2. Diogenes
Antisthenes agreed with the conclusion, but not the arguments, of this philosophy, and drew out of the same Socrates an ascetic theory of life. The founder of the Cynic school was the son of an Athenian citizen and a Thracian slave. He fought bravely at Tanagra in 426. He studied for a time with Gorgias and Prodicus, and then set up his own school; but having heard Socrates discourse, he went over—taking his pupils with him—to learn the wisdom of the older man. Like Eudoxus he lived at the Piraeus, and walked to Athens nearly every day—four or five miles each way. Perhaps he was present when Socrates (or Plato) discussed with a complaisant interlocutor the problem of pleasure.
Socr. Do you think that the philosopher ought to care about the pleasures of . . . eating and drinking?
Simmias. Certainly not.
Socr. And what do you say of the pleasures of love—should he care about them?
Sim. By no means.
Socr. And will he think much of the other ways of indulging the body—for example, the acquisition of costly raiment, or sandals, or other adornments of the body? Instead of caring about these does he not rather despise anything beyond what nature needs?
Sim. I should say that the true philosopher would despise them.34
This is the essence of the Cynic philosophy: to reduce the things of the flesh to bare necessities in order that the soul may be as free as possible. Antisthenes took the doctrine literally, and became a Greek Franciscan without theology. Aristippus’ motto was, “I possess, but am not possessed”; Antisthenes’ was, “I do not possess, in order not to be possessed.” He had no property,35 and dressed in so ragged a cloak that Socrates twitted him: “I can see your vanity, Antisthenes, through the holes of your cloak.”36 Aside from this his only weakness was the writing of books, of which he left ten; one of them was a history of philosophy. After Socrates died Antisthenes resumed his role as teacher. He chose as his lecture center the gymnasium Cynosarges (Dogfish) because it was maintained for people of low, or alien, or illegitimate birth; the name Cynic became attached to the school rather from the place than from the creed.37 Antisthenes dressed like a workman, took no pay for his teaching, and preferred the poor for his pupils; anyone unwilling to practice poverty and hardship was driven away by Antisthenes’ tongue or his club.
He refused at first to take Diogenes as a pupil; Diogenes insisted, bore insult patiently, was received, and made his teacher’s doctrine famous throughout Hellas by living it completely. Antisthenes had been half slave in origin; Diogenes was a bankrupt banker from Sinope. Diogenes had begged from actual want, and was pleased to learn that this was a part of virtue and wisdom. He adopted the beggar’s garb, wallet, and staff, and for a time made his home in a tub or cask in the court of the temple of Cybele at Athens.38 He envied the simple life of animals, and tried to imitate it; he slept on the ground, ate what he could find wherever he found it, and (we are assured) performed the duties of nature and the rites of love in the sight of all.39 Seeing a child drink from its hands, he threw away his cup.40 Sometimes he carried a candle or a lantern, saying that he was looking for a man.41 He injured no one, but refused to recognize laws, and announced himself, long before the Stoics, a kosmopolites, or Citizen of the World. He traveled leisurely, and we hear of him living for a time in Syracuse. On one of his journeys he was captured by pirates, who sold him as a slave to Xeniades of Corinth. When his owner asked him what he could do, he answered, “Govern men.” Xeniades made him tutor of his sons and manager of his household, in which capacities Diogenes did so well that his master called him “a good genius,” and took his advice in many things. Diogenes continued to live his simple life, so consistently that he became, next to Alexander, the most famous man in Greece.
He was something of a poseur, and evidently relished his renown. He had a gift for debate, and his namesake reports that he never lost an argument.42 He called freedom of speech the greatest of social goods, and made much use of it, with coarse humor and unfailing wit. He rebuked a woman who knelt with head to the ground before a holy image: “Are you not afraid,” he asked her, “to be in so indecent an attitude, when some god may be behind you, for every place is full of them?”43 When he saw the son of a courtesan throw a stone at a crowd he warned him, “Take care lest you hit your father.”44 He disliked women, and despised men who behaved like them; when a richly dressed and perfumed young Corinthian asked him a question he said, “I will not answer you until you tell me whether you are a boy or a girl.”45 All the world knows the story of how Alexander, at Corinth, came upon Diogenes lying in the sun. “I am Alexander the Great King,” said the ruler. “I am Diogenes the dog,” said the philosopher. “Ask of me any favor you choose,” said the King. “Stand out of the sun,” answered Diogenes. “If I were not Alexander,” said the young warrior, “I would be Diogenes”;46 but we do not hear that the philosopher returned the compliment. The two men died, we are asked to believe, on the same day in 323: Alexander at Babylon in his thirty-third year, Diogenes at Corinth in his nineties.47 The Corinthians placed a marble dog over his grave; and Sinope, which had banished him, raised a monument to his memory.
Nothing could be clearer than the Cynic philosophy. It dallied with logic only long enough to dismiss as moonshine that theory of Ideas with which Plato was bewildering the intellectuals of Athens. Metaphysics, too, seemed to the Cynics a vain game; we should study nature not in order to explain the world, which is impossible, but that we may learn the wisdom of nature as a guide to life. The only real philosophy is ethics. The aim of life is happiness; but this is to be found not in the pursuit of pleasure but in a simple and natural life, independent as possible of all external aids. For though pleasure is legitimate if it results from one’s own labor and effort, and is not followed by remorse,48 yet it so often eludes us in the chase, or disappoints us when captured, that it may more wisely be called an evil than a good. A modest and virtuous life is the only road to abiding content; wealth destroys peace, and envious desire, like a rust, eats away the soul. Slavery is unjust but unimportant; the sage will find it as easy to be happy in bondage as in freedom; only internal freedom counts. The gods, said Diogenes, gave man an easy existence, but man has complicated it by itching for luxuries. Not that the Cynics put much faith in the gods. When a priest explained to Antisthenes how many good things the virtuous will enjoy after death, he asked, “Why, then, do you not die?”49 Diogenes smiled at the Mysteries, and remarked of the offerings set up in Samothrace by those who had survived shipwreck, “The offerings would have been much more numerous if those who were lost had offered them instead of those who were saved.”50 Everything in religion but the practice of virtue seemed to the Cynics superstition. Virtue must be accepted as its own reward and should not depend upon the existence or justice of the gods. Virtue consists in eating, possessing, and desiring as little as possible, drinking only water, and injuring no one. Asked how to defend oneself against an adversary, Diogenes answered, “By proving honorable and upright.”51 Only sexual desire seemed reasonable to the Cynics. They avoided marriage as an external bond, but patronized prostitutes. Diogenes advocated free love and a community of wives,52 and Antisthenes, seeking independence in everything, complained that he could not satisfy his hunger as solitarily as he could assuage his lust.53 Having accepted sexual desire as normal and natural, like hunger, the Cynics professed themselves unable to understand why men should be ashamed to satisfy the one appetite, like the other, in public.54 Even in death a man should be independent, choosing for it his own place and time; suicide is legitimate. Diogenes, some say, killed himself by holding his breath.55
The Cynic philosophy was part of a “back-to-nature” movement which arose in fifth-century Athens as a reaction of maladjustment to an irksomely complex civilization. Men are not civilized by nature, and bear the restraints of ordered life only because they fear punishment or solitude. Diogenes stood to Socrates in somewhat the same relation as Rousseau to Voltaire: he thought that civilization was a mistake, and that Prometheus had deserved his crucifixion for bringing it to mankind.56 The Cynics, like the Stoics and Rousseau, idealized “nature peoples”;57 Diogenes tried to eat meat raw because cooking was unnatural.58 The best society, he thought, would be one without artifices or laws.
The Greeks smiled upon the Cynics, and tolerated them as medieval society tolerated its saints. After Diogenes the Cynics became a religious order without religion; they made a rule of poverty, lived on alms, tempered their celibacy with promiscuity, and opened schools of philosophy. They had no homes, but taught and slept in the street or the temple porticoes. Through Diogenes’ disciples, Stilpo and Crates, the Cynic doctrine passed down into the Hellenistic age, and formed the basis of Stoicism. The school disappeared as an entity about the end of the third century; but its influence remained strong in the Greek tradition, and perhaps reappeared in the Essenes of Judea and the monks of early Christian Egypt. How far all these movements were influenced by, or influenced, similar sects in India, scholarship cannot yet say. The “back-to-nature” devotees of our own day are the intellectual descendants of those men and women of Oriental or Greek antiquity who, tired of unnatural and cramping restraints, thought that they could turn and live with the animals. No full life is without a touch of this urban fantasy.