LIFE OF ZENO.
I. Zeno was the son of Mnaseas, or Demeas, and a native of Citium, in Cyprus, which is a Grecian city, partly occupied by a Phœnician colony.
II. He had his head naturally bent on one side, as Timotheus, the Athenian, tells us, in his work on Lives. And Apollonius, the Tyrian, says that he was thin, very tall, of a dark complexion; in reference to which some one once called him an Egyptian Clematis, as Chrysippus relates in the first volume of his Proverbs: he had fat, flabby, weak legs, on which account Persæus, in his Convivial Reminiscences, says that he used to refuse many invitations to supper; and he was very fond, as it is said, of figs both fresh and dried in the sun.
III. He was a pupil, as has been already stated, of Crates. After that, they say that he became a pupil of Stilpon and of Xenocrates, for ten years, as Timocrates relates in his Life of Dion. He is also said to have been a pupil of Polemo. But Hecaton, and Apollonius, of Tyre, in the first book of his essay on Zeno, say that when he consulted the oracle, as to what he ought to do to live in the most excellent manner, the God answered him that he ought to become of the same complexion as the dead, on which he inferred that he ought to apply himself to the reading of the books of the ancients. Accordingly, he attached himself to Crates in the following manner. Having purchased a quantity of purple from Phœnicia, he was shipwrecked close to the Piræus; and when he had made his way from the coast as far as Athens, he sat down by a bookseller’s stall, being now about thirty years of age. And as he took up the second book of Xenophon’s Memorabilia and began to read it, he was delighted with it, and asked where such men as were described in that book