Essay · By Stephen Pasquini · Stoic Lives
Cleanthes arrived in Athens as a boxer with almost no money. To pay for philosophy lessons, he hauled water in people’s gardens all night and sat at Zeno’s feet all day. Classmates called him slow, and he laughed it off. Then he outlasted them all, led the Stoic school for more than thirty years, and wrote the most beautiful poem early Stoicism left behind. Here is who Cleanthes was, what he added to Stoicism, and why Seneca kept his words close. This is the third essay in our Stoic Lives series, which walks through the movement one person at a time.
Cleanthes at a glance
- Bornc. 330 BC, Assos, on the coast of what is now northwest Turkey
- Diedc. 230 BC, Athens, at a great age
- Before philosophyA boxer
- Day jobNight water-carrier, nicknamed “the Well-lifter”
- RoleSecond head of the Stoic school, after Zeno
- Best known forThe Hymn to Zeus
The boxer from Assos
Cleanthes, son of Phanias, came from Assos, a hilltop town above the sea in the region the Greeks called the Troad, not far from old Troy. (Aristotle had lived there for a few years, a generation earlier.) Our main ancient source, Diogenes Laërtius, says Cleanthes started out as a boxer. In R. D. Hicks’s 1925 translation, he says Cleanthes reached Athens “with four drachmas only.” That was a few days’ wages.
In Athens he found Zeno, the shipwrecked merchant who had started teaching on the Painted Porch, and he stayed. One ancient tradition says he studied first with Crates the Cynic, as Zeno had. For the bigger story of how the school began, see where Stoicism came from.
Water by night, philosophy by day
Cleanthes had to eat, and he had to pay his way. So, as Diogenes Laërtius puts it, “by night he used to draw water in gardens”, and by day he studied. The Athenians gave him a nickname for it: Phreantlês, the Well-lifter.
That double life once landed him in court. A strong young man with no visible income, attending lectures all day, looked suspicious, and he was called before the Areopagus, the old council of Athens, to explain how he lived. He brought in his witnesses: the gardener whose water he drew, and a woman who sold meal, whose grain he used to crush. The council acquitted him and voted him a gift of money. Zeno told him not to accept it.
Zeno’s training had a hard edge. Diogenes Laërtius even says Zeno made him hand over an obol, a small coin, out of his wages. Nobody is quite sure why; it may have been a teasing joke, with Zeno playing the master who takes a cut of a hired man’s pay. Cleanthes didn’t seem to mind. When a gust of wind blew his cloak open and showed he wore no shirt underneath, the crowd watching broke into applause.
“The Ass” and the second Heracles
Cleanthes was not quick. Ancient writers call him slow and plodding, and his fellow students called him “the Ass.” He took the name as a compliment. An ass carries loads, he said, and he alone was “strong enough to carry the load of Zeno.”
He also had the kind of strength that doesn’t show off. He liked to say his work could support a second Cleanthes as well as himself, and so people called him a second Heracles, after the hero of the twelve labors. And he was hard on himself in a way that was half comic. Once Ariston, a fellow student who later went his own way, found him scolding himself out loud and asked who he was scolding. His answer: “An old man with grey hairs and no wits.”
- Cynic and Stoic teachers
- Cleanthes
- Rival schools
- The king who admired him
Head of the school
Cleanthes studied with Zeno for about nineteen years. When Zeno died, around 262 BC, the slow student was the one who took over. He was not the obvious choice. Zeno had brighter pupils, and some of them, like Ariston of Chios, went off and taught their own versions of Stoicism. But Cleanthes had something rarer than brilliance. He had lived alongside Zeno, and he knew the teaching from the inside.
He led the school for more than thirty years, in a crowded field. Epicurus’s followers taught in their Garden across town, and in the Academy, Arcesilaus was arguing that nothing can be known for certain. Cleanthes held the line, and powerful people noticed. Antigonus Gonatas, king of Macedon, attended his lectures and once sent him a large gift of money. Asked by the king why he still drew water, Cleanthes answered that drawing water wasn’t all he did: he dug and watered gardens too, and all of it for philosophy’s sake.
He wrote about fifty books, on ethics, physics, logic, the gods and the philosopher Heraclitus. Almost all of them are lost. What we have are fragments quoted by later writers, and one poem.
What Cleanthes added to Stoicism
It would be easy to picture Cleanthes as a loyal note-taker who just repeated Zeno. He wasn’t. He gave Stoicism its warmth, its sense of awe, and some of its most lasting ideas:
The Hymn is what shows Cleanthes best. In it, Zeus is not a moody god on a mountain but the divine reason that holds the world together, and every human being shares in that reason. Wrong-doers, the poem says, are people who have lost sight of it, chasing fame, money or pleasure and getting the opposite of what they want. The poem ends by asking God to free people from ignorance. For Cleanthes, philosophy and prayer were the same act: seeing the world clearly and saying yes to it.
The poem had a long life. When the apostle Paul spoke to the Athenians in the Book of Acts, he quoted a line, “we are his offspring,” that is very close to a line in the Hymn, although it is usually traced to the poet Aratus, who is said to have studied with Zeno too. Centuries later the philosopher David Hume named one of the speakers in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Cleanthes, and gave him the job of arguing that the world shows the marks of a designing mind.
Cleanthes died in Athens around 230 BC. Several ancient writers say he was 99, others give different ages, and Diogenes Laërtius reports that in his last illness he chose to end his life. His student Chrysippus took over the school.
Where Cleanthes meets Seneca
Seneca lived nearly three hundred years after Cleanthes, and he speaks of him with real affection. In the letters Cleanthes turns up as a proof that anyone can become a philosopher, as a model student, and as the voice of the Stoic prayer.
In Letter 44, when his friend Lucilius worries that he comes from nowhere, Seneca reminds him where the great ones came from:
“Socrates was no aristocrat. Cleanthes worked at a well and hired himself out to water a garden. Philosophy didn’t find Plato already a nobleman; it made him one.”
In Letter 6 he holds up Cleanthes as proof that we learn more from a teacher’s life than from his lectures:
“Cleanthes could never have become the very image of Zeno if he had only heard his lectures.”
The most famous moment comes in Letter 107. Lucilius’s slaves have run off and he is rattled. Seneca answers with a few lines of Cleanthes, which he turns into Latin verse himself. They end:
“Yes: the willing soul Fate leads, but the unwilling drags along.”
That image, of a willing traveler and an unwilling one being hauled along the same road, is Stoic acceptance in a single line. A century later, Epictetus taught the same prayer, and it appears in the closing chapter of his Handbook.
Seneca also borrows Cleanthes’ view of why poetry hits harder than prose. From Letter 108:
“Just as our breath makes a louder sound when it passes through the long, narrow tube of a trumpet and bursts out of the flared end, so the tight rules of poetry make our meaning ring out more clearly.”
Elsewhere Seneca uses him as a reference point. In Letter 94 he reports Cleanthes’ middle position on practical advice: useful, but weak unless it grows out of real principles. In Letter 113 he points out that Cleanthes and his own student Chrysippus couldn’t even agree on what walking is, and uses that to claim his own freedom to think. And in Letter 33 he warns Lucilius not to hide behind “the opinion of Cleanthes” but to say something of his own. Cleanthes, whose own student argued with him openly, would probably have approved.
Want to see where Cleanthes fits among everyone who came before and after him? Our Stoicism at a glance timeline and map lay out the whole movement.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Cleanthes?
Cleanthes of Assos was a Greek philosopher, a former boxer, who studied with Zeno of Citium for about nineteen years and became the second head of the Stoic school in Athens, leading it from about 262 to 230 BC.
Why is Cleanthes called the water-carrier?
He was too poor to study without working, so he drew water in Athenian gardens at night and attended Zeno’s lectures during the day. The Athenians nicknamed him the Well-lifter.
What is the Hymn to Zeus?
A poem by Cleanthes praising Zeus as the divine reason that orders the universe and asking him to free humans from ignorance. It is the longest surviving piece of early Stoic writing.
What did Cleanthes teach?
That virtue is the only good, that we should live in agreement with nature, that a strong soul has the right “tension,” and that the universe is a living, rational whole whose ruling part is the sun.
Who was Cleanthes’ most famous student?
Chrysippus, who succeeded him as head of the school and built Stoicism into a full system of logic, physics and ethics.
Does Seneca mention Cleanthes?
Yes, often. Seneca quotes and translates him in Letters 6, 44, 107 and 108, and refers to his views in Letters 33, 94 and 113.
Next in the Stoic Lives series: Chrysippus, the brilliant, prickly student who told Cleanthes to just give him the doctrines and he would find the proofs himself, and who built Stoicism into a complete system.
Go deeper
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers
Diogenes Laërtius, whose Book 7 holds nearly every story about Cleanthes, in Pamela Mensch’s readable translation.
Seneca, who translated Cleanthes’ prayer into Latin and held him up as proof that anyone can become a philosopher.
Discourses and Selected Writings
Epictetus, whose Handbook’s final chapter opens with Cleanthes’ famous “Lead me” prayer.
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