Wisdom from the Early Stoics, Zeno of Citium 16

The Athenians buried him in the Ceramicus and honored him in the decrees already cited above, adding their testimony of his goodness. Here is the epitaph composed for him by Antipater of Sidon:

Here lies great Zeno, dear to Citium, who scaled high Olympus, though he piled not Pelion on Ossa, nor toiled at the labors of Heracles, but this was the path he found out to the stars—the way of temperance alone.

Here too is another by Zenodotus the Stoic, a pupil of Diogenes:

Thou madest self-sufficiency thy rule,
Eschewing haughty wealth, O godlike Zeno,
With aspect grave and hoary brow serene.
A manly doctrine thine: and by thy prudence
With much toil thou didst found a great new school,
Chaste parent of unfearing liberty.
And if thy native country was Phoenicia,
What need to slight thee? came not Cadmus thence,
Who gave to Greece her books and art of writing?

And Athenaeus the epigrammatist speaks of all the Stoics in common as follows:

O ye who've learnt the doctrines of the Porch
And have committed to your books divine
The best of human learning, teaching men
That the mind's virtue is the only good!
She only it is who keeps the lives of men
And cities—safer than high gates and walls.
But those who place their happiness in pleasure
Are led by the least worthy of the Muses.

—Diogenes Laërtius, 7.29-30

IMAGE: Kerameikos Cemetery,  Athens