No one knows what caused the wreck. Was it a storm? Pirates? Human error? Does it matter? Zeno lost everything—ship and cargo—in a time before insurance and venture capital. It was an irreplaceable fortune. Yet the unlucky merchant would later rejoice in his loss, claiming, “I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered shipwreck.” For it was the shipwreck that sent Zeno to Athens, on the path to creating what would become Stoic philosophy.
There are, like the origin stories of all prophets, some conflicting accounts of Zeno’s early life, and his shipwreck is no exception. One account claims that Zeno was in Athens already when he learned of his cargo’s demise and said, “Well done, Fortune, to drive me thus to philosophy!” Still others hold that he had already sold the cargo in Athens when he took up the pursuit of philosophy. It’s also quite possible that he had been sent to the city by his parents to avoid the terrible war between Alexander the Great’s successors that ravaged his homeland. In fact, some ancient sources report that he possessed an estate and maritime investments worth many millions at the time of his arrival in Athens. Yet another source records that Zeno arrived in 312 BC, at the age of twenty-two, the very year that his birthplace was razed and its king was killed by an invader.
Of all the possible origins for a philosophy of resiliency and self-discipline, as well as indifference to suffering and misfortune, an unexpected disaster rings the most true—whether or not it fully wiped out Zeno and his family financially. A shipwreck might just as easily have driven Zeno to an ordinary life as a land-based merchant, or, depriving him of his family, it could have driven him to drink or destitution. Instead, it was something he used—it was a call he decided to answer, spurring him to a new life and a new way of being.
This ability to adapt was a survival trait well suited to the times. The world of Zeno’s boyhood was one of chaos. In 333 BC, the year after he was born in Kition, a Greek city on the island of Cyprus, Alexander the Great liberated the country from two centuries of Persian rule. From then on, Zeno’s home was a valuable chess piece on this shifting board of broken empires, one that changed hands many times.
His father, Mnaeseas, was forced to literally navigate this chaos, as he traveled the seas in the family trade. There would have been blockades to run, bribes to pay, and enemy lines to avoid as he sailed from Cyprus to Sidon, Sidon to Tyre, Tyre to the Piraeus, the great port city outside Athens, and back again. Yet he seems to have been a loving father who made sure to bring home many books to his son, including those about Socrates.
It was likely never a question of whether Zeno would enter the family trade and follow his father to the sea, trading Phoenician dye, dreaming of adventure and riches. We’re told he was tall and lean, and that his dark complexion and bearing earned him the epithet “an Egyptian Vine.” In his later years, he would be described as thick-legged, flabby, and weak—attributes that caused him some awkwardness and social shyness as he aged and adjusted to life on land.
For all the uncertainty of the conditions of Zeno’s arrival in Athens, we know what the city was like when he arrived. Athens was a bustling commercial center with twenty-one thousand citizens, half as many foreign nationals, and a staggeringly large slave population, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The entire city was turned toward business, ruled by literate elites whose success and education allowed them time to explore and debate ideas that we are still talking about today. It was fertile ground for the awakening that was to come for Zeno. In fact, we even know exactly where this awakening happened—a surprisingly modern place: a bookstore.
One day, Zeno found himself taking a break from the fray of business, browsing titles in a bookshop, looking for something to read, when he learned that a talk had been scheduled for that day. Taking his seat, he listened to the bookseller read a medley of works about Socrates, the philosopher who had been put to death in Athens a century before and whose ideas Zeno’s father had introduced him to as a boy.
On one of his voyages before his shipwreck, perhaps inspired by a similar trek that Socrates had made, Zeno consulted an oracle about what he should do to live the best life. The oracle’s response: “To live the best life you should have conversation with the dead.” It must have struck him there in that bookstore, possibly the same one his father had shopped in years before, as he listened to the words of Socrates read aloud and brought to life, that he was doing precisely what the oracle had advised.
Because isn’t that what books are? A way to gain wisdom from those no longer with us?
As the bookseller read from the second book of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Zeno was hearing Socrates’s teachings as they had been conducted in those very streets just a few generations before. The passage that struck him most was “The Choice of Heracles,” itself a story of a hero at a crossroads. In this myth, Heracles is forced to choose between two maidens, one representing virtue and the other vice—one a life of virtuous hard work, the other of laziness. “You must,” Zeno would have heard the character Virtue say, “accustom your body to be the servant of your mind, and train it with toil and sweat.” And then he heard Vice offer a very different choice. “Wait a minute!” she cries. “Don’t you see what a long and hard road to the joy she describes? Come the easy way with me!”
Two roads diverge in the wood, or, rather, in a bookstore in Athens. The Stoic chooses the hard one.
Approaching the bookseller, Zeno asked the question that would change his life: “Where can I find a man like that?” That is: Where can I find my own Socrates? Where can I find someone to study under, as Xenophon had under that wise philosopher? Who can help me with my choice?
If Zeno’s misfortune had been to suffer that terrible shipwreck, his luck was more than made right for having walked into that bookshop, and made doubly good when in that moment, Crates, a well-known Athenian philosopher, happened to be passing by. The bookseller simply extended his hand and pointed.
You could say it was fated. The Stoics of later years certainly would have. The hero had suffered a great loss, and because of it crossed a threshold to find his true teacher. At the same time, it was the choice that Zeno made—to go into the bookstore after his terrible loss, to sit and listen to the bookseller, and, most important, to not be content to leave the words he had heard there at that. No, he wanted more. He demanded more answers, demanded to be taught more, and it’s from that impulse that Stoicism would be formed.
Crates of Thebes, like Zeno, was the son of a wealthy family and heir to a large fortune. From Diogenes Laërtius we learn that after Crates watched a performance of the Tragedy of Telephus—the story of King Telephus, son of Heracles, wounded by Achilles—he gave his money away and moved to Athens to study philosophy. There he became known as the “door-opener,” Diogenes wrote, “the caller to whom all doors fly open” of those eager to learn from the great philosopher.
When the student is ready, the old Zen saying goes, the teacher appears. Crates was exactly what Zeno needed.
One of Crates’s first lessons was intended to cure Zeno of his self-consciousness about his appearance. Sensing that his new pupil was too worried about his social status, Crates assigned him the task of carrying a heavy pot of lentil soup across town. Zeno tried to sneak the pot through town, taking back streets to avoid being seen doing such a humiliating task.* Tracking him down, Crates cracked the pot open with his staff, spilling the soup all over him. Zeno trembled with embarrassment and tried to flee. “Why run away, my little Phoenician?” Crates laughed. “Nothing terrible has befallen you.”