Epicureanism degenerated by taking the hedonistic principle of its founder too literally. Like the Sophists, the school has influenced modern economic thought through its conception of justice, as a mere convention for mutual advantage.914
CYNICS
The Cynics developed the negative attitude of the Socratics toward wealth to its extreme in asceticism. Their doctrine was subversive of all economic interest. Antisthenes, the founder of the school, was a contemporary of Plato, a Sophist in his youth, but later associated with the Socratic circle. He appears prominently in the Symposium of Xenophon.915 He urged a return to nature in the literal sense.916 His book on the nature of animals (περὶ ζώων φύσεως) probably presented examples from the animal world as models for natural human living. Like many writers of his time and later, he idealized the life of primitive and barbarous peoples.917 In utter antithesis to Aristotle,918 he declared city life and civilization to be the source of all injustice, luxury, and corruption. In his opinion, Zeus punished Prometheus, not because he envied men any good, but because the discovery of fire was the source (ἀφορμή) of all effeminacy and luxury for men.919 Material wealth was, to him, if not an absolute evil, something about which men should be entirely indifferent, for in essence, good and evil could have only a moral reference.920 The craving for wealth or power was a vain illusion. Nothing was good for a man except what was actually his own,921 and this was to be found only in the soul.922 Wealth without virtue was not only worthless, but a fruitful source of evil,923 and no lover of money could be either virtuous or free.924 He thus advanced beyond the Socratic doctrine of ability to use as the criterion of value.
However, though despising wealth, Antisthenes upheld the dignity of free labor. He believed it to be a good by which alone virtue is gained, the source of independence.925 Like the rest of the Cynics, he was thus