Around his youth he exposed rhetoric under Gorgias, perhaps besides under Hippias and Prodicus. A few indicate that he was originally inside skillful circumstances, however was reduced to poorness. But this can be, he come under a influence of Socrates, and became the devoted pupil.

Thus avid was he to hear a words of Socrates that he utilized to hike day-to-day from either Peiraeus to Athens, and persuaded his friends accompany him. Filled by using enthusiasm for the Socratic idethe virtue, he founded a school of his have in the Cynosarges. There he attracted a poorer people per simplicity of his life & teaching. He was affected to disdain a pride & pomp of the globe. He bore the cloak & carried a staff and a pocketbook when the badge of philosophy. This costume became uniform of his followers, however therefore with ostentation when to draw from either Socrates a reprimand, "I see your pride looking out through the rent of your cloak, O Antisthenes."

Diogenes Laertius says that his works filled ten volumes, however one, single fragments remain. His favorite style seems to stand been a dialogue, wherein i view a outcome of his early rhetorical expert instruction. Aristotle speaks of him as uneducated & elementary-minded, & Plato describes him as struggling vainly by using a difficulties of dialectic; these assessments come probably at least somewhat coloured per competition between a philosophic schools. His act is of these smashing aspect of Socratic philosophy, & should exist as likened using a Cyrenaic and Igarian doctrines.

Marcus Aurelius quotes him in his Meditations (late 2nd century): "It is royal to do good and be abused."