This headless statue of an old man wrapped in a cloak against the cold may originally have represented Chrysippus, a Stoic philosopher of the 3rd century BC. According to Cicero, writing in the 1st century BC (On the Ends of Good and Evil, I, 39), and Sidonius Apollinaris, writing in the middle of the 5th century BC (Letters, IX, 14), a statue of Chrysippus erected in Ceramicus (the potters’ district in Athens) showed him punctuating his speech by counting the arguments on the fingers of his upturned hand. Pliny the Elder, in the 1st century AD (Natural History, XXXIV, 88), attributes the original to the Greek sculptor Euboulides in the late 3rd century BC.

The feet and several folds around the right fore-arm, index-finger and thumb have been restored. The statue, to which a head of Aristotle (Ma 80 bis) was at one time added, originally had a head of the type seen in figure Ma 326.

Former Della Porta collection, then Borghese collection Purchased in 1807