Maximus of Tyre

late 2nd century AD), also known as Cassius Maximus Tyrius, was a Greek rhetorician and philosopher who lived in the time of the Antonines and Commodus, and who belongs to the trend of the Second Sophistic.

[4] He begins with a narrative of how Prometheus created mankind, who initially lived a life of ease "for the earth supplied them with aliment, rich meadows, long-haired mountains, and abundance of fruits"[5] – in other words, a Garden of Eden that resonates with Cynic ideas.

Then, taking perhaps from Lucretius, he contrasts that Garden to mankind's "second life", which started with the division of the earth into property, which they then enclosed into fortifications and walls, and started to wear jewellery and gold, built houses, “molested the earth by digging into it for metals”, and invaded the sea and the air (killing animals, fish and birds), in what he described as a “slaughter and all-various gore, pursuing gratification of the body”.

[7] He then contrasts the two lives – that of the original Garden and of the “second life” he has just described and asks, which man would not choose the first, who “knows that by the change he shall be liberated from a multitude of evils” and what he calls “a dreadful prison of unhappy men, confined to a dreadful prison of unhappy men, confined in a dark recess, with large iron fetters round their feet, a great weight about their neck…passing their time in filth, in torment, and in weeping”.

[8] He goes on to praise Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic, for choosing his ascetic life, but only because he avoided the often fearful fates of other philosophers – such as Socrates being condemned.