Anecdotes of the Cynics by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241251485
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

A motivated buyer questioned him as to what he could do. ‘I know how to govern men,’ he said with perfect frankness — his soul, it seems, giving spontaneous expression to the free, fine and royal element in his nature.

DL 6. 76–9

By report he was close to ninety when he died. Accounts differ as to the cause. One has him seized by colic after eating raw octopus. In another version he held his breath until he passed away … According to yet another tradition, he sustained a bad bite to his foot when feeding a dog pack with pieces of octopus, a wound that finally carried him off. But Antisthenes in his work On Philosophers and Their Disciples reverts to the view that he died of self-suffocation. The story is that he was camping in the Craneum, the exercise area outside Corinth, when his friends arrived as usual one day and found him wrapped in his mantle head to foot. They thought he was sleeping, although it was not like him to nap or doze during the day. Pulling the cloak away, they found his body inert. The consensus was that he had deliberately taken his leave of the world.

Supposedly, though, his followers then fell to arguing over who should have the honour of burying him. It even came to blows. The young men’s parents and estate managers had to intervene, until the decision was made to bury the great man by the gate leading to the Isthmus. A pillar was placed on his burial mound, crowned with the likeness of a dog carved from Parian marble. Citizens of Corinth subsequently dedicated bronze statues on the site. On one the following verses were inscribed:

Even this bronze will tarnish with time: but eternity itself

cannot

efface your name. For you alone pointed Man towards the path

through life of greatest independence and least trouble or

inconvenience.

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