This Is How They Will Learn

Published: June 9, 2020, 5 a.m.

"It was said for all the genius that Socrates possessed, Plato, and Aristotle, and all the sages who learned from him 'derived more benefit from the character than from the words of Socrates.' So it was too for Zeno and Cleanthes, the two earliest Stoic philosophers. 'Cleanthes could not have been the express image of Zeno,' Seneca would write, 'if he had merely heard his lectures; he shared in his life, saw into his hidden purposes, and watched him to see whether he lived according t...