the suffering virtuous.

The typical Athenian of the Periclean age would have been in the first
state of mind. His 'good' would be in the nature of success: to spread
Justice and Freedom, to make Athens happy and strong and her laws wise
and equal for rich and poor. Antisthenes had fallen violently into the
second. He was defeated together with all that he most cared for, and he
comforted himself with the thought that nothing matters except to have
done your best. As he phrased it _Arete is the good_, Arete meaning
'virtue' or 'goodness', the quality of a good citizen, a good father, a
good dog, a good sword.

The things of the world are vanity, and philosophy as vain as the rest.
Nothing but goodness is good; and the first step towards attaining it is
to repent.

There was in Athens a gymnasium built for those who were base-born and
could not attend the gymnasia of true citizens. It was called Kynosarges
and was dedicated to the great bastard, Heracles. Antisthenes, though he
had moved hitherto in the somewhat patrician circle of the Socratics,
remembered how that his mother was a Thracian slave, and set up his
school in Kynosarges among the disinherited of the earth. He made
friends with the 'bad,' who needed befriending. He dressed like the
poorest workman. He would accept no disciples except those who could
bear hardship, and was apt to drive new-comers away with his stick. Yet
he also preached in the streets, both in Athens and Corinth. He preached
rhetorically, with parables and vivid emotional phrases, compelling the
attention of the crowd. His eloquence was held to be bad style, and it
started the form of literature known to the Cynics as +chreia+, 'a
help', or +diatribe+, 'a study', and by the Christians as +homilia+, a
'homily' or sermon.

This passionate and ascetic old man would have attracted the interest of
the world even more, had it not been for one of his disciples. This was
a young man from Sinope, on the Euxine, whom he did not take to at first
sight; the son of a disreputable money-changer who had been sent to
prison for defacing the coinage. Antisthenes ordered the lad away, but
he paid no attention; he beat him with his stick, but he never moved. He
wanted 'wisdom', and saw that Antisthenes had it to give. His aim in
life was to do as his father had done, to 'deface the coinage', but on a
much larger scale. He would deface all the coinage current in the world.
Every conventional stamp was fals