Cleanthes (c. 330–233/231 BCE) was the second school leader of the ancient Stoa, after Zeno and before Chrysippus, who was Cleanthes’ disciple.

Cleanthes is especially famous for his Hymn to Zeus, which manifests his profound religiosity in a Stoic framework. He did not divide philosophy into logic, physics, and ethics, which is the standard Stoic partition, but into six parts, which result from the duplication of the aforementioned three: dialectics and rhetoric, ethics and politics, and physics and theology (SVF 1.482; Ramelli, 20…