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Aristippus and his companions after being shipwrecked, by A Zucchi (1768).

Aristippus was far more radical than the more famous Epicurus.

Ancient philosophy, for all its theoretical underpinnings, was above all an art of living, which aimed, through self-transformation, at controlling the passions, relieving suffering, and attaining wisdom. Philosophy was to the soul, or mind, as medicine is to the body, and the professional philosopher was, first and foremost, a healer of the soul. In the words of the Roman statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero, “Unless the soul is cured, which cannot be done without philosophy, there will be no end to our miseries.” According to the Roman Stoic Musonius Rufus, “We must live like doctors and be continually treating ourselves with reason.”

This notion of philosophy as therapy, or an art of living, can be traced back to Socrates. After his heroic death by hemlock in 399 BCE, his nearest students ran off each with a different aspect of his teaching. While Plato and the Platonic Academy which he founded inherited his theoretical side, Antisthenes embraced his ethical or practical side, advocating an ascetic life of virtue and laying the foundations for the Cynic school. A third follower, Aristippus, had a very different take on their master’s ethics and established the Cyrenaic school, which taught that the only intrinsic good is pleasure, especially momentary pleasures and above all physical ones—a position far more radical than that eventually espoused by Epicurus.

The Life of Aristippus

Aristippus of Cyrene (435-356 BCE), who died before Epicurus was even born, emphasized present and physical pleasures over long-term pleasure or tranquillity. For Aristippus and his followers the Cyrenaics, pleasure meant not merely the absence of pain but positively making the most out of every moment.

Aristippus had been a follower of Socrates, and once had the temerity to tell him that he lived in Athens so as not to be embroiled in the politics of his native city—the kind of remark that turned other students of Socrates, notably Plato and Xenophon, against him. Aristippus was the first of the Socratics to take money for teaching. When he demanded five hundred drachmas out of a man for tutoring his son, the man protested, “For that much money, I could buy a slave!” “Go ahead” he replied, “then you’ll have two.”

Many saucy stories are told of Aristippus. One day, Diogenes the Cynic was washing the dirt from his vegetables, and, seeing him pass by, called out, “Had you learnt to make these your diet, you would have no need to pay court to kings.” “And you, Diogenes” he shot back, “had you learnt to associate with men, you would have no need to wash these vegetables.”

When someone chided him for his extravagance in catering, he retorted, “Wouldn’t you have bought this if you could have got it for three obols? Very well then, it is no longer I who am a lover of pleasure, but you who are a lover of money.”

When someone remarked that philosophers always seem to be at rich men’s doors, he replied, “Physicians are always calling on those who are sick, but no one on that account would prefer being sick to being a physician.”

When Dionysus I, the tyrant of Syracuse, asked him why he had come to his court, he said, “When I needed wisdom, I went to Socrates; but now that I am in need of money, I come to you.”

One time, Dionysus spat in his face. When someone reproached him for putting up with this, he said, “If fishermen are prepared to be drenched in seawater in order to catch a gudgeon, should I not be prepared to be sprayed with spittle in order to take a blenny?”

When Dionysus gave him his choice of three courtesans, he carried off all three, explaining, “Paris paid dearly for preferring one out of three.”

He was for a long time intimate with the courtesan Lais of Corinth, who was said to be the most beautiful woman in all of Greece.

The Cyrenaic School of Philosophy

But appearances, especially when it comes to the hedonists, can be deceptive. Aristippus was far from amoral. He simply believed that we ought to make the most out of every situation. Upon being criticised for his love of pleasure, he replied, “It is not abstinence from pleasures that is best, but mastery over them without ever being worsted.” One time, as he entered the house of a courtesan, one of the lads with him blushed. Seeing this, he said, “It is not going in that is shameful, but being unable to come out.”

Vitruvius, in his treatise on architecture, relates the story of Aristippus’ shipwreck. Upon being cast ashore on Rhodes, he repaired to the city and made straight for the gymnasium, where he spoke so eloquently that the Rhodians provided for all his needs and all his companions’ needs. When his companions wished to return to their country and asked what message they might bear from him, he bade them say this: that children ought to be provided with property and resources of a kind that can swim with them even out of a shipwreck.

Despite having two sons, Aristippus designated his daughter Arete as his successor at the head of the Cyrenaic school, and it was Arete’s son, Aristippus the Younger, who formalized the principles of Cyrenaicism.

A number of later Cyrenaics departed from this canon; for instance, Theodorus the Atheist (c. 340-c. 250 BCE) emphasized mental over physical pleasures and defined the good as prudence and justice. Hegesias of Cyrene (fl. 290 BCE), who might have been influenced by Buddhist missionaries sent forth by Ashoka the Great, argued that, since happiness is impossible to achieve, the goal of living ought instead to be the avoidance of pain and trouble. According to Cicero, he wrote a book called Death by Starvation that persuaded so many people that death is preferable to life that Ptolemy II Philadelphus banned him from teaching in Alexandria.

Cyrenaicism died out within a century to be replaced by Epicureanism.

Read my related article on Epicurus, The Arithmetics of Pleasure.

Neel Burton is author of Stoic Stories: Stoicism by Its Best Stories.

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The Stoic emperor never intended his work for publication. So why did he write it?

After the three Flavian emperors—Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian—came the “Five Good Emperors” of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and our man Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 CE). These emperors, wrote Machiavelli, “had no need of praetorian cohorts, or of countless legions to guard them, but were defended by their own good lives, the goodwill of their subjects, and the attachment of the Senate.” Whereas Vespasian and Domitian had persecuted philosophers, Hadrian and Antoninus had courted them—until Marcus crossed over to the other side.

In Plato’s Republic (c. 375 BCE), Socrates says that his vision of the ideal state could not exist “until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy… then only will our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.” Here he was at last, more than five hundred years later, rarer even than the Egyptian phoenix, the fabled philosopher king—and not just any vassal or kinglet, but the Emperor of Rome.

In the latter years of his life, Marcus kept a journal, now called the Meditations, which has miraculously come down to us, and through which we might enter the mind of the philosopher-king. The twelve books of the Meditations do not present any chronological or thematic order but consist of a variety of unrelated reflections that seem to have been written for Marcus’ own benefit: for strength, for guidance, and for self-improvement—for example, “To speak to the Senate—or anyone—in the right tone, without being overbearing. To choose the right words.” This touching intimacy, and the epigrammatic character of many of his reflections, have ensured the appeal and perennial popularity of the work.

The first book, in which Marcus reflects with gratitude on what he has learned from various relatives and mentors, stands out from the rest as being more structured and autobiographical. He concludes this first book by thanking the gods that “when I became interested in philosophy, I didn’t fall into the hands of charlatans, and didn’t get bogged down in writing treatises, or become absorbed by logic-chopping, or preoccupied with physics.” The influence of the Stoic teacher Epictetus, here and elsewhere, is easy enough to discern.

It is unlikely that Marcus intended his thoughts for publication, or, even, for anyone’s eyes except his own. The “you” that he often uses is not a generic “you,” but him addressing himself—for example, “When you look at yourself, see any of the emperors… Then let it hit you: Where are they now?”

In one place, he refers to the Stoics in the third person: “Things are wrapped in such a veil of mystery that many good philosophers have found it impossible to make sense of them. Even the Stoics have trouble.” This suggests that he did not consider himself a Stoic, or even a philosopher, but merely a friend or student of philosophy.

Whatever the case, he clearly held the Stoics, and Epictetus, in the highest regard, and endeavoured all his life to live up to their precepts. In the Discourses, Epictetus advises the reader to rehearse and write down Stoic responses to life’s challenges. This embedding of Stoic principles, this turning of theory into practice, is what Marcus appears to be doing in and by the Meditations.

This kind of reflective journaling is not original to Epictetus. In On Anger, the Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE) says that he acquired the habit from his teacher Sextius, who would nightly ask himself: “Which of your ills did you heal today? Which vice did you resist? In what aspect are you better?” “Your anger,” says Seneca, “will cease and become more controllable if it knows that every day it must come before a judge.”

Is there anything finer, then, than this habit of scrutinizing the entire day? What sort of sleep follows this self-examination—how peaceful, how deep and free… I exercise this jurisdiction daily and plead my case before myself. When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent… I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.

According to Epictetus, students of Stoicism ought to be trained in three areas, or disciplines, if they are to become good and virtuous and happy: desire, action, and assent. This pedagogy is echoed by Marcus when he writes, “Wipe out imagination: check desire: extinguish appetite: keep the ruling faculty in its own power.” That Marcus’ principal themes break down around the three disciplines supports the notion that the work represents his attempt to apply and embed the precepts of Stoicism.

And it’s surprising how Christian, or proto-Christian, he can sometimes sound—for example, when he writes: “God sees all our souls freed from their fleshy containers, stripped clean of their bark, cleansed of their grime. He grasps with his intelligence alone what was poured and channelled from himself into them. If you learn to do the same, you can avoid a great deal of distress. When you see through the flesh that covers you, will you be unsettled by clothing, mansions, celebrity—the painted sets, the costume cupboard?” Christian persecutions in fact increased during Marcus’ reign, although that probably had little to do with him.

Who discovered the Meditations after the death of Marcus? Who copied it? Who disseminated it? We may never find out. The first categorical mention of the Meditations, after more than four centuries of radio silence, is from the late ninth or early tenth century. In 1558, the German scholar Wilhelm Xylander translated the work into Latin, after which it came to assume its place in the Western canon.

After Wen Jiabao, the prime minister of China from 2003 to 2013, revealed that he had read it over a hundred times, it became a surprise bestseller in China too. How fitting, then, that the first recorded Roman embassy to China, at that time under the Hans, arrived in 166, in the reign of Marcus.

Neel Burton is author of Stoic Stories: Stoicism by Its Best Stories.

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The life and philosophy, and radical freedom, of Diogenes the Cynic.

​Diogenes and other Cynics took the asceticism of Socrates to an extreme. Diogenes lived in a storage jar, begged from statues, and walked backward in the street. He had not lost his mind but was trying to show people up as mindless hypocrites. The Cynics were the ancestors of the Stoics.

Diogenes the Cynic (c. 412–323 BCE) was a contemporary of Plato, who once called him “a Socrates gone mad.”

After being exiled from his native Sinope for having defaced its coinage, Diogenes moved to Athens, took up the life of a beggar, and made it his mission to metaphorically deface the coinage of custom and convention—which, he maintained, was the false currency of morality. This story about defacing coinage may have been no more than a play on words, since, in Greek, the word for “money,” nomisma, sounds like, and is derived from, the word for “custom,” nomos—although it is also the case that archaeologists have unearthed defaced mid-fourth-century coins from Sinope.

Diogenes disdained the need for conventional shelter and other corrupting “dainties” and chose instead to sleep in a storage jar and get by on a diet of chickpeas and lupins. He used to beg for the bare necessities, including from statues—explaining to passers-by that he was thereby practising for rejection. He held that human beings had much to learn from the artlessness of dogs, which, unlike human beings, had not “complicated every simple gift of the gods.” The term “cynic” derives from the Greek for “dog-like,” kynikos.

Diogenes placed nature and reason firmly above custom and convention, which he held to be incompatible with happiness. It is natural for human beings to act in accord with reason, and reason dictates that human beings ought to live in accord with nature. Instead of wasting our substance in the pursuit of wealth or renown, we ought to have the sense and the courage to live like animals or gods, reveling in life’s simplest pleasures, which are also its greatest, without bond or fear. Thus, Diogenes taught that if an act is not shameful in private, it should not be shameful in public, either. Once, upon being challenged for masturbating in the marketplace, he replied, “If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly.”

Although he privileged reason, Diogenes despised abstract philosophy of the kind practised at Plato’s Academy. When, to great acclaim, Plato defined a human being as “an animal, biped, and featherless,” Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it to the Academy with the words, “Behold! I have brought you Plato’s man.” Plato consequently refined his definition, adding to it “with broad nails.” One day, Diogenes asked Plato for a handful of figs from his garden. When Plato had a whole bushel sent out, he muttered, “Typical Plato.” Like Socrates, Diogenes favoured living dialogue over the dead word. When a certain Hegesias asked to be lent one of his writing tablets, he replied, “You are a simpleton Hegesias; you do not choose painted figs, but real ones; and yet you pass over the true training and would apply yourself to written rules.”

Diogenes was not easily impressed by his fellow men and women, not even by Alexander the Great, who, according to an apocryphal story, came to visit him one morning while he was basking in the sun. When Alexander asked him whether he might do anything for him, he replied, “Yes, stand out of my sunshine.” To his credit, Alexander still declared, “If I were not Alexander, I should wish to be Diogenes.” The old dog used to stroll around Athens in broad daylight brandishing an ignited lamp. Whenever curious people stopped to ask what he was doing, he would reply, “I am just looking for a human being.” He would also walk backward in the street or walk into the theatre against the flow of people leaving. When a large enough crowd had gathered around to laugh at him, he would turn on his heels and say, “Why do you mock, when you’ve spent your whole life walking backwards? I, at least, am able to turn around.”

After his death in the city of Corinth, the Corinthians honoured him with a pillar surmounted by a dog of Parian marble. The Cynics exerted a strong influence on Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, who began his career as a Cynic.

Neel Burton is author of Stoic Stories, which is part of the Ancient Wisdom series.​