He was a man of a very investigating spirit, and one who inquired very minutely into everything; in reference to which, Timon, in his Silloi, speaks thus:
I saw an aged woman of Phoenicia, Hungry and covetous, in a proud obscurity, Longing for everything. She had a basket So full of holes that it retained nothing. Likewise her mind was less than a skindapsus.
He used to study very carefully with Philo, the dialectician, and to argue with him at their mutual leisure; on which account he excited the wonder of the younger Zeno, no less than Diodorus his master.
There were also a lot of dirty beggars always about him, as Timon tells us, where he says:
Till he collected a vast cloud of beggars, Who were of all men in the world the poorest, And the most worthless citizens of Athens.
And he himself was a man of a morose and bitter countenance, with a constantly frowning expression. He was very economical, and descended even to the meanness of the barbarians, under the pretence of economy.
If he reproved anyone, he did it with brevity and without exaggeration, and as it were, at a distance. I allude for instance to the way in which he spoke of a man who took exceeding pains in setting himself off, for as he was crossing a gutter with great hesitation, he said: “He is right to look down upon the mud, for he cannot see himself in it.” And when some Cynic one day said that he had no oil in his cruise, and asked him for some, he refused to give him any, but bade him go away and consider which of the two was the more impudent. He was very much in love with Chremonides; and once, when he and Cleanthes were both sitting by him, he got up; and as Cleanthes wondered at this, he said: “I hear from skillful physicians that the best thing for some tumours is rest.” Once, when two people were sitting above him at table at a banquet, and the one next him kept kicking the other with his foot, he himself kicked him with his knee; and when he turned round upon him for doing so, he said: “Why then do you think that your other neighbor is to be treated in this way by you?”
On one occasion he said to a man who was very fond of young boys, that: “Schoolmasters who were always associating with boys had no more intellect than the boys themselves.” He used also to say that the discourses of those men who were careful to avoid solecisms, and to adhere to the strictest rules of composition, were like Alexandrine money, they were pleasing to the eye and well-formed like the coin, but were nothing the better for that; but those who were not so particular he likened to the Attic tetradrachmas, which were struck at random and without any great nicety, and so he said that their discourses often outweighed the more polished styles of the others. And when Ariston, his disciple, had been holding forth a good deal without much wit, but still in some points with a good deal of readiness and confidence, he said to him: “It would be impossible for you to speak thus, if your father had not been drunk when he begat you;” and for the same reason he nicknamed him the chatterer, as he himself was very concise in his speeches. Once, when he was in company with an epicure who usually left nothing for his messmates, and when a large fish was set before him, he took it all as if he could eat the whole of it; and when the others looked at him with astonishment, he said: “What then do you think that your companions feel every day, if you cannot bear with my gluttony for one day?”
On one occasion, when a youth was asking him questions with a pertinacity unsuited to his age, he led him to a looking-glass and bade him look at himself, and then asked him whether such questions appeared suitable to the face he saw there. And when a man said before him once, that in most points he did not agree with the doctrines of Antisthenes, he quoted to him an apothegm of Sophocles, and asked him whether he thought there was much sense in that, and when he said that he did not know: “Are you not then ashamed,” said he, “to pick out and recollect anything bad which may have been said by Antisthenes, but not to regard or remember whatever is said that is good?” A man once said that the sayings of the philosophers appeared to him very trivial: “You say true,” replied Zeno, “and their syllables too ought to be short, if that is possible.” When someone spoke to him of Polemo, and said that he proposed one question for discussion and then argued another, he became angry, and said: “At what value did he estimate the subject that had been proposed?” And he said that a man who was to discuss a question ought to have a loud voice and great energy, like the actors, but not to open his mouth too wide, which those who speak a great deal but only talk nonsense usually do. And he used to say that there was no need for those who argued well to leave their hearers room to look about them, as good workmen do who want to have their work seen; but that, on the contrary, those who are listening to them ought to be so attentive to all that is said as to have no leisure to take notes.
Once when a young man was talking a great deal, he said: “Your ears have run down into your tongue.” On one occasion a very handsome man was saying that a wise man did not appear to him likely to fall in love: “Then,” said he, “I cannot imagine anything that will be more miserable than you good-looking fellows.” He also used often to say that most philosophers were wise in great things, but ignorant of petty subjects and chance details; and he used to cite the saying of Caphesius, who, when one of his pupils was laboring hard to be able to blow very powerfully, gave him a slap, and said that excellence did not depend upon greatness, but greatness on excellence. Once, when a young man was arguing very confidently, he said: “I should not like to say, O youth, all that occurs to me.” And once, when a handsome and wealthy Rhodian, but one who had no other qualification, was pressing him to take him as a pupil, he, as he was not inclined to receive him, first of all made him sit on the dusty seats that he might dirt his cloak, then he put him down in the place of the poor that he might rub against their rags, and at last the young man went away. One of his sayings used to be that vanity was the most unbecoming of all things, and especially so in the young. Another was that one ought not to try and recollect the exact words and expressions of a discourse, but to fix all one’s attention on the arrangement of the arguments, instead of treating it as if it were a piece of boiled meat, or some delicate eatable. He used also to say that young men ought to maintain the most scrupulous reserve in their walking, their gait, and their dress; and he was constantly quoting the lines of Euripides on Capaneus, that—
His wealth was ample. But yet no pride did mingle with his state, Nor had he haughty thought, or arrogance More than the poorest man.
And one of his sayings used to be that nothing was more unfriendly to the comprehension of the accurate sciences than poetry; and that there was nothing that we stood in so much need of as time. When he was asked what a friend was, he replied: “Another I.” They say that he was once scourging a slave whom he had detected in theft; and when he said to him: “It was fated that I should steal;” he rejoined: “Yes, and that you should be beaten.” He used to call beauty the flower of the voice; but some report this as if he had said that the voice is the flower of beauty. On one occasion, when he saw a slave belonging to one of his friends severely bruised, he said to his friend: “I see the footsteps of your anger.” He once accosted a man who was all over unguents and perfumes: “Who is this who smells like a woman?” When Dionysius Metathemenus asked him why he was the only person whom he did not correct, he replied: “Because I have no confidence in you.” A young man was talking a great deal of nonsense, and he said to him: “This is the reason why we have two ears and only one mouth, that we may hear more and speak less.”
Once, when he was at an entertainment and remained wholly silent, he was asked what the reason was; and so he bade the person who found fault with him tell the king that there was a man in the room who knew how to hold his tongue; now the people who asked him this were ambassadors who had come from Ptolemy, and who wished to know what report they were to make of him to the king. He was once asked how he felt when people abused him, and he said: “As an ambassador feels when he is sent away without an answer.” Apollonius of Tyre tells us that when Crates dragged him by the cloak away from Stilpo, he said: “O Crates, the proper way to take hold of philosophers is by the ears; so now do you convince me and drag me by them; but if you use force towards me, my body may be with you, but my mind with Stilpo.”
He used to devote a good deal of time to Diodorus, as we learn from Hippobotus; and he studied dialectics under him. And when he had made a good deal of progress he attached himself to Polemo because of his freedom from arrogance, so that it is reported that he said to him: “I am not ignorant, O Zeno, that you slip into the garden-door and steal my doctrines, and then clothe them in a Phoenician dress.” When a dialectician once showed him seven species of dialectic argument in the mowing argument, he asked him how much he charged for them, and when he said “a hundred drachmas,” he gave him two hundred, so exceedingly devoted was he to learning.
They say too, that he was the first who ever employed the word duty (καθῆκον), and who wrote a treatise on the subject. And that he altered the lines of Hesiod thus:
He is the best of all men who submits To follow good advice; he too is good, Who of himself perceives whate’er is fit.
For he said that that man who had the capacity to give a proper hearing to what was said, and to avail himself of it, was superior to him who comprehended everything by his own intellect; for that the one had only comprehension, but the one who took good advice had action also.
When he was asked why he, who was generally austere, relaxed at a dinner party, he said: “Lupins too are bitter, but when they are soaked they become sweet.” And Hecaton, in the second book of his Apothegms, says that in entertainments of that kind, he used to indulge himself freely. And he used to say that it was better to trip with the feet than with the tongue. And that goodness was attained by little and little, but was not itself a small thing. Some authors, however, attribute this saying to Socrates.
He was a person of great powers of abstinence and endurance, and of very simple habits, living on food which required no fire to dress it, and wearing a thin cloak, so that it was said of him:
The cold of winter, and the ceaseless rain, Come powerless against him; weak is the dart Of the fierce summer sun, or fell disease, To bend that iron frame. He stands apart, In nought resembling the vast common crowd; But, patient and unwearied, night and day, Clings to his studies and philosophy.
And the comic poets, without intending it, praise him in their very attempts to turn him into ridicule. Philemon speaks thus of him in his play entitled the Philosophers:
This man adopts a new philosophy, He teaches to be hungry; nevertheless, He gets disciples. Bread his only food, His best desert dried figs; water his drink.
But some attribute these lines to Posidippus. And they have become almost a proverb. Accordingly it used to be said of him: “More temperate than Zeno the philosopher.” Posidippus also writes thus in his Men Transported:
So that for ten whole days he did appear More temperate than Zeno’s self.
For in reality he did surpass all men in this description of virtue, and in dignity of demeanour, and, by Jove, in happiness. For he lived ninety-eight years, and then died, without any disease, and continuing in good health to the last. But Persaeus, in his Ethical School, states that he died at the age of seventy-two, and that he came to Athens when he was twenty-two years old. But Apollonius says that he presided over his school for forty-eight years.