The Cynics and Money

The essential Ancient Cynic, Diogenes of Sinope, treated money and coinage as metaphors for the laws, norms, and actions of everyday life, as conveyed in the traditional story of his conversion to philosophy by “restamping the currency.” In his life of voluntary poverty, he also confronted his urban contemporaries with challenges to their use of actual money and to its reliability as a representation of value. His Socratic predecessor, Antisthenes, more clearly rejected the substitution of money for the real goods of wisdom and friendship. Diogenes’ preference to retain a recognition of money while constantly highlighting its conventionality is reflected in his constitution for the ideal city, which was egalitarian and communist but did not abolish money. Rather, Diogenes legislated a currency of knucklebones, animal parts used by the Greeks as the tokens in games of chance and the medium for oracular responses of the gods.