Crates inherited a considerable fortune in Thebes, enough never to have to work again. He became the best-known Cynic of his time, more famous even than his teacher Diogenes. By tradition he sold it and gave the proceeds away to his fellow citizens; another version says he left it with a banker with instructions to give it to his children if they turned out ordinary, and to the people if they turned out philosophers.
What he kept was a cloak, a bag and the street. He lived in Athens in public space, slept in porticoes, and had no door he could close behind him.
The Athenians called him not the beggar but the door-opener. He was let into houses where he had not been invited, and people asked him to settle quarrels. A man with no property has nothing to gain from a conflict, and that made him useful.
He married Hipparchia of Maroneia, who came from a well-off family and chose him when he showed her what life with him meant. They lived together in poverty and she is one of the few women philosophers of antiquity whose name survives.
Crates taught Zeno of Citium, the merchant who had lost his cargo. What Zeno learned there he later worked into a school that did not adopt the giving away of property but did adopt the question behind it: what do you need, and what has you.
The Stoa is therefore the moderate heir of something more radical. It called possessions an indifferent rather than a burden, and that difference is the whole difference between living on the street and living with a house you can lose.
You have enough never to need anything again. That is precisely what you want to be rid of.
The tempting sorting is that Crates saw his property as an evil. That is the Cynic reading, and the Stoa did not take it over. Property is not bad; the grip it gets on you is the problem.
The cut he made is sharper than it looks. What he gave away lay entirely within his power: it was his, he could decide about it. What he bought back with it was also his, namely the impossibility of losing anything he feared to lose.
The nickname is the sign that it worked. People let him in because he had nothing to gain. Independence was for him not an inner state but something others could see in him.
The question he left open is the one the Stoa picked up. Must you give everything away to be free, or is it enough to know that you could do without it? Zeno chose the second, and that is the harder variant.
Giving everything away is a choice that exists only for those who have something. Crates chose poverty; most of the poor in Athens had no such choice, and for them his way of life was not philosophy but their daily situation.
And there is a price the stories rarely name. His children grew up in that poverty without having chosen it themselves. Whoever practises his own detachment rarely practises it alone.
If money is a tool, what is yours for? And would you give the same answer if nobody were watching?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions