Cleanthes came from Assos in Asia Minor and arrived in Athens, by tradition, with four drachmas in his pocket, roughly a skilled labourer's daily wage. He had been a boxer.
He wanted to study under Zeno, and the fees and his living had to come from somewhere. So he worked at night: drawing water from the wells and watering gardens, heavy and badly paid work nobody else wanted. By day he sat in the colonnade at the lectures.
The Athenians found it suspicious. A man with no visible income who spent all day listening to philosophy smelled of theft. He was summoned before the council to explain what he lived on. He called the gardener and the woman whose flour he ground as witnesses, and the council wanted to award him a sum of money out of admiration. Zeno forbade him to accept it.
He studied under Zeno for nineteen years and succeeded him around 262 BC as head of the school, which he led for over thirty years.
His contemporaries found him slow-witted, and he did not contradict them. He called himself a writing tablet that takes impressions slowly but holds them deep. Other students were quicker; none of them led the school.
His Hymn to Zeus survives, the longest continuous early Stoic text we have. And from him comes the line Seneca later translated and made famous: fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling.
You have no money, no aptitude and no time. What you do have is the night, and the willingness to use it.
The tempting sorting is that he made it by working hard, and that is the motivational-poster version of this story.
What is actually being sorted is more exact. His poverty, his slowness and the Athenians' judgment lay outside him; he could not become cleverer and could not be born richer. What did lie with him was whether he would use those nights, and whether he would keep turning up while others advanced faster.
The sharpest test is the council's offer. He was permitted money, earned by admiration, and he did not take it. With that he kept his independence, which was the point of the whole exercise; whoever is paid to be a philosopher has become something else.
That he remained a student for nineteen years while learning slowest is the real story. He did not compare himself with the others. He came back.
Stories like this are easily used to say that anyone can do it if they want to, and that is not true. Cleanthes was healthy, strong enough to box and to haul, and he lived in a city where teaching could be heard free in the street. Whoever is ill, has children, or lives in a country without such colonnades does not have those nights.
The Stoics would agree, incidentally. They called health and opportunity preferred indifferents: not the good itself, but things that make it easier. That Cleanthes had them does not diminish his persistence, but it does stop his story from being a proof.
What would you give to learn what you really want to learn? And which circumstance are you currently using as the reason it cannot be done, while somewhere a cup stands ready?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions