Demonax c. 70 – c. 170

Demonax was a Cypriot Cynic philosopher of the second century AD who lived for most of his long life in Athens. The biographer Lucian, his pupil, devoted to him a brief Life that has preserved most of what is known about him, painting a portrait of a humane and witty Cynic in the lineage of Diogenes and Crates who freed the school from its harsher and more theatrical excesses. He was widely loved by the Athenians, who, according to Lucian, gave him a public funeral and treated his rough cloak and staff as relics.

Demonax was born to a wealthy Cypriot family probably around AD 70 and is known almost entirely from the biographical encomium of his pupil Lucian of Samosata. He studied successively under the Cynic Demetrius, the Platonist-Cynic Agathobulus, the Stoic Epictetus, and the Peripatetic Timocrates of Heraclea, and from his early manhood lived simply at Athens, where he became a familiar figure in the agora and the gymnasia for almost a century.

He wrote nothing himself; Lucian's Life of Demonax preserves his bearing, his manner of teaching by counter-question, and a long collection of his sayings. He was tried for impiety like Socrates because he refused to sacrifice and would not be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, but the jury rose to acquit him without a vote.

Demonax represents a milder, almost Socratic Cynicism: he kept the freedom of speech and the indifference to wealth and reputation of his school but rejected its harsh asceticism and public exhibitionism, treated his fellow citizens with humour rather than scorn, and tried to reconcile rather than mock. According to Lucian he died at Athens in extreme old age, around AD 170, by voluntary abstinence from food, and was given a state funeral by the Athenians.