CYRENAICS, an ancient philosophical sect, so called from Cyrene, the birthplace of Aristippus its founder. Like the Cynic and Megarian schools, it emerged directly from the Socratic philosophy; and while these schools afterwards combined to form the system of Stoicism, the Cyrenaic, after
receiving modifications from the hands of Hegesias, Anniceris, and Theodorus, was ultimately merged in the kindred philosophy of Epicurus.
With them the summum bonum was pleasure, and that not merely as identical with a general tranquillity of mind, but as composed of a great variety of individual pleasant sensations. The choice, then, of what is individually pleasurable, and the rejection of what is individually painful, becomes the great practical rule of life and action; and it is the intellectual faculty which strikes the balance and determines the choice. In this way, the Cyrenaic philosophy was a one-sided development of the Socratic, being based on the doctrine of that great sage in regard to the connection of reason and intellect with virtue; while the Cynic school confined its view almost exclusively to his rigid discipline.