Plutarch's prosecutorial essay quoting Zeno, Cleanthes, and especially Chrysippus against themselves to show Stoic doctrine is riddled with self-contradiction.
De Stoicorum Repugnantiis ("On the Self-Contradictions of the Stoics") is not a philosophical treatise in its own voice but a courtroom brief: Plutarch, an Academic-Platonist sympathizer, assembles direct quotations from the founding Stoics — chiefly Chrysippus, with Zeno, Cleanthes, and Antipater also cited — and lines them up in pairs that flatly contradict one another. He opens with the charge that Stoic lives don't match Stoic teaching (the founders praised public service yet none of them held office), then moves methodically through ethics, theology, and physics, always using the Stoics' own book titles and near-verbatim wording as his evidence.
The essay's centerpiece is Chrysippus, whom Plutarch treats as uniquely productive and uniquely inconsistent: he wrote that ethics should be studied last, after logic and physics, yet always puts theology first in practice; he says philosophers shouldn't argue both sides like advocates, then wrote entire books doing exactly that against Custom and against Plato and Aristotle; he calls the sage indifferent to money while also detailing exactly how and when the sage should collect his lecture fees. Plutarch pushes hardest on theology and fate: Chrysippus makes Zeus (identified with fate and universal reason) the source of literally everything that happens, including vice and war, while also insisting the divine can't be "partly responsible for anything shameful" — a contradiction Plutarch says needs saying "ten thousand times." Long stretches examine physics minutiae (whether air is naturally light, whether the cosmos is nourished, why it sits at the world's center) to show the same pattern of asserting X in one book and not-X in another.
The work matters as a rare surviving anthology of verbatim Stoic fragments — many Chrysippus quotations here exist nowhere else — and as a case study in ancient philosophical polemic: Plutarch isn't refuting Stoicism's conclusions so much as convicting it of internal incoherence, book by book, using the school's own authoritative texts as the witnesses against it.
“As for the rest who do engage in public affairs, they are still more at odds with their own doctrines.”
— De Stoicorum Repugnantis · read this chapter →
“one ought not to build temples of the gods; for a temple is not worth much, and is not holy; and nothing made by the work of builders and craftsmen is worth much.”
— De Stoicorum Repugnantis · read this chapter →
“the prudent man is a man of leisure and of few affairs and minds his own business, since minding one's own business and being a man of few affairs are both fine things.”
— De Stoicorum Repugnantis · read this chapter →
“Are our affairs, then, faring so wretchedly, really governed by the providence of the gods?”
— De Stoicorum Repugnantis · read this chapter →
“hold fast to whatever ill or good he sends to each of you”
— De Stoicorum Repugnantis · read this chapter →
It is Plutarch's essay cataloging self-contradictions in Stoic philosophy, built almost entirely from direct quotations of Zeno, Cleanthes, and above all Chrysippus. Plutarch pairs statements from different books by the same author to show they cancel each other out, covering ethics, theology, fate, and physics.
Chrysippus was the third head of the Stoic school and its most prolific writer, and he is Plutarch's main target here. Plutarch quotes his treatises On Lives, On the Gods, On Nature, On Justice, and others to show he repeatedly asserts a position in one work and its opposite in another.
Plutarch quotes Chrysippus's On Lives and On Appropriate Acts describing the sage negotiating fees with pupils, deciding whether to collect payment before or after instruction, and even 'turning a somersault for a talent' if paid — undercutting the Stoic claim that the sage is indifferent to wealth.
Yes, at length. He shows Chrysippus making Zeus/fate the cause of absolutely everything, including wars and human vice, while elsewhere insisting the divine cannot be held even partly responsible for anything shameful — a contradiction Plutarch says must be repeated 'ten thousand times.'
It is valuable precisely because Plutarch quotes verbatim from Stoic books, many otherwise lost, making it a key fragment source for Chrysippus's actual words — though his selection and framing are adversarial, designed to expose inconsistency rather than present Stoicism fairly.
He writes as a critic sympathetic to the Academic-Platonist tradition, not as a neutral historian. His method throughout is to hold Stoic writers to their own stated standards and their own words, rather than to argue against Stoic conclusions on independent grounds.
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