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UMI: GREEK CHARACTERS OMITTED.
REPRESENTING A DOMINANT TREND in Cynic scholarship, J. L. Moles writes, '`The theoretical underpinning of Cynicism is minimalist: the essence of the Cynic message is that the good life is easy to understand and to practice: everything else, including elaborate education and philosophizing, is not only irrelevant but inimical to this central message.1 For Moles, the true Cynic's "actual behavior is self-justifying.' Hence Moles minimizes organizing or justifying factors for the Cynic lifestyle even though he admits (139f,144, 157) that there is evidence for some of these in the sources, especially the example of Diogenes and the anti-Prometheus or Age of Chronos myth.
This scholarly trend correctly avoids etic categories in assessing Cynicism, as well as the reductionist fallacy of explaining the widespread and diverse Cynic movement by a single or a few factors.2 By not perceiving any organizing factors in Cynicism or by failing to assess the weight and importance of such factors, however, this trend overlooks significant information in Cynic sources. Evidence from primary and ancient secondary sources demonstrates that Cynics do often propose justifications for their lifestyle. A repeated justification in these materials is the appeal to myth and especially the myth of the Age of Chronos.3 Moles (157) comments, "The question is whether the Cynic way of life is underpinned by anything that can be described as a theory. The nearest thing to such a theory is the Cynic anti-Prometheus myth." The present essay investigates the significance of myth, especially that of the Age of Chronos, in justifying and informing the Cynic lifestyle.4
The Cynics on Myth
Myths, along with their themes and characters, frequently occur in Cynic materials. Ps.-Diogenes defends his begging and attire by appealing to myth. In a letter to his mother Olympias, he credits the myths and not Antisthenes with first instructing him in the Cynic lifestyle:
Now I did not learn these lessons [the Cynic way of life] from Antisthenes first, but from the gods and heroes and those who converted Greece to wisdom, like Homer and the tragic poets. [2] For they said that Hera ... took up a way of life of this sort, collecting alms for the "nymphs of the spring, noble goddesses, life-giving offspring of Inachus, the Argive...