Nevertheless, in the eyes of Greeks, the Phoenicians constituted an ancient barbarian nation, which had been conquered and was ruled by Persia.Īs far as we know, Phoenicia never had a centralized government but was always a loose federation of largely autonomous city-states. It may just have been a term used by the Greeks to lump together various seafaring semitic peoples who shared a common language. Some scholars have questioned whether the Phoenicians actually existed as a distinct civilization.

They are now believed to have been a Semitic people, possibly related to the Canaanites, who originated in the Levant region of West Asia. (The derogatory term barbaroi literally meant people who sound like they are saying bar bar or blah blah, i.e., who speak a foreign tongue.) Crucially, that is, they were not Greek. The Phoenicians, in the eyes of Athenians, were a seafaring race of barbarians. Basically, to most Greeks, he looked a bit foreign. The point he’s trying to make seems to have been that Zeno was somewhat darker in appearance than a typical Athenian. Diogenes Laertius makes a point of describing him as melanchrous, however, which means black-skinned or swarthy. Zeno, his son, was probably born into a culture at Citium, which was already becoming Hellenized, despite still being governed by Phoenician nobles. Mnaseas, his father, was perhaps born into a family who identified more with their Phoenician heritage, and lived to see the Hellenization of Cyprus. Rather appropriately for the founder of Stoicism, it means “ of Zeus”.

Zeno’s own name, as Brunschwig notes, is thoroughly Greek. If that is true, the conclusion to draw would be, of course, that Zeno’s father was a Phoenician but also, and much more importantly in my opinion, that he was already a hellenized Phoenician.

It is generally agreed that Mnaseas is a hellenized version of Semitic names like Manasse or Menahem. What of his father’s name, mentioned in the quote above? Jacques Brunschwig, a professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Sorbonne, writes in a recent study of Zeno’s origins: The evidence of inscriptions therefore suggests that a Phoenician royal dynasty continued to rule Citium throughout Zeno’s youth, until around the time he left and ended up in Athens. It was ruled by a dynasty of Phoenician petty kings, whose names figure in the Punic inscriptions found on the spot From 361 to 312 B.C., within which period the first twenty years of Zeno's life probably fall, its king was Pumi-yathon the son of Milk-yathon the son of Baal-ram. (The term we use to refer to a foreign nation embracing Greek language and culture.) Nevertheless, Cyprus still retained ties to Phoenician culture:Ĭitium in Cyprus, the native place of Zeno, had a population which was largely Phoenician in blood. After being conquered by Alexander the Great, in 333 BCE, around the time when Zeno was born, Cyprus was progressively Hellenized. Diogenes LaertiusĪs we’ll see, other references make it clear that Zeno was related to these Phoenician settlers rather than to the original Greek colonists. Zeno, the son of Mnaseas (or Demeas), was a native of Citium in Cyprus, a Greek city which had received Phoenician settlers.

Alexander diogenes quotes