Discussion 8

50 Dædalus Summer 2008

Cosmopolitan, the English equivalent of the older French word cosmopolite, de- rives from the ancient Greek term kos- mopolites (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 ½rst applied it to himself.1 “Citizen of the world” suited Diogenes’s stance of flouting local con- ventions 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,” citizen- ship 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 be- came 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

A. A. Long

The concept of the cosmopolitan in Greek & Roman thought

A. A. Long, a Fellow of the American Academy since 1989, is Irving G. Stone Professor of Litera- ture, Professor of Classics, and Af½liated Profes- sor of Philosophy and Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. His publications include “Language and Thought in Sophocles: A Study of Abstract Nouns and Poetic Technique” (1968), “Stoic Studies” (1996), and “Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life” (2002). He has edit- ed “Problems in Stoicism” (1996), “The Question of ‘Eclecticism’: Studies in Later Greek Philoso- phy” (with J. M. Dillon, 1988), and “The Cam- bridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy” (1999). He is a Corresponding Fellow of the Brit- ish Academy.

© 2008 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

1 Diogenes’s use of the expression is attested in the biography of him composed by Diogenes Laertius (fl. c. A.D. 200) in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers, book 6, section 63. This biography (hereafter DL) is the best source for the life and thought of the Cynic Diogenes. On the Cynics in general, see Robert B. Branham and Marie- Odile Goulet-Cazé, The Cynics: The Cynic Move- ment in Antiquity and its Legacy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996).

2 DL, 6.54.

The concept of the cos- mopolitan in Greek & Roman thought

out as an independent movement and was absorbed into Stoicism until it un- derwent a revival in the Roman Imperial period.

Before Stoicism, the great contribu- tions to political thought of Plato and Aristotle presupposed the small and na- tionalistic city-state as the normative context of community life. With no ves- tige of cosmopolitan sympathy, each as- sumed that the populace of an ideal community would hardly reach six ½g- ures, and that it would engage in defen- sive and offensive wars from time to time. Babylon, for example, notwith- standing its encircling walls, was for Ar- istotle too large to count as a true city- state.3

Stoic ethical and political thought, however, in the ½ve centuries of its edu- cational impact on the Mediterranean world, readily embraced cosmopolitan- ism in its various guises. Crates of Thebes, a leading Cynic follower of Di- ogenes, powerfully influenced Zeno (334 –262), the Cypriot immigrant to Athens who established the Stoic school of phi- losophy there.4 Such different ½gures as the Roman jurist and philosopher Cicero (106–43); the apostle Paul (fl. 50–60); Philo (c. 30 B.C.–A.D. 45), the Alexan- drian exegete of the Torah; and the Ro- man emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161–180) also express cosmopolitan sen- timents. Philo, although not an of½cial

adherent of Stoicism (his allegorical in- terpretations of the Five Books of Moses are permeated with Stoic ideas nonethe- less), is in fact the earliest surviving au- thor to use the exact expression kosmopo- lites.5

Ancient ideas of the Stoic cosmopoli- tan live on today, especially in such no- tions and contexts as moral universalism in the Kantian tradition, natural law the- ory, and the indifference of race, gender, and status to the worth of individuals.6 Yet none of these ideas is as important to modern cosmopolitan or quasi-cosmo- politan contexts as international politi- cal institutions, free trade, and suprana- tional efforts to implement world peace, combat rogue regimes, and relieve suf- fering across national borders. More- over, the ancient cosmopolitan wasn’t typi½ed as a highly sophisticated person or someone with multicultural sympa- thies, whose tastes, manners, and values are precisely what make him or her at home anywhere, as the modern cosmo- politan is cast. The principal continuity between the ancient and modern cosmo- politan turns on taking citizen, in the ex- pression “citizen of the world,” in an ex- tended or metaphorical sense. In the ab- sence of a global state or government (which no Greek or Roman envisioned), literal world citizenship is an impossibil- ity. What is possible, however, and what Stoic cosmopolitans advocated our do- ing, is for us to treat persons, no matter who or where, as quasi-siblings, whose claims on our care and fair treatment are grounded simply in the fact that we are all human beings.

3 Aristotle, Politics, 2.6, 65a14, 3.3, 76a28.

4 On Zeno, see Theodore Scaltsas and Andrew Mason, The Philosophy of Zeno (Larnaca: The Municipality of Larnaca, 2002). For detailed treatment of early Stoicism, see Keimpe Algra et al., The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philos- ophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and for an introductory account that ex- tends into the later Stoic tradition, see A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).

5 On Philo, see David T. Runia, Exegesis and Philosophy: Studies on Philo of Alexandria (Great Yarmouth: Variorum, 1990).

6 See Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown, “Cos- mopolitanism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philoso- phy, http://plato.stanford.edu.

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Citizenship of the world presupposes the existence of cities in the ordinary sense of the word: settled communities with precise territorial boundaries, cul- tural traditions, laws, political institu- tions, and social identities. In Homer’s epic poetry, our principal written source for earliest Greece, full-fledged cities are not part of the main narrative, which looks back to less formally structured communities governed by hereditary chieftans.7 There are forti½ed palatial settlements, centralized farmsteads, such as the home of Odysseus on Ithaca, and the great citadel of Troy, but nothing that we can call a polis in the sense of a Greek city-state. Such communities and their colonies only start to emerge in the eighth century B.C., some ½ve hundred years after the Bronze Age societies that Homer principally envisions. His Ach- aeans and their Trojan foes are ½ercely partisan, but foreign though the latter are, Homer himself does not take sides. He scarcely differentiates the two sets of people in the Iliad or Odyssey, where eth- nicity and nationality are not identi½ers of human worth. Instead he character- izes human beings quite uniformly as mortals, bread-eaters, speech-users, and with numerous other attributes.8 His evenhandedness and uniformity, rife with normative connotations, imply that human identity is inseparable from an ethical orientation.

Is Homer’s outlook cosmopolitan? Yes and no. His uniform perspectives are more than Panhellenic because they ex- tend to Egyptians and Ethiopians, as well as Trojans. But nationalism is too weak a component of his poems for it to

be transcended by strict cosmopolitan- ism. What is most striking is the com- plete absence from his vocabulary of the word barbaros (barbarian) in reference to non-Greeks. Homer knows the word on- ly as part of an epithet meaning “for- eign-speaking.”

As a prejudiced ethnic slur connoting brutish, stupid, slavish, and coward, bar- baros came into vogue in the context of the unexpectedly successful Greek, and especially Athenian, victories against the invading Persians.9 Depreciation of non- Greeks had already begun after Homer, but it gained momentum, especially at Athens as that dominant community es- tablished its hegemony over other Greek city-states (ostensibly as an alliance against Persia), during the ½rst half of the ½fth century. Still, Herodotus, the Io- nian historian of the Persian Wars, was wonderfully aware of cultural relativism. Other contemporary writers comment- ed on the natural (as distinct from the cultural) identity of human beings, the absence of a natural basis for slavery, and the existence of natural norms that transcend the practices of particular communities.10 The atomist philoso- pher Democritus is credited with saying “To a wise man every land is accessible; for the entire world (kosmos) is a good soul’s native land.”11

Prejudice and chauvinism did, howev- er, prevail at this time, no doubt deriv-

7 See the classic study by Moses I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (Viking: New York, 1978).

8 See Harold C. Baldry, The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1965), chap. two.

9 See Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-De½nition through Tragedy (Oxford: Claren- don Press, 1989).

10 See William K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 3, The Fifth-Century Enlighten- ment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), chap. VI, and George B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 154–159.

11 Fragment 247 Diels-Kranz.

ing much of their support from the belli- cose patriotism individual Greek states adopted both in relation to one another and to the continuing threats of Persian invasion. For the medical writer Hippoc- rates, differences in basic human nature do not make peoples of Asia–modern Turkey, Iraq, and Iran–“soft” and “lazy” by comparison with Europeans, but, in- stead, the equable climate and despotic regimes of their native lands.12

Was Socrates an early cosmopolitan? His incalculable influence on all of mor- al philosophy and his position as the Stoics’ chief role model make this ques- tion an important one. Offered the op- portunity to escape while awaiting exe- cution, Socrates, according to Plato’s Crito, declined to do so, on the ground that he would be doing wrong to the laws of Athens, which he personi½ed as his cultural parents. Even though Socra- tes appears to have left Athens only when on military service and showed no signi½cant interest in foreign affairs, his ethical convictions are completely uni- versal in their scope, including such propositions as the involuntariness of wrong-doing and the absolute sover- eignty of justice.13

Two of Socrates’s followers merit mention as well. Aristippus, reputed founder of the Cyrenaic school of radi- cal hedonism, is reported to have told Socrates that his own ideal was a life of freedom (avoiding the two extremes of of½ce holding and slavery), which he pursued by “not con½ning [himself ] to

one nationality but by being a stranger everywhere.”14 A Cynic or Stoic would substitute “citizen” for “stranger,” so Aristippus was at most a half-hearted cosmopolitan. Antisthenes, another of Socrates’s leading companions, proba- bly had a major influence on Diogenes.15 Self-suf½ciency, mental strength, free- dom grounded in deliberate poverty, “making reason one’s city wall,” as he is memorably quoted as saying, and ap- proval of the Homeric Odysseus for his adaptability and indifference to conven- tional shame–these are the salient fea- tures of Antisthenes’s recommended outlook, all of them authentically So- cratic. Do they throw light on what Di- ogenes meant by calling himself a citi- zen of the world?

Asked where he came from, Diogenes said, “I am a kosmopolites.”16 The phrase “defacing the currency,” an activity (probably a self-description) attributed to Diogenes, helps us interpret this as- sertion.17 The word translated currency is related to nomos, signifying custom or law. According to our best source for the historical Diogenes, “he gave to matters of nomos none of the weight he granted to matters of nature” and placed nothing ahead of freedom.18 The biographical tradition tells us that the young Dioge- nes was compelled to leave his native Sinope because either he or his father

12 See Hippocrates’s remarkable little work Airs, Waters, and Places.

13 A case for attributing some cosmopolitan tendencies to Socrates is made by Eric Brown, “Hellenistic Cosmopolitanism,” in Mary L. Gill and Pierre Pellegrin, eds., A Companion to An- cient Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).

14 Xenophon, Memoirs of Socrates, 2.1.13.

15 On Antisthenes, see Susan Prince, “Socrates, Antisthenes, and the Cynics,” in Sara Ahbel- Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar, eds., A Compan- ion to Socrates (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).

16 DL, 6.63.

17 DL, 6.71.

18 Ibid.

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had defaced the local coinage.19 (This story reads suspiciously like an attempt to provide a literal scenario for Dioge- nes’s metaphorical defacements of cus- tom or law. Other anecdotes include his being captured by pirates and sold as a slave.) In due course he found his way to Athens, where he lived as a “resident alien” without citizen rights, seemingly supporting himself entirely by begging and the handouts he received as a fa- mously entertaining curmudgeon and street philosopher.

Diogenes sought to present himself as a living icon of counter-culturalism. He was especially renowned for his way-out exhibitionism–masturbating in public, eating raw meat, living in a tub–his cult of poverty, rugged simplicity, refusal to respect anyone on the basis of rank or position, and his brilliantly caustic dis- course, the last of which harked back to Socrates and Antisthenes. Neither of these predecessors, though, anticipated Diogenes’s unremitting exhibitionism and affronts to conventional decency and manners.

Where is the originator of cosmopoli- tanism in any of this? He approved be- ing described in the following verses from Greek tragedy: “Stateless, home- less, without a native land / A beggar, a vagabond, living by the day.”20 Here his world citizenship, rather than an en- dorsement of internationalism or world- wide community, looks like a combina- tion of refugee and hippy, with the “I don’t give a damn where I live and I re- gard all laws as constraints on my free- dom” flavor of the modern cynic.

Reading Diogenes’s expression “citi- zen of the world” negatively is certainly correct up to a point; he took himself to be living a life unconstrained by any lo- cal or of½cial citizenship. However, Di- ogenes wasn’t purely iconoclastic in his rejection of the conventional norms of civic life, nor did he have only a negative manifesto to promote. Diogenes Laer- tius, after quoting the verses printed above in his biography of Diogenes, says of the Cynic, “He claimed that he could oppose con½dence to fortune, nature to law or custom, and reason to emotion” –with nature and reason being the cru- cial words in this statement. By oppos- ing nature to nomos Diogenes took up sides in a debate that had been rumbling on for the previous one hundred years. Earlier defendants of nature tended to view it as libertarianism, and, in doing so, saw themselves as hedonists or sup- porters of untrammeled political power. Diogenes was a libertarian of a kind, but the nature he opposed to nomos was not an anything-goes egoism, but, rather, reason, which he took to be the essence of human nature. His forceful attacks on nomos, ribald though they typically were in formulation, had the serious purpose of challenging his audience to hold their cultural practices accountable strictly to the light of reason. By forcefully con- trasting nature with nomos, Diogenes drew attention, as Antisthenes had al- ready done, to the idea that in reason hu- man beings have their greatest authority for action and their greatest bulwark against the vicissitudes of fortune. For Diogenes, the true Cynic was a Hercules of the mind, whose conquests would be the monsters of irrational passion and cultural prejudice and whose weapon would be reason on the path to self-mas- tery.

We are probably warranted in credit- ing Diogenes with the idea that human

19 DL, 6.20, probably with a view to putting bad money out of circulation. Diogenes’s father is said to have been in charge of the local mint.

20 DL, 6.38.

nature in its rational capacities tran- scends all civic and ethnic boundaries. Diogenes’s cosmopolitanism was nor- mative rather than descriptive, though. His worldwide city should be regarded as the community of the wise, an ideal of enlightened persons united not by lo- cal or relational ties but by the common values they share–a group that under- stands what human nature needs in or- der to perfect itself.21 This is the cosmo- politanism that Diogenes, through his follower Crates, passed down to Zeno and the Stoic tradition.22

In the early Hellenistic world, Greek language and culture spread into West- ern Asia and Egypt in the aftermath of the conquests of Alexander the Great (d. 323), providing a fertile context for implicit cosmopolitan sentiments to take root. Stoicism provided the theo- retical stimulus and explicit support for these sentiments.

Zeno stamped Cynic credentials on his earliest and most famous book, Republic, probably in deliberate confrontation with Plato’s most celebrated work of the same name. The philosopher and biogra- pher Plutarch, writing some four hun- dred years later, described its main point thus:

Our household arrangements should not be based on cities or local populations,

each one marked out by its own legal sys- tem, but we should regard all people as our fellow-citizens and local residents, and there should be one way of life and one order, like that of a herd grazing to- gether and nurtured by a common law.23

Zeno radically proposed that the ideal community would dispense with such fundamental Hellenic institutions as temples, courts of law, gymnasia, cur- rency, conventional family life, and dress codes. Plutarch’s “one way of life” cap- tures some of Zeno’s ideas, but fails to register the completely utopian charac- ter of the Stoic founder’s vision, namely a community comprised solely of the wise and virtuous.

Zeno gave impetus to two closely relat- ed and enormously influential ideas: moral universalism and natural law. Ac- cording to Stoic cosmology, the world is under the direction of a supreme nature named Zeus, who is perfectly rational and providential and present to all hu- man beings (or at least those who listen to the voice of reason) in Zeus’s law-like prescriptions and prohibitions.24

Zeno himself may not have theorized the concept of a world city, but Stoicism was soon associated with the notion that the universe as such is a kind of city or, as Cicero two centuries later expressed it, “the common home of gods and hu- man beings, or a city that belongs to both.”25 Rather than reject the conven- tional concept of a city or local commu- nity, Stoics characteristically spoke of “two communities.” The Roman Stoic Seneca (d. A.D. 65) said:

21 Did Diogenes present himself as a universal benefactor and philanthropist? I see him as more quirky and hard-edged than these de- scriptions imply, appropriate though they are to the Stoicized Cynic of Epictetus. But for a different view see John Moles, “Cynic Cosmo- politanism,” in Branham and Goulet-Cazé, The Cynics.

22 On Crates, who is said to have been Zeno’s ½rst teacher (DL, 7.1–2), see A. A. Long, “The Socratic Tradition: Diogenes, Crates, and Hel- lenistic Ethics,” in Branham and Goulet-Cazé, The Cynics, 41–46.

23 On the Fortune of Alexander, 329A–B.

24 DL, 7.87–89.

25 Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, 2.154. For further evidence and discussion, see Malcolm Scho½eld, The Stoic Idea of the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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There are two communities–the one, which is great and truly common em- bracing gods and human beings, in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the bound- aries of our state by the sun; the other, the one to which we have been assigned by the accident of our birth.26

Marcus Aurelius penned the most elo- quent statements of our cosmic citizen- ship. Through a chain argument, he links what is common, reason, law, citi- zenship, humanity as a whole, and the world:

If mind is common to us all, then so is the reason which makes us rational be- ings; and if that be so, then so is the rea- son which prescribes what we should do or not do. If that be so, there is a common law also; if that be so, we are fellow-citi- zens; and if that be so, the world is a kind of state. For in what other common con- stitution can we claim that the whole hu- man race participates?27

For both Marcus Aurelius and the ex- slave and Stoic teacher Epictetus (c. A.D. 55–135), persons who detach them- selves from human society are as “sev- ered limbs.”28 Epictetus presents an idealized Cynic as his cosmopolitan par- adigm. This ½gure, whom he also calls God’s messenger, makes the earth and the sky his home. Witnessing to the truths that make for a good life, Epicte- tus’s Cynic cosmopolitan practices phi- lanthropy on a global scale.

This cosmopolitanism does not imply that Stoics thought that human beings lack, or should learn to lack, all prefer- ences for their immediate family mem-

bers or weaken their ties to local com- munities. Stoics listed among appropri- ate acts (which reason recommends our undertaking) honoring parents, broth- ers, and native land and spending time with friends.29 They derived human so- ciability from our natural love of off- spring and (outside the utopian contexts of their earliest philosophers) proposed that their wise paragon would want to engage in government, marry, and have children.30

Yet, while softening Diogenes’s mor- dant unconventionalism, Stoicism was the one ancient philosophy that adum- brated ideas of natural human rights and international ideals of justice. In On Duties (De of½ciis), Cicero, writing as a supporter of Stoicism, argues that inter- national law (ius gentium), the law gov- erning relations between states, ought to be the civil law (ius civile). At the same time he complains (in sentiments that have lost no force in the ensuing two thousand years) that we still lack a ½rm image of the authentic justice that inter- national law should reflect.31 Cicero’s On Duties was more influential on early modern thought than any other work of classical antiquity.32

Hierocles, a Stoic philosopher of the second century A.D., proposed a fasci- nating model and recommendation for the way human beings should regard their personal and social identities.33 Each of us, he said, should picture our-

26 On Leisure, 4.1.

27 Meditations, 4.4.

28 Meditations, 4.29; Epictetus 2.5.26.

29 DL, 7.108.

30 Cicero, On Ends, 3.67–68.

31 Cicero, On Duties, 3.69.

32 See Andrew R. Dyck, A Commentary on Cicero, De of½ciis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 39–48.

33 The translated text is included in A. A. Long and David N. Sedley, The Hellenistic

selves as the center of a series of concen- tric circles. The nearest circle contains one’s immediate family–parents, sib- lings, spouse, and children–and the next contains uncles and aunts, grand- parents, nephews, nieces, and cousins. The circle beyond this is comprised of more distant relatives, and then, as one goes farther, the circle of neighbors, then fellow tribesmen, then fellow citizens, then people from nearby towns, then fel- low-countrymen, and, ½nally, in the out- ermost and largest circle, the entire hu- man race. Hierocles recommended two strategies for reducing the distance be- tween oneself and the series of circles. First, we should draw the circles closer to ourselves, treating the third circle as if it were second and so on, making the occupants of each circle that degree clos- er to us. Second, we should call cousins brothers, uncles and aunts fathers and mothers, and so forth. Without rejecting the nuclear family, as early Stoic utopi- anism had proposed, Hierocles offered this way of reducing the conventional gaps separating close family members from other citizens, and citizens from foreigners.

Stoic thought clearly shaped cosmopol- itan sentiments in the general culture of later antiquity, too. Take, for example, the Apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Gala- tions (3:26). After telling the baptized that they have been clad in Christ, the Epistle reads: “There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female; for you are all one in Christ Je- sus.” Paul, in the context of the irrele- vance of Jewish ritual and identity to the Christian faith, focuses on unity and anticipates Marcus Aurelius’s concep- tion of universal and shared citizenship.

His negation of race, status, and gender differences is a rhetorically charged application of the Stoics’ claim that all human beings are the same in virtue of their basic natural attributes.

A second example harks back to Philo of Alexandria, the extraordinary exegete of the Torah who wrote a few decades be- fore Paul. Philo, mentioned above as the earliest extant author to use the exact Greek word kosmopolites, did so because he had an expert knowledge of Stoicism that he drew on constantly, not for its own sake but as an interpretive guide to the more obscure passages of Biblical narrative. In most instances, Philo ap- plies the term to virtuous and wise per- sons in contexts that are obviously Cyn- ic and Stoic in inspiration: “The good man [alluding to Moses] is a citizen of the world, and therefore / not on the roll of any of the world’s cities since he has the whole world as his portion” and “The law-abiding man is directly a world citizen because he regulates his actions by / reference to the will of nature by which the entire world is adminis- tered.”34 Of particular interest is Philo’s assessment of Adam as the aboriginal and unique citizen of the world. The world was quite literally Adam’s home and city because in Eden he lived with- out a manufactured dwelling and passed his life there in complete fearlessness and peace, in command over all other created beings.35 With shades of prim- itivism and pre-civilized innocence, Philo’s Adam reads like an ideal Cynic, fully integrated with himself and his nat- ural surroundings.

Cynics and Stoics were classical antiq- uity’s principal theorists of cosmopoli-

Philosophers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 439–440.

34 First reference from Life of Moses, 157; sec- ond reference from On the Creation, 3.

35 Ibid., 142.

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tanism. What merits future research is the extent to which the Roman Empire, with its extensions of citizenship to its multitudinous provincials, gave people a sense of identity that went beyond their local allegiances. Would “citizen of the world” have come so readily into Philo’s mind three centuries earlier? I doubt it, largely because a cosmopolitan ideal is not attested in other philosophical schools before the Roman Empire.

Epicurus founded his school at Athens a few years before Zeno acquired his fol- lowing of Stoics. Avoiding political in- volvements and cultivating a simple life, Epicurus showed some af½nity to the Cynic practice of Diogenes and Crates, but he recommended that his adherents live in ashram-like communities of friends under the protection of conven- tional cities, rather than as citizens of the world. In the second century of our era, yet another Diogenes (of Oenoan- da in central Anatolia) characterized the Epicurean millennium in strongly cos- mopolitan terms, saying “Then every- thing will be full of justice and mutual friendship, and there will be no need of city-walls or laws.”36 In this future ideal of felicitous farming and philosophy (as the text explains), the state has with- ered away. As with Philo, Diogenes of Oenoanda is capable of looking at nor- mative human identity and culture on a global scale.

Thinking along such lines must have been encouraged by the international- ism of the Roman Empire, but such an outlook was hardly widespread. No classical author is more sophisticated than the satirist Lucian (b. c. A.D. 120), but, though he liked to draw on Cynic authors, he shows no sympathy for cos- mopolitanism. In a little work entitled

Encomium of one’s native land, Lucian, drawing on Odysseus’s epic nostalgia for Ithaca, voices what was–and probably still is–the majority attitude of people today: the land where one is born is dearer than anywhere else.

36 See A. A. Long, From Epicurus to Epictetus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 198–199.

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