Cleanthes of Assos: The Boxer and Water Carrier Who Led the Stoics

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Cleanthes was born around 330 BC in Assos and arrived in Athens as a former boxer with four drachmas. He studied with Crates the Cynic and then Zeno, founder of Stoicism, attending lectures by day and hauling water from public wells for a gardener by night, which earned him the nickname the Well Water Collector. Suspicious that a man with no visible income looked so well fed, the authorities hauled him before the Areopagus. He called the gardener and the women whose meal he ground as witnesses, and the judges voted him 10 minae from the public treasury, which Zeno told him to refuse. Classmates called him the ass for his slowness, and he embraced it as praise for his endurance.

When Zeno died around 262 BC, Cleanthes became head of the school and led it for more than three decades, respected by Chrysippus and King Antigonus II, while still working with his hands. He introduced tonos, a physical tension holding all matter together, and argued the soul is physical pneuma, citing inherited traits and the way grief and injury affect body and mind. He saw the sun as the heart of a living cosmos, and some sources say he accused Aristarchus of impiety for setting the Earth in motion. His Hymn to Zeus holds that fate guides the willing and drags the unwilling. He lived to 99 or perhaps 101, and after fasting cured an ulcer he refused to resume eating and died.

• He rejected pleasure as contrary to nature because chasing it makes inner tension fluctuate.
• He added to Zeno's advice to live consistently that one must live consistently with nature.
• He theorized that panic and anxiety make the soul's fire lose heat and pressure, so the body wastes away.
• The Roman Senate later erected a statue of him in Assos.
• David Hume named a character Cleanthes in his dialogues to represent a rational, evidence-based view of the divine.