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Reviewed by:
  • The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy by R. Bracht Branham, Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé
  • Brad Inwood
R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, editors. The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. ix + 456. Cloth, $55.00.

The ancient philosophical biographer, Diogenes Laertius, included the Cynics in his array of philosophical schools despite their loose organization and lack of fixed doctrine. He begins Book Six of his Lives of the Philosophers with the Socratic Antisthenes, lavishes more than half the book on Diogenes of Sinope, includes minor figures such as Monimus and Onesicritus, tells us most of what we know about Crates of Thebes, his wife Hipparchia and her brother Metrocles, and concludes with short entries on Menippus and Menedemus. This only takes Cynicism down to the third century B.C., a point which marks the beginning of a slight lull in its visibility.

But as this comprehensive and authoritative collection of essays shows, that is only the beginning of the history of Cynicism. The editors and contributors (15 in all) choose well in treating it as a movement rather than as a conventional philosophical school. For it lacked fixed doctrines (except at the broadest and most general level), did not depend on teacher-student transmission for its continued existence, and relied for its impact less on argument and more on lecturing, street-theater, humor, personal charisma, and literary tools. Its message of radical anticonventionalism and subversive rational criticism could be carried in a variety of media, a fact which enabled Cynicism as an intellectual tradition to reinvent itself repeatedly from its apparent beginnings in the fifth century B.C. to the present day.

Branham and Goulet-Cazé have produced a volume of papers which will serve as the new starting point for anyone interested in Cynicism (or indeed cynicism) as a philosophical idea or cultural phenomenon. It is significant that while working on this review I was asked at various times by four colleagues and graduate students what they should read on some aspect of Cynicism or another; I had no hesitation in saying “start with the new Branham/Goulet-Cazé collection.” Previously one would have had to refer enquirers to Dudley’s A History of Cynicism from Diogenes to the Sixth Century A.D., which was published in 1937. The Cynics does far more than bring Dudley up to date.

The present volume deals extensively with the antecedents of Cynicism in Greek culture (in excellent papers by James Romm and Richard Martin) and extends the chronological boundaries from the late-ancient period (Margarethe Billerbeck and Derek Krueger) to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Sylvain Matton, Joel Relihan, Daniel Kinney). Beyond that lies the paper from which I personally learned the most, Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting’s study of Cynic ideas in the Enlightenment and in Nietzsche, [End Page 125] which concludes with an appreciation of the Cynical argument of Peter Sloterdijk, whose Kritik der zynischen Vernunft appeared in 1983.

In the more familiar period of the movement’s history, we get: a fresh evaluation of Cynicism’s relationship to Socrates and the Hellenistic schools by A. A. Long; Goulet-Cazé on religion in early Cynicism; Branham on the rhetoric of the Cynics and John Moles on the controversial issue of Cynic cosmopolitanism; James Porter on the Cynic side of the Stoic Aristo of Chios; and Miriam Griffin on the reaction of Roman culture to Cynicism. The volume concludes with a detailed study of the iconography of Cynicism by Diskin Clay.

Thematic inclusiveness and the high general quality of the papers make this an indispensable book. The peripheral resources it provides are a considerable bonus. The annotated bibliography on Cynicism and its reception is a work of scholarship in its own right; the indices locorum and nominum are carefully done. Moreover, Goulet-Cazé has added two appendices, the first an exhaustive annotated catalogue of all known Cynic philosophers from the ancient world, the second an argument (based on Aristotle’s Rhetoric 1411a24–25) that the first philosopher referred to as ‘the dog’ was probably Antisthenes rather than Diogenes.

Throughout the editors have...

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