ZENO OF CITIUM (335-263 B.C.) Founder of Stoic philosophy, bom
at Citium on Cyprus, probably of Phoenician ancestry. In 313 he
went to Athens to attend the Platonic Academy, but converted to
Cynicism, in which vein he wrote his earliest treatises. He
taught in the Stoa Poikile (Painted Porch) at the foot of the
Acropolis in Athens, where he drew many listeners. When
Antigonus Gonatas, king of Macedonia, invited hirn to his court
in Pelia, he dispatched a disciple instead of going in person,
breaking Plato's and Aristotle's tradition of serving tyrants.
Zeno's complete philosophical system borrowed physics from
Heraclitus and Aristotelian logic from Antisthenes and Diodorus
the Megaran, but it was his ethics, according to which virtue is
the only good and vice or moral weakness the only real evil,
that comforted many during the wars and tyrannies of the
successors of Alexander the Great,the late Roman Republic, and
the Empire. A protégé of the Scipios, Paenatius of Rhodes (ca.
150 B.C.), introduced Stoic phiio