Not a Stoic but one of Zeno's teachers, Stilpo watched his city sacked and his family taken, and answered the conquering king that he had lost nothing of his own.
Stilpo led the Megarian school, a rival tradition to the Academy that specialised in logic and paradox. He belongs on a Stoic site for a specific reason: Zeno of Citium studied under him before founding the Stoa, and the line that made Stilpo famous states the Stoic position on possession before there was a Stoa to state it.
Calling him a Stoic is a common error and worth avoiding. He was a Megarian, and some of what he taught the Stoics rejected. What they took from him was a way of holding on to things.
In 307 BC Demetrius Poliorcetes took Megara. In the sack Stilpo lost his property, and according to the sources his wife and children as well. Demetrius, who admired him, offered to make good the losses and asked him to draw up a list of what had been taken.
Stilpo declined the offer. Nobody, he said, had carried off anything belonging to him. The learning was still there; the reason and the knowledge were untouched. Seneca, who retells the story three centuries later, gives it in the form it is usually quoted: everything that is mine, I carry with me.
It is easy to read this as coldness, and Seneca had to defend it against exactly that reading. The Stoic point is not that a sacked city is a matter of indifference in the ordinary sense of the word. It is that the things a tyrant can take and the things that make a person good are two separate categories, and that confusing them is what gives the tyrant his real power.
The sources also disagree about the details. Diogenes Laertius preserves several versions of Stilpo's life, and the exchange with Demetrius appears in more than one shape. The saying travelled further than the man.
Stilpo is where the two boxes are first drawn in a sentence. Everything on the far side of the line, the house, the goods, the city, the family, could be and was removed in a day. Everything on the near side went with him out of the ruins. The whole of the Stoic teaching on possession is a commentary on that answer.
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