History & overview · every faith gets one
Own nothing, owe nothing, say everything.
The Greek school that treated poverty as training and rudeness as a method. Diogenes of Sinope slept in a storage jar, begged his food, ate in the marketplace where eating in public was not done, and called the whole apparatus of custom — money, marriage, city, shame — counterfeit coinage to be defaced. It built no institution and every book it wrote is lost; what survives is a few hundred anecdotes.
Why it is filed this way
Filed as a philosophy, though it left nothing to philosophise from. The Cynics wrote and every book is lost, so the school is known through anecdote — a form of transmission closer to hagiography than argument. Later Stoics claimed them as ancestors and later Christians borrowed the wandering-preacher posture, and both have shaped which stories survived.
No Cynic body outlived antiquity and there is none now. Imitators recur — mendicant preachers, Rousseau, the modern minimalist — but there is no succession and nothing to join.
The founding
Diogenes reached Athens as an exile, driven out of Sinope over the adulteration of the city's coinage — his father ran the mint, and Diogenes admitted the charge in a work later readers could still consult. He kept the verb: paracharattein to nomisma, deface the currency. Nomisma is the coin and it is also the custom.
Its founding is bound to Antisthenes, then Diogenes of Sinope — c. 400 BCE.
What it holds
Reality. One world, no borders, and nothing in it owed to convention.
The divine. The Cynics did not argue against the gods — they refused the economy around them, mocking sacrifice, oracles and initiation. What stands where a god would is physis, nature: what an animal does without instruction, held up as a standard human beings have fallen below..
Death and after. Not addressed — this life, lived without padding.
The line
descent is public here — where it came from, what left itBranches:
Stoicism — Two handles on everything; take the one you can hold.