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Cosmopolitan, the English equivalent of the older French word cosmopolite, derives from the ancient Greek term kosmopolitës (kosmos plus polites) to signify "citizen of the world." The original Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (c. 390-323 B.C.), notorious for his "in your face" discourse and readiness to do everything in public, probably coined this expression and first applied it to himself.1 "Citizen of the world" suited Diogenes's stance of flouting local conventions in order to demonstrate their lack of grounding in what he took to be the pre-cultural norms of human nature. In light of the hundreds of individual Greek city-states, highly jealous of their autonomy but also Panhellenic in many of their customs and collective sense of superiority to the "barbarians," citizenship of the world must have originally seemed a profoundly paradoxical, even nonsensical concept.
Diogenes was a younger contemporary of Plato (alleged to have called Diogenes "Socrates gone mad") and much the same age as Aristotle.2 With its dropout lifestyle, Diogenes's Cynicism never became a school with a formal curriculum. Its leading adherents left a prominent mark on Hellenistic literature through their sardonic criticism of conventional values, but Cynicism more or less died out as an independent movement and was absorbed into Stoicism until it underwent a revival in the Roman Imperial period.
Before Stoicism, the great contributions to political thought of Plato and Aristotle presupposed the small and nationalistic city-state as the normative context of community life. With no vestige of cosmopolitan sympathy, each assumed that the populace of an ideal community would hardly reach six figures, and that it would engage in defensive and offensive wars from time to time. Babylon, for example, notwithstanding its encircling walls, was for Aristotle too large to count as a true citystate.3
Stoic ethical and political thought, however, in the five centuries of its educational impact on the Mediterranean world, readily embraced cosmopolitanism in its various guises. Crates of Thebes, a leading Cynic follower of Diogenes, powerfully influenced Zeno (334 - 262), the Cypriot immigrant to Athens who established the Stoic school of philosophy there.4 Such different figures as the Roman jurist and philosopher Cicero (106 - 43); the apostle Paul (fl. 50 - 60); Philo (c. 30 B.C. - A.D. 45), the Alexandrian exegete of...