The Logos Scripture · Acts of the Apostles

The Hard Road of Antisthenes in the Dust

Acts of the Apostles 3 · A Record of the Great Scattering

3.1Meanwhile Antisthenes remained in the poorest quarter of Athens.

3.2And made his camp where foreigners and vagrants gathered.

3.3He wore one thin and ragged cloak.

3.4So that Socrates once teased him: "Antisthenes, I can see your vanity through the holes in your clothes."

3.5He remembered that sentence all his life, and did not change his clothes either.

3.6Yet Antisthenes turned his poverty into a blade against the pride of the world.

3.7A wealthy youth came seeking wisdom, dressed in costly purple.

3.8Antisthenes took him into the busiest market and made him carry a heavy basin of lentil soup through a crowd of aristocrats.

3.9And watched his face go red with shame.

3.10Then Antisthenes smashed the basin, let the soup spill in the mud, and rebuked him:

3.11"Look at you! You are the slave of the bad opinion of a blind crowd!"

3.12"Your shame is a chain that ties you in the mire."

3.13He taught his followers to live like the dogs of the street — alert, without ornament.

3.14And wholly unmoved by human luxury or human insult.

3.15He laid the foundation stone of the Cynic road.

3.16And proved to the world that a soul stripped of every worldly comfort is a fortress no empire can take.