One of the better-attested stories about Diogenes is that he acknowledged his need for sexual relief, which he met by himself, yet often in public. Another story about his austerity is that he had a wooden cup but threw it away when he saw a lad drinking out of a cupped hand, and realised that he already had what he needed for drinking. He had no house, but notoriously slept in a large ceramic jar (which has often been called a ‘barrel’). He lived by begging, but was willing to be invited to dinner – though he once refused to dine a second time with a host whom he felt had not been properly grateful for his presence the first time round. He carried a knapsack for such possessions as he needed – basically his food. So he reduced his clothing to a single cloak that he could fold in two, making him cool in summer and warm in winter. The story goes that Diogenes saw a mouse eating the crumbs from the coarse bread on which he had been dining, and was inspired to reduce his own life to the bare minimum. Walking through the market, Socrates famously said, “How many things I don’t need!” Diogenes took Socratic simplicity to its logical conclusion, so much so that Plato, Diogenes’ contemporary, allegedly called him ‘Socrates gone mad’. He usually went barefoot (although he would wear sandals when the occasion demanded it) and he wore shabby old clothes but he had a house and a family. Socrates, who died when Diogenes was an infant, had also tried to live a simple life. He was also reluctant to take on pupils but, the story goes, when Diogenes insisted and Antisthenes threatened him with his stick, Diogenes replied, “Strike me if you wish, I’ll offer you my head, but you’ll never find a stick strong enough to drive me away from your discourses.” “And,” says the biographer Diogenes Laertius, “from that time forth he became his pupil, and being an exile, strove to live a simple life.” Antisthenes has a walk-on part in Xenophon’s Symposium and is recorded as not being ‘of pure Athenian birth’ – so, like Diogenes, he was something of an outsider. He studied under Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates. This gave rise to the first great one-liner attributed to him: when someone said, “The Sinopeans have condemned you to exile”, he allegedly replied, “Yes, and I’ve condemned them to stay where they are.”ĭiogenes went into exile at Athens, then the intellectual centre of the Hellenic world. In any case, Diogenes was exiled from Sinope. Has this term been read back into the scandal, or did he adopt the term in remembrance of the scandal? The latter would be perfectly in character. Later, Diogenes would describe his aim as to ‘re-stamp’ human beings. It is usually said that someone ‘re-stamped’ the currency. This led to a scandal involving either Diogenes or his father, or both. It lay at the end of a trade route from Mesopotamia and forwarded luxury goods to the heart of the Hellenic world.ĭiogenes’ father Hikesias was a banker and also in charge of the Sinopean mint. Go any further east and you encountered the Scythians, horse-borne nomads whom the Greeks considered barbarians. Diogenes the Cynic was born in the Greek city of Sinope, on the southern shore of the Black Sea, at the very edge of the Hellenic world. Let us start with what seems to be reasonably certain. It’s like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle without a picture to work from, knowing that you probably don’t have all the pieces, and that some of the pieces that you do have might not belong to the puzzle at all. Some are probably genuine, others less so. We have to reconstruct his life and ideas from quotations and anecdotes in sources long after his lifetime. But he had no contemporary recorder of his thoughts. We also have letters alleged to be by him, although these are generally agreed to be fakes. Diogenes may or may not have written something: later sources quote the titles of lost works attributed to him. Socrates notoriously never wrote anything down, but we at least have dialogues written by his contemporaries Plato and Xenophon claiming to record what he said. SUBSCRIBE NOW Brief Lives Diogenes the Cynic (c.404-323 BC) Martin Jenkins recalls what we know for sure about the philosopher in the barrel.
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