Birth
Born in Athens
Born to an Athenian father and, tradition says, a Thracian mother — a mixed parentage that barred him from full citizenship and that he wore lightly all his life.
Words
“I would rather go mad than feel pleasure.”
Antisthenes attended Gorgias and learned the arts of rhetoric, then crossed Athens to follow Socrates, and what Socrates said about virtue struck him so hard that he became the most ascetic of all the Socratics. Virtue alone is sufficient for happiness, he taught. Pleasure is not a good but a trap. Social conventions — wealth, reputation, power — are at best neutral, at worst chains. He wore a rough cloak and lived simply, and when Plato said he could see Antisthenes' vanity through the holes in his coat, Antisthenes replied that he could see Plato's vanity through his words. His school on the outskirts of Athens, named the Cynosarges, gave the Cynic tradition its name and its first doctrine. Diogenes, the barrel-dweller, would sharpen what Antisthenes began.
Born to an Athenian father and, tradition says, a Thracian mother — a mixed parentage that barred him from full citizenship and that he wore lightly all his life.
Words
“I would rather go mad than feel pleasure.”