It is unreliably reported that the Cynic philosopher Chimerides, whose dates are unknown and whose very existence is doubted, was exiled to the salt marshes of Meddo (Asia Minor) for the excessive venom of his political criticisms. There he is believed to have written a series of essays which he sent home to a friend in Athens under the title Letters from Mount Dog. This was a sarcastic reference to (a) the unremitting flatness of Meddo and its environs and (b) the nickname of his own philosophic school, members of which were decried as snarling fault-finders. The essays were obviously written in defiance of his judges and detractors, the implication being that, no matter where he might be obliged to live, his very contumely would always afford him a lofty view.
It is a great loss that these essays of Chimerides survive only in fragments quoted by contemporaries – a perverse sentence here, a surly phrase there. He must certainly have been more than a sublime curmudgeon, estimable though that would be. His acrid reproof, ‘Belief is merely a failure of doubt: beware’, is justly celebrated for its elegant scepticism, and this centuries before Pascal, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, to say nothing of Wilde.
Precisely because of modern scholarly opinion to the contrary, I am more than ever convinced that Chimerides existed. Faint whiffs come down to us of the awe in which his brilliant crabbiness was held: difficult people may become legends but they do not become myths. Whatever the case, one or two of the stories in this volume were written in the foothills of Mount Dog, whose summit stands ever before me as inspiration and challenge. Naturally, the higher I climb the more I shall come to doubt Chimerides ever lived. But even if he did not I honour his putative memory, worthless though it is. Or, rather, my own memory of his memory, now failing.