What model might the Greco-Roman Cynics have provided?
“Both are populists, appealing to the ordinary people; both are life-style preachers, advocating their position not only by word but by deed, not only in theory but in practice; both use dress and equipment to symbolize dramatically their message. But he is rural, they are urban; he is organizing a communal movement, they are following an individual philosophy; and their symbolism demands knapsack and staff, his no-knapsack and no-staff. Maybe Jesus is what peasant Jewish Cynicism looked like.” [jarb122] [essay] “The Cynics… were itinerant preachers of a philosophy of freedom from every constraint and a life lived with minimal requirements ‘according to nature.’ Flouting social convention, they derived their name (kynikoi,”dog-like”) from an epithet applied to one of their founders, “the Dog” Diogenes (of Sinope, 4th-cent. BCE), who went about Athens doing in public everything that a dog might do, all the while hurling insults on his contemporaries…
