Note 147.1 — Chapter V · THE PERIOD AFTER ALEXANDER

The philosophic school that was most aggressively protestant against the popular creeds and cults appears to have been the Cynic, mordant and outspoken criticism being characteristic of this sect. We have record of Diogenes’ contempt for the Eleusinian mysteries, of Antisthenes’ disdain for the Great Mother of Phrygia and her mendicant priests; and the fragments in a newly discovered papyrus of a treatise by Kerkidas,147.1 the Cynic philosopher and statesman of Megalopolis in the third century B.C., contain a theory which reduces personal deities to impotent instruments of Fate and would substitute for Zeus and his colleagues certain divinised abstractions, such as Nemesis and Μετάδως; the latter term, if the reading is sound, seems to denote the Spirit of Unselfishness or Sacrifice, an interesting and potentially valuable idea, but at this time still-born.