Ajax
Athens
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Antisthenes
Antisthenes
c. 446 BCE–c. 366 BCE · Athens
Antisthenes (c. 446 – c. 366 BCE) was an Athenian philosopher, a pupil of Socrates, and later regarded by ancient writers as a founder of the Cynic tradition. He emphasized the ethical dimension of Socrates' teaching, arguing that virtue is sufficient for happiness and can be taught, and advocating a self-sufficient, ascetic way of life. Having earlier studied rhetoric under Gorgias, he composed the two surviving declamations Ajax and Odysseus, paired epideictic speeches in which the two Homeric heroes contend over the arms of Achilles. His ethical doctrines influenced Diogenes of Sinope and the later Stoics.
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AthensAttica (Greece)
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About Athens
The intellectual capital of the Greek world, where Socrates questioned in the agora and four great schools—Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa, and Epicurus' Garden—took root within a single square mile.
In Athens at the same time
Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Herodotus, Gorgias of Leontini, Euripides
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Antisthenes’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Herodotus, Gorgias of Leontini, Euripides, Antiphon, Socrates, Prodicus, Democritus, Thucydides, Critias, Aristophanes, Lysias, Andocides, Isocrates, Alcidamas, Xenophon
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Antisthenes’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works(2)
Odysseus
Athens