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Updated: May 26, 2025
A certain tyrant asked him what benefit he had derived from so long and so devoted a study of philosophy. 'It has given me the power, replied Aristippus, 'to converse with all men without fear or concern. My speech has begun with a certain abruptness of expression due to the suddenness with which the subject suggested itself to me.
But among these he also finds a man whom he can develop and set forth as the representative of his own convictions I mean Aristippus. Here philosophy and worldly pleasure are through wise moderation so united in serene and welcome fashion that the wish arises to be a contemporary in so fair a land, and in such goodly company.
It happens only too often that Epicurus is confounded with Aristippus, who places sensual pleasure above intellectual enjoyment, as he holds that bodily pain is harder to endure than mental anguish.
"You answer me," said Aristippus, "as you answered me before, when I asked you whether you knew any good thing." "And do you think," replied Socrates, "that the good and the beautiful are different? Know you not that the things that are beautiful are good likewise in the same sense? It would be false to say of virtue that in certain occasions it is beautiful, and in others good.
Yet if those poetical Deities had foreseen that their indulgence would have proved fatal to their sons, they must have been thought blamable for it. Aristo of Chios used often to say that the philosophers do hurt to such of their disciples as take their good doctrine in a wrong sense; thus the lectures of Aristippus might produce debauchees, and those of Zeno pedants.
When we speak of men of honour we join the two qualities, and call them excellent and good. In our bodies beauty and goodness relate always to the same end. In a word, all things that are of any use in the world are esteemed beautiful and good, with regard to the subject for which they are proper." "At this rate you might find beauty in a basket to carry dung," said Aristippus.
For, being told that one of them lived too luxuriously, he asked him this question: "If you were entrusted, Aristippus, with the education of two young men, one to be a prince and the other a private man, how would you educate them? Let us begin with their nourishment, as being the foundation of all."
"And if there be any art that teaches to overcome our enemies, to which of the two is it rather reasonable to teach it?" "To him to," said Aristippus, "for without that art all the rest would avail him nothing." "I believe," said Socrates, "that a man, who has been educated in this manner, would not suffer himself to be so easily surprised by his enemies as the most part of animals do.
He moulded on the antique figures drawn from life by the historian the ideal of his own life, only all the parts of every great man suited him alike: he assumed them by turns, realised them in his reveries, as suited to reproduce In him the voluptuary as the sage, the malcontent as the patriot; Aristippus as Themistocles; Scipio as Coriolanus.
There have been great philosophers who have made nothing of this tie of nature, as Aristippus for one, who being pressed home about the affection he owed to his children, as being come out of him, presently fell to spit, saying, that this also came out of him, and that we also breed worms and lice; and that other, that Plutarch endeavoured to reconcile to his brother: "I make never the more account of him," said he, "for coming out of the same hole."
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