Ajax
Athens
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Antisthenes
Antisthenes
c. 446 BCE–c. 366 BCE · Athens
Antisthenes (c. 446 – c. 366 BCE) was an Athenian philosopher, a pupil of Socrates, and later regarded by ancient writers as a founder of the Cynic tradition. He emphasized the ethical dimension of Socrates' teaching, arguing that virtue is sufficient for happiness and can be taught, and advocating a self-sufficient, ascetic way of life. Having earlier studied rhetoric under Gorgias, he composed the two surviving declamations Ajax and Odysseus, paired epideictic speeches in which the two Homeric heroes contend over the arms of Achilles. His ethical doctrines influenced Diogenes of Sinope and the later Stoics.
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AthensAttica (Greece)
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
About Athens
Athens, the capital of Greece since 1834, was the leading intellectual centre of the classical Greek world. Socrates taught there, and four major philosophical schools took root in the city: Plato's Academy, founded around 387 BCE, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa of Zeno, and Epicurus' Garden. Under Hellenistic and Roman rule Athens remained a place of study that drew students from across the empire; in the 4th century CE the Christian writers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus studied there together, while Neoplatonist teachers kept lecturing. Emperor Justinian's ban on pagan teaching of philosophy in 529 is generally taken to mark the end of the city's ancient history.
In Athens at the same time
Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Gorgias of Leontini, Herodotus, Euripides
Across the traditions, in Athens at the same time
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Antisthenes’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Gorgias of Leontini, Herodotus, Euripides, Antiphon, Socrates, Prodicus, Democritus, Thucydides, Critias, Aristophanes, Lysias, Andocides, Isocrates, Alcidamas, Xenophon
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Antisthenes’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works(2)
Odysseus
Athens