Antisthĕnes
（
Ἀντισθένης). A Greek philosopher of Athens, born about
B.C. 440, but only a half-citizen, because his mother was a Thracian. He was in his youth a
pupil of Gorgias, and himself taught for a time as a sophist, till, towards middle life, he
attached himself to Socrates, and became his bosom friend. After the death of Socrates, in
B.C. 399, he established a school in the gymnasium
Κυνόσαργες, the only one open to persons of half-Athenian descent, whence his
followers bore the name of Cynici (
Κυνικοί). He lived to the
age of seventy. Like Socrates, he regarded virtue as necessary— indeed, alone
sufficient—for happiness, and to be a branch of knowledge that could be taught, and
that once acquired could not be lost, its essence consisting in freedom from wants by the
avoidance of evil (by evil meaning pleasure and desire). Its acquisition needs no dialectic
argumentation, only Socratic strength. His pupils, especially the famous Diogenes of
Sinopé, degraded his doctrine to cynicism by depreciating all knowledge and
despising the current morality of the time. His philosophical and rhetorical works are lost,
all but two slight declamations on the contest for the arms of Achilles, the
Aias and
Odysseus; and even their genuineness is disputed. They
have been edited by W. Winckelmann
(Zürich, 1842). See also
Müller,
De Antisthenis Cynici Vita et Scriptis (Dresden,
1860), and the life by Susemihl
(1884).
