Lycinus. A Cynic

Ly. Give an account of yourself, my man. You wear a beard and let your hair grow; you eschew shirts; you exhibit your skin; your feet are bare; you choose a wandering, outcast, beastly life; unlike other people, you make your own body the object of your severities; you go from place to place sleeping on the hard ground where chance finds you, with the result that your old cloak, neither light nor soft nor gay to begin with, has a plentiful load of filth to carry about with it. Why is it all?

Cy. It meets my needs. It was easy to come by, and it gives its owner no trouble. It is the cloak for me.

Pray tell me, do you not call extravagance a vice? Ly. Oh, yes.

Cy. And economy a virtue?

Ly. Yes, again.

Cy. Then, if you find me living economically, and others extravagantly, why blame me instead of them?

Ly. I do not call your life more economical than other people’s; I call it more destitute — destitution and want, that is what it is; you are no better than the poor who beg their daily bread.

Cy. That brings us to the questions, What is want, and what is sufficiency? Shall we try to find the answers? Ly. If you like, yes.

Cy. A man’s sufficiency is that which meets his necessities; will that do?

Ly. I pass that.

Cy. And want occurs when the supply falls short of necessity — does not meet the need?

Ly. Yes.

Cy. Very well, then, I am not in want; nothing of mine fails to satisfy my need.

Ly. How do you make that out?

Cy. Well, consider the purpose of anything we require; the purpose of a house is protection?

Ly. Yes.

Cy. Clothing — what is that for? protection too, I think.

Ly. Yes.

Cy. But now, pray, what is the purpose of the protection, in turn? the better condition of the protected, I presume.

Ly. I agree.

Cy. Then do you think my feet are in worse condition than yours?

Ly. I cannot say.

Cy. Oh, yes; look at it this way; what have feet to do?

Ly. Walk.

Cy. And do you think my feet walk worse than yours, or than the average man’s?

Ly. Oh, not that, I dare say.

Cy. Then they are not in worse condition, if they do their work as well.

Ly. That may be so.

Cy. So it appears that, as far as feet go, I am in no worse condition than other people.

Ly. No, I do not think you are.

Cy. Well, the rest of my body, then? If it is in worse condition, it must be weaker, strength being the virtue of the body. Is mine weaker?

Ly. Not that I see.

Cy. Consequently, neither my feet nor the rest of my body need protection, it seems; if they did, they would be in bad condition; for want is always an evil, and deteriorates the thing concerned. But again, there is no sign, either, of my, body’s being nourished the worse for its nourishment’s being of a common sort.

Ly. None whatever.

Cy. It would not be healthy, if it were badly nourished; for bad food injures the body.

Ly. That is true.

Cy. If so, it is for you to explain why you blame me and depreciate my life and call it miserable.

Ly. Easily explained. Nature (which you honour) and the Gods have given us the earth, and brought all sorts of good things out of it, providing us with abundance not merely for our necessities, but for our pleasures; and then you abstain from all or nearly all of it, and utilize these good things no more than the beasts. Your drink is water, just like theirs; you eat what you pick up, like a dog, and the dog’s bed is as good as yours; straw is enough for either of you. Then your clothes are no more presentable than a beggar’s . Now, if this sort of contentment is to pass for wisdom, God must have been all wrong in making sheep woolly, filling grapes with wine, and providing all our infinite variety of oil, honey, and the rest, that we might have food of every sort, pleasant drink, money, soft beds, fine houses, all the wonderful paraphernalia of civilization, in fact; for the productions of art are God’s gifts to us too. To live without all these would be miserable enough even if one could not help it, as prisoners cannot, for instance; it is far more so if the abstention is forced upon a man by himself; it is then sheer madness.

Cy. You may be right. But take this case, now. A rich man, indulging genial kindly instincts, entertains at a banquet all sorts and conditions of men; some of them are sick, others sound, and the dishes provided are as various as the guests. There is one of these to whom nothing comes amiss; he has his finger in every dish, not only the ones within easy reach, but those some way off that were intended for the invalids; this though he is in rude health, has not more than one stomach, requires little to nourish him, and is likely to be upset by a surfeit. What is your opinion of this gentleman? is he a man of sense?

Ly. Why, no.

Cy. Is he temperate?

Ly. No, nor that.

Cy. Well, then there is another guest at the same table; he seems unconscious of all that variety, fixes on some dish close by that suits his need, eats moderately of it and confines himself to it without a glance at the rest. You surely find him a more temperate and better man than the other?

Ly. Certainly.

Cy. Do you see, or must I explain?

Ly. What?

Cy. That the hospitable entertainer is God, who provides this variety of all kinds that each may have something to suit him; this is for the sound, that for the sick; this for the strong and that for the weak; it is not all for all of us; each is to take what is within reach, and of that only what he most needs.

Now you others are like the greedy unrestrained person who lays hands on everything; local productions will not do for you, the world must be your storehouse; your native land and its seas are quite insufficient; you purchase your pleasures from the ends of the earth, prefer the exotic to the home growth, the costly to the cheap, the rare to the common; in fact you would rather have troubles and complications than avoid them. Most of the precious instruments of happiness that you so pride yourselves upon are won only by vexation and worry. Give a moment’s thought, if you will, to the gold you all pray for, to the silver, the costly houses, the elaborate dresses, and do not forget their conditions precedent, the trouble and toil and danger they cost — nay, the blood and mortality and ruin; not only do numbers perish at sea on their account, or endure miseries in the acquisition or working of them; besides that, they have very likely to be fought for, or the desire of them makes friends plot against friends, children against parents, wives against husbands.

And how purposeless it all is! embroidered clothes have no more warmth in them than others, gilded houses keep out the rain no better, the drink is no sweeter out of a silver cup, or a gold one for that matter, an ivory bed makes sleep no softer; on the contrary, your fortunate man on his ivory bed between his delicate sheets constantly finds himself wooing sleep in vain. And as to the elaborate dressing of food, I need hardly say that instead of aiding nutrition it injures the body and breeds diseases in it.

As superfluous to mention the abuse of the sexual instinct, so easily managed if indulgence were not made an object. And if madness and corruption were limited to that —; but men must take nowadays to perverting the use of everything they have, turning it to unnatural purposes, like him who insists on making a carriage of a couch.

Ly. Is there such a person?

Cy. ............