SVF I.84
Stoic: Zeno of Citium · Ancient source: Anonymous rhetorical handbook, Téchnē (Spengel, Rhetores Graeci I) — Rhet. Gr. I 447,11 · Source language: Ancient Greek · Source status: Testimonium
Original — Ancient Greek
ὡς δὲ Ζήνων· παράδειγμά ἐστι γενομένου πράγματος ἀπομνημόνευσις εἰς ὁμοίωσιν τοῦ νῦν ζητουμένου.
StoicOs Translation
As Zeno has it: an example (paradeigma) is the recollection of a thing that has happened, brought into likeness with what is now being examined.
Context
An anonymous teacher of rhetoric, cataloguing the tools of argument, reaches back to Zeno for the definition of the example. A millennium later the Byzantine scholar Planudes still transmits the same definition under Zeno's name — a small but persistent thread of the Stoic rhetorical tradition.
Greek text verified against H. von Arnim, SVF I (1903), no. 84, p. 23 (scanned page). LATE TRANSMISSION: the definition survives in an anonymous rhetorical handbook of uncertain (late) date, and is repeated by Maximus Planudes (c. 1300 CE) — “eandem definitionem Zenoni tribuit”, as von Arnim notes. Von Arnim's apparatus adds a cross-reference to Zeno's apophthegm no. 304.
What the source actually tells us
An attributed definition in the late rhetorical tradition: “as Zeno has it” is explicit, and the independent repetition by Planudes shows a stable attribution, but no witness earlier than late antiquity survives and no book of Zeno is named. The definitional style matches Zeno's securely attested definitions (cf. SVF I.73).
Philosophical meaning
The example is memory put to work: something that really happened, recalled and set beside the present case until the likeness illuminates it. In one compact formula Zeno binds rhetoric to experience — we persuade and learn by holding the past against the present.
Scholarly uncertainty
Both witnesses are late and anonymous or Byzantine; whether the wording is Zeno's own or a school formula bearing his name cannot be decided. Von Arnim's cross-reference to apophthegm no. 304 suggests the definition circulated with anecdotal material.
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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.