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Simultaneously he had been entrusted with the usual honorific
offices and he had to bear the self-understood obligations of undertaking
various grants, which were usual in those times and by which
the needs of public education were met. In this sense we can also assume
him to have been the honorary president of the Gymnasion of Philadelphia.
Regarding his life, that is mainly regarding his professional plans,
undertakings and successes, we are well informed through his correspondence
which was discovered in 1915 in the basement of an ancient
house in Philadelphia. It is a matter of over a thousand seperate documents
of which most are with precise dates, examples of an activity
covering a decade and which are of the greatest importance for us, for
our knowledge of the economic side of Hellenistic life. Occasionally
and by chance we learn of his intellectual interests or about his personal
affairs as, for instance, in the case of a dangerous hunting expedition of
Zeno which - obviously under instructions - he sets out poetically, and
is included in the correspondence.
The tendency for the development of the Greek colonies is expressed
for the most part in the form of prosaic plans and calculations, as, e.g.,
the proposed improvement of the soil for better yields in cultivation
of arable land, through the irrigation schemes of the expert Cleon or
regarding the spreading of the institution of Greek baths in the land of
"water-shy" Egypt, from the revenue accounts of the many public
baths, from the bathers taxes, from the water charges of the city, or
from the salaries of the staff of the baths.
We are obliged to content ourselves also regarding our knowledge
relative to active athletic movement, such as hunting, horse racing,
through almost exclusively chance notes. We do not hesitate to consider
this, rather than the contrary, as silent proof of a self-understood
general sports movement. Apart from this, athletic events were not
normally annotated in ink on papyri. but incised with a chisel on stone.
Thus in Zeno's correspondence we only once find personal information
regarding the victory of a new youth during the Ptolemaic Games at
the Hiera Nesos (Sacred Isle) in cojunction with other personal news.
Even the Gymnasion and the Palaestra, the existence and function of
which attract our special attention, are referred to for the most part
only in conjuction with professional and administrative matters.
Referrence has already been made to the father of Pyrrhon who
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