--- Chris Brooke <chris.brooke at magdalen.oxford.ac.uk> wrote: Zeno's Republic is certainly lost, but what's the evidence for thinking that it was burned because of its argument about slavery (whatever that was, which is difficult to reconstruct from what we do know about the text).
Chris --
Zeno of Citium (The Stoic) (c. 333- c. 262 BC) was a Hellenistic philosopher from Citium, Cyprus. Zeno was the son of a merchant and a student of Crates of Thebes. Zeno was, himself, a merchant until the age of 42, when he started a school. According to a Legend on one trip Zeno was shipwrecked and he somehow ended up in Athens. He met philosophers there and he fell in love with philosophy. He soon began studying under the philosophers such as Crates, Stilpon, Xenocrates, and others. When he asked a man working at a bookstore where men like Socrates could be found the man pointed at somebody walking down the street and said, "follow him". It was Crates, Zeno's first instructor. What we know of him mainly comes from later philosophers. It is known, however, that Zeno did not begin teaching on his own until late in life. Named for his teaching platform, the Painted Porch ("stoa" is Greek for "porch"), his teachings were the beginning of Stoicism. None of Zeno's works have survived; he is believed to have taught that tranquility can best be reached via indifference to pleasure and pain. Stoicism was the first philosophy in history to morally condemn slavery. Emancipation of slave makes their freedom of thought public, maybe also because Zeno was a slave for some time. Stoicism was important as it was adopted by many important Romans (Cicero, Seneca, Josephus, Marc Aurel...).
Some of Zeno's opinion:
The cosmos is a divine being with a soul.
Human beings are to live according to nature.
Man must control his emotions to remain indifferent to suffering.
Slavery violates natural law. It exists only where civil law and international custom fail to conform to natural law.
By natural law human beings are rational and thus have a power of self-government. Hence no human being should be governed by an external master.
Man-made Civil law and customary law ought to be reformed to be put in conformity with natural law. That is our moral duty.
The sun is a sphere of fire and the moon shines from reflected light.
Steel your sensibilites, so that life shall hurt you as little as possible.
Philosophy is like an orchard, with Physics as the soil and the trees, Logic as the fence guarding the orchard, and Ethics as the fruit of the trees.
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Live/Writer/ZenoCitium.htm
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