“When, then, does the soul attain to truth?”—Plato, Phaedo
Cyrene became the Athens of Africa.
One of the great minds the ancient city produced was the geometer Theodorus, who lived in the age of Socrates. Before him, the Pythagoreans believed the universe was governed by mathematical harmony and could be measured using only whole numbers and fractions.
But then Theodorus fitted one right triangle to another and continued until he revealed an elegant spiral. The spiral could be drawn in the sand or carved in stone. It could be seen, touched, traced. Yet many of its lengths could not be expressed exactly as whole numbers or fractions, but only as irrational numbers.
This astonished Plato.
The world of the senses could only be known approximately. Yet mathematical truth could be demonstrated exactly. Did this mean that reality itself—that ultimate Truth—could only be approached through the intellect?
The Spiral of Theodorus lent support to Plato’s Theory of Forms, which posited an otherworldly realm of eternal Ideas—perfect Forms that the physical world only approximates.
We can define a circle, a square, or a triangle exactly, but any of these found in the physical world will be imperfect—a kind of shadow of the ideal Form.
Centuries later, this Platonic dualism—this separation of matter and idea, physical body and ideal form—helped provide a philosophical framework for Christian theology, with its sharp distinction between body and soul, its promise of eternal life, and its suspicion of sensual reality as corrupt and fallen.
After Theodorus, Cyrene ripened another apple, one which fell somewhat farther from the tree: Socrates’ most scandalous student, Aristippus. This skeptical hedonist pulled hard in the opposite direction. He argued that we can know only what our own senses reveal.
The rest is silence.
Sitting before the crackling warmth of a fire, I can know only what my senses disclose to me, never what yours disclose to you.
Geometry may shape cities and civilizations, but we are forever bound to the mortal body, with no special access to an eternal god’s-eye view.
Two millennia later, Arthur Schopenhauer arrived at a similar conclusion about the limits of knowledge, writing that a man “does not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth.”
From this hard empiricism, Aristippus founded the ancient world’s most radical school of pure hedonism: Cyrenaicism.
Aristippus taught that bodily pleasure was the supreme and only good of life, and he encouraged his students to seek active, intense, and immediate sensual gratification.
Yet he did not teach licentiousness.
After all, not all pleasures are worth the chase. Many pursuits bring more pain than pleasure. So his philosophy required discernment, restraint, and self-knowledge.
Aristippus kept company with his desires. He mastered them—not they him. He lived by his motto:
“I possess, but am not possessed.”
When he had wine, he drank heartily. When he had none, he kept his cheer. When he found a lover, he embraced her. When she left him, he let her go.
She had other customers.
The Roman poet Horace admired his ability to adapt, writing that “every hue of life became him.”
Yet some called him a charlatan and a sophist. They complained that he charged steep fees to teach clever tricks, not wisdom.
Others called him a tyrant’s dog, claiming that, to fund his extravagant tastes, he threw himself shamelessly at the feet of King Dionysius I.
At a banquet, the tyrant spat in his face.
When asked why he was not offended, Aristippus replied with a question: “If fishermen endure being drenched at sea to catch little fish, why shouldn’t I endure a little spittle to catch a whale?”
The darkest slander that circulated about him claimed that he had compared his infant son to useless phlegm, and cast him out to die.
Yet he raised two sons, it seems, as well as a daughter named Arete—whose name means virtue—and chose her as his intellectual heiress.
In an age that seldom taught philosophy to its daughters, this remarkable woman vindicated her father’s unconventional judgment.
From childhood, her father taught her to pursue pleasure with discipline and to disdain excess. She grew to embody a balanced and reflective ideal of rational hedonism.
A Renaissance tradition portrays her as the intellectual heart of the Cyrenaic school, where she taught for decades.
She carried her father’s philosophy into the next generation, and may have written as many as forty books—all lost to time.
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🗂️ Indexes: Chapter 1 • Chapter 2 • Chapter 3 • Chapter 4 • Chapter 5
Sources & Further Reading
Plato, Theaetetus, 147d–148b.
Xenophon, Memorabilia, Book II, chapter 1.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book II, sections 65–104.
Kurt Lampe, The Birth of Hedonism: The Cyrenaic Philosophers and Pleasure as a Way of Life (2015).
Voula Tsouna, The Epistemology of the Cyrenaic School (1998).
Katharine R. O’Reilly, “Arete of Cyrene and the Role of Women in Philosophical Lineage,” in Ancient Women Philosophers (2023).
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