Antisthenes

“ Did Antisthenes not say, that the victory of the Athenians over the Persians at Salamis would have been something admirable, had the Persians excelled the Athenians in point of virtue and capability? For in that case the Athenians would have proved even more virtuous and more capable. However, the Persians, Antisthenes elaborately proves, were altogether inferior. ”

“ Antisthenes denied what Plato affirmed, and as Plato affirmed it. Aristotle denied it also; maintaining that genera, species, and attributes, though distinguishable as separate predicates of, or inherencies in, individuals — yet had no existence apart from individuals. Aristotle was no less wanting than Antisthenes, in the intellectual eye required for discerning the Platonic Ideas. ”

“ It was not said amiss by Antisthenes, when people told him that one Ismenias was an excellent piper, "It may be so," said he, "but he is but a wretched human being, otherwise he would not have been an excellent piper." And king Philip, to the same purpose, told his son Alexander, who once at a merry-meeting played a piece of music charmingly and skillfully, "Are you not ashamed, son, to play so well?" ”

“ Respecting Diogenes and the Cynic philosophers generally, we have to regard not merely their doctrines, but the effect produced by their severity of life. In this point Diogenes surpassed his master Antisthenes, whose life he criticised as not fully realising the lofty spirit of his doctrine. The spectacle of man not merely abstaining from enjoyment, but enduring with indifference hunger, thirst, heat, cold, poverty, privation, bodily torture, death, &c., exercises a powerful influence on the imagination of mankind. ”

“ Doctrines of Antisthenes and Aristippus passed to the Stoics and Epikureans.
In the history of the Greek mind these two last-mentioned philosophers (though included by Cicero among the plebeii philosophi) are not less important than Plato and Aristotle. The speculations and precepts of Antisthenes passed, with various enlargements and modifications, into the Stoic philosophy: those of 199Aristippus into the Epikurean: the two most widely extended ethical sects in the subsequent Pagan world. ”

“ Plato on his side attacked the opinions of Antisthenes, and spoke contemptuously of his intelligence, yet without formally naming him. At least there are some criticisms in the Platonic dialogues (especially in the Sophistês, p. 251) which the commentators pronounce, on strong grounds, to be aimed at Antisthenes: who is also unfavourably criticised by Aristotle. We know but little of the points which Antisthenes took up against Plato and still less of the reasons which he urged in support of them. ”

“ These bold creations of the Platonic fancy were repudiated by Antisthenes and Diogenes: who are both said to have declared “We see Man, and we see Horse; but Manness and Horseness we do not see”. Whereunto Plato replied “You possess that eye by which Horse is seen: but you have not yet acquired that eye by which Horseness is seen”.123
122 Among the titles of the works of Antisthenes, preserved by Diogenes Laertius (vi. 15) , several relate to dialectic or logic. ”

“ Diogenes handed him a dagger, saying, "This will." "I want to be free from pain, but not from life." Into such degradation had philosophy, as represented by the Cynical school, fallen, that it may be doubted whether it is right to include a man like Antisthenes among those who derive their title from their love of wisdom—a man who condemned the knowledge of reading and writing, who depreciated the institution of marriage, and professed that [150] he saw no other advantage in philosophy than that it enabled him to keep company with himself. ”

“ With these words the speaker ended, and Callias exclaimed:
By Hera, I envy you your wealth, Antisthenes, firstly, because the state does not lay burthens on you and treat you like a slave; and secondly, people do not fall into a rage with you when you refuse to be their creditor.
You may stay your envy (interposed Niceratus) , I shall presently present myself to borrow of him this same key of his to independence. ”

“ Their doctrine is, that the chief good of mankind is to live according to virtue, as Antisthenes says in his Hercules, in which they resemble the Stoics. For those two sects have a good deal in common with one another, on which account they themselves say that cynicism is a short road to virtue; and Zeno, the Cittiæan lived in the same manner.
They also teach that men ought to live simply, using only plain food in moderate quantities, wearing nothing but a cloak, and despising riches, and glory, and nobleness of birth ”

“ There is, he said, only one good, that is, knowledge, and only one evil, that is, ignorance; wealth and good birth bring their possessor no dignity, but on the contrary evil. At all events, when some one told him that Antisthenes' mother was a Thracian, he replied, "Nay, did you expect a man so noble to have been born of two Athenian parents?" He made Crito ransom Phaedo who, having been taken prisoner in the war, was kept in degrading slavery, and so won him for philosophy. ”

“ And as there was a law, that a man who had squandered the whole of his patrimony, should not be allowed funeral rites in his country, Antisthenes says, that he, being aware of this law, and not wishing to be exposed to the calumnies of those who envied him, and would be glad to accuse him, recited to the people his work called the Great World, which is far superior to all his other writings, and that as a reward for it he was presented with five hundred talents ”

“ Yet Socrates saw pride even through the holes of Antisthenes’ shabby robe.
Antisthenes was not much in metaphysics. He was puzzled by abstract generalizations, and to Plato’s Idealism opposed an uncompromising Realism. “Plato,” he said, “I can see a horse, and I can see a man, but horsehood and manhood I cannot see.”—“True,” replied Plato, “you have the eye that can see a horse and a man; but the eye which can see horsehood and manhood you lack.”
Of the many works of this first Cynic philosopher, scarcely anything is left. ”

“ Another of their doctrines is, that virtue is a thing which may be taught, as Antisthenes affirms in his Heraclides; and that when it has once been attained it can never be lost. They also say that the wise man deserves to be loved, and cannot commit error, and is a friend to every one who resembles him, and that he leaves nothing to fortune. And everything which is unconnected with either virtue or vice they call indifferent, agreeing in this with Aristo, the Chian. ”

“ Antisthenes and his school, of which Diogenes is the most popular and characteristic type, were afterwards known as Cynics; but the name is never mentioned by Plato and Aristotle, nor do they allude to the scurrility and systematic indecency afterwards associated with it. The anecdotes relating to this unsavoury subject should be received with extreme suspicion. There has always been a tendency to believe that philosophers carry out in practice what are vulgarly believed to be the logical consequences of their theories. ”

“ Antisthenes, surnamed Rhodes, at the marriage of his daughter, feasted all the citizens throughout every street, and procured above eight hundred chariots to attend upon the bride: and not only horsemen out of the city, but many who were invited out of the country, went before the new-married lady in great pomp and splendor. ”

“ And the Socratic Antisthenes, paraphrasing that prophetic utterance, "To whom have ye likened me? saith the Lord," [161] says that "God is like no one; wherefore no one can come to the knowledge of Him from an image."
Xenophon too, the Athenian, utters these similar sentiments in the following words: "He who shakes all things, and is Himself immoveable, is manifestly one great and povrerful. But what He is in form, appears not. No more does the sun, who wishes to shine in all directions, deem it right to permit any one to look on himself. ”

“ XII. Menedemus was not easy to be understood, and in his conversation he was hard to argue against; he spoke on every subject, and had a great deal of invention and readiness. But he was very disputatious, as Antisthenes says in his Successions; and he used to put questions of this sort, “Is one thing different from another thing?” “Yes.” “And is benefiting a person something different from the good?” “Yes.” “Then the good is not benefiting a person.” ”

“ Here they closely resembled the Cynics, as also in their contempt for formal logic; but while Antisthenes found a sanction for his indifference and impassivity in the order of nature, their chief representative, Stilpo, achieved the same result by pushing the sceptical principle to consequences from which even the Cyrenaics would have shrunk. Denying the possibility of attaching a predicate to a subject, he seems, in like manner, to have isolated the mind from what are called its affections, or, at least, to have made this isolation his ideal of the good. ”

“ Ye experts in Stoic story, ye who commit to sacred pages most excellent doctrines - that virtue alone is the good of the soul: for virtue alone saves man's life and cities. But that Muse [10] that is one of the daughters of Memory approves the pampering of the flesh, which other men have chosen for their aim.
15. Antisthenes [11] gave the impulse to the indifference of Diogenes, the continence of Crates, and the hardihood of Zeno, himself laying the foundations of their state. Xenophon calls him the most agreeable of men in conversation and the most temperate in everything else. ”

“ Zeno first, like Antisthenes, denied any value whatever to these earthly things that are not virtue—to health or sickness, riches or poverty, beauty or ugliness, pain or pleasure; who would ever mention them when the soul stood naked before God? All that would then matter, and consequently all that can ever matter, is the goodness of the man's self, that is, of his free and living will. The Stoics improved on the military metaphor; for to the soldier, after all, it does matter whether in his part of the field he wins or loses. ”

“ What saith Antisthenes? Hast thou never heard?—
It is a kingly thing, O Cyrus, to do well and to be evil spoken of. ”

“ They wished to abolish the whole system of logic and natural philosophy, like Aristo of Chios, and thought that men should study nothing but ethics; and what some people assert of Socrates was described by Diocles as a characteristic of Diogenes, for he said that his doctrine was, that a man ought to investigate—
Only the good and ill that taketh place
Within our houses.
They also discard all liberal studies. Accordingly, Antisthenes said that wise men only applied themselves to literature and learning for the sake of perverting others ”

“ The ugly and ill-shapen Crates of Thebes was one of the successors of Antisthenes. A beautiful and popular maiden, Hipparchia, with her brother Metrocles, heard the lectures of Crates, and she was so captivated by his teachings and his manner of life that she became not only his most zealous disciple, but fell violently in love with her teacher. She scorned all her younger, richer, more handsome suitors, and declared that she would have only Crates. She threatened to kill herself if her parents did not secure Crates for her husband. ”

“ No one ever carried the ambition of making a great figure in the public games of Greece so far as Alcibiades, in which he distinguished himself in the most splendid manner, by the great number of horses and chariots, which he kept only for the races. It is not easy to comprehend, how the wealth of a private person should suffice to so enormous an expense: but Antisthenes, the scholar of Socrates, who relates what he saw, informs us, that many cities of the allies, in a kind of emulation with each other, supplied Alcibiades with all things necessary for the support of such magnificence. ”

“ The effect does not take place in other cases, for we frequently admire what we do not wish to produce; indeed we often are charmed with the work, but despise the workman, as in the case of dyes and perfumery which we take pleasure in, although we regard dyers and perfumers as vulgar artizans. That was a clever saying of Antisthenes, who answered, when he heard that Ismenias was a capital flute-player, "But he must be a worthless man, for if he were not, he would not be such a capital flute-player!" ”

“ It is by their recognition of the duty of living consistently by theory instead of mere impulse or custom, their sense of the new value given to life through this rationalization, and their effort to maintain the easy, calm, unwavering firmness of the Socratic temper, that we recognize both Antisthenes and Aristippus as “Socratic men,” in spite of the completeness with which they divided their master’s positive doctrine into systems diametrically opposed. ”

“ Diogenes preached 'virtue' and assumed that his way of life was 'virtue'. But was it really so? And, if so, on what evidence? To live like a beast, to be indifferent to art, beauty, letters, science, philosophy, to the amenities of civic life, to all that raised Hellenic Man above the beast or the savage? How could this be the true end of man? The Stoic School, whose founder, Zeno, was a disciple of old Antisthenes, gradually built up a theory of moral life which has on the whole weathered the storms of time with great success. ”

“ He was but a few years in his grave when two of these were teaching regularly in the two old gymnasia of Athens. Plato, a full-blooded Athenian, was teaching in the Academy the intellectual and moral theories of his master, while Antisthenes, a half-breed (his mother being a Thracian) , was inculcating the lesson of his heroic life in Cynosarges. Their followers were called, respectively, Academics and Cynics. Thus, by these two men, was the higher education for the first time introduced into the public institutions of Athens. ”