The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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PREDECESSORS OF STOICS IN ETHICS 131
him. Zeno joined him and became his disciple, and
thus started his life of philosopher under the Cynic
banner.
Whether this story be literally true or not, it declares
the undoubted fact that the Cynics, who claimed to be
the only real representatives of the Socratic teaching,
greatly impressed the Stoics, beginning with the founder
Zeno.
What, then, was the Cynics view of life, and of man
and his aspirations and his relations to nature and to
God? for these are the main questions that engaged
the attention of the Stoics.
In the Symposium of Xenophon, Antisthenes, the
founder of the Cynic school, is introduced as upholding
the thesis that his wealth is the thing of which he is
most proud, and, at the same time, he expresses him
self shocked at the principle of Callias that the way to
make men just and upright
is
by giving them money.
The seeming paradox
is resolved by observing the
double meaning of * (
wealth or money. You cannot
buy uprightness with material coin ;
but you may be
wealthy, though poor and lacking such coin, in spiritual
riches. I hold to the belief," he says,
"that wealth
and poverty
lie not in men s
"wealth of my sort will make you
estate but in men s souls,"
liberal of nature."
The soul is the great thing,
and its health the first
concern ;
and the discourse on this text that he gives
is an advocacy of the wisdom, for the soul s sake, of
sitting loose to the pleasures of the world, of moderating
and suppressing one s desires, of finding the source of
happiness and peace in the mind and inward being, not