The Garden Door

by Antiochus of Ascalon, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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There is one question my pupils always ask, and the clever ones ask it first. Cicero asked it in writing. In the fourth book of On Ends he turns to Cato and lists the old hearers of Plato, Speusippus, Aristotle, Xenocrates, Polemon, Theophrastus. They had, he says, a doctrine that was full and finished. Why then did Zeno, who had heard Polemon, part company with him and with all those before him? Cicero meant it against the Stoics, and he meant it against me as well. If I am right that Zeno kept the teaching of Plato's successors and only changed its words, then I have to explain why Zeno walked out of the Academy, set up in a public colonnade on the other side of the city, and called what he taught there by another name.

Before I answer I will tell you something I am not proud of. For years I used this question myself, as a weapon.

I was Philo's pupil then, and a loyal one. I defended suspension of judgement in the Academy, the same position Arcesilaus and Carneades had held before me, and I defended it well. When a Stoic visitor told us that his school had the true criterion, the impression that grasps its object, I would ask him where his founder had learned his trade. In the Academy, under Polemon. And then I asked him why Zeno had left, if the Academy had been teaching anything worth staying for. The question made the Stoic look like a runaway pupil who had set up a stall outside his master's door and sold cheap copies. I enjoyed it. It is a good question for a sceptic, because it asks a dogmatist to explain a fact about a man's life, and nobody can fully explain a man's life.

So I know what the question can do, and I have used it on others. Now that I am on the other side I owe it a better answer than the one I used to demand. Here it is.

I. What we know

We must start with the facts, and there are not many of them.

Diogenes Laertius, who collected everything and judged almost nothing, says that Zeno came to Athens from Citium, a Phoenician town on Cyprus. He read Xenophon's memoir of Socrates in a bookshop, asked where such men were to be found, and the bookseller pointed at Crates the Cynic, who was walking past: "Follow that man." He followed. Later, Diogenes says, he heard Stilpo the Megarian, and Xenocrates for ten years, on the authority of a certain Timocrates, and Polemon as well. The ten years with Xenocrates are hard to fit into the dates. I will not build anything on them. Polemon, though, is certain. Varro, speaking for me in the Academica, says plainly that Zeno and Arcesilaus both heard Polemon, and heard him often (Polemonem audiverant assidue Zeno et Arcesilas). They were fellow pupils in the same room, under the same head of the Academy, in the years when the Academy still taught what Plato's own hearers had taught.

Diogenes also keeps a remark of Polemon's. I value it more than everything else written about Zeno. "You slip in by the garden door, Zeno, I know you do. You steal my doctrines and give them a Phoenician make-up."

People quote this against Zeno, and they are right to. Polemon is calling him a thief. But think about what a thief is. A man cannot steal what does not belong to someone else. When Polemon complains that his doctrines are being carried off, he is telling us that they were his doctrines, and that he recognised them when they came back to him in a foreign dress. He did not say, "You have invented something strange, Zeno, and I do not know what it is." He said, "That is mine." The man who knew the Old Academy best, because he was its head, looked at the beginnings of Stoicism and saw his own teaching with Phoenician paint on it.

This is the first half of my answer, and it is not a small half. When people ask why Zeno left the Academy, they assume he took nothing with him. The one witness who was there says he took a great deal, and took it without asking.

II. What he changed

Polemon's remark does not settle the matter, and I will not pretend that it does. A man may steal another man's silver and melt it down. What comes out of the furnace may be silver still, and it may be a different object altogether. The real question is what Zeno did to what he took.

Here I must go to Varro's account, because Varro sets out my own reading of the history, and I will defend it as mine. He says that Zeno corrigere conatus est disciplinam: he tried to correct the system. He did not try to overturn it, refute it or replace it. Correction is work done on something that already exists. After Varro has finished, Cicero has himself sum up my view in the same words: what the Stoics taught should be counted as a correction of the Old Academy rather than as any new system (correctionem veteris Academiae potius quam aliquam novam disciplinam). That is my claim, and I put it in that form on purpose.

What, then, were the corrections? Varro gives them in order, and I will give them in order too, because the order is honest. It begins with what is plainly a matter of words and moves towards what is not.

First, ethics. The Old Academy and the Peripatetics had said that virtue is the chief good, but that health, strength, friends and a sufficiency of means are goods as well. They are lesser goods and bodily goods, but goods. Zeno said that virtue alone is good. The rest he did not throw away. He sorted it: some things, he said, are to be valued more and some less, some to be taken and some refused. Varro's comment on this, and mine, is that Zeno changed it non tam rebus quam vocabulis: not so much in substance as in vocabulary. The Old Academy called health a good. Zeno called it a thing preferred and to be chosen. Both told the sick man to seek a doctor. Both told the healthy man not to sell his honesty for his health. When you go through the cases one by one, the two schools tell a man to do the same thing in nearly every one. A doctrine is tested by what it tells a man to do. If two doctrines command the same actions under different names, they are one doctrine, and the quarrel is about the names.

Then the further corrections. Zeno put all the virtues in reason, where the Old Academy had allowed some virtues to belong to the habits of the irrational part of the soul. He held that the emotions are judgements and voluntary, not movements of a separate part of the soul that reason must tame. In physics he refused the fifth substance that some of the older philosophers had added to the four elements, and made fire the stuff of mind. And in the theory of knowledge he gave the criterion a sharper form: an impression of a particular kind, which comes from what is and is stamped by it so that it could not have come from what is not. When a man assents to an impression of that kind, he has grasped his object.

I have now listed six or seven corrections. I could stop and say, "All verbal," and many of my followers would be content. But I know the arguments on the other side better than most men who have made them, and I will not say it. That would be the very fault I accuse Arcesilaus of: finding in a text what the argument needs and calling it the tradition.

III. Where Zeno was not only renaming

So here is the concession, and I make it in full.

The claim that the emotions are judgements is not a matter of words. The Old Academy and Aristotle divided the soul. There is the reasoning part and there is a part that hungers and fears and rages, and virtue in that second part is a training, as a horse is trained. On that view, a good man may still feel the old animal start up in him when a ship lurches, and he masters it. Zeno said there is no such second part. The lurch of fear is the mind itself assenting too quickly to the thought that something bad is happening, and a sage would not assent. These are two different accounts of what a man is. A teacher who holds the first will train a boy's habits before he argues with him. A teacher who holds the second will argue with him from the start. They will run their schools differently, and their pupils will be different men.

The ethical correction is not entirely verbal either, whatever I said a moment ago. I hold to "not so much in substance as in vocabulary," and I chose the words not so much with care. A change in vocabulary that a school insists on for long enough stops being only a change in vocabulary. Zeno said health was not a good. His followers took him at his word and went on to say, as a point of pride, that the wise man is as happy on the rack as at his own table, and just as happy. That sentence is not true. No one believes it, and I think Zeno himself would have winced to hear it said in the open air. It is a paradox that grows out of a renaming. The vocabulary went into men's mouths and then into their judgements. I have spent a good part of my teaching undoing it. I say that the virtuous man is happy, and that the Stoics are right that virtue is enough for that. But I also say that the virtuous man who is healthy and has friends and enough to live on is happier, with the fullest happiness a human life can have. I have argued that elsewhere and will not repeat it here. I mention it only so that you know I do not swallow Zeno whole. I correct his correction where it overshot.

So the question becomes: does a corrector who sometimes overshoots, and on one point about the soul goes his own way, still belong to the house he was correcting? Or did he found a new one?

My answer is that he belongs to it. My reason is the criterion of truth, and that question governs everything else.

Lucullus, speaking for me in the Academica, reports me as holding that the two chief concerns of philosophy are the criterion of truth and the end of human life. Take the end first. Polemon's writings, as Cicero admits in his reply to Lucullus, held that the end is to live honourably while enjoying the things nature first commends to a man. Cicero adds, a little sourly, that I approved of Polemon above all others. I do. Put Zeno's account of the end beside Polemon's: to live in agreement with nature, choosing what is natural and refusing what is against it, with virtue governing the choices. These are not two theories of the end. They are one theory, stated once by a man who called the natural things goods and once by a man who would only call them preferred.

Then the criterion. Did Polemon teach that a man can know? Yes. He taught his doctrine of the end as a thing known, not as a likelihood, and so had Xenocrates and Speusippus before him. None of them sat in the garden of the Academy and told the young that nothing can be grasped. Zeno sharpened the account of how knowing happens. That is a correction in the strictest sense: the older men said knowledge is possible and Zeno said precisely how. A man who explains how the thing his teachers believed in actually works has not left his teachers. He has done the work they left undone.

On the two concerns that matter most, then, Zeno stands with Polemon. On the nature of the soul he went his own way, and on the names of goods he went too far. That is a quarrelsome pupil. It is not a new school.

IV. Why he left the room

Now I come to the question as it was put to me, which I have so far answered only indirectly. If all this is true, why did he leave?

I must say first that I do not know. Nobody knows. Zeno left no account of his reasons that has come down to us. Diogenes gives anecdotes, and anecdotes about a man's motives are the cheapest kind of evidence there is. When I was a sceptic I would have pressed this point hard: you cannot explain the departure, so you cannot claim it means nothing. That is fair. I will tell you what I think and say plainly that I think it, as an honest witness says where he saw and where he only heard.

A school is not a doctrine. A school is a garden, a room, a list of heads in succession and a group of men who sit at the head's feet. Polemon was head and was alive. After him the headship would pass to whom the school chose, and it passed, in fact, to Crates of Athens and then to Arcesilaus. A man of Zeno's age and force of mind, with corrections he believed were important, could not teach them as the head of the Academy while Polemon lived, and might never teach them there at all. He could stay and murmur, or he could go and teach. He went to the Painted Colonnade in the marketplace, which any man could walk into, and taught there.

This is what pupils with something to say have always done. Aristotle did not become head of the Academy either. He taught in the Lyceum, and nobody concludes from the fact that he had a different garden that he had heard nothing in Plato's. In my reading the Peripatetics and the Old Academy agreed in substance and differed in names, and Varro says as much for me in the Academica. What Zeno did was what Aristotle had done: he took what he had learned, set it in order as he judged it should be ordered, and taught it under his own roof. Where a man teaches tells you something about his career. It does not tell you whose doctrine he is teaching.

That is the second half of my answer, and I hold it with less confidence than the first. Polemon's complaint is evidence. My account of Zeno's motives is a reasonable guess. You should keep the two apart in your minds, as I am keeping them apart in mine.

V. The harder objection

I have answered the question the clever pupils ask. The cleverest ones ask a second, which is harder, and I want to finish with it because I think it decides the matter.

It goes like this: "You say the sceptical Academy betrayed Plato and the Stoics preserved him. But Zeno left Polemon's Academy, which on your own account was not sceptical at all. It was the Old Academy, still teaching doctrine. So Zeno's departure cannot be evidence that scepticism was a betrayal, because scepticism had not yet happened. If he quarrelled with anyone, he quarrelled with the dogmatists. You have used a fact about the Old Academy to accuse the New."

That is correct, and I accept it without reserve. I have never argued that Zeno left because the Academy had turned sceptical. He left before it turned. His going is no evidence against Arcesilaus.

But think about what happened next, because that is the real evidence, and the question about Zeno has kept it out of sight.

Two men sat in Polemon's room and heard him often. One of them went out by the garden door with Polemon's teaching under his cloak, dressed it in Phoenician colours, and taught it in the marketplace. The other stayed. He became head of the Academy, sat in Polemon's chair in Polemon's garden, and taught that nothing can be grasped and that the wise man will withhold assent from everything.

And whom did he fight? Cicero tells us, in his own person in the Academica: Arcesilaus, he says, cum Zenone omne certamen instituit. His whole contest was with Zeno. Cicero adds, and he is generous here, that Arcesilaus did this not from obstinacy or love of winning but because of the obscurity of things, the same obscurity that had brought Socrates to confess his ignorance, and Democritus and Anaxagoras and Empedocles before him.

I will speak to Arcesilaus directly now, since he is here with us in this Academy and has every right to answer.

Arcesilaus, I grant what Cicero grants. You were not obstinate. You were serious, and you were moved by something real: Socrates saying he knew nothing, and the dialogues that end with no answer and the young man going home more puzzled than when he came. I have felt that pull myself. I taught your arguments for longer than some men teach anything, and I taught them because I believed them. You can be wrong and serious at the same time. I know, because I was.

But look at the shape of your career. You did not argue against Polemon. You could not, because you sat in his chair, and you would have had to argue against the room you taught in. So you argued against Zeno. You took as your enemy the criterion Zeno had drawn out of what Polemon taught, and you spent your life showing that no impression is so stamped by what is that it could not have come from what is not. Every argument you made was an argument against a doctrine of knowledge, and the doctrine you attacked was the one Zeno carried out of Polemon's garden. Then you went back into that garden and called what was left the authentic Plato.

Which of you inherited Polemon? The one who took his teaching and changed its clothes, or the one who kept his garden and emptied it? You say the house is the inheritance. I say the doctrine is. Polemon, when he complained of the thief at the garden door, agreed with me. He did not complain that Zeno had taken a room. He complained that Zeno had taken his teaching.

VI. The charge turned back

Cicero, who has the last word on almost everything because he outlived the rest of us and wrote it all down, has one more thing to say. I should let him say it.

He reminds me that my own spokesman in On Ends, Piso, called the Stoics thieves. Piso says they took the Old Academy's teaching and, as other thieves change the marks on what they have stolen, changed the names as if they were the labels of things (nomina tamquam rerum notas mutaverunt). The retort is obvious, and Cicero's whole reply to Lucullus leans on it: if the Stoics only changed the labels, what was left for me to do? Why did the Academy need Antiochus? And in that reply he says of me what has been said ever since. I was called an Academic, he says, but if I had changed a very few things I would have been the most genuine Stoic there is (si perpauca mutavisset, germanissimus Stoicus).

He meant it as a wound. I take it as arithmetic. A very few things, he says. On my reading that is exactly right, and that is the whole point. The distance between the Old Academy and the Stoa is a very few things: a theory of the soul's parts, a habit of paradox, a dispute about what to call health. The distance between the Old Academy and the school Arcesilaus made is not a very few things. It is everything. It is the difference between saying that men can know and saying that they cannot. On the two concerns of philosophy that matter most, the criterion and the end, Cicero has just conceded that I and the Stoics stand together, and he can only make that sound like a charge by forgetting that Polemon stands with us.

As for why the Academy needed me: when Zeno went out of the garden door, he took the furniture of the house with him across the city. Arcesilaus kept the house, and he and his successors argued for two hundred years that it had always been empty. Then Philo, my teacher, published in Rome that it had never really been empty after all, that the Academy had always allowed knowledge of a kind. I read that, and saw that if he was right, the two hundred years of argument had been about nothing, and if he was wrong, he had given the argument away. Either way, the furniture had to come home. I went across the city to the Painted Colonnade and found Polemon's silver there, melted into new shapes, some of them handsome and one or two of them strange. I recognised it as his work, as Polemon had recognised it, and I carried back as much as I could carry, and I put it in the Academy where it belonged.

That is why Zeno left: to teach what he had learned and corrected, under his own roof, as Aristotle had done before him. And that is why his leaving proves nothing against me. A man who walks out of a room carrying the teaching has not left the teaching. Polemon knew it. He stood in his own garden and watched Zeno slip in at the side door, and, so far as anyone tells us, he did not have the door locked. He said what he saw, and he let him come.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Novembribus (1 November 2026), ab Antiochō Ascalōnītā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Antiochus of Ascalon, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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