SVF I.246

Original — Ancient Greek

ὑπογράφειν ὁ Κιτιεὺς ἔοικε Ζήνων εἰκόνα νεανίου καὶ οὕτως αὐτὸν ἀνδριαντουργεῖ· “ἔστω, φησί, καθαρὸν τὸ πρόσωπον, ὀφρὺς μὴ καθειμένη, μηδ᾽ ὄμμα ἀναπεπταμένον μηδὲ διακεκλασμένον, μὴ ὕπτιος ὁ τράχηλος, μηδ᾽ ἀνιέμενα τὰ τοῦ σώματος μέλη, ἀλλὰ [τὰ] μετέωρα ἐντόνοις ὅμοια· ὀρθὸς νοῦς πρὸς τὸν λόγον, ὀξύτης καὶ κατοκωχὴ τῶν ὀρθῶς εἰρημένων, καὶ σχηματισμοὶ καὶ κινήσεις μηδὲν ἐνδιδοῦσαι τοῖς ἀκολάστοις ἐλπίδος. αἰδὼς μὲν ἐπανθείτω καὶ ἀρρενωπία.”

StoicOs Translation

Zeno of Citium seems to sketch the image of a young man, and he sculpts him thus: “Let the face,” he says, “be clean, the brow not drooping, the eye neither wide-staring nor languishing, the neck not thrown back, nor the limbs of the body slackened, but poised like well-strung cords; the mind upright toward the argument, quickness and firm hold of what has been rightly said, and postures and movements that give the dissolute nothing to hope for. Let modesty bloom upon him, and a manly bearing.”

Context

Clement, instructing Christian youth in bearing and dress, borrows a portrait he found in Zeno — quoting it with “he says” as a sculptor's programme for the young student of philosophy.

Source notes:Text verified against von Arnim, SVF I (1903), no. 246, p. 58 (OCR of the scanned edition). Clement quotes the sketch with “he says” (phēsi); one bracketed article follows the edition. A few OCR letter-garblings are restored.

What the source actually tells us

An extended quotation with explicit speech-marker, unusually concrete for the Zeno tradition; the vocabulary of tension (entonois, “well-strung”) matches Zeno's physics of tonos and the sinew-image of SVF I.218.

Philosophical meaning

Philosophy shows in the body before it speaks: the young man's face, eye, neck and gait are the visible grammar of an ordered soul. Character is trained from the outside in as well as the inside out — the same conviction that made ēthos the fountain of actions (SVF I.203).

Scholarly uncertainty

Clement himself hedges (“seems to sketch”), and the quotation may be adapted to his pedagogical aims; from which work of Zeno it comes is unknown. The tension-vocabulary argues for a genuinely early core.

Go deeper

• Read SVF I.203 — character is the fountain of life →
• Read SVF I.218 — the soul strung with firm doctrines →