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Equally distasteful were those who equalled him in wealth alone, for by a strange contradiction, the very fact that the rumshop did not jar on their sensibilities, marked them for him as coarse and uncongenial. Weston had turned to himself. It is the study of oneself that makes cynics. The study of others makes egotists. Then a woman had come.
Everybody bowed down before Alexander, and all looked at him with awe and respect, as he made his triumphant progress through Greece, all except the sage Di-og´e-nes. This man belonged to a class of philosophers who were called "cynics," which means "doglike," because, as some say, they did not care for the usual comforts of life.
If all this was not visible to Aristotle when he penned his immortal opening paragraph of the Politics, he is at least entitled to the credit of having laid his doctrine of state-sovereignty on a foundation so sure that over twenty centuries of discussion from the Stoics and Cynics, through Augustine and Dante, down to Rousseau and Lenin, have not been able to shake it.
Aristippus, the founder of the Cyreniac school, was a sort of philosophic voluptuary, teaching that pleasure is the end of life. Antisthenes, the founder of the Cynics, was both virtuous and arrogant, placing the supreme good in virtue, but despising speculative science, and maintaining that no man can refute the opinions of another.
Both men were cynics in their way and viewed their fellow-men with a measure of contempt. But here parallel ends. Butler was an intellectual, inferior as a craftsman to Peace, the essentially practical, unread, naturally gifted artist. Butler was a man of books. He had been schoolmaster, journalist.
There are cynics and sentimentalists who are the despair of all who are seriously working for better citizenship. But the chances are that the men to whom our stranger was listening were neither cynics nor sentimentalists, but idealists who had the American temperament.
All the cynics and epigram makers in the world agree that love ends with marriage, and this not only in modern times but even back into those days of the French Court of Love, when Margaret de Valois decided that the lover had more claims than the husband. Romance dies with marriage is the plaint of poet and novelists; the charm of woman disappears with her mystery, with possession.
"I had been told that life was easy and with abundant opportunity for all intellects and all energies," he declared at his trial, "but experience has shown me that only the cynics and the servile can make a place for themselves at the banquet. I had been told that social institutions were based on justice and equality, and I have seen about me only lies and deceit.
Antinous felt much disgusted by the hideous appearance, the coarse manners, and shrill voices of these persons, and when he rose as the cynics' diatribe seemed especially directed against him they scoffed at him as he went, mocking at his costume and his oiled and perfumed hair. The Bithynian made no reply to this abuse. It was odious to him, but he thought it might perhaps have amused Caesar.
True, her long eyelashes were not altogether innocent of "kohl," true, there was a faint odor about her as of rare perfumes and cosmetics, true, there was something not altogether sincere or natural even in her ravishing smile and fascinating ways but few, save cynics, could reasonably dispute her physical perfections, or question the right she had to tempt and arouse the passions of men, or to trample underfoot? with an air of insolent superiority, the feelings of women less fair and fortunate.
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