but it seems that in them the fire is not to be
taken literally as one of the four elements of which physical things are composed.
Zeno had no patience with metaphysical subtleties. Virtue was what he thought important, and
he only valued physics and metaphysics in so far as they contributed to virtue. He attempted to
combat the metaphysical tendencies of the age by means of common sense, which, in Greece,
meant materialism. Doubts as to the trustworthiness of the senses annoyed him, and he pushed
the opposite doctrine to extremes.
" Zeno began by asserting the existence of the real world. 'What do you mean by real?' asked the
Sceptic. 'I mean solid and material. I mean that this table is solid matter.''And God,' asked the
Sceptic, 'and the Soul.' 'Perfectly solid,' said Zeno, 'more solid, if anything, than the table.''And
virtue or justice or the Rule of Three; also solid matter?''Of course,' said Zeno, 'quite solid.'" *
It is evident that, at this point, Zeno, like many others, was hurried by anti-metaphysical zeal
into a metaphysic of his own.
* Gilbert Murray, The Stoic Philosophy ( 1915), p. 25.