Diogenes of Sinope

Diogenes of Sinope was a Greek philosopher of the fourth century BCE and the most famous of the Cynics, who taught that happiness comes from living simply and in accordance with nature, free of possessions, social conventions and the opinions of others. He lived out his philosophy in public in Athens and Corinth, begging for food, sleeping in a large storage jar and mocking the powerful, and his jokes and provocations made him one of the best-known figures of the ancient world. He left no reliable writings, and almost everything known about him comes from anecdotes collected long after his death.

The main source for Diogenes is the sixth book of the Lives of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, a different man of the same name who wrote around the third century CE, more than five hundred years later. It is essentially a collection of sayings and stories, many of them retold in different versions or attributed elsewhere to other people. Other anecdotes appear in writers such as Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom and Epictetus. Ancient lists credited Diogenes with dialogues, letters and tragedies, including a Republic describing an ideal Cynic society, but even in antiquity some denied that he wrote anything, and none of it survives. The stories below show how Diogenes was remembered; few can be confirmed.

Diogenes was born in Sinope, a Greek trading city on the southern coast of the Black Sea, in what is now northern Turkey; his birth is usually placed around 412 or 404 BCE. His father, Hicesias, is said to have been a banker in charge of the city's coinage. According to the best-known story, father or son, or both, were caught "defacing the currency", perhaps by debasing or cutting coins, and Diogenes went into exile. Debased coins from Sinope of the mid-fourth century, some issued under the name Hikesios, give the story a possible historical core. Later, he turned the phrase into a motto: to deface the currency meant to strip away false social values.

He settled in Athens. Ancient tradition makes him a pupil of Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates, who is said to have tried to drive him away with a stick until worn down by his persistence. Modern scholars note that the chronology is awkward and that later writers had reasons to invent a line of succession running from Socrates through Antisthenes and Diogenes to the Stoics, so the connection is uncertain.

The name Cynic comes from the Greek kyon, dog. Diogenes was called "the dog" for living shamelessly in public, and he seems to have embraced the insult, admiring dogs for their simplicity and for biting those who deserved it. He owned almost nothing: a cloak, a staff and a bag. He is said to have slept in a large clay storage jar near a temple in Athens, and to have thrown away his wooden cup when he saw a child drinking from his hands. He ate, slept and performed bodily functions in the marketplace, arguing that nothing natural can be shameful.

Many stories show his style of philosophy, which taught by deed and jibe rather than by lecture. He walked through the streets in daylight with a lamp, saying he was looking for a human being. When Plato defined a human as a featherless biped, Diogenes reportedly brought a plucked chicken to the Academy and announced that here was Plato's human. Plato is said to have called him a Socrates gone mad.

Behind the theatre lay a coherent ethical view. Diogenes held that happiness depends on virtue, and that virtue is a matter of practice, not of theory. Most human misery, he thought, comes from desires and fears created by convention: the pursuit of wealth, reputation, luxury and power. By living according to nature and needing as little as possible, a person could achieve self-sufficiency and freedom of speech, the frankness to say anything to anyone. He trained himself through deliberate hardship, rolling in hot sand in summer and embracing cold statues in winter.

He was contemptuous of theoretical studies that did not help one live well, such as mathematics, astronomy and much of philosophy as practised in the schools. Asked where he came from, he reportedly said that he was a citizen of the world, a kosmopolites, one of the earliest recorded uses of the idea. Some interpret this negatively, as a rejection of loyalty to any particular city; others see in it the beginning of the idea that all humans share a common community.

Diogenes later lived in Corinth. One story holds that he was captured by pirates while sailing to Aegina and sold as a slave; asked what he could do, he said "govern men", and was bought by a Corinthian named Xeniades, who made him tutor to his sons. Another anecdote has him taken prisoner after the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE and brought before Philip II of Macedon, whom he called a spy of insatiable greed.

The most famous encounter is with Philip's son, Alexander the Great, who is said to have visited Diogenes in Corinth and asked if he could do anything for him. Diogenes, sunning himself, replied that Alexander could stand out of his light. Alexander is supposed to have said that if he were not Alexander he would wish to be Diogenes. The meeting may well be fiction, since it fits too neatly the contrast between the conqueror of the Macedonian Empire and the man who wanted nothing.

Diogenes died in Corinth, traditionally in 323 BCE, on the same day as Alexander, a coincidence that later writers found too good not to repeat. Accounts of his death vary: from eating a raw octopus, from a dog bite, or by holding his breath. These look like philosophical fictions, and he most likely died of old age. The Corinthians reportedly set up a column topped by a marble dog over his grave.

Diogenes became the model of the Cynic sage. His follower Crates of Thebes gave away his fortune to live as a Cynic, and Crates in turn taught Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, whose early Republic drew on Diogenes' ideas. The Stoics softened Cynic shamelessness but kept its core belief that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness, and later Stoics such as Epictetus held him up as an ideal. Cynic preachers remained a familiar sight in the Roman Empire for centuries, linking his legacy to Hellenistic and Roman philosophy as well as to the late classical world of ancient Greek philosophy.

In later centuries Diogenes became a favourite subject for writers and painters, from the Renaissance onwards, and his name was given to Diogenes syndrome, a modern term for extreme self-neglect, somewhat unfairly given his discipline. The modern word cynic, meaning someone who distrusts others' motives, has drifted far from his original project, which was not distrust but a radical attempt to live freely according to nature.