The legend says he travelled to the famous Delphic Oracle pleading for guidance from the god Apollo. He’d lost everything and was left wandering the streets of Athens, a foreign city, in rags. His fortune came from and now returned to the sea. He watched helpless on the beach as his precious cargo, his entire fortune, dissolved into the ocean. The ship sank but he survived, washed ashore at a port near Athens. One day a Phoenician merchant called Zeno of Citium, from the island of Cyprus, was transporting his cargo of this dye across the Mediterranean when he was caught in a storm. Many thousands of decaying shellfish had to be labouriously dissected by hand just to extract a few grams of this incredibly valuable dye. It was used to dye the robes of kings but making it was one of the worst jobs in the world. The ancient Phoenicians made their fortune by trading a famous purple dye extracted from the murex sea snail. The story of Stoic philosophy begins with a shipwreck. This is a short story that I used to explain Stoicism to my five year old daughter, Poppy.
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