- Lived:
- c. 279–206 BCE · born in Soli, Cilicia (southern coast of modern Turkey); worked in Athens
- Tradition:
- Hellenistic Greek; third head of the Stoic school — its great systematizer
- The Big Idea:
- Everything happens by fate, yet you are still responsible for what you do — and the logic of if this, then that can be made as exact as arithmetic.
- In their words:
- "If I had followed the crowd, I should not have become a philosopher."
- If you remember one thing:
- The ancients said it themselves: "If Chrysippus had not existed, the Stoa would not exist." He wrote 705 books, invented the logic your computer runs on, and built the first serious answer to the question of free will — and every one of those books is lost.