There has been considerable discussion as to whether he was the immediate successor of Aristo, but the evidence is confused and unprofitable.
Aristo is frequently confounded with another philosopher of the same name, Ariston of Iulis, in Ceos, who, about 230 B.C., succeeded Lyco as scholarch of the Peripatetics.
The idea is drawn from Aristo of Chios, and the materials largely derived from Xenophon and Plato.
If the recognition of physics and logic as two studies coordinate with ethics is sufficient to differentiate the mature Zeno from the Cynic author of the Republic, no less than from his own heterodox disciple Aristo, the Cleanthes.
Accordingly Aristo, holding to Cynicism when Zeno himself had got beyond it, rejected two of these parts of philosophy as useless and out of reach - a divergence which excluded him from the school, but strictly consistent with his view that ethics alone is scientific knowledge.