A. A. Long - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

A. A. Largo

The concept of the cosmopolitan
in Greek & Roman thought

Cosmopolitan, the English equivalent

of the older French word cosmopolite, de-
rives from the ancient Greek term kos-
mopolites (kosmos plus polites) to signify
“citizen of the world.” The original
Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope
(C. 390–323 B.C.), notorious for his “in
your face” discourse and readiness to do
everything in public, probably coined
this expression and ½rst applied it to
himself.1 “Citizen of the world” suited
Diogenes’s stance of flouting local con-
ventions in order to demonstrate their

A. A. Largo, a Fellow of the American Academy
desde 1989, is Irving G. Stone Professor of Litera-
tura, Professor of Classics, and Af½liated Profes-
sor of Philosophy and Rhetoric at the University
of California at Berkeley. His publications include
“Language and Thought in Sophocles: A Study of
Abstract Nouns and Poetic Technique” (1968),
“Stoic Studies” (1996), and “Epictetus: A Stoic
and Socratic Guide to Life” (2002). He has edit-
ed “Problems in Stoicism” (1996), “The Question
of ‘Eclecticism’: Studies in Later Greek Philoso-
phy” (with J. METRO. Dillon, 1988), and “The Cam-
bridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy”
(1999). He is a Corresponding Fellow of the Brit-
ish Academy.

lack of grounding in what he took to be
the pre-cultural norms of human nature.
In light of the hundreds of individual
Greek city-states, highly jealous of their
autonomy but also Panhellenic in many
of their customs and collective sense of
superiority to the “barbarians,” citizen-
ship of the world must have originally
seemed a profoundly paradoxical, incluso
nonsensical concept.

Diogenes was a younger contemporary
of Plato (alleged to have called Diogenes
“Socrates gone mad”) and much the
same age as Aristotle.2 With its dropout
lifestyle, Diogenes’s Cynicism never be-
came a school with a formal curriculum.
Its leading adherents left a prominent
mark on Hellenistic literature through
their sardonic criticism of conventional
valores, but Cynicism more or less died

1 Diogenes’s use of the expression is attested in
the biography of him composed by Diogenes
Laertius (fl. C. ANUNCIO. 200) in his Lives of Eminent
Philosophers, libro 6, sección 63. This biography
(hereafter DL) is the best source for the life and
thought of the Cynic Diogenes. On the Cynics
en general, see Robert B. Branham and Marie-
Odile Goulet-Cazé, The Cynics: The Cynic Move-
ment in Antiquity and its Legacy (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: Press de la Universidad de California,
1996).

2 DL, 6.54.

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The concept
of the cos-
mopolitan
in Greek
& Roman
pensamiento

out as an independent movement and
was absorbed into Stoicism until it un-
derwent a revival in the Roman Imperial
período.

Before Stoicism, the great contribu-
tions to political thought of Plato and
Aristotle presupposed the small and na-
tionalistic city-state as the normative
context of community life. With no ves-
tige of cosmopolitan sympathy, each as-
sumed that the populace of an ideal
community would hardly reach six ½g-
ures, and that it would engage in defen-
sive and offensive wars from time to
tiempo. Babylon, Por ejemplo, a pesar de que-
standing its encircling walls, was for Ar-
istotle too large to count as a true city-
state.3

Stoic ethical and political thought,
sin embargo, in the ½ve centuries of its edu-
cational impact on the Mediterranean
mundo, readily embraced cosmopolitan-
ism in its various guises. Crates of
Thebes, a leading Cynic follower of Di-
ogenes, powerfully influenced Zeno (334
–262), the Cypriot immigrant to Athens
who established the Stoic school of phi-
losophy there.4 Such different ½gures as
the Roman jurist and philosopher Cicero
(106–43); the apostle Paul (fl. 50–60);
Philo (C. 30 B.C.–A.D. 45), the Alexan-
drian exegete of the Torah; and the Ro-
man emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned
161–180) also express cosmopolitan sen-
timents. Philo, although not an of½cial

3 Aristotle, Política, 2.6, 65a14, 3.3, 76a28.

4 On Zeno, see Theodore Scaltsas and Andrew
Mason, The Philosophy of Zeno (Larnaca: El
Municipality of Larnaca, 2002). For detailed
treatment of early Stoicism, see Keimpe Algra
et al., The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philos-
ophy (Cambridge: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge,
1999), and for an introductory account that ex-
tends into the later Stoic tradition, see A. A.
Largo, Hellenistic Philosophy (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: Press de la Universidad de California, 1986).

adherent of Stoicism (his allegorical in-
terpretations of the Five Books of Moses
are permeated with Stoic ideas nonethe-
menos), is in fact the earliest surviving au-
thor to use the exact expression kosmopo-
lites.5

Ancient ideas of the Stoic cosmopoli-
tan live on today, especially in such no-
tions and contexts as moral universalism
in the Kantian tradition, natural law the-
ory, and the indifference of race, género,
and status to the worth of individuals.6
Yet none of these ideas is as important to
modern cosmopolitan or quasi-cosmo-
politan contexts as international politi-
cal institutions, free trade, and suprana-
tional efforts to implement world peace,
combat rogue regimes, and relieve suf-
fering across national borders. Más-
encima, the ancient cosmopolitan wasn’t
typi½ed as a highly sophisticated person
or someone with multicultural sympa-
thies, whose tastes, manners, and values
are precisely what make him or her at
home anywhere, as the modern cosmo-
politan is cast. The principal continuity
between the ancient and modern cosmo-
politan turns on taking citizen, in the ex-
pression “citizen of the world,” in an ex-
tended or metaphorical sense. In the ab-
sence of a global state or government
(which no Greek or Roman envisioned),
literal world citizenship is an impossibil-
idad. What is possible, sin embargo, y qué
Stoic cosmopolitans advocated our do-
En g, is for us to treat persons, no matter
who or where, as quasi-siblings, cuyo
claims on our care and fair treatment are
grounded simply in the fact that we are
all human beings.

5 On Philo, see David T. Runia, Exegesis and
Philosophy: Studies on Philo of Alexandria (Excelente
Yarmouth: Variorum, 1990).

6 See Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown, “Cos-
mopolitanism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philoso-
phy, http://plato.stanford.edu.

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A. A. Largo
en
cosmopoli-
tanism

Citizenship of the world presupposes

the existence of cities in the ordinary
sense of the word: settled communities
with precise territorial boundaries, cul-
tural traditions, laws, political institu-
ciones, and social identities. In Homer’s
epic poetry, our principal written source
for earliest Greece, full-fledged cities are
not part of the main narrative, cual
looks back to less formally structured
communities governed by hereditary
chieftans.7 There are forti½ed palatial
settlements, centralized farmsteads,
such as the home of Odysseus on Ithaca,
and the great citadel of Troy, but nothing
that we can call a polis in the sense of a
Greek city-state. Such communities and
their colonies only start to emerge in the
eighth century B.C., some ½ve hundred
years after the Bronze Age societies that
Homer principally envisions. His Ach-
aeans and their Trojan foes are ½ercely
partisan, but foreign though the latter
son, Homer himself does not take sides.
He scarcely differentiates the two sets of
people in the Iliad or Odyssey, where eth-
nicity and nationality are not identi½ers
of human worth. Instead he character-
izes human beings quite uniformly as
mortals, bread-eaters, speech-users, y
with numerous other attributes.8 His
evenhandedness and uniformity, rife
with normative connotations, imply that
human identity is inseparable from an
ethical orientation.

Is Homer’s outlook cosmopolitan? Sí

and no. His uniform perspectives are
more than Panhellenic because they ex-
tend to Egyptians and Ethiopians, como
well as Trojans. But nationalism is too
weak a component of his poems for it to

7 See the classic study by Moses I. Finley, El
World of Odysseus (Viking: Nueva York, 1978).

8 See Harold C. Baldry, The Unity of Mankind in
Greek Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
Sity Press, 1965), cap. dos.

be transcended by strict cosmopolitan-
ismo. What is most striking is the com-
plete absence from his vocabulary of the
word barbaros (barbarian) in reference to
non-Greeks. Homer knows the word on-
ly as part of an epithet meaning “for-
eign-speaking.”

As a prejudiced ethnic slur connoting
brutish, stupid, slavish, and coward, bar-
baros came into vogue in the context of
the unexpectedly successful Greek, y
especially Athenian, victories against the
invading Persians.9 Depreciation of non-
Greeks had already begun after Homer,
but it gained momentum, especially at
Athens as that dominant community es-
tablished its hegemony over other Greek
city-states (ostensibly as an alliance
against Persia), during the ½rst half of
the ½fth century. Aún, Herodotus, the Io-
nian historian of the Persian Wars, era
wonderfully aware of cultural relativism.
Other contemporary writers comment-
ed on the natural (as distinct from the
cultural) identity of human beings, el
absence of a natural basis for slavery,
and the existence of natural norms that
transcend the practices of particular
communities.10 The atomist philoso-
pher Democritus is credited with saying
“To a wise man every land is accessible;
for the entire world (kosmos) is a good
soul’s native land.”11

Prejudice and chauvinism did, sin embargo-

es, prevail at this time, no doubt deriv-

9 See Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Griego
Self-De½nition through Tragedy (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1989).

10 See William K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek
Philosophy, volumen. 3, The Fifth-Century Enlighten-
mento (Cambridge: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge,
1969), cap. VI, and George B. Kerferd, El
Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge
Prensa universitaria, 1981), 154–159.

11 Fragment 247 Diels-Kranz.

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The concept
of the cos-
mopolitan
in Greek
& Roman
pensamiento

ing much of their support from the belli-
cose patriotism individual Greek states
adopted both in relation to one another
and to the continuing threats of Persian
invasion. For the medical writer Hippoc-
tarifas, differences in basic human nature
do not make peoples of Asia–modern
Pavo, Irak, and Iran–“soft” and “lazy”
by comparison with Europeans, pero, en-
lugar, the equable climate and despotic
regimes of their native lands.12

Was Socrates an early cosmopolitan?
His incalculable influence on all of mor-
al philosophy and his position as the
Stoics’ chief role model make this ques-
tion an important one. Offered the op-
portunity to escape while awaiting exe-
ejecución, Socrates, according to Plato’s
Crito, declined to do so, on the ground
that he would be doing wrong to the
laws of Athens, which he personi½ed as
his cultural parents. Even though Socra-
tes appears to have left Athens only
when on military service and showed no
signi½cant interest in foreign affairs, su
ethical convictions are completely uni-
versal in their scope, including such
propositions as the involuntariness of
wrong-doing and the absolute sover-
eignty of justice.13

Two of Socrates’s followers merit
mention as well. Aristippus, reputed
founder of the Cyrenaic school of radi-
cal hedonism, is reported to have told
Socrates that his own ideal was a life of
libertad (avoiding the two extremes of
of½ce holding and slavery), which he
pursued by “not con½ning [él mismo] a

12 See Hippocrates’s remarkable little work
Airs, Waters, and Places.

one nationality but by being a stranger
everywhere.”14 A Cynic or Stoic would
substitute “citizen” for “stranger,” so
Aristippus was at most a half-hearted
cosmopolitan. Antisthenes, another of
Socrates’s leading companions, proba-
bly had a major influence on Diogenes.15
Self-suf½ciency, mental strength, gratis-
dom grounded in deliberate poverty,
“making reason one’s city wall,” as he is
memorably quoted as saying, and ap-
proval of the Homeric Odysseus for his
adaptability and indifference to conven-
tional shame–these are the salient fea-
tures of Antisthenes’s recommended
outlook, all of them authentically So-
crático. Do they throw light on what Di-
ogenes meant by calling himself a citi-
zen of the world?

Asked where he came from, Diogenes
dicho, “I am a kosmopolites.”16 The phrase
“defacing the currency,” an activity
(probably a self-description) attributed
to Diogenes, helps us interpret this as-
sertion.17 The word translated currency
is related to nomos, signifying custom or
law. According to our best source for the
historical Diogenes, “he gave to matters
of nomos none of the weight he granted
to matters of nature” and placed nothing
ahead of freedom.18 The biographical
tradition tells us that the young Dioge-
nes was compelled to leave his native
Sinope because either he or his father

14 Xenophon, Memoirs of Socrates, 2.1.13.

15 On Antisthenes, see Susan Prince, “Socrates,
Antisthenes, and the Cynics,” in Sara Ahbel-
Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar, editores., A Compan-
ion to Socrates (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).

13 A case for attributing some cosmopolitan
tendencies to Socrates is made by Eric Brown,
“Hellenistic Cosmopolitanism,” in Mary L. Gill
and Pierre Pellegrin, editores., A Companion to An-
cient Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).

16 DL, 6.63.

17 DL, 6.71.

18 Ibídem.

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A. A. Largo
en
cosmopoli-
tanism

had defaced the local coinage.19 (Este
story reads suspiciously like an attempt
to provide a literal scenario for Dioge-
nes’s metaphorical defacements of cus-
tom or law. Other anecdotes include his
being captured by pirates and sold as a
slave.) In due course he found his way to
Atenas, where he lived as a “resident
alien” without citizen rights, seemingly
supporting himself entirely by begging
and the handouts he received as a fa-
mously entertaining curmudgeon and
street philosopher.

Diogenes sought to present himself as
a living icon of counter-culturalism. Él
was especially renowned for his way-out
exhibitionism–masturbating in public,
eating raw meat, living in a tub–his cult
of poverty, rugged simplicity, refusal to
respect anyone on the basis of rank or
posición, and his brilliantly caustic dis-
curso, the last of which harked back to
Socrates and Antisthenes. Ninguna de
these predecessors, aunque, anticipated
Diogenes’s unremitting exhibitionism
and affronts to conventional decency
and manners.

Where is the originator of cosmopoli-
tanism in any of this? He approved be-
ing described in the following verses
from Greek tragedy: “Stateless, hogar-
menos, without a native land / A beggar, a
vagabond, living by the day.”20 Here his
world citizenship, rather than an en-
dorsement of internationalism or world-
wide community, looks like a combina-
tion of refugee and hippy, with the “I
don’t give a damn where I live and I re-
gard all laws as constraints on my free-
dom” flavor of the modern cynic.

19 DL, 6.20, probably with a view to putting
bad money out of circulation. Diogenes’s father
is said to have been in charge of the local mint.

20 DL, 6.38.

Dædalus Summer 2008

Reading Diogenes’s expression “citi-
zen of the world” negatively is certainly
correct up to a point; he took himself to
be living a life unconstrained by any lo-
cal or of½cial citizenship. Sin embargo, De-
ogenes wasn’t purely iconoclastic in his
rejection of the conventional norms of
civic life, nor did he have only a negative
manifesto to promote. Diogenes Laer-
tius, after quoting the verses printed
above in his biography of Diogenes, dice
of the Cynic, “He claimed that he could
oppose con½dence to fortune, nature to
law or custom, and reason to emotion”
–with nature and reason being the cru-
cial words in this statement. By oppos-
ing nature to nomos Diogenes took up
sides in a debate that had been rumbling
on for the previous one hundred years.
Earlier defendants of nature tended to
view it as libertarianism, y, in doing
entonces, saw themselves as hedonists or sup-
porters of untrammeled political power.
Diogenes was a libertarian of a kind, pero
the nature he opposed to nomos was not
an anything-goes egoism, pero, bastante,
reason, which he took to be the essence
of human nature. His forceful attacks on
nomos, ribald though they typically were
in formulation, had the serious purpose
of challenging his audience to hold their
cultural practices accountable strictly
to the light of reason. By forcefully con-
trasting nature with nomos, Diogenes
drew attention, as Antisthenes had al-
ready done, to the idea that in reason hu-
man beings have their greatest authority
for action and their greatest bulwark
against the vicissitudes of fortune. Para
Diogenes, the true Cynic was a Hercules
of the mind, whose conquests would be
the monsters of irrational passion and
cultural prejudice and whose weapon
would be reason on the path to self-mas-
tery.

We are probably warranted in credit-
ing Diogenes with the idea that human

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nature in its rational capacities tran-
scends all civic and ethnic boundaries.
Diogenes’s cosmopolitanism was nor-
mative rather than descriptive, aunque.
His worldwide city should be regarded
as the community of the wise, an ideal
of enlightened persons united not by lo-
cal or relational ties but by the common
values they share–a group that under-
stands what human nature needs in or-
der to perfect itself.21 This is the cosmo-
politanism that Diogenes, through his
follower Crates, passed down to Zeno
and the Stoic tradition.22
In the early Hellenistic world, Griego

language and culture spread into West-
ern Asia and Egypt in the aftermath of
the conquests of Alexander the Great
(d. 323), providing a fertile context for
implicit cosmopolitan sentiments to
take root. Stoicism provided the theo-
retical stimulus and explicit support for
these sentiments.

Zeno stamped Cynic credentials on his
earliest and most famous book, República,
probably in deliberate confrontation
with Plato’s most celebrated work of the
same name. The philosopher and biogra-
pher Plutarch, writing some four hun-
dred years later, described its main point
de este modo:

Our household arrangements should not
be based on cities or local populations,

21 Did Diogenes present himself as a universal
benefactor and philanthropist? I see him as
more quirky and hard-edged than these de-
scriptions imply, appropriate though they are
to the Stoicized Cynic of Epictetus. But for a
different view see John Moles, “Cynic Cosmo-
politanism,” in Branham and Goulet-Cazé, El
Cynics.

22 On Crates, who is said to have been Zeno’s
½rst teacher (DL, 7.1–2), see A. A. Largo, "El
Socratic Tradition: Diogenes, Crates, and Hel-
lenistic Ethics,” in Branham and Goulet-Cazé,
The Cynics, 41–46.

each one marked out by its own legal sys-
tema, but we should regard all people as
our fellow-citizens and local residents,
and there should be one way of life and
one order, like that of a herd grazing to-
gether and nurtured by a common law.23

The concept
of the cos-
mopolitan
in Greek
& Roman
pensamiento

Zeno radically proposed that the ideal
community would dispense with such
fundamental Hellenic institutions as
temples, courts of law, gymnasia, cur-
rency, conventional family life, and dress
codes. Plutarch’s “one way of life” cap-
tures some of Zeno’s ideas, but fails to
register the completely utopian charac-
ter of the Stoic founder’s vision, a saber
a community comprised solely of the
wise and virtuous.

Zeno gave impetus to two closely relat-

ed and enormously influential ideas:
moral universalism and natural law. C.A-
cording to Stoic cosmology, the world is
under the direction of a supreme nature
named Zeus, who is perfectly rational
and providential and present to all hu-
man beings (or at least those who listen
to the voice of reason) in Zeus’s law-like
prescriptions and prohibitions.24

Zeno himself may not have theorized
the concept of a world city, but Stoicism
was soon associated with the notion that
the universe as such is a kind of city or,
as Cicero two centuries later expressed
él, “the common home of gods and hu-
man beings, or a city that belongs to
both.”25 Rather than reject the conven-
tional concept of a city or local commu-
natal, Stoics characteristically spoke of
“two communities.” The Roman Stoic
Seneca (d. ANUNCIO. 65) dicho:

23 On the Fortune of Alexander, 329A-B.

24 DL, 7.87–89.

25 Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, 2.154. Para
further evidence and discussion, see Malcolm
Scho½eld, The Stoic Idea of the City (Cambridge:
Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge, 1991).

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A. A. Largo
en
cosmopoli-
tanism

There are two communities–the one,
which is great and truly common em-
bracing gods and human beings, en
which we look neither to this corner
nor to that, but measure the bound-
aries of our state by the sun; the other,
the one to which we have been assigned
by the accident of our birth.26

Marcus Aurelius penned the most elo-
quent statements of our cosmic citizen-
barco. Through a chain argument, él
links what is common, reason, law, citi-
zenship, humanity as a whole, y el
mundo:

If mind is common to us all, then so is
the reason which makes us rational be-
ings; and if that be so, then so is the rea-
son which prescribes what we should do
or not do. If that be so, there is a common
law also; if that be so, we are fellow-citi-
zens; and if that be so, the world is a kind
of state. For in what other common con-
stitution can we claim that the whole hu-
man race participates?27

For both Marcus Aurelius and the ex-
slave and Stoic teacher Epictetus (C.
ANUNCIO. 55–135), persons who detach them-
selves from human society are as “sev-
ered limbs.”28 Epictetus presents an
idealized Cynic as his cosmopolitan par-
adigm. This ½gure, whom he also calls
God’s messenger, makes the earth and
the sky his home. Witnessing to the
truths that make for a good life, Epicte-
tus’s Cynic cosmopolitan practices phi-
lanthropy on a global scale.

This cosmopolitanism does not imply

that Stoics thought that human beings
lack, or should learn to lack, all prefer-
ences for their immediate family mem-

26 On Leisure, 4.1.

27 Meditations, 4.4.

28 Meditations, 4.29; Epictetus 2.5.26.

Dædalus Summer 2008

bers or weaken their ties to local com-
municipios. Stoics listed among appropri-
ate acts (which reason recommends our
undertaking) honoring parents, broth-
ers, and native land and spending time
with friends.29 They derived human so-
ciability from our natural love of off-
spring and (outside the utopian contexts
of their earliest philosophers) propuesto
that their wise paragon would want to
engage in government, marry, and have
children.30

Todavía, while softening Diogenes’s mor-
dant unconventionalism, Stoicism was
the one ancient philosophy that adum-
brated ideas of natural human rights and
international ideals of justice. In On
Duties (De of½ciis), Cicero, writing as a
supporter of Stoicism, argues that inter-
national law (ius gentium), the law gov-
erning relations between states, ought to
be the civil law (ius civile). Al mismo
time he complains (in sentiments that
have lost no force in the ensuing two
thousand years) that we still lack a ½rm
image of the authentic justice that inter-
national law should reflect.31 Cicero’s
On Duties was more influential on early
modern thought than any other work of
classical antiquity.32

Hierocles, a Stoic philosopher of the
second century A.D., proposed a fasci-
nating model and recommendation for
the way human beings should regard
their personal and social identities.33
Each of us, he said, should picture our-

29 DL, 7.108.

30 Cicero, On Ends, 3.67–68.

31 Cicero, On Duties, 3.69.

32 See Andrew R. Dyck, A Commentary on
Cicero, De of½ciis (ann-arbor: Universidad de
Michigan Press, 1996), 39–48.

33 The translated text is included in A. A.
Long and David N. Sedley, The Hellenistic

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The concept
of the cos-
mopolitan
in Greek
& Roman
pensamiento

selves as the center of a series of concen-
tric circles. The nearest circle contains
one’s immediate family–parents, sib-
lings, spouse, and children–and the
next contains uncles and aunts, magnífico-
padres, nephews, nieces, and cousins.
The circle beyond this is comprised of
more distant relatives, y luego, as one
goes farther, the circle of neighbors, entonces
fellow tribesmen, then fellow citizens,
then people from nearby towns, then fel-
low-countrymen, y, ½ finalmente, in the out-
ermost and largest circle, the entire hu-
man race. Hierocles recommended two
strategies for reducing the distance be-
tween oneself and the series of circles.
Primero, we should draw the circles closer
to ourselves, treating the third circle as if
it were second and so on, making the
occupants of each circle that degree clos-
er to us. Segundo, we should call cousins
hermanos, uncles and aunts fathers and
mothers, Etcétera. Without rejecting
the nuclear family, as early Stoic utopi-
anism had proposed, Hierocles offered
this way of reducing the conventional
gaps separating close family members
from other citizens, and citizens from
foreigners.

Stoic thought clearly shaped cosmopol-

itan sentiments in the general culture
of later antiquity, también. Llevar, Por ejemplo,
the Apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Gala-
ciones (3:26). After telling the baptized
that they have been clad in Christ, el
Epistle reads: “There is no such thing as
Jew and Greek, slave and free, masculino y
femenino; for you are all one in Christ Je-
sus.” Paul, in the context of the irrele-
vance of Jewish ritual and identity to the
Christian faith, focuses on unity and
anticipates Marcus Aurelius’s concep-
tion of universal and shared citizenship.

His negation of race, estado, y género
differences is a rhetorically charged
application of the Stoics’ claim that all
human beings are the same in virtue of
their basic natural attributes.

A second example harks back to Philo
of Alexandria, the extraordinary exegete
of the Torah who wrote a few decades be-
fore Paul. Philo, mentioned above as the
earliest extant author to use the exact
Greek word kosmopolites, did so because
he had an expert knowledge of Stoicism
that he drew on constantly, not for its
own sake but as an interpretive guide to
the more obscure passages of Biblical
narrativo. In most instances, Philo ap-
plies the term to virtuous and wise per-
sons in contexts that are obviously Cyn-
ic and Stoic in inspiration: “The good
hombre [alluding to Moses] is a citizen of
el mundo, and therefore / not on the
roll of any of the world’s cities since he
has the whole world as his portion” and
“The law-abiding man is directly a world
citizen because he regulates his actions
por / reference to the will of nature by
which the entire world is adminis-
tered.”34 Of particular interest is Philo’s
assessment of Adam as the aboriginal
and unique citizen of the world. El
world was quite literally Adam’s home
and city because in Eden he lived with-
out a manufactured dwelling and passed
his life there in complete fearlessness
and peace, in command over all other
created beings.35 With shades of prim-
itivism and pre-civilized innocence,
Philo’s Adam reads like an ideal Cynic,
fully integrated with himself and his nat-
ural surroundings.

Cynics and Stoics were classical antiq-

uity’s principal theorists of cosmopoli-

34 First reference from Life of Moses, 157; segundo-
ond reference from On the Creation, 3.

Philosophers, volumen. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge
Prensa universitaria, 1987), 439–440.

35 Ibídem., 142.

Dædalus Summer 2008

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Encomium of one’s native land, Lucian,
drawing on Odysseus’s epic nostalgia for
Ítaca, voices what was–and probably
still is–the majority attitude of people
hoy: the land where one is born is
dearer than anywhere else.

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A. A. Largo
en
cosmopoli-
tanism

tanism. What merits future research is
the extent to which the Roman Empire,
with its extensions of citizenship to its
multitudinous provincials, gave people a
sense of identity that went beyond their
local allegiances. Would “citizen of the
world” have come so readily into Philo’s
mind three centuries earlier? I doubt it,
largely because a cosmopolitan ideal is
not attested in other philosophical
schools before the Roman Empire.

Epicurus founded his school at Athens
a few years before Zeno acquired his fol-
lowing of Stoics. Avoiding political in-
volvements and cultivating a simple life,
Epicurus showed some af½nity to the
Cynic practice of Diogenes and Crates,
but he recommended that his adherents
live in ashram-like communities of
friends under the protection of conven-
tional cities, rather than as citizens of
el mundo. In the second century of our
era, yet another Diogenes (of Oenoan-
da in central Anatolia) characterized the
Epicurean millennium in strongly cos-
mopolitan terms, saying “Then every-
thing will be full of justice and mutual
friendship, and there will be no need of
city-walls or laws.”36 In this future ideal
of felicitous farming and philosophy (como
the text explains), the state has with-
ered away. As with Philo, Diogenes of
Oenoanda is capable of looking at nor-
mative human identity and culture on a
global scale.

Thinking along such lines must have
been encouraged by the international-
ism of the Roman Empire, but such an
outlook was hardly widespread. No
classical author is more sophisticated
than the satirist Lucian (b. C. ANUNCIO. 120),
pero, though he liked to draw on Cynic
autores, he shows no sympathy for cos-
mopolitanism. In a little work entitled

36 See A. A. Largo, From Epicurus to Epictetus
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 198–199.

Dædalus Summer 2008
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