ABSTRACT
Zeno of Citium at Cyprus, the founder of Stoicism (335-265), arrived in Athens in 313 after a perilous voyage (Diog. Laert. VII 2 ff.). In Athens he happened by a bookseller and heard him reading Xenophon’s Memorabilia aloud to himself. Zeno was fascinated by what he heard, and asked where one in our day could find such a splendid man as Socrates. ‘Follow that man’, said the bookseller, pointing to the Cynic Crates who just then was passing in the street. Thereafter, as we are told, Zeno joined Crates, even though he adopted more decent manners than his master’s. In 301 he founded his own schoolwhich is to say that he lectured in rooms in the Stoa in the market square (stoa: colonnade). Crates (VI 85 ff.) was a student of the notorious Diogenes (c.400-325) who earned his fame for all eternity by living in a barrel and speaking familiarly to Alexander the Great (cf. 38). He practised extreme asceticism, rid himself of all conventions, and lived the life of a dog (kyō n: a dog). To posterity Diogenes stands as the figurehead of the Cynics, but the later tradition is probably correct in maintaining that in all essentials the Cynics continued Antisthenes’ ethics. Thereby the succession from Socrates to Zeno was established, and the bookseller anticipated the judgement of history when he pointed to the leading Cynic of his day as a Socrates redivivus. Diogenes-and with him the other Cynics —first and foremost showed their ascetic attitude to life in practice, and surely it was part
of their strategy to provoke established society. The purpose was to ‘adulterate the coinage’, as Diogenes said with a subtle allusion to his father’s being incarcerated as a coiner (20; 71). A closer justification for this ‘Umwertung aller Werte’ is hidden behind countless anecdotes of witty replies in grotesque situations; yet the main way of thinking is clear enough: social status, wealth, reputation, seeming good fortune, tradition, and custom (nomos) mean nothing (72). Man is to return to nature (physis) and its simple demands; what matters is inner freedom, the freedom to speak and act as one wishes, freedom from affects (cf. 38; 69; 71). Reason dictates such an attitude and in it virtue consists; whatever does not contribute to a virtuous life is worthless, adiaphoron (24; 73; 104 ff.).
