Menippus: Cynic

¹ Achaicus tells us in his Ethics that Menippus was:

• a Cynic
• a Phœnician by descent
• a slave by birth

Diocles informs us that his master was Baton, a native of Pontus.

Menippus became rich because of his master’s importunities and miserly habits and obtained the rights of citizenship at Corinth.

II. His writings are full of ridiculous matter.

It is similar to those of Meleager, who was his contemporary.

Hermippus tells us that he was a man who lent money at daily interest, and that he was called a usurer; for he used to lend on nautical usury, and take security, so that he amassed a very great amount of riches.

III. But at last he fell into a snare, and lost all his money, and in a fit of despair he hung himself, and so he died. And we have written a playful epigram on him:

This man was a Syrian by birth, And a Cretan usurious hound, As the name he was known by sets forth, You’ve heard of him oft I’ll be bound; His name was Menippus—men entered his house, And stole all his goods without leaving a louse, When (from this the dog’s nature you plainly may tell) He hung himself up, and so went off to hell.

IV. But some say that the books attributed to him are not really his work, but are the composition of Dionysius and Zopyrus the Colophonians, who wrote them out of joke, and then gave them to him as a man well able to dispose of them.

V. There were six persons of the name of Menippus; the first was the man who wrote a history of the Lydians, and made an abridgment of Xanthus; the second was this man of whom we have been speaking; the third was a sophist of Stratonice, a Carian by descent; the fourth was a statuary; the fifth and the sixth were painters, and they are both mentioned by Apollodorus.

VI. The writings left by the Cynic amount to thirteen volumes; a Description of the Dead; a volume called Wills;[257] a volume of Letters in which the Gods are introduced; treatises addressed to the Natural Philosophers, and Mathematicians, and Grammarians; one on the Generations of Epicurus, and on the Observance of the Twentieth Day by the philosophers of his school; and one or two other essays.