Be that as it may, I looked him up, and some of what he says is quite interesting:
Cleanthes maintained that pleasure is not only not a good, but is “contrary to nature” and “worthless.”[15] It was his opinion that the passions
(love, fear, grief) are weaknesses: they lack the strain or tension
which he persistently emphasized, and on which the strength of the soul,
no less than that of the body, depends, and which constitutes in human
beings self-control, and moral strength, and also conditions every
virtue.[15]
He said in a striking passage: “People walk in wickedness all their
lives or, at any rate, for the greater part of it. If they ever attain
to virtue, it is late and at the very sunset of their days.”[16]
Zeno had said that the goal of life was “to live consistently,” the
implication being that no life but the passionless life of reason could
ultimately be consistent with itself. Cleanthes is credited with having
added the words “with nature,” thus completing the well-known Stoic
formula that the goal is “to live consistently with nature.”[17]
For Cleanthes, this meant, in the first place, living conformably to
the course of the universe; for the universe is under the governance of
reason, and everyone has it as their privilege to know or become
acquainted with the world-course, to recognize it as rational and
cheerfully to conform to it.[18]
This, according to him, is true freedom of will not acting without
motive, or apart from set purpose, or capriciously, but humbly
acquiescing in the universal order, and, therefore, in everything that
befalls one.[18] The direction to follow Universal Nature can be traced in his famous prayer:
Lead me, Zeus, and you too, Destiny,
To wherever your decrees have assigned me.
I follow readily, but if I choose not,
Wretched though I am, I must follow still.
Fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling.
Is this not quite close to the Buddhist conception of abandoning desire? I would say, though, that “logos” in my view should mean more than reason and intellectual order. A forest has “logos” because it is ordered too, simply in a deeper way. Chaos, per Chaos Theory, has a “logos” that can be approximated.
We do not live according to reason. We live according to our spirits, of which reason and apparent logic is but one manifestation. We have to have a place for “that”, as I have said.
That’s enough on that. I am procrastinating.