Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

xxxviii INTRODUCTION SECT.
of married or domestic life, and so to move among his
fellows in fearless isolation, as God's commissioned
messenger for the service and conversion of men,
privileged, through blameless transparency of life, to
become father and brother and friend to the whole
family of human kind.
Thus, though Stoicism widened the basis and the
intellectual outlook of Cynism, it stood faithful to the
tie of descent and the inalienable claim of moral
affinity; and the main dogmas of the Cynic school
the identification of virtue with knowledge, the auto-
cracy and indivisibility of virtue, and the moral independence
of the individual remained firmly embedded
in the Stoic creed, the central core of its teaching, and
the raison d'etre of its promulgation.
2. From Cynism to Stoicism
The founder of Cynism was Antisthenes, pupil of
Gorgias and Socrates; his disciple Diogenes was its
most effective missionary, and from him the leadership
on to Crates. At Athens the two teachers who
passed
most influenced Zeno, the author of Stoicism, were
Crates the Cynic and Stilpo the Megarian. The latter
brought a new and unexpected element to bear on
Cynism, by grafting upon Cynic morals the system of
pure
Megara.
dialectic associated with the name of Euclides of
Just as Antisthenes had narrowed philosophy into
a problem of personal ethics, and dissociated it from
general dialectic, so Euclides, sensitive only to another
side of the Socratic impulse, divorced dialectic from