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.
Places
Ideas
Words
“I would rather go mad than feel pleasure.”
“It is a royal thing to do good and to be spoken of badly.”
Works
Life & Moments
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.
From rhetoric to Socrates
First trained under the rhetorician Gorgias, then abandoned display oratory for Socrates, walking five miles a day from the Piraeus to hear him. He was present at the master's death.
Teaching at the Cynosarges
After Socrates' death he taught at the Cynosarges, a gymnasium outside the walls reserved for those of mixed birth. One later story derives the very name 'Cynic' from it, the school of the plain life that Diogenes would push to its extreme.
Influence
Influenced by
- Socrates
Antisthenes was among Socrates' closest followers and was present at his death; what he took from him was not the search for definitions but the example of a man who needed almost nothing.
Influenced
- Diogenes
Ancient sources make Antisthenes the teacher of Diogenes and so the founder of Cynicism, though the chronology is contested and some read the link as a later attempt to give the Cynics a Socratic pedigree.
