A quotation from Antisthenes
Quotation
It is a royal thing to do good and to be spoken of badly.
Antisthenes
He learned from Socrates that virtue is all that matters, and from that premise he dismantled everything else.
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.
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What does Antisthenes mean by this quotation?
He learned from Socrates that virtue is all that matters, and from that premise he dismantled everything else. 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 a…