Thinker · Stoics

Zeno of Citium

c.334 – 262 BC · Stoics · The Greeks

A shipwrecked merchant lost his whole cargo in the sea, wandered ashore into a bookshop, picked up a book about Socrates, and walked out on his way to founding the most influential practical philosophy in human history. Stoicism (virtue is the only good, everything else is indifferent, live in agreement with reason) outlasted Rome, outlasted Christianity's rise, and is being read on phones today. The catch: every single word Zeno wrote is gone. The founder of the philosophy that taught indifference to loss began by losing everything, and left behind not one sentence in his own voice. We know him entirely through other people's reports, the best of them written six hundred years after he died.