lectuals were involved in politics and made their living from their private for-
tunes, in political office, or by making speeches or practicing medicine.^14 The
Sophists continued this pattern, except that some of them, like Protagoras or
Gorgias, became notorious for taking pupils for pay, which was regarded in
aristocratic circles as a shocking innovation.^15 Socrates, who was not so very
different from the other Sophists in his intellectual relationships, was very
self-consciously respectable in that he lived off his wealthier friends as a guest;
this same relationship of patron to client, glossed as his “amicus,” was the
prestigious form of intellectual support in Roman times as well (Rawson, 1985:
67). Isocrates’ school set the model for the commercialized fee-taking pattern,
which seems to have become respectable in Hellenistic times but was down-
graded again for a while with the Roman conquest. By around 200 c.e., when
official salaried positions were established for professors of rhetoric or phi-
losophy, or for a municipal doctor, these too were considered respectable, since
they did not involve selling one’s services for fees (Jones, [1964] 1986: 1012–
13; cf. Rawson, 1985: 170–171).
Although there are only two organized schools among the pre-Socratics,
neither reaching back much before 500 b.c.e., Figure 3.2 shows some five or
six personal chains, already reaching the limits of the law of small numbers.
The school of Abdera (Figure 3.3) begins soon after the Miletus chain leaves
off; one might say the intellectual “space” for a naturalist or materialist
position was continuously filled by these two interrupted chains (if indeed there
was no actual contact between them, as implied in the report that Leucippus
was a native of Miletus). Other chains appear in the generations after 500,
involving Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Protagoras, and Anaxagoras.
The generation around 400 which sees the proliferation of organized
schools—Megarian, Cyrenaic, Academic, and so on—is in fact even more
crowded (Figure 3.4). The Cynics appear at this time, prefigured by Antisthenes
and then epitomized by Diogenes of Sinope. This was far from being an
organized school; indeed it might even be called an anti-school, with its
doctrine of avoiding material possessions and social responsibilities of any
kind. The Cynic movement adds to the pattern of intellectual rivalries of the
300s c.e.; for all its maverick qualities, it had the same life span as most of
the other “minor” Socratic schools. Diogenes’ follower Crates was the last
“pure” Cynic. The whole movement covered only three generations, from
Antisthenes, who lived on the whole a conventional lifestyle; through Diogenes,
who radicalized the position from an intellectual one to a total commitment
as a way of life; ending with Crates and his contemporaries. Other followers
turned the Cynic stance into a formula for popular literature, writing plays,
diatribes, and satires, which provided a basis of material support (Reale, 1985:
35–37). Cynicism caught the public eye more than any other philosophical
Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^95