[Aristippus, bust portrait]

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Aristippus of Cyrene, the fourth-century BCE philosopher shown here in a bust portrait, is a figure whose likeness has been reproduced in engraving for centuries, though this card gives no date for the plate. He was a student of Socrates and is traditionally regarded as the founder of the Cyrenaic school, which held that pleasure and immediate sensation were the chief good, a view that later writers often linked with hedonism. Engravers of the early modern period drew on ancient busts and coins to imagine the faces of classical thinkers, so portraits like this one tell us as much about how later audiences pictured antiquity as about the man himself.

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