Zeno of Citium

Zeno was a merchant of Phoenician descent from Citium in Cyprus. Around thirty, his ship carrying purple dye was wrecked near Athens. He wandered into a bookshop, read Xenophon's memoirs of Socrates, and asked where such a man might be found; the bookseller pointed to the Cynic Crates, who happened to be passing. He later said his shipwreck had been a prosperous voyage.

He learned Cynic self-sufficiency from Crates and logic and dialectic from the Academy and the Megarians, and around 300 BCE began teaching in the Painted Colonnade, the Stoa Poikile, beside the Athenian market, which gave the school its name. He divided philosophy into logic, physics and ethics, comparing them to the wall, the trees and the fruit of an orchard. The Athenians honoured his temperance and consistency with a statue and the keys to the city gates.

His central teaching: the universe is a living whole pervaded by reason, the Logos; human reason is part of it; therefore the good is to live in accord with nature, which is to live in accord with reason. Wealth, health and reputation are not goods but 'preferred indifferents'; the only good is virtue and the only evil is vice. It is said that when he fell and broke a toe, he struck the ground and said, 'I come, why do you call me?', then took his own life.