concept of the cosmopolitan in Greek & Roman thought, The

Daedalus, Summer 2008 by Long, A A

Cosmopolitan, the English equivalent of the older French word cosmopolite, derives from the ancient Greek term kosmopolitës (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 first applied it to himself.1 "Citizen of the world" suited Diogenes's stance of flouting local conventions in order to demonstrate their 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," citizenship of the world must have originally seemed a profoundly paradoxical, even 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 became a school with a formal curriculum. Its leading adherents left a prominent mark on Hellenistic literature through their sardonic criticism of conventional values, but Cynicism more or less died out as an independent movement and was absorbed into Stoicism until it underwent a revival in the Roman Imperial period.

Before Stoicism, the great contributions to political thought of Plato and Aristotle presupposed the small and nationalistic city-state as the normative context of community life. With no vestige of cosmopolitan sympathy, each assumed that the populace of an ideal community would hardly reach six figures, and that it would engage in defensive and offensive wars from time to time. Babylon, for example, notwithstanding its encircling walls, was for Aristotle too large to count as a true citystate.3

Stoic ethical and political thought, however, in the five centuries of its educational impact on the Mediterranean world, readily embraced cosmopolitanism in its various guises. Crates of Thebes, a leading Cynic follower of Diogenes, powerfully influenced Zeno (334 - 262), the Cypriot immigrant to Athens who established the Stoic school of philosophy there.4 Such different figures as the Roman jurist and philosopher Cicero (106 - 43); the apostle Paul (fl. 50 - 60); Philo (c. 30 B.C. - A.D. 45), the Alexandrian exegete of the Torah; and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161 - 180) also express cosmopolitan sentiments. Philo, although not an official adherent of Stoicism (his allegorical interpretations of the Five Books of Moses are permeated with Stoic ideas nonetheless), is in fact the earliest surviving author to use the exact expression kosmopolites.5

Ancient ideas of the Stoic cosmopolitan live on today, especially in such notions and contexts as moral universalism in the Kantian tradition, natural law theory, and the indifference of race, gender, and status to the worth of individuals.6 Yet none of these ideas is as important to modern cosmopolitan or quasi-cosmopolitan contexts as international political institutions, free trade, and supranational efforts to implement world peace, combat rogue regimes, and relieve suffering across national borders. Moreover, the ancient cosmopolitan wasn't typified as a highly sophisticated person or someone with multicultural sympathies, whose tastes, manners, and values are precisely what make him or her at home anywhere, as the modern cosmopolitan is cast. The principal continuity between the ancient and modern cosmopolitan turns on taking citizen, in the expression "citizen of the world," in an extended or metaphorical sense. In the absence of a global state or government (which no Greek or Roman envisioned), literal world citizenship is an impossibility. What is possible, however, and what Stoic cosmopolitans advocated our doing, is for us to treat persons, no matter who or where, as quasi-siblings, whose claims on our care and fair treatment are grounded simply in the fact that we are all human beings.

Citizenship of the world presupposes the existence of cities in the ordinary sense of the word: settled communities with precise territorial boundaries, cultural traditions, laws, political institutions, 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, which looks back to less formally structured communities governed by hereditary chieftans.7 There are fortified 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 five hundred years after the Bronze Age societies that Homer principally envisions. His Achaeans and their Trojan foes are fiercely partisan, but foreign though the latter are, Homer himself does not take sides. He scarcely differentiates the two sets of people in the Iliad or Odyssey, where ethnicity and nationality are not identifiers of human worth. Instead he characterizes human beings quite uniformly as mortals, bread-eaters, speech-users, and with numerous other attributes.8 His evenhandedness and uniformity, rife with normative connotations, imply that human identity is inseparable from an ethical orientation.