Library › Greek: Satire & Fable › Letter to the Wallet-Bearers
Letter to the Wallet-Bearers is a very short Cynic letter headed with the name of Menippus of Gadara, the 3rd-century BC Cynic writer, and addressed to the "self-wallet-bearers," the Cynics who carried the beggar's pouch. Framed as a mock decree, it praises them for going hungry, thirsty, cold and sleeping on the ground as the law of Diogenes requires, and threatens those who disobey with disease, envy, gout and coughing. Its source is unidentified and its genuineness is unverified.
Menippus gave his name to Menippean satire, which mixed prose and verse and influenced Varro and Lucian, yet almost none of his own writing survives. Whoever wrote it, this piece shows the Cynic habit of parody at work: it borrows the solemn language of law and curse to celebrate poverty and endurance, casting Diogenes of Sinope as a lawgiver on the model of Lycurgus.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions. Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ). This short Cynic mock-decree letter is headed with Menippus' name, but its source is unidentified and its genuineness is unverified; almost no authentic text of Menippus survives.