The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

STOIC MASTERS AND THEIR WRITINGS 23
effect in shaping
though ultimately opposed
the form that Stoicism took. Even
to one and all of these
schools, Zeno learned and assimilated something from
each, and reproduced
it in his teaching. Although
repelled by the slovenly and sometimes offensive habits
and not less by the intellectual narrowness of the
Cynics, he, nevertheless, caught their spirit of a high
ethical ideal and a contempt for mere pleasure, and
based his own ethical system on the conception of the
Ideal wise man. Hence, Diogenes the Cynic could be
accepted by the Stoics as a pattern sage (along with
Socrates and Hercules and a few others) but it was
;
Diogenes without the tub. 1 From the Megarics, and
more especially from Stilpo, whose pupil he was, he
would at least acquire an interest
in Logic, and would
be sharpened by them in the practice of Eristic, for
which they were famous. He would learn from Stilpo,
further, the doctrine of Passionlessness or <x7ra0eia,
which that great Megaric shared with the Cynic school.
By the Academics he would be introduced, among other
things, to certain Platonic ethical notions, and to the
teaching of Heracleitus a teaching which, as we
know, he highly prized, accepting
it as the groundwork
of his own physical theorizing. He would learn from
the Aristotelians formal logic and metaphysics, no less
than natural science. Indeed, so fully did the various
Greek schools affect Zeno, that even in his own day
he was roundly accused of being a plagiarist or a mere
2
eclectic, devoid of originality. But this may simply
have meant that he had an open and receptive mind,
1 The Cynic influence is further considered in Chapter VII.
2
See Diogenes Laertius, vii, 20,