Zeno of Citium

Zeno came to Athens from Citium in Cyprus, a merchant of Phoenician descent, and lost his cargo at sea. The story he told afterwards was that the shipwreck was the making of him. Adrift in a strange city, he wandered into a bookseller's, read an account of Socrates, and asked where such men were to be found. The bookseller pointed at Crates the Cynic walking past.

He taught in the Stoa Poikile, the painted porch on the edge of the Athenian agora, and the school took its name from the building rather than the man. Everything he wrote is lost, including a Republic that scandalized later Stoics. What survives is the shape of the thing: that virtue alone is good, that externals are indifferent, and that a life goes well when it is lived in agreement with nature.