course of its development, it underwent transformations in direction and in
content, as social circumstances changed throughout the centuries, for which
reason, the Cynicism of the early Greek Cynics was bound to differ from the
Cynicism of their Hellenistic and Roman descendants.

I have endeavored to shed light on the relationship between classical
Cynicism and what I call 'modern cynicism', and I hope to show that such a
relationship is weaker and more tenuous than what we could initially gather from
the common use of the terms 'cynic' and 'cynicism', which are often employed
to designate both the classical Cynics and the modern cynics. In fact, it is my
conviction that modern cynicism is in reality, all appearances notwithstanding,
the antithesis of classical Cynicism. The modern cynical person stands in most
respects in opposition to what the classical Cynics stood for. Modern cynicism,
as will be seen in chapter 1, is characterized by a pervasive sort of ethical
nihilism and by a permeating commitment to egoism, and is a social phenome-
non from which any and every kind of human aspiration is lacking. Classical
Cynicism, on the other hand, is based on a set of ethical and moral convictions,
that, although poorly defined and indistinctly stated, can be discerned through the
negativity apparent in its teachings and examples.

In chapter 1, I address a number of important issues, such as the origins
of the Cynic movement, dealing in particular with the question, interesting yet
not decisive in significance, of who among the Greeks was the real 'founder' or
originator of Cynicism. I also comment in this chapter on the problem of the
sources of our information concerning the Cynic movement, a problem that, as
will be seen throughout this book, plagues us everywhere and all the time as we
endeavor to reconstruct the history of this movement. The nature of the sources
is such that we are justified in affirming that on the one hand, we know a great
deal about Cynicism and about the major Cynics, and, on the other hand, we
know hardly anything about what Cynicism really was and about the ideas and
lives of specific Cynics. The anecdotes and statements attributed to the Cynics
are plentiful and colorful, the legends instructive and often amusing, and the
reports edifying and substantive, but the actual facts are few and the teachings
of the Cynics only partly elucidated. What I have attempted to create in chapter
1 is a frame of reference for our understanding of classical Cynicism, and for
this purpose I have drawn what appears to me to be a generic portrait of a
typical Greek or Roman Cynic philosopher, a portrait that, not paradoxically, fits
well all the classical Cynics and yet not completely any of them.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are devoted respectively to Antisthenes, Diogenes.
and Crates. In them, I appeal to a variety of sources in order to reconstruct, in
so far as this is possible, an adequate portrayal of these Cynic philosophers. In
chapter 5, I offer a review of the history of Cynicism from the third century B.C.
to the end of this movement in the fifth century A.D. In this chapter, I have
approached the subject by selecting nine Cynic philosophers--Onesicritus of
Astypalaea, Monimus of Syracuse, Bion of Borysthenes, Menippus of Pontus,
Cercidas of Megalopolis, Meleager and Oenomaus of Gadara, Demetrius of

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