Demetrius the Cynic

Demetrios (Greek Δημήτριος, Latin Demetrius ) was a Cynic philosopher from Corinth, who lived in Rome during the reign of Caligula, Nero and Vespasian, ie in the 1st century.

He was a familiar, highly valued friend of Seneca, who often mentions him in his writings. In his De beneficiis ( About boons ) Demetrios is characterized as:

"Nature made ​​him, I think, in our own time out to show that he was too healthy to infected by us, and we too corrupt to be reformed by him - a man of an all samples existing wisdom, though he is far away to have this opinion of himself, of aushaltender strength in its principles and resolutions, and by a male and unvarnished eloquence that without troubling to delicate phrases and artificial word order, always the power of his feelings follows, and is the free full outpouring of the object of enthusiastic soul. I have no doubt that Providence this man the will and pleasure to live, and have given the talent to talk, so it lacked our century neither on a polishing examples yet of a relentless detractors. "

His disregard for worldly wealth and his Cynic wit are clearly in an embellished by Wieland Seneca tradition:

" Gaius Caesar ( Caligula ) once offered him a gift of 8,000 thalers to either merely a gracious impulse of imperial generosity to a poor devil of a philosopher whose singularity may have had amused him for a moment - or to see what a sum, which should be in the eyes of a poor earth so very handsome son, would make for an effect on him. Demetrius seems to have guessed the latter. He struck out the gift, and was so far from thus want great that he felt humiliated rather, to be held by the emperor for small enough that such a gift it should either honor or can bribe. If he wanted to lead me into temptation, Demetrius said, he should have offered me all his realm. "

Demetrios was also a friend Thrasea Paetus and was present at his forced suicide by Nero, as Tacitus writes in his annals. As AD 71 was expelled many philosophers from Rome, had to Demetrius to Greece to go into exile, as Cassius Dio.

Demetrios is sometimes confused with a Demetrios of Sounion, which is mentioned in Lucian. It is however likely to be a slightly later Cynics.