Zeno of Citium

Zeno was born around 334 BCE in Citium, a city on the southern coast of Cyprus with a substantial Phoenician population; he is often described in ancient sources as Phoenician by descent and Greek by education. His father was a merchant, and Zeno took up the family trade.

According to the most widely repeated tradition (Diogenes Laertius), Zeno came to Athens around 312 BCE after being shipwrecked off the Piraeus while carrying a cargo of Phoenician purple dye. Wandering into an Athenian bookshop, he heard the proprietor reading from Xenophon's Memorabilia and asked where such men were to be found; the bookseller pointed at the passing figure of the Cynic philosopher Crates of Thebes, whom Zeno followed and made his first master.

He went on to study with the Megarian Stilpo and the Academic Polemo, and in time began teaching in his own right at the Stoa Poikile — the "Painted Porch" on the north side of the Athenian Agora, decorated with frescoes by Polygnotus. His followers came to be called Stoics after the place he taught. He declined an offer of Athenian citizenship but was honoured at his death around 262 BCE with a public funeral and a decree of the Athenian assembly.

Everything Zeno wrote is lost. Titles preserved by Diogenes Laertius include the Republic (a notorious work advocating a community without temples, courts, or currency), On Human Nature, On Life According to Nature, On Passions, On Duty, and On the Whole. What remains are fragments and doxographical summaries, collected in Von Arnim's Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta vol. I.

c. 334 BCE — born in Citium, Cyprus.
c. 312 BCE — shipwrecked near Athens; begins studying under Crates the Cynic.
c. 310–301 BCE — studies under Stilpo, Diodorus Cronus, and Polemo.
c. 301 BCE — begins teaching at the Stoa Poikile.
c. 262 BCE — dies in Athens; succeeded by Cleanthes.

Zeno founded what would become the dominant moral philosophy of the Greco-Roman world for the next six centuries. The Stoa he established at the Painted Porch outlived him by four hundred years in Athens and much longer in its diffusion through Rome. The defining Stoic formula — that the end of life is "to live in agreement with nature" — originates with him.

Athens's decree honouring him praised the example he set for the young; Antigonus II Gonatas of Macedon, who had been his student, built him a monument after his death.