Collecting Cherie

 Chreia, in ancient Greek, meant use. By extension, it came to mean a useful anecdote. The plural is chreiai(pronounced KRAY-eye).

For some thinkers, a useful anecdote was one you could live by. And so people like Diogenes Laërtius collected chreiai. His Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is full of them. 

If you are inclined to think about literary forms, the basic form for chreiai is something like this: “Seeing x” or “Being asked y,” the eminent person “said z.”

Here’s one on Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic.

He used to enter the theater, walking against the flow of people exiting. When asked why, he replied, “I’ve been pursing this course of action my entire life.”

In other words, seeing contrariness as a virtue, he was just practicing.

In the ancient world, people collected chreiai. There were private collections — Seneca mentioned his. But there were also collections that appeared in various versions of The Progymnasmata, an ancient textbook on rhetoric.

Try to picture students — kids that might be in junior high today — poring through collections of chreiai and then, as part of their training, rewriting them in different tenses and in the voices of different characters.

Scott Newstok makes a convincing case that this kind of education shaped Shakespeare and would be useful to people who are learning to write today.

But it seems to me that chreiai are also elemental in morality — at least in the way that some of us construct it. Many of us, when faced with a moral or ethical problem, resort to a collection of chreiai we carry around in our minds: stories our grandparents told us, parables from the Bible, anecdotes told of our heroes.

What briefs and cases are to our concept of law, chreiai are to our sense of morality.

They are, I think, the building blocks of how we think about our own behavior.

• Sources: Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Section 64. The translation is by M.D. Usher in How to Say No: Diogenes and the Cynics; Princeton University Press, 2022. 

For more on Scott Newstok and his views on ancient education, see “Thinking about the Progymnasmata,” June 24, 2022, and “Habits that shape the mind,” June 28, 2022.