The Cynics’ Parrhesia: The Example of Antisthenes of Athens

Dorota Tymura

doi:10.18290/rh25733.12

Published : 2025-07-07

Vol. 73 No. 3 (2025)

The Cynics’ Parrhesia: The Example of Antisthenes of Athens

Dorota Tymura

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7836-9591

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh25733.12

Abstract

This article re-examines the Cynic concept of parrhesia – fearless and truth-telling speech – through the largely overlooked figure of Antisthenes of Athens. In contrast to the prevailing scholarly view, which identifies Diogenes of Sinope as the central exemplar of Cynic candor, this study argues that Antisthenes established both the theoretical and practical foundations of this tradition by integrating Socratic elenchos with a new, publicly oriented rhetoric. After outlining the semantic evolution of parrhesia – from Homeric custom to the democratic ideology of the fifth century BCE – the article offers a close analysis of the extant fragments by Antisthenes, as well as relevant testimonies from Diogenes Laertius, Xenophon, and later doxographers. It advances three central claims: (1) Antisthenes reconceived philosophy as a lived mission of moral provocation aimed at exposing conventional values; (2) his bios kynikos—marked by voluntary poverty, a life “according to nature”, and the unity of word and deed – functioned as a performative vehicle for parrhesia; and (3) his model significantly shaped subsequent Cynic and Stoic takes on candid speech as an ethical and political practice. By analyzing Antisthenes’ aphorisms, his criticism of power and his self-creation as a public person, the article fills a significant historiographical gap and demonstrates how Cynic parrhesia evolved from Socratic dialectic into an embodied rhetoric of ethical confrontation.

Keywords:

parrhesia, Cynicism, Antisthenes, Greek ethics, bios kynikos

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