Essay · By Stephen Pasquini · Stoic Lives
Before there were Stoics, there were the Cynics: a beggar-philosopher who lived in a storage jar and told Alexander the Great to get out of his light, and a rich man from Thebes who gave his fortune away and walked into strangers’ houses to give them advice. Stoicism grew straight out of their movement. Here is who Diogenes and Crates were, what they stood for, and why Seneca kept a Cynic as one of his closest friends. This is the second essay in our Stoic Lives series, which walks through the movement one person at a time.
The Cynics at a glance
- Name means“Dog-like” (Greek kunikos)
- Diogenesc. 412/404–323 BC, from Sinope on the Black Sea
- Cratesc. 365–285 BC, from Thebes
- WhereThe streets of Athens and Corinth
- Big ideaLive by nature, not by custom
- Link to StoicismCrates was Zeno’s first teacher
Philosophers who lived like dogs
The Cynics were less a school than a way of life. They had no building, no fees and no fixed syllabus. They slept outdoors, ate whatever came their way, said exactly what they thought, and treated most of society’s rules as a kind of shared silliness. People called them dogs, and they took the insult as a badge.
Ancient writers traced the line back to Antisthenes, a tough-minded student of Socrates who taught at a gymnasium in Athens called the Cynosarges. Diogenes Laërtius, our main ancient source, says Diogenes learned from Antisthenes. Modern scholars aren’t so sure. The dates fit awkwardly, and the neat teacher-to-student chain looks like something later writers tidied up. What is not in doubt is the line from Diogenes to Crates, and from Crates to Zeno, the founder of Stoicism. (For the bigger picture of how that happened, see where Stoicism came from.)
Diogenes: the man in the jar
Diogenes came from Sinope, a Greek trading city on the south coast of the Black Sea. His father, Hicesias, was a banker, and something went badly wrong with the city’s money. In one version his father debased the coinage; in another Diogenes did it himself. Either way, Diogenes ended up in exile. Later the Cynics turned the scandal into a motto: “deface the currency,” meaning stamp out false values and put true ones in their place.
In Athens he made his home in a large clay storage jar (older translations say “tub,” and later legend made it a barrel) beside a temple near the marketplace. He owned a cloak, a staff and a bag. Then one day he saw a boy drinking from his cupped hands and threw away his cup too. “A child has beaten me in plainness of living,” he said.
He was also a performer. Diogenes Laërtius, in R. D. Hicks’s 1925 translation, collects dozens of stories:
- He walked around with a lamp in broad daylight saying, “I am looking for a man.”
- When Plato defined a human being as a featherless two-legged animal, Diogenes plucked a chicken, brought it into the lecture room and announced, “Here is Plato’s man.”
- Asked where he came from, he said, “I am a citizen of the world.” His Greek word, kosmopolitês, is the root of our cosmopolitan.
- Asked what sort of man Diogenes was, Plato is said to have answered: “A Socrates gone mad.”
“Stand out of my light”
The most famous story of all happened in Corinth. Alexander the Great, the most powerful man in the world, came to see the famous dog and offered him anything he wanted. Diogenes was sunning himself. His reply: “Stand out of my light.” Whether or not it happened exactly that way, the point stuck. A man who wants nothing cannot be bought, not even by a king.
Late in life, the story goes, Diogenes was captured by pirates and put up for sale as a slave. Asked what he could do, he said he could govern men, and pointing at a well-dressed buyer named Xeniades, he said: “Sell me to this man; he needs a master.” Xeniades bought him and made him tutor to his sons.
Diogenes died in Corinth, very old. One ancient writer claimed it was the same day Alexander died in Babylon, in 323 BC, which is a little too perfect to trust. Ancient authors told several different stories about how he died, and they don’t agree.
- Socrates, the root of it all
- The Cynics
- The first Stoic
- The king who met Diogenes
Crates: the door-opener
Crates was born into a wealthy family in Thebes. According to Diogenes Laërtius, he turned his property into money, a large fortune, and gave it away to his fellow citizens. One report says Diogenes himself talked him into it.
What came next made him the warmest of the Cynics. Crates went into people’s homes, uninvited but welcome, to scold and counsel them. People nicknamed him the “Door-opener”. Where Diogenes barked, Crates counseled. He was lame, plain-looking and, by his own description, hunchbacked in old age, and people laughed at him in the gym. It never seems to have bothered him.
He also wrote poetry. In one poem he imagines a little city called Pera, which is the Greek word for the beggar’s bag every Cynic carried. In Pera there are no fools, no flatterers and no gluttons, only thyme, garlic, figs and bread. The whole Cynic utopia fits in a shoulder bag.
When Alexander asked whether Crates would like his home city of Thebes, which Alexander himself had destroyed, rebuilt, Crates shrugged: “Why should it be? Perhaps another Alexander will destroy it again.”
Hipparchia
Crates had an extraordinary partner. Hipparchia, from Maroneia in northern Greece, fell in love with his teaching and his way of life and refused every wealthy suitor her family found. Her parents asked Crates to talk her out of it. Instead he stood up, shed his cloak and said, “This is the bridegroom, here are his possessions.” She married him anyway, dressed as he did, and went with him everywhere, including to dinner parties where women usually didn’t appear. When a guest mocked her for leaving the loom, she answered that time spent on education was no mistake. She is one of the very few women philosophers of ancient Greece whose story survives.
The teacher of Zeno
Around 312 BC a shipwrecked merchant from Cyprus asked an Athenian bookseller where he could find a man like Socrates. The bookseller pointed at Crates, who was walking past. That merchant was Zeno, and for several years Crates trained him, once by making him carry a pot of lentil soup through town and then smashing it, to cure him of caring what people thought.
From the dog to the porch
Zeno eventually left Crates to study logic and other subjects, and the school he founded kept much of the Cynic core while softening its edges. Here is how the ideas traveled:
The two movements agreed on the big things. Both said virtue is the only real good, that happiness depends on your character and not your possessions, and that we should live in agreement with nature. Both thought of themselves as citizens of the world. Zeno’s first book, the Republic, was so Cynic in spirit that people joked he had written it “on the dog’s tail.”
Where they parted ways was over everything else: whether to own anything, whether manners matter, whether a wise person should take part in public life. Later Stoics even had a phrase for the relationship. Diogenes Laërtius reports that some of them called the Cynic life a shortcut to virtue. A shortcut, though, is also the steep way up.
Money
CynicGet rid of it. Diogenes threw away even his cup.
StoicIt’s “indifferent.” You may have it, just don’t need it.
Custom and manners
CynicMostly nonsense. Mock it in public.
StoicRespect what serves people; question the rest.
Public life
CynicStay out. Heckle from the street.
StoicServe your community if you can.
Theory
CynicSkip it. Philosophy is a way of living.
StoicPractice comes first, but logic and physics back it up.
Where the Cynics meet Seneca
Nearly four hundred years after Diogenes, Seneca was one of the richest men in Rome, which makes his admiration for the Cynics all the more interesting. He tells their stories again and again in his letters, and he sometimes argues with them too.
In Letter 10 he borrows a line from Crates. A young man said he was walking alone because he was keeping his own company:
“Be careful, then,” said Crates, “and watch yourself closely — you’re keeping company with a bad man.”
In Letter 90 he retells the story of the cup, asking whether the wise man is the inventor of the saw or Diogenes, who:
“on seeing a boy drinking water from the cupped hollow of his hand, immediately took the cup from his bag and broke it, scolding himself: ‘Fool — to have been carrying this excess baggage all this time!’”
Seneca also knew the Cynic downside. In Letter 29 he questions whether Diogenes and his followers were right to hand out blunt advice to anyone who happened by. Advice, he says, should be aimed like an arrow, at people ready to hear it. And in his essay On Tranquility of Mind he tells how Diogenes’ only slave ran away and Diogenes refused to chase him: it would be shameful, he said, if the slave could live without Diogenes but Diogenes could not live without the slave. In Letter 47 Seneca names Diogenes among the free men who ended up in chains, a reminder that fortune can make anyone a slave.
Demetrius, Seneca’s Cynic friend
Seneca didn’t only read about Cynics. He had one as a friend. Demetrius was a Cynic who lived in Rome in Seneca’s time, half-dressed and owning almost nothing, and later he was banished by the emperor Vespasian. Seneca, who knew a thing or two about great wealth, says he would rather talk with Demetrius than with the senators in purple. In Letter 62:
“Anyone has the power to despise everything, but no one has the power to own everything. The shortest way to wealth is to despise wealth.”
And in Letter 20, after seeing Demetrius sleep without so much as a blanket, Seneca gives him the highest praise he knows:
“He isn’t only a teacher of the truth — he’s a witness to it.”
That is the Cynic gift to Stoicism in one sentence. The Cynics proved with their bodies that a person can live on almost nothing and stay free. The Stoics kept that proof and built a philosophy around it that a senator, a slave or an emperor could live by. A century after Seneca, Epictetus held up the true Cynic as a messenger sent by God, while warning his students not to take up that life lightly.
Want to see where the Cynics sit among everyone who came after them? Our Stoicism at a glance timeline and map lay out the whole movement.
Frequently asked questions
Who were the Cynics?
The Cynics were Greek philosophers, starting in the 300s BC, who believed happiness comes from virtue and living simply by nature, and who openly mocked wealth, status and social custom. The best known are Diogenes of Sinope and Crates of Thebes.
Why were they called Cynics?
From the Greek word for dog. Critics called Diogenes a dog for living and eating in public, and the Cynics adopted the name. Some ancient writers also linked it to the Cynosarges, the gymnasium where Antisthenes taught.
Did Diogenes really live in a barrel?
Not a barrel. The ancient sources say he lived in a large clay storage jar, a pithos, in Athens. Barrels came later, in paintings and legends.
What is the difference between Cynics and Stoics?
Both said virtue is the only true good. The Cynics rejected possessions, manners and public life almost entirely, while the Stoics treated those things as “indifferent” and added logic, physics and a duty to serve the community.
Was Crates really Zeno’s teacher?
Yes. According to Diogenes Laërtius, Crates was the first philosopher Zeno studied with after arriving in Athens, before he went on to other teachers and founded Stoicism.
What did Seneca think of the Cynics?
He admired their freedom from wealth and quoted Diogenes and Crates in his letters, but he thought their scattershot frankness often missed its target. His close friend Demetrius was a Cynic.
Next in the Stoic Lives series: Cleanthes, the boxer who carried water by night so he could study philosophy by day, and who became Zeno’s successor.
Go deeper
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers
Diogenes Laërtius, whose Book 6 is where nearly every Cynic story comes from, in Pamela Mensch’s readable translation.
Seneca, the millionaire who kept a half-dressed Cynic as his favorite company.
Discourses and Selected Writings
Epictetus, the Stoic who most admired the Cynics and most bluntly warned how hard their life was.
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