Dio Chrysostom, Or. 36.55 and the Stoic Conflagration

Abstract The present paper questions the assumption in modern scholarship that section 55 of Dio Chrysostom’s Borysthenitic discourse is a reliable source for Chrysippus’ theory of conflagration. We may suppose instead that it is a description of the conflagration in broad Stoic terms that does not contain features that distinguish Chrysippus from other members of the school. And there is also room for disputing that the passage is a description of the conflagration. The phenomenon it describes may not be the conflagration at all, but the cosmogony.