In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

66 chapter 3 Yearning for Excellence: Odysseus in Cynic and Stoic Thought But I will tell you all the sorrows you are fated to endure In your well fitted palace. You must bear them, And not disclose to anyone, man or woman, That you have come back from your wanderings, but suffer In silence many painful things, and subject yourself to the violence of men (Od. 13.306–10) sources We now step onto more familiar territory: Odysseus in his Cynic and Stoic garb is a well-known figure to readers acquainted with the hero’s reception in antiquity . If we believe the available sources, Diogenes, the father of the Cynic movement , was an enthusiastic admirer of Odysseus. The same is likely to be true for Zeno, the founder of the Stoa, of whom we know that he wrote five books of Homeric Problems. Though there is no evidence in the extant fragments that Zeno promoted Odysseus as a moral exemplar, it is reasonable to assume so because the points of Stoic ethics that Odysseus came to illustrate—the obligations for us to submit to fate cheerfully and to be indifferent to both pleasure and pain—belonged already to the repertoire of the early Stoics and did not undergo significant changes in the subsequent phases of the movement.1 That said, however, in the surviving evidence the Stoic engagement with Odysseus dates almost entirely to the Imperial period. A survey of the fragments attributed to the early Stoics (Cleanthes and Chrysippus in addition to Zeno) as well as to the so-called middle Stoics of the second and first centuries BC (Panaetius and Posidonius) shows little or no concern with Odysseus. Cicero is the only author of the late Republican period to document a Stoic interest in Odysseus, but in using Cicero as a source for Stoic ideals we must apply caution Yearning for Excellence 67 because he is not himself a Stoic (in fact, we shall see that in some important respects his treatment of Odysseus follows in Platonic footsteps). Conversely, Seneca, Epictetus, Musonius, and Dio Chrysostom, Stoic or Stoicizing authors all belonging to the first and second centuries AD, have transmitted to us the image of Odysseus we tend to associate with the Stoics. This wealth of evidence strongly suggests that interest in Odysseus within the Stoic movement increased significantly in the early centuries of the Roman Empire. Some features of Odysseus, if properly reconfigured, were indeed bound to appeal to a stoically minded subject to Rome. His endurance in particular was fitting to illustrate how to survive the “blows of fortune”—a universal condition, to be sure, but one that must have been poignantly felt under the sway of Roman rule. Odysseus in that context could also teach those excluded from politics or deprived of their estate, exiles and outcasts, that political influence and wealth are not real sources of power, that one may well look like a pauper, but truly be a king. Did the Cynic admiration for Odysseus likewise grow in the Imperial period ? When tackling Cynic sources we are on shaky ground, for almost all of them, not just those concerned with Odysseus, date to several centuries after the beginnings of the movement with Diogenes and his disciple Crates of Thebes. It is possible that interest in Odysseus, among the Cynics as among the Stoics, intensified in the Roman period, though at the same time Diogenes is insistently paired with Odysseus, whereas the founder of the Stoa, Zeno, is not. With the sources at our disposal we can only hope to draw the lines of a Cynic portrait of the hero, but not to give that portrait a date of birth. I shall conventionally speak of “Diogenes”though the character as we have it is a later construct. Another major problem connected to our sources is how to tell apart Cynic uses of Odysseus from Stoic ones, for the Stoics are an offshoot of the Cynics (Zeno was a follower of Crates). The similarities between the two movements faded with the middle Stoics and the Roman Stoics of the Imperial period (especially Seneca and Marcus Aurelius), but they never disappeared entirely. Though Juvenal exaggerates when he jokingly says (13.121–22) that the Stoics differ from the Cynics only by a tunica (meaning that they dress), he could apparently anticipate that readers would see enough proximity between the two philosophies to enjoy the joke (which, if I may, reminds me of the description of...

Share