The Cynics had no set space where they met and discoursed, such as the Garden, the Lyceum, or the Academy; for Diogenes and Crates, the streets of Athens provide the setting for both their teaching and their training. To call the Cynics a “school” though, immediately raises a difficulty for so unconventional and anti-theoretical a group. The word cynosarges means the “place of the white dog”. Nature replaces convention as the standard for judgment. If Antisthenes was not the first Cynic by name, then the origin of the appellation falls to Diogenes of Sinope, an individual well known for dog-like behavior. With the rise of Stoicism in the 3rd Century B.C., Cynicism as a serious philosophical activity underwent a decline, and it was not until the Roman era that there was a Cynic revival. Such askēsis leads the Cynic to live in poverty, embrace hardship and toil, and permits the Cynic to speak freely about the silly, and often vicious, way life is lived by his or her contemporaries. Social conventions, however, can hinder the good life by compromising freedom and setting up a code of conduct that is opposed to nature and reason. The Cynics, as well as the Stoics who followed them, characterize the Cynic way of life as a “shortcut to virtue” (see Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 104 and Book 7, Chapter 122). Legendary examples of the Cynic’s fearlessly free speech occur in Diogenes of Sinope’s interchanges with Alexander the Great.

For example, he eats, drinks, and masturbates in the marketplace, and ridicules the shame felt when one’s body is unruly or clumsy.

Hock, R.F. Foremost for understanding the Cynic conception of ethics is that virtue is a life lived in accord with nature. He breaks etiquette by publicly carrying out activities an Athenian would typically perform in private. In this last quote, Diogenes is responding to a question calling for him to state his origin with what seems to be a neologism. The Cynics, however, made it a point to shun such contact. With a few notable exceptions, the philosophers of antiquity can be found at some time or another in the company of rulers (Plato, Aeschines, and Aristippus all attended the court of Dionysius, Xenophon is intimately associated with Cyrus, Aristotle with the Macedonian ruling family, and so on). For example, in Lives of Emminent Philosophers, one finds the following anecdote: “Observing a fool tuning a harp, ‘Are you not ashamed,’ he said, ‘to give this wood concordant sounds, while you fail to harmonize your soul with your life?’ To one who protested ‘I am unfit to study philosophy,’ Diogenes said, ‘Why then live, if you do not care to live well?’” (Diogenes Laertius, Book 6, Chapter 65; R.D. Though nothing unquestionably links Antisthenes or any other Cynic to the Cynosarges, Antisthenes was a nothos and the temple was used for worshipping Hercules, the ultimate Cynic hero.

He also advocated shamelessness (performing actions that were harmful to no one but unconventional in certain circumstances), outspokenness (to further his cause), and training in austerity. As such, the historical authenticity of this heredity is suspect.

Diogenes’ cosmopolitanism represents, then, a first suggestion that human affiliation ought to be to humanity rather than a single state. The evidence regarding the Cynics is limited to apothegms, aphorisms, and ancient hearsay; none of the many Cynic texts have survived.

According to the first explanation, the term Cynic would, then, derive from the place in which the movement’s founder worshipped, exercised, and, most importantly, lectured. Diogenes of Sinope fervently rejects nomos, or convention, by showing the arbitrary and frequently amusing nature of Athenian social, religious, and political mores and trampling the authority of religious and political leaders. As such, the Cynic is freed to live according to nature and not according to the laws and conventions of the polis.

The tradition records the tenets of Cynicism via their lives. They saw part of their job as acting as the watchdog of humanity, and to evangelize and hound people about the error of their ways, particularly criticizing any show of greed, which they viewed as a major cause of suffering.

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