The Stoics
Cleanthes
Second head of the Stoa
c. 330–230 BC
No securely identified likeness survives.
Cleanthes of Assos arrived in Athens with almost nothing, having been a boxer, and paid for his education by hauling water in the dark hours. His contemporaries thought him slow. He was, by his own account, a vessel that took a long time to fill and then held what it was given.
He led the school for over thirty years after Zeno's death and pushed Stoic thought toward its physics and its theology. His Hymn to Zeus is the longest continuous piece of early Stoic writing to survive, and it reads less like doctrine than like prayer. At around ninety he stopped eating, and having started, declined to start again.
What he taught
The order you find in the world is not indifferent to you. Living well means falling into step with it rather than dragging against it.
Works
- Hymn to Zeus
- On Pleasure (lost)
Who it is for
Anyone who suspects they are the slow vessel, and wants the argument for persisting anyway.
Where to start reading
Stoicism (Ancient Philosophies)Stoicism (Ancient Philosophies)
The serious scholarly introduction. Sellars is a philosopher specializing in the ancient Stoics. This is the book to read after the practical introductions if you want to understand the school's full architecture (logic, physics, ethics) and its place in ancient thought. Concise, dense, definitive.
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