The Cynic (11-15)

Again, when people use edible things not for food but to get dye out of—the murex-dyers, for instance—are they not abusing God’s gifts?

Lycinus Certainly not; the flesh of the murex can provide a pigment as well as food.

Cynic Ah, but it was not made for that. So you can force a mixing-bowl to do the work of a saucepan; but that is not what it was made for. However, it is impossible to exhaust these people’s wrong-headedness; it is endless. And because I will not join them, you reproach me, My life is that of the orderly man I described; I make merry on what comes to hand, use what is cheap, and have no yearning for the elaborate and exotic.

Moreover, if you think that because I need and use but few things I live the life of a beast, that argument lands you in the conclusion that the Gods are yet lower than the beasts; for they have no needs at all. But to clear your ideas on the comparative merits of great and small needs, you have only to reflect that children have more needs than adults, women than men, the sick than the well, and generally the inferior than the superior. Accordingly, the Gods have no needs, and those men the fewest who are nearest Gods.

Take Heracles, the best man that ever lived, a divine man, and rightly reckoned a God; was it wrong-headedness that made him go about in nothing but a lion’s skin, insensible to all the needs you feel? No, he was not wrong-headed, who. righted other people’s wrongs; he was not poor, who was lord of land and sea. Wherever he went, he was master; he never met his superior or his equal as long as he lived. Do you supfose he could not get sheets and shoes, and therefore went as he did? absurd! he had self-control and fortitude; he-wanted power, and not luxury.

And Theseus his disciple—king of all the Athenians, son of posidon, says the legend, and best of his generation,—he too chose to go naked and unshod; it was his pleasure to let his hair and beard grow; and not his pleasure only, but all his contemporaries’; they were better men than you, and would no more have let you shave them than a lioa would; soft smooth flesh was very well for women, they thought; as for them, they were men, and were content to look it; the beard was man’s ornament, like the lion’s, or the horse’s mane; God had made certain beautiful and decorative additions to those creatures; and so he had to man, in the beard. Well, I admire those ancients and would fain be like them; I have not the smallest admiration for the present generation’s wonderful felicity—tables! clothes! bodies artificially polished all

My prayer would be that my feet might be just hoofs, like Chiron’s in the story, that I might need bedclothes no more than the lion, and costly food no more than the dog. Let my sufficient bed be the whole earth, my house this universe, and the food of my choice the easiest procurable. May I have no need, I nor any that I call friend, of gold and silver. For all human evils spring from the desire of these, seditions and wars, conspiracies and murders, The fountain of them all is the desire of more. Never be that-desire mine; let me never wish for more than my share, but be content with less.