Vitae philosophorum

King Antigonus to Zeno the philosopher, greeting.

While in fortune and fame I deem myself your superior, in reason and education I own myself inferior, as well as in the perfect happiness which you have attained. Wherefore I have decided to ask you to pay me a visit, being persuaded that you will not refuse the request. By all means, then, do your best to hold conference with me, understanding clearly that you will not be the instructor of myself alone but of all the Macedonians taken together. For it is obvious that whoever instructs the ruler of Macedonia and guides him in the paths of virtue will also be training his subjects to be good men. As is the ruler, such for the most part it may be expected that his subjects will become.

And Zeno’s reply is as follows:

Zeno to King Antigonus, greeting.

I welcome your love of learning in so far as you cleave to that true education which tends to advantage and not to that popular counterfeit of it which serves only to corrupt morals. But if anyone has yearned for philosophy, turning away from much-vaunted pleasure which renders effeminate the souls of some of the young, it is evident that not by nature only, but also by the bent of his will he is inclined to nobility of character. But if a noble nature be aided by moderate exercise and further receive ungrudging instruction, it easily comes to acquire virtue in perfection.

But I am constrained by bodily weakness, due to old age, for I am eighty years old; and for that reason I am unable to join you. But I send you certain companions of my studies whose mental powers are not inferior to mine, while their

So he sent Persaeus and Philonides the Theban; and Epicurus in his letter to his brother Aristobulus mentions them both as living with Antigonus. I have thought it well to append the decree also which the Athenians passed concerning him.

It reads as follows[*](Cf. Tarn, Antig. Gon. p. 309, especially note 106; he considers the decree, as we have it, a fusion of two genuine decrees, (1) voting a crown to Zeno in his life-time, (2) decreeing a public funeral after his death.):

In the archonship of Arrhenides, in the fifth prytany of the tribe Acamantis on the twenty-first day of Maemacterion, at the twenty-third plenary assembly of the prytany, one of the presidents, Hippo, the son of Cratistoteles, of the deme Xypetaeon, and his co-presidents put the question to the vote; Thraso, the son of Thraso of the deme Anacaea, moved:

Whereas Zeno of Citium, son of Mnaseas, has for many years been devoted to philosophy in the city and has continued to be a man of worth in all other respects, exhorting to virtue and temperance those of the youth who come to him to be taught, directing them to what is best, affording to all in his own conduct a pattern for imitation in perfect consistency with his teaching,

it has seemed good to the people— and may it turn out well—to bestow praise upon Zeno of Citium, the son of Mnaseas, and to crown him with a golden crown according to the law, for his goodness and temperance, and to build him a tomb in the Ceramicus at the public cost. And that for the making of the crown and the building of the tomb, the people shall now elect five commissioners