philosophy he held to be worthless; what could be known, could be known by the plain man. He
believed in the "return to nature," and carried this belief very far. There was to be no
government, no private property, no marriage, no established religion. His followers, if not he
himself, condemned slavery. He was not exactly ascetic, but he despised luxury and all pursuit
of artificial pleasures of the senses. "I had rather be mad than delighted," he said. *
The fame of Antisthenes was surpassed by that of his disciple Diogenes, "a young man from
Sinope, on the Euxine, whom he [ Antisthenes] did not take to at first sight; the son of a
disreputable money-changer who had been sent to prison for defacing the coinage. Antisthenes
ordered the lad away, but he paid no attention; he beat him with his stick, but he never moved.
He wanted 'wisdom,' and saw that Antisthenes had it to give. His aim in life was to do as his
father had done, to 'deface the coinage,' but on a much larger scale. He would deface all the
coinage current in the world. Every conventional stamp was false. The men stamped as generals
and kings; the things stamped as honour and wisdom and happiness and riches; all were base
metal with lying superscription." â€
He decided to live like a dog, and was therefore called a "cynic," which means "canine." He
rejected all conventions--whether of religion, of manners, of dress, of housing, of food, or of
decency. One is told that he lived in a tub, but Gilbert Murray assures us that this is a mistake: it
was a large pitcher, of the sort used in primitive times for burials. ‡ He lived, like an Indian
fakir, by begging. He proclaimed his brotherhood, not only with the whole human race, but also
with animals. He was a man about whom stories gathered, even in his lifetime. Every one
knows how Alexander visited him, and asked if he desired any favour; "only to stand out of my
light," he replied.
The teaching of Diogenes was by no means what we now call "cynical"--quite the contrary. He
had an ardent passion for "virtue," in comparison with which he held worldly goods of no
account. He sought virtue and moral freedom in liberation from desire: be indifferent to the
goods that fortune has to bestow, and you will be emancipated from fear. In this respect, his
doctrine, as we shall see, was
* Benn, Vol. II, pp. 4, 5; Murray, Five Stages, pp. 113-14.â
€ Murray, Five Stages, p. 117.â
€
¡Murray, Five Stages, p. 119.