Review article

The Map of Mediterranean Cyrenaism

Željko Škuljević

Abstract

The fact that Aristippus, considered the founding father of Cyrenaic hedonism, is a Socratic is far more astounding than the fact that he was born in Cyrene on the Mediterranean. His hometown was founded a few centuries earlier by Greek colonists arriving from the Island of Thera. According to Pindar, his family was the richest and of the noblest lineage in the whole of Libya, which says that this future hedonist had been used to a life in luxury ever since he was born. He was never considered a Socratic in the true sense of the word (Plato disliked him, Xenophanes despised him, Aeschines argued with him endlessly, Diogenes considered him an enemy of virtue), which was to become the cause of controversy between Socrates’s followers. The world of sensual reality he belonged to on the one hand and Plato’s world of ideas on the other pose the question of Socrates’s original orientation – was he originally a hedonist, a Cyrenaic or a Platonist, which is what most researchers suggest?

Keywords

Aristip; Cyrenaism; Mediterranean

Hrčak ID:

18299

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/18299

Publication date:

7.12.2007.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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