This past week I’ve been studying up on the origins of Stoicism, a subject I post often about. Ever since I came across the Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday I’ve worked to incorporate the practical daily wisdom of Stoicism into my life. Recently, while reading the wiki of Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, I learned that Zeno encountered Crates, the famous cynic philosopher who became his mentor, by chance. The story goes that Zeno, a wealthy merchant, survived a shipwreck while traveling from Phoenicia to Peiraeus, eventually ending up in Athens. There, while visiting a bookstore, he asked the owner where men like Socrates were to be found. At that moment, Crates happened to be walking by, and as they say, the rest was history.

Ironically I came across the Zeno shipwreck story within a few days of reading about another ancient shipwreck told in the Aesop fable, The Shipwreck of Simonides. While reading an essay on Stoicism by the author who writes under the pen name Quintus Curtius included in a collection titled Thirty Seven: Essays on Life, Wisdom and Masculinity, I was introduced to the fable. I’ve long been fascinated with how human beings passed down important knowledge about their societies and timeless wisdom on human nature and morality through oral traditions like Aesop’s fables. Much like the biblical stories, the fables are the compilation of oral traditions written down and published through various translations in hundred of languages. Like so many of us, I was introduced to Aesop’s fables through a collection of children’s books that were read to me as a child. The fables are now mostly known as children’s stories, but for centuries they existed as oral stories that passed on important life lessons.