CIRENAICI. — Greek philosophical sect, founded by Aristippo of Cirene (whence the name), one of the four that arose from the teaching of Socrates. Its principal representatives were: Aristippo, his daughter Arète, her son Aristippo the Younger, called “his mother’s pupil,” Teodoro the atheist, Egesia called “the persuader of death” (πεισθάνατος), and Anniceri, all of them from Cirene.
ARISTIPPO, born at Cirene in 435 B.C., came to Athens in 416 and was among the most assiduous followers of Socrates. When the latter died, he was in Aegina (Plato, Phaed., 59 c). He lived at Syracuse at the court of the two Dionysii. Diogenes Laertius records under his name two lists of works; the second, shorter one, was the one recognized by Sotion and Panaetius. Of these, only a single frag-ment has survived: “Men leave wealth to their children, but do not leave them the knowledge necessary to make use of it” (Demetrius, De eloc., § 296). The accounts that the sources give of his doctrine do not permit any distinction between what is owed to him and what, in the form of its problems and its terminology, appears more reasonably to belong to the age of Aristippo the Younger. Rather than a system, he elaborated an art of living, abundantly characterized in the numerous anecdotes and sayings transmitted under his name.
Like Antisthenes, he is in part a continuer of the sophists, and like him he let slip what was essential in Socratic dialectic, the search for the universal. His epistemology is connected with that of Protagoras (cf. Plato, Theaet., 156 a), and develops it into an absolute phenomenalism. Sensations are only subjectively true: the object is unknowable, and we have no other source of knowledge than sensations. His ethics follows the same line, combining sophistic and Socratic elements. Socrates had admitted utility and pleasure, but had universalized them, thereby bringing them to coincide with the good. For Aristippo the universal does not exist, and hence the good is reduced to pleasure. But here too he goes beyond the first sophistic hedonism. Pleasure is pleasure in actuality, the pleasure of the moment, and just as sensation does not provide the qualities of the object but the modifications of the subject (Sextus Empiricus, Adv. math., VII, 191), the same applies to affection. This restores to the subject that freedom in relation to things which Socrates sought in the universal, and, transforming hedonism into aestheticism, restores to intelligence (the Socratic φρόνησις) its guiding function. Hence the famous motto: “I possess; I am not possessed” (ἔχω, ἀλλ' οὐκ ἔχωμαι). Yet intelligence has no criteria of its own: the criterion of truth and of good is always present sensation; its task is therefore reduced to deriving from every circumstance the greatest possible quantity of pleasure. This requires an art, and Aristippo was its master (Diog. Laert., II, 66): Horace characterizes him perfectly in the well-known line: “omnis Aristippum dequit color et status et res” (Ep., I, 23). That right and wrong, beautiful and ugly in the ethical sense, are matters of convention and not of nature scarcely needs to be said. If the sage respects custom and the laws, he does so in order not to incur the corresponding penalties and out of respect for his name (Diog. Laert., II, 93; cf. also loc. cit., 87, 89, 90 and X, 136-37, where a parallel is drawn between the doctrine of Epicurus and that of the C.).
With Teodoro and Egesia the center of the doctrine was shifted. TEODORO, called the atheist because he denied the gods (in Athens he ran the risk of being prosecuted, had Demetrius of Phalerum not rescued him from his difficulties), transferred the end from the body to the soul, proclaiming wisdom and justice to be goods, the dispositions opposed to them evils, and placing physical pleasure and pain among indifferent things. Consequently, he considered the proper joy of wisdom to be the end, and the corresponding sadness of folly its opposite. These terms must not, however, mislead us: wisdom and justice are understood in an absolutely individualistic sense. Teodoro displayed a great contempt for things and for men, developing in a radical direction the indifference proper to Aristippo. He denied friendship, because it was useless to the wise, who needed no one, and harmful to fools; he considered it plausible that the sage should not sacrifice himself for his country, because wisdom must not perish for the sake of folly. The doctrine that the sage will steal and commit adultery and sacrilege when he has the opportunity must be regarded as a slander by opponents (Diog. Laert., II, 98-99).
The doctrine was developed in a distinctly pessimistic sense by EGESIA. The happiness that Aristippo had declared worth choosing not for its own sake but for the pleasures of which it is composed, he removed from the number of real things, and limited the end to flight from pain and disturbance of the soul, agreeing with Teodoro in considering pleasure and pain indifferent states. He nevertheless showed greater understanding toward fools, denying the voluntariness of error and prescribing indulgence for the sage.
He considered living and dying to be matters of free choice, and life useful only to fools. Hence the name “persuader of death” (Diog. Laert., II, 93-96).
With ANNICERI the doctrine returned to its original form, but emerged from its egoistic isolation. He prescribed that the sage cultivate friendship, love his parents and his country, and, where necessary, sacrifice his own pleasure for them (Diog. Laert., II, 96-97); V. EDONISMO.