ZENO OF CITIUM

Zeno of Citium was a Greek thinker who founded the Stoic school of philosophy, which influenced the development of philosophical and ethical thought inHellenistic and Roman times.Zeno went to Athens c. 312 BCE and attended lectures by the Cynic philosophers Crates of Thebes and Stilpon of Megara, in addition to lectures at the Academy. Arriving at his own philosophy, he began to teach in the Stoa Poikile (Painted Colonnade), whence the name of his philosophy. None of his many treatises, written in harsh but forceful Greek, has survived save in fragmentary quotations.Zeno’s philosophical system included logic and theory of knowledge, physics, and ethics—the latter being central. He taught that happiness lay in conforming the will to the divine reason, which governs the universe. In logic and the theory of knowledge he was influenced by Antisthenes and Diodorus Cronus, in physics by Heracleitus.

ZENO’S PHILOSOPHY 

Zeno showed in his own doctrines the influence of earlier Greek attitudes. He was apparently well versed in Platonic thought, owing to his study at Plato’s Academy. He was responsible for the division of philosophy into three parts: logic, physics, and ethics. He also established the central Stoic doctrines in each part, so that later Stoics were to expand rather than to change radically the views of the founder. With some exceptions (in the field of logic), Zeno thus provided the following themes as the essential framework of Stoic philosophy:

• Logic as an instrument and not as an end in itself
• Human happiness as a product of life according to nature
• Physical theory as providing the means by which right actions are to be determined
• Perception as the basis of certain knowledge
• The wise man as the model of human excellence
• Platonic forms as the abstract properties that things of the same genus share—as being unreal 
• True knowledge as always accompanied by assent
• The fundamental substance of all existing things as being a divine fire, the universal principles of which are (1) passive (matter) and(2) active (reason inherent in matter)
• Belief in a world conflagration and renewal
• Belief in the corporeality of all things•Belief in the fated causality that necessarily binds all things
• Cosmopolitanism, or cultural outlook transcending narrower loyalties.

Stoics also believed that it was humankind’s obligation, or duty, to choose only those acts that are in accord with nature, all other acts being a matter of indifference.