Antisthenes

Antisthenes started around 446 BCE learning the art of persuasion under Gorgias, but Socrates pulled him in another direction entirely. He became a devoted follower and distilled the master's ethics into something sharper: live ascetically, live by virtue, shed everything else. That austerity—more severe than Socrates himself—marked him as something new. By the time he died around 366 BCE, later writers were pointing back to him as the fountainhead of Cynic philosophy, the school that would take his refusal of comfort and turn it into a way of life.