Chris,
Virtually all philosophical books from the post-Aristotelian period have been lost; there's no reason to think that Zeno's Republic was specifically suppressed / burned / whatever because of it's argument about slavery. The summary piece you quote below doesn't attempt to provide one.
And Zeno's political thought is *very difficult* to reconstruct: compare two excellent recent scholarly treatments from Malcolm Schofield (The Stoic Idea of the City) and Andrew Erskine (The Hellenistic Stoa) which -- if memory serves, as I don't have either of them on my shelves -- draw quite different conclusions about the argument of this book.
The Stoics on slavery are also problematic: yes, they denied the Aristotelian category of natural slaves. But they also argued that everyone apart from "the wise man" (whom, they accepted, might never have existed, or might never exist, though Socrates, Diogenes the Cynic and, later, Zeno himself were sometimes considered to belong to this category) were properly regarded as slaves (and fools, and so on).
The Stoic argument (very roughly) was that bodily slavery didn't really matter because mental slavery was what really mattered, and that had no relationship to one's legal status as slave or free. And that argument played quite an important role (I think) in shaping early Christian attitudes to slavery, with the distinctive coexistence of occasional moral condemnation coupled with legal/political toleration of the institution.
Chris
On 15/8/04 12:37 pm, "Chris Doss" <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- 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...