SVF Volumes II–III
Chrysippus of Soli
Χρύσιππος ὁ Σολεύς · c. 279–206 BCE
Who was Chrysippus of Soli?
Chrysippus (c. 279–206 BCE) came from Soli in Cilicia, trained under Cleanthes, and around 230 BCE became the third head of the Stoa. Antiquity credited him with over seven hundred books and with rebuilding the school's doctrine so thoroughly after Arcesilaus' sceptical attacks that the saying arose: 'without Chrysippus there would be no Stoa'. Logic, the theory of impressions and assent, the doctrine of fate and the analysis of the passions all received from him the systematic form later Stoicism inherited.
How his work survives — mostly through his opponents
Of the seven hundred books not one survives whole. What remains — nearly two thousand fragments in von Arnim's volumes II and III — reaches us largely through hostile channels: Plutarch quoting him to convict him of self-contradiction, Galen dissecting his psychology on Posidonius' behalf, Alexander of Aphrodisias attacking his determinism, Cicero and Gellius reporting for Roman readers, and the dry summaries of the doxographers. These witnesses often quote verbatim precisely because they attack; but selection, framing and context are theirs, not his.
Reading the Chrysippus sources critically
Each entry in this edition distinguishes what kind of evidence it rests on: Chrysippus' own words quoted with a book title; a paraphrase in a reporter's language; a hostile witness whose quotations are accurate but whose framing is polemical; a doxographer's compressed summary; or doctrine reported for the school as a whole, where the formula 'Chrysippus and the Stoics' does not guarantee that the wording is his. Later Stoic formulations — Epictetus' or Marcus' — are never projected back onto him without an explicit ancient basis.
Source entries
- SVF II.54 — Aëtius, Placita IV 12,1 (DDG p. 401,14). Chrysippus says these four differ from one another. An impression (phantasia) is an affection arising in the soul which reveals in itself also what produced it. — The impression is named from light: for as light shows itself and the other things contained in it, so the impression shows itself and what produced it. The impressor (phantaston) is what produces the impression: the white, the cold, everything able to move the soul. Empty attraction (phantastikon) is an affection in the soul arising from no impressor, as with the man who shadow-boxes and strikes at emptiness — for the impression has some impressor underlying it, the empty attraction none. A figment (phantasma) is that to which we are drawn in such empty attraction; these things occur in the melancholic and the mad.
- SVF II.277 — Cicero, Academica priora (Lucullus) II 93. For Chrysippus' view is that when one is questioned step by step — for instance whether three are few or many — one should come to rest some while before reaching 'many': that is what they call hēsychazein, keeping still. 'For all I care you may even snore,' says Carneades, 'not merely keep still.'
- SVF II.913 — Stobaeus, Eclogae I (de fato), p. 79 W.. Chrysippus (calls) the substance of fate a pneumatic power, administering the universe by order. This in the second book On the Cosmos. But in the second book On Definitions, in the books On Fate and elsewhere he declares it in scattered places and many ways, saying: 'Fate is the logos of the cosmos', or 'the logos of the things in the cosmos administered by providence', or 'the logos according to which what has come to be has come to be, what is coming to be is coming to be, and what will come to be will come to be.'
- SVF II.974 — Cicero, De fato 39–43. But Chrysippus, since he both rejected necessity and wanted nothing to happen without prior causes, distinguishes kinds of causes, so as to escape necessity and yet retain fate. 'Of causes,' he says, 'some are perfect and principal, others auxiliary and proximate. Therefore when we say that all things happen by fate through antecedent causes, we do not mean perfect and principal causes, but auxiliary and proximate ones.' — 'As, then,' he says, 'he who pushed the cylinder gave it the beginning of its motion but did not give it its rollability, so an encountered impression will indeed imprint and as it were stamp its form on the mind; but assent will be in our power, and — as was said of the cylinder — though pushed from without, for the rest it will move by its own force and nature.'
- SVF II.1000 — Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae VII 2. Fate, which the Greeks call heimarmenē, Chrysippus, chief of Stoic philosophy, defines roughly to this effect: 'Fate', he says, 'is a certain everlasting and unswerving series and chain of things, rolling and entwining itself through eternal orders of consequence, out of which it is fitted and bound together.' — In the fourth book On Providence he says that fate is 'a certain natural ordering of the whole from everlasting, the one set of things following upon and succeeding the other, such interconnection being inviolable.'
- SVF II.1169 — Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae VII 1. Arguing against this in the fourth book On Providence, Chrysippus says: 'Nothing is more fatuous than those who suppose there could have been goods if there were not evils alongside them. For since goods are contrary to evils, both must stand opposed to each other, propped, as it were, by a mutual and opposing effort: no contrary exists without its contrary. How could there be a sense of justice unless there were injuries? What else is justice but the privation of injustice? How could courage be understood except by juxtaposition with cowardice? Or self-control except from intemperance? — For the one is bound to the other, as Plato says, by their contrary vertices: if you take away one, you will have taken away both.'
- SVF III.4 — Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Philosophers, Book 7. Again, living according to virtue is equal to living according to experience of what happens by nature, as Chrysippus says in the first book On Ends: for our natures are parts of the nature of the whole. Therefore the end becomes living in accordance with nature — that is, according to one's own nature and according to that of the whole. — (ibid. 89) By the nature which one must follow in living, Chrysippus understands both the common nature and, specifically, human nature.
- SVF III.175 — Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis 11, 1037f. And indeed impulse (hormē), according to him (Chrysippus), is a person's reason commanding him to act, as he has written in On Law. So repulsion too is reason forbidding, and so is avoidance; ⟨and caution⟩ is reasonable avoidance: caution, then, is reason forbidding — in the wise man; for being cautious is proper to the wise, not to the base.
- SVF III.178 — Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Philosophers, Book 7. They say the living being's first impulse is toward preserving itself, since nature appropriates it to itself from the beginning — as Chrysippus says in the first book On Ends, declaring that what is first and proper (oikeion) to every living being is its own constitution and the awareness of it. For it was not likely that nature should estrange the creature from itself, nor that, having made it, she should neither estrange it nor appropriate it. It remains, then, to say that in constituting it she appropriated it to itself. Thus it repels what harms and admits what is akin.
- SVF III.314 — Marcianus, Institutiones I (Dig. 1,3,2; Mommsen I p. 11,25). And Chrysippus too, philosopher of the highest Stoic wisdom, begins thus in the book he wrote On Law: 'Law is king of all things divine and human; it must be the overseer of what is noble and what is base, and ruler and guide, and thereby the standard of just and unjust — and, for beings political by nature, prescriptive of what is to be done and prohibitive of what is not to be done.'
- SVF III.456 — Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Philosophers, Book 7. They hold that the passions are judgments, as Chrysippus says in his On Passions: for love of money is a supposition that money is a fine thing, and drunkenness and intemperance likewise, and the rest.
About this edition
StoicOs Ancient Library is a developing multilingual digital study edition of surviving early Stoic material. The Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta assembled by Hans von Arnim provides the traditional reference framework. StoicOs distinguishes carefully between fragments, testimonia, later reports and interpretation. StoicOs translations are prepared from the surviving ancient-language sources where available.