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Updated: June 18, 2025
On one occasion Socrates looked sharply at a rent in the cloak of his friend and said, "Ah, Antisthenes, through that hole in your cloak I see your vanity!" Xenophon sat at the feet of Socrates for a score of years, and then wrote his recollections of him as a vindication of his character.
The man who had thus attained to wisdom, not of words, but of deeds, was, as it were, in an impregnable fortress that could neither crumble into ruin nor be lost by treachery. And so Antisthenes, being asked what was the most essential point of learning, answered, "To unlearn what is evil."
Think of Antisthenes and his disciples, the dog-like Cynics think of the fools shut up in the temple of Serapis! Nothing is beautiful but what is free, and he only is not free who is forever striving to check his inclinations for the most part in vain in order to live, as feeble cowards deem virtuously, justly and truthfully.
And in like manner Antisthenes the Cynic, being asked how a man should approach politics, answered, "He will approach it as he will fire, not too near, lest he be burnt; not too far away, lest he starve of cold." And Diogenes, being asked of what city he was, answered, "I am a citizen of the world."
Antisthenes, too, one of the scholars of Socrates, said, in earnest, of the Thebans, when they were elated by their victory at Leuctra, that they looked like schoolboys who had beaten their master.
The typical Athenian of the Periclean age would have been in the first state of mind. His 'good' would be in the nature of success: to spread Justice and Freedom, to make Athens happy and strong and her laws wise and equal for rich and poor. Antisthenes had fallen violently into the second.
It was not said amiss by Antisthenes, when people told him that one Ismenias was an excellent piper, "It may be so, but he is a wretched human being, otherwise he would not have been an excellent piper." And King Philip, to the same purpose, told his son Alexander, who once at a merry meeting played a piece of music charmingly and skillfully, "Are you not ashamed, my son, to play so well?"
VIRAG'S HEAD: Quack! But beware Antisthenes, the dog sage, and the last end of Arius Heresiarchus. The agony in the closet. LYNCH: All one and the same God to her. Or a monk. LYNCH: He is. A cardinal's son. STEPHEN: Cardinal sin. Monks of the screw. Seven dwarf simian acolytes, also in red, cardinal sins, uphold his train, peeping under it. He wears a battered silk hat sideways on his head.
"You take no notice," replied Socrates, "that Antisthenes is fond of honour, and desirous to excel all others in whatever he undertakes, which is a very necessary qualification in a general. Have you not observed, that whenever he gave a comedy to the people, he always gained the prize?"
"Strike!" said Diogenes; "you will not find a stick hard enough to conquer my perseverance." Antisthenes, overcome, had not another word to say, but forthwith accepted him as his pupil. Energy of temperament, with a moderate degree of wisdom, will carry a man further than any amount of intellect without it. Energy makes the man of practical ability.
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