On the Unlikelihood of Knowing Anything About Cynicism At All
Diogenes lived around 2300 years ago. The dog pack, his Cynics, existed as a way of thought and life for about 800 years after he died.
There are other philosophers whose work survived that long. Religions, too, that started around this time and survive to this day. Thrive, even. But there are many, many more that didn’t.
The Roman Empire, especially the closer it came to its twilight years, was brimming with cults, many of which were bizarre. Plutarch, for example, offhandedly refers sometimes to the cult of Aremanius, in which the power of evil was celebrated and the worshipers sacrificed wolves.
Sounds like something from an RR Martin novel. No loss there.
One of the biggest religions that grew in this time was called Mithraism. At least in some way, it was a transplant from the Persian Zoroastrian religion, with Mithris as the keeper of contracts between humanity and Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian god.
Ahura Mazda was too distant, too unknowable, for humans to have a relationship with him. So Mithris was their intermediary. He was the god of friendship, brotherhood, honesty, and the enemy of lies. Sound familiar?
Over time, Mithris transformed from the great mediator into the Unconquered Sun and his cult grew until it covered the entire Empire. More than a hundred Mithraic temples have been found in Europe, but nobody knows what their symbols mean.
The religion changed too much from the Persian root, and as a ‘mystery religion,’ in which the rites were kept secret by the members, no one wrote them down. There’s a Wikipedia page, but I wouldn’t put too much money on what it says.
So Mithraism, successful as it was, disappeared with so much else when that other mystery religion, one that also had an Unconquered Son, rocketed to stardom and toppled all its competitors. And by topple, I mean completely annihilate.
The early Christians were, like most troglodytes that manage to get power, not very concerned with moral practice once they had it. Historians estimate that they destroyed 99% of the philosophical and historical writings of those who came before them once they took power.
I’m planning to get into this period of time in much greater detail in a later essay, but basically, the early Christians were closer to ISIS than any Christian would care to think.
Anyway, most things didn’t make it. But if Christianity had for whatever reason been snuffed out or just lost popularity, it could just as easily have been the Mithraic cult that had billions of followers. Yet somehow, we still know about Diogenes, Socrates, Epicurus, and others.
Why did Christianity take off and not Mithraism? And why is it that 2300 years later, we still read and know about Diogenes and other Greeks of his time? Isn’t the world so much different than it was then?
As it turns out, probably not. At least not where it matters: human nature and all the fits of joy and tales of woe that go along with that.
Part of it, maybe the biggest part, is the quality of their stories.
There are strange similarities that arise when you start digging deep into these ancient figures. The myths that surround them share common features, sometimes even identical traits, and there are stances that they share that transcend the particular ideology.
Jesus died on Golgotha, or Calvary, which was supposed to be a skull-shaped hill outside Jerusalem. Diogenes died in Corinth around 300 years before that in a place called the Craneum, or skull, where he too went to end his life.
Jesus gave himself up to the authorities because it was God’s will so that he could redeem humanity of its sins. Diogenes supposedly died by “withholding his breath” because he was sick of trying to wage his war against the immorality of the world.
There are other similarities, some of which are obvious. Both men lived extreme lives of poverty, rebelled against the powers of their day, and fought non-violent wars against the immorality they saw around them.
Their differences are important too - Diogenes didn’t claim to be the son of a god, and he didn’t start a religion. There are also plenty of differences of thought between the two, as well. But the similarities are striking.
The biggest one is that we only know of them through the writings of others. Writings that have survived around 2000 years.
It’s so long, with so many lost writings and hearsay and legend mixed in, that we can’t be sure they’re real people at all.
This is true of a lot from back then. I remember a historian in college saying that the Moses story is one of a dozen at least where mothers saved their son by putting him in a basket and sending him upriver away from the angry king or whoever wanted to kill him.
Of course, this son grew up and overthrew the evil power. It was, according to that historian, like the Harry Potter of the time. Does it mean that the whole story is fake, or not important?
No. It means that the deep core, the thesis, the meaning of the story, matters. The writer Christopher Hitchens used to say that he didn’t care if Socrates was a real person or not, or if he’d ever said the things he reputedly said. The truth of what was written was so powerful it didn’t matter.
A good story has that quality. Sure, it has to be entertaining too, but it will have some protein and healthy fats mixed in with all the sugar if it’s going to last long. Let alone 2000 years. And part of that lasting power is relevance.
We have better technology, better living standards, and lives that would be incomprehensible to people from back then in so many ways. And yet our societies and a lot of us are as fucked up now as we were then.
We’re lucky that some of the truthful teachings at least managed to survive, due in no small part maybe to the quality of the story and the ongoing relevance to a deeper human need.
How much might also be due to some of the similarities between the stories?