After Alexander: Diogenes, the Cynics, and a City With No Walls

0:00 Aristotle built an entire ethics on a citizen fulfilling his nature inside the city, whereas Diogenes built one on a life that had no use for the city whatsoever. Both were answers to the same question: What does progress toward a good life actually require? And neither man would have recognized the other answer as an answer to progress at all Hi, welcome to Notions of Progress, the show that traces ideas of progress from antiquity to the age of AI.

0:40 Over the last two episodes, five thinkers used Aristotle to ask what a human being needs in order to live well. And most of them, following Aristotle himself, assumed that the answer runs through the polis, the Greek city-state, the political community a citizen belonged to, voted in, and depended on for a meaningful life This episode opens up a new arc, the Hellenistic period, the term historians use for the roughly two and a half centuries stretching from Alexander the Great's conquest to the, our rise of Rome. So this episode begins where the last arc left off, with Aristotle's own assumption, and that asks what happened to it? This episode covers Alexander's reign and what it did to the polis that Aristotle had taken for granted, the range of philosophical movements that emerged in the years afterward, and one of the movements in depth, the Cynics.

1:32 We'll look at their founder, Diogenes of Sinope, who was a genuinely colorful character whose philosophy amounted to its own answer to the idea of progress. So while this episode does not argue that the reign of Alexander brought about one school of philosophy or another, it does seek to surface the individuals and the movements that emerged in this aftermath. So as we discussed in previous episodes, Aristotelian ideas of flourishing, eudaimonia, were built around the notion of the citizen and the polis working together. So what follows is a documented transformation in what the polis could still offer its citizens and a range of thinkers, Aristotle among them, who each engaged that transformation in their own way.

2:15 What a good life actually requires and what happens when the thing it was built on stops being reliable is not a question that remained. So Aristotle's entire theory of human flourishing depended on one institution more than any other. He argued that a human being is by nature a political animal, and that a flourishing life was barely intelligible outside the polis, outside the city state, where a Greek citizen voted in and depended on. So ethics for Aristotle was not something that worked out alone. It was something that was practiced inside of a political community with other citizens over one's lifetime. That interrelationship between flourishing and community is the hinge that this episode turns on.

2:58 It begins with one of Aristotle's own students and a very well-known figure, Alexander the Great. Now, Aristotle's student went on to conquer the known world, and in doing so, he ended the kind of political independence the polis at its best had offered its citizens. Alexander's father, Philip, had spent two decades unifying Macedon and extending its power south into Greece before that. So at the Battle of Chaeronea, Philip's army defeated a coalition of Greek city-states, including Athens, Thebes, and thereby ending organized Greek military resistance for good. So Ar- Alexander inherited both the army and the ambition set out on the campaign of conquest that carried Macedonian rule from Greece to Egypt to the edge of India.

3:47 Historian F.W. Walbank documents what this did to the character of Greek political life. So this is really important because this, this historian makes the claim that this had a major shift in how Greeks perceived themselves within the political arena, the s- the political sphere. Alexander himself, Walbank writes, quote, "Had grown increasingly authoritarian," and his empire, quote, "Retained only the faintest links with the Macedonian monarchy that had once grown with at least some accountability to its own nobility." So kingship under Alexander became personal rather than national. Loyalty to one man, not to any inherited political order.

4:28 This integration continued after Alexander was gone. He died in three twenty three B.C. with no clear successor, and his former generals spent the next twenty-five years fighting each other for control of what Alexander had built Wallbank documents their methods directly. They repeatedly proclaimed Greek freedom as a public slogan while actually controlling the cities through military garrisons. So it was kind of like a two-tiered system here, freedom and autonomy that in Wallbank's own words did not provide control over Greece and usually remained mere words. So this was very performative. The polis that Aristotle had assumed would anchor his citizens' ethical life now existed in some- someone else's empire far away, and it was also defended by someone else's soldiers with the use of mercenaries, and it promised a freedom that rarely arrived.

5:21 Whatever the polis had been for Aristotle, it was something completely different now following Alexander, and different people responded to that difference in very different ways. Disintegration of the polis did not produce one monolithic philosophical response. No, not at all. It produced several, and what follows is a quick survey of the field before this episode narrows in one figure in particular. Zeno of Citium, who arrived in Athens not long after Alexander's death, eventually founded the Stoics, a school built on the idea that virtue alone is sufficient for a good life, regardless of outcome and regardless of circumstance. Another, Epicurus, a near exact contemporary, he founded a completely different school that was built around friendship, modest pleasure, and deliberate withdrawal from public life.

6:12 These were two different responses in the post-Alexander world. Both schools get their own episodes, and we're gonna discuss them later in this arc. This episode goes on to the response that came first, chronologically as well as philosophically, the Cynics, founded by a man who answered the disintegration of the polis by rejecting the idea that anyone needed a polis at all, and that figure was Diogenes, a genuinely colorful character. His reputation for biting wit was, according to the sources, entirely earned, and whose personality did as much to found the Cynic movement as any doctrine he wrote. Diogenes earned the nickname The Dog, Kynikos in Greek, the origin of Cynic.

6:57 So that's where the word comes from, because he lived by one distinction, nature against convention, physis against nomos. What that translates to is natural functions, he argued, were proper and should be done openly, without shame, the way a dog does them. So he appeared very crude to the folks during that time, and he looked the part. Diogenes lived in a discarded wine jar, as legends, as legend tells it. He walked barefoot in the snow, and he got on by whatever a beggar's cloak, a walking stick, and a knapsack can carry. And some Plato, according to classicist A.A. Long, is reported to have summed him up in three words: "Socrates gone mad." He described that life as a kind of training, not deprivation.

7:45 Diogenes held, according to Professor Long, that human excellence takes both mental and physical exercise, the same continuous practice that lets flutists and athletes excel in their own fields. Diogenes is preaching the virtue of a lived life, a practiced life. His own words, preserved by Diogenes, "Training can prevail over anything." Quote, "The actual despising of pleasure is thoroughly pleasurable when it has become habitual." So Diogenes, in part, spoke about self-denial and discipline. He treated the discipline of wanting nothing as its own kind of contest, where he clearly meant to win. His wit shows up just as clearly in two confrontations, as was noted by classicist R. Bracht Branham, identifies as the defining moments of his public life.

8:33 In the first one, against Plato, philosophy's highest authority at the time, and one against Alexander the Great, the world's greatest political authority. So when Plato defined the human being as a featherless biped, Diogenes is said to have plucked a chicken, walked into Plato's lecture, and announced, "Here is Plato's man." When Alexander found Diogenes at Cor- Corinth and offered him anything he wanted, Diogenes asked him to just please step out of the light. Reportedly the only thing he wanted from the most powerful man alive. It's quite quixo- quixotic. Alexander is said to have walked away remarking, "Had I not been Alexander, I would have liked to have been Diogenes." So he s- he secretly admired his free spirit.

9:17 The-- This mockery went on further. When Alexander himself worshipped as the god Dionysus, Dia- Diogenes reportedly proposed that Alexander in turn be worshipped as Serapis, which was a direct jab at the time The theorist Brannum reads the Alexander episode specifically as the political counterpart to the confrontation with Plato. Proof in both cases that Diogenes needed nothing from power at all, whether it was philosophical or political. And Diogenes, unlike his predecessors, never built a school in any formal sense. He left no institution behind him. What carried his critique forward was a person, not a text.

9:58 Crates of Thebes became his most influential follower and reached his own philosophical maturity, according to classicist A. Long, in the years right after Alexander's death, the same chaotic years the generals were fighting over Alexander's empire. Crates, in turn, is the direct link to the next generation A young merchant's son named Zeno arrived in Athens around 312 BC, and he asked a bookseller where he can find someone like Socrates, and was pointed toward a man walking past outside. "Crates, follow that man," the bookseller said, according to historian Peter Green. Zeno did, and became a Cynic himself before eventually founding his own school, the Stoics.

10:42 Again, this is something we'll discuss in later episodes. Behind the wit and the theatrics was an actual philosophical claim, and specifically one that amounts to its own idea of progress, and it was very distinct from every version the series has covered so far. Classicist Long reads Diogenes' project as more than eccentricity or performance. He sees something much deeper. Diogenes' real agenda, Long argues, was a radical critique of the Greek polis. So he saw Diogenes as a very important and a serious figure, even though he couched it in a humorous way, as a critic of the Greek system directly.

11:22 And Diogenes said as much directly. Classicist John Moles points to Diogenes' own words describing the polis itself as, quote, "Against nature." Long identifies the fuller shape of the critique that Di- Diogenes held that wealth, fame, and political power itself, in his own phrase, had no value in nature whatsoever. A polis exists in large part to protect exactly those three things, so therein lies the conflict. Diogenes, on the other hand, rejected all three at once. But that rejection had a positive side, not just a negative one. Diogenes called himself cosmopolites, a citizen of the cosmos, not just of one small specific city.

12:06 An early globalist, one might argue. Classicist John Moles argues against the longstanding scholarly consensus that this claim was purely negative. Simply another way of saying Diogenes belonged nowhere. Moles reads it, uh, instead as a genuine substantive alternative. Diogenes was proposing a different site for belonging together, not just not the city, but the whole of humanity, understood as one shared community. So read this way, the Cynic idea of progress wasn't just a rejection of society. The Cynic idea of progress does not abandon the question of how a person should live in relation to others. Instead, it relocates the question entirely from citizenship in a particular city-state to membership in a community with no borders at all.

12:54 Historian Peter Green places that relocation in a wider intellectual current. The impulse behind Greenargius did not begin with Diogenes. He traces it back over a century to Pythagoras, the Orphics, and Plato himself actually, which is very interesting. What Alexander's conquest changed was not the impulse, but its force. In Green's words, "Subjugation of the Greek city-states to outside control, it just simply accelerated and intensified an already existing process." The Cynics did not invent the process of rejecting the polis, but instead, according to Green, they radicalized it at the exact moment that the polis had the least power left to protect anyone.

13:36 So that radicalism echoes directly in the early work of Zeno of Citium, the same young Cynic converted, introduced above, later the founder of the Stoics. His treatise on the ideal state, The Republic, was shaped so thoroughly by Cynic thinking, Professor Green states, that it was joked to have been written on the dog's tail, a statement that points to the original Cynic himself, Diogenes. And Zeno wanted everything that made up an entirely Greek city, temples, courts, gymnasiums, money, local loyalties, swept entirely away. Green calls this, quote, "A frontal assault on Plato and Aristotle, since both of them in their own way built their ideal ruler around the polis, while the Cynics held the polis in contempt."

14:25 Green adds, "Now that its real power was broken." So ancient critics leveled a specific complaint at the Cynics, claiming that it lacked a telos, a stated end, or an ultimate goal, that it was random, the kind of thing that let other schools claim status as a genuine philosophy rather than a lifestyle. So this is important. We've discussed telos in previous episodes. It, you know, basically their implication was, was that this, this particular movement had no end goals whatsoever. Classicist Brock Branham and Marie Caves traced that expectation itself directly back to Aristotle. Philosophical schools only began being defined by their sovereign good following Aristotle's work, the Nicomachean Ethics.

15:12 Diogenes and Antisthenes never stated one at all. It was a later Stoic, Apollodorus of Solutia, applying to Diogenes and the Cynics retroactively after their death and gave them a telos, interestingly, living in accordance with virtue decades after Diogenes was dead as part of an argument linking the Cynics and the Stoics in one unbroken line to Socrates. Diogenes, in other words, never organized his life around a stated goal at all. What he had instead was a practice. Much of this section has been about what the Cynics rejected. Well, it's also worth being clear about what they actually stood for. The theorist Long traces it to self-sufficiency.

15:56 Autarkia achieved through deliberate training and the same discipline in Diogenes' word that lets an athlete earn a skill Branham identifies a second virtue behind both the Plato and the Alexander confrontations. Parrhesia, the freedom to speak the truth to anyone, regardless of rank. Mole adds a third positive component, cosmopolitanism, kinship with all of humanity, not merely the absence of a city. And underneath all three, Long argues, sits a single standard, living according to nature, which is physis over nomos.

16:36 Physis, nature. Nomos are just the standards of the, of the world that you're living in. So the same distinction that defined Diogenes' whole project from the start. Now, Aristotle, for his part, knew of Diogenes directly. His own work, Rhetoric, quotes a joke of Diogenes, naming him only as The Dog, the earliest surviving mention of a Cynic anywhere in Greek literature, confirmed by Long. So Aristotle built an entire ethics on a citizen fulfilling his nature inside the city, whereas Diogenes built one on a life that had no use for the city whatsoever. Both were answers to the same question: What does progress toward a good life actually require?

17:20 And neither man would have recognized the other answer as an answer to progress at all. So the Cynics' departure from Aristotle was not just a matter of degree. Simply stated, Aristotle argued that flourishing depended, depended directly on the polis, on the city-state, and it was built and sustained by the citizens within that city-state who were acting together. Now, Diogenes argued the opposite, that the polis itself was against the laws of nature, and that a person needed nothing from it in order to live well. One built an entire ethics around belonging to a political community, Aristotle, while the other built his around needing no community smaller than the entire whole of humanity.

18:06 Between these two positions, there was no obvious room for compromise. They were completely, they're completely different. Now, the Cynics were not the only answer to the world that Alexander left behind. Zeno's Stoics and Epicurus followers were working out their own answers in the same Athenian streets in the same unsettled decades following Alexander's departure. Now, whether the Stoics kept that contempt once their own school matured or found their way back to something closer to Aristotle's picture is a question that the next two episodes will take up directly. Epicurus, working on it almost exactly the same time, will raise a different question again, not what a person needs from the city, but whether a person needs the city's business at all.

18:48 What comes next is what two more schools of thought decided a person actually needs, and how close or how far each of them ended up from where Aristotle started. Look forward to discussing this with you the next time. Thanks for listening to part one.