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Updated: May 24, 2025
Though the rhetoric of Cleanthes may be admired, its irrelevancy to the point at issue must be admitted. Wandering still further into the region of declamation, he works himself into a passion: "You alone, or almost alone, disturb this general harmony. You start abstruse doubts, cavils, and objections: You ask me what is the cause of this cause? I know not: I care not: that concerns not me.
It is reported that Cleanthes on that struck his foot on the ground, and repeated a verse out of the Epigonæ: Amphiaraus, hear'st thou this below? He meant Zeno: he was sorry the other had degenerated from him.
After this he slept so soundly, that he was heard to snore by those that were without. About midnight, he called up two of his freedmen, Cleanthes, his physician, and Butas, whom he chiefly employed in public business. Him he sent to the port, to see if all his friends had sailed; to the physician he gave his hand to be dressed, as it was swollen with the blow he had struck one of his servants.
In matters of religion I submit to the rules of the high-priests, T. Coruncanius, P. Scipio, and P. Scævola; not to the sentiments of Zeno, Cleanthes, or Chrysippus; and I pay a greater regard to what C. Lælius, one of our augurs and wise men, has written concerning religion, in that noble oration of his, than to the most eminent of the Stoics: and as the whole religion of the Romans at first consisted in sacrifices and divination by birds, to which have since been added predictions, if the interpreters of the Sibylline oracle or the aruspices have foretold any event from portents and prodigies, I have ever thought that there was no point of all these holy things which deserved to be despised.
Cleanthes had good sense, a great memory, and a constitution capable of the closest application: in a word, there was no profession in which Cleanthes might not have made a very good figure; but this won't satisfy him; he takes up an unaccountable fondness for the character of a line gentleman; all his thoughts are bent upon this, instead of attending a dissection, frequenting the courts of justice, or studying the Fathers.
He then enumerates Socrates, and Zeno, and Cleanthes, and some others of the same sort; and, after all, he adds himself to them, which is the most wonderful thing of all that he says, and pronounces Alexandria to be happy, because it hath such a citizen as he is in it; for he was the fittest man to be a witness to his own deserts, although he hath appeared to all others no better than a wicked mountebank, of a corrupt life and ill discourses; on which account one may justly pity Alexandria, if it should value itself upon such a citizen as he is.
I will say nothing of the arts, nothing of philosophy, of eloquence, of poetry, of war: O my brethren, hers is the glory which must shine forever in perfected letters, by which He we go to find and proclaim will be made known to all the earth. The land I speak of is Greece. I am Gaspar, son of Cleanthes the Athenian.
In spite of this vagueness his view is unitary, and the unitary conception is continued by the Stoics, its best Stoic expression being found in the famous hymn of Cleanthes to Zeus: "Nothing occurs on earth apart from thee" and "We are thy offspring."
Now the duty of a comforter is, to remove grief entirely, to quiet it, or draw it off as much as you can, or else to keep it under, and prevent its spreading any further, and to divert one's attention to other matters. There are some who think, with Cleanthes, that the only duty of a comforter is to prove that what one is lamenting is by no means an evil.
But with regard to banishment, if we examine the nature of things, not the ignominy of the name, how little does it differ from constant travelling! in which some of the most famous philosophers have spent their whole life, as Xenocrates, Crantor, Arcesilas, Lacydes, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Antipater, Carneades, Panætius, Clitomachus, Philo, Antiochus, Posidonius, and innumerable others, who from their first setting-out never returned home again.
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