CYNICS. - A Greek philosophical sect, founded by Antisthenes, one of the four that arose from the teaching of Socrates. The name means "followers of the Dog," and "Dog" was said par excellence, and Diogenes of Sinope called himself so; but the appellation is already attested for Antisthenes (Diog. Laert., VI, 13), and the fact that he held his lectures in the gymnasium of Cynosarges, reserved for the sons of non-Attic mothers, must also have contributed to it. Particularly flourishing in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C., Cynicism regained vigor in the imperial age. In the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. it had representatives even among Christians.
EARLY CYNICISM - It is represented by Antisthenes, Diogenes and his immediate pupils. Neither the year of Antisthenes' birth nor that of his death is known, but he was already old in 366. As a young man he heard Gorgias, and later he joined Socrates. He wrote a great deal: Diogenes Laertius' list contains 62 titles. Nothing remains to us but fragments, most of them at second hand. Socratic in his ethics, he remains bound to the sophists on the ground of logic. The problems of logic, however, are of relative importance: wisdom consists in the exercise of virtue, which is indeed teachable and has its foundation in judgment, but needs neither much knowledge nor long discourses, and asks only for "Socratic strength." The model of the sage is Heracles, whom Prodicus had already depicted at the crossroads between virtue and pleasure. Hence the denial of all external goods, not only material but also social, and the maxim that the sage knows no law other than the moral one, and it is only within its limits that he takes part in political life. He was particularly harsh against Athenian democracy: "With your votes," he said, "you make an ass become a horse" (Diog. Laert., loc. cit.). With regard to the religious problem, Antisthenes placed himself in clear contradiction with the whole Greek popular tradition. "According to traditional belief there are many gods, but according to nature God is one" (Philodemus, De piet., p. 76 G).
In an even more radical sense the doctrines of Antisthenes were developed by Diogenes of Sinope on the Pontus, who has remained the most perfect type of the Cynic. His life was very soon wrapped in legend. According to tradition, he was the son of a banker. Having fled or been driven from his city, he came to Athens, where, having become a follower of Antisthenes, he put his precepts into practice by reducing his needs to a minimum and living the life of a beggar. Having moved to Corinth, he died there in 324. To him goes back the type of the Cynic who goes about with a coarse cloak, a staff and a wallet preaching morality, sharply satirizing the faults of men. Diogenes Laertius (VI, 80) reports as his the titles of 14 dialogues and 7 tragedies, but adds that Sosicrates and Satyrus disputed their authenticity. A wholly different list was given by Sotion. The question is insoluble, but at least one work can be certain to be his, the Republic, mentioned by Cleanthes and by Chrysippus. Diogenes sharpens still further the opposition between nature and custom, denounced by the sophists and continued by Antisthenes: everything that is according to nature is good, whatever custom has added to it is bad. All traditional values must therefore have their sign reversed: this he expressed by saying to "change the stamp on the coins" (παραχαράττειν τὸ νόμισμα: Diog. Laert., VI, 20). He thus overturned the theory of human progress of Anaxagoras, Democritus and Epicurus. As evidence for his demonstrations he took the barbarian peoples and the animals; the latter he called his brothers (Diog. Laert., VI, 79), and himself he compared to the dog, making a title of honor out of what had originally been a nickname of contempt. Consequently he fought against the sense of shame, which became one of the principal characteristics (ἀναίδεια) of Cynicism. The two points on which he pushed the doctrine of Antisthenes to the extreme are: asceticism, understood not only in a positive sense as the pursuit and endurance of pain, and the demand for the greatest possible freedom. If Antisthenes had preserved the necessity of the State, while distinguishing from it the morality of the sage, Diogenes denies it: the sage knows no laws other than those of nature. He was the first to proclaim himself a citizen of the world (Diog. Laert., VI, 63); and with the State he also abolished the family, upholding the community of women.
Diogenes had as his immediate disciples: Philiscus; Onesicritus, author of a romanticized history of Alexander; Metrocles, creator of the genre of the "chreiai" (χρεῖαι), brief narratives of notable sayings and deeds; Crates of Thebes, originally rich, who gave all his possessions to the city and wore the beggar's cloak and was the teacher of Zeno the Stoic; and Monimus, who spread the genre of the "serious-joke" (σπουδογέλοιον).
LITERARY CYNICISM OF THE 3rd CENTURY - With the representatives of the 3rd century, the harshness of Cynicism is softened so as to conform to every condition of life, and it assumes predominantly literary forms. The first one encountered, Bion of Borysthenes on the Euxine Pontus, already begins the deviation by initiating the hedonistic current. He was not a very consistent man: at first he heard Crates the Academic, then he passed over to Cynicism, then he followed Theodore the Cyrenaic, to end up with Theophrastus. He remains in the history of literature for the creation of a new literary genre, the diatribe (properly, conversation), the last transformation of the Socratic dialogue, a kind of sermon in a popular tone addressed to a fictitious listener, whose possible objections are anticipated or rebutted. The genre had a long life: it served as a model for the satires of Horace, it is found again in Seneca, in Epictetus, and lastly in the Christian homilies. Of the content and the form of his diatribes, which are lost, one can form an idea from the fragments of Teles of Megara (ca. 240 B.C.) preserved for us by Stobaeus. More important for the reflections that are found in Roman literature is Menippus of Gadara in Coele-Syria, who created a popular type of satire mixing verse and prose. He was imitated by Varro in his Saturae Menippeae and by Seneca in the Apocolocyntosis. Verse was used by Cercidas of Megalopolis (second half of the 3rd century B.C.), a statesman, captain and legislator of his city. His compositions, in the meters of classical lyric poetry, bore the title of Meliambi: a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus has given us back ample fragments of them. Converted to atheism by Theodore, he attacks the concept of divine providence. The only divinities are for him Paean (an epithet of Apollo the physician) and Metados, that is, Liberality, two metaphors to indicate what man owes to his fellow men.
CYNICISM IN THE IMPERIAL AGE
During the imperial age Cynicism, on the rise again, harked back to the model of Diogenes. The beggar's coarse cloak came back into favor, and the roads of the Empire were traveled by wandering preachers. One of these, the only one whose works have been preserved and which, by their retrospective value, constitute the greatest source for the reconstruction of Cynic thought, is Dio of Prusa in Bithynia (b. ca. 40 A.D.), called Chrysostom, or Golden-Mouth, for his eloquence. Eighty orations by him have come down to us, which are customarily divided into sophistic, political and moral. In the political and moral ones the Cynic motifs are contemporary with and fused with the Stoic ones. He is entirely on the side of the Stoics as regards the religious problem, and with them he affirms not only the existence of God, but His provident governance of the world and the kinship of men with Him. Particularly important for the history of Cynicism are oration XIII, in which an Antisthenic model is reproduced, and the orations relating to Diogenes. In sharp polemic against mantic and historical fatalism and against the forms of traditional religion are, on the other hand, Oenomaus of Gadara and his contemporary Demonax of Cyprus, who lived in the 2nd century. Of the former we possess a series of extracts in Eusebius, of the latter an idealized life in Lucian.