He had asked someone to find a cottage for him when he came to the city, but when the search dragged on he found an old wooden tub down by the river and lived there instead. Plato once passed Diogenes washing wild lettuce to eat, and commented “If you had prayed to Dionysus, you wouldn’t be reduced to washing lettuce.” Diogenes replied “If you’d learned to wash lettuce, you wouldn’t have to pray to Dionysus.”ĭiogenes in his tub, by Jean-Leon Gerome.ĭiogene’s meagre living was legendary. This was not the only reported run-in between the two. Reportedly when Plato defined man as “a featherless biped”, Diogenes turned up at one of his lectures with a plucked chicken. His philosophy was not spoken, but was rather the philosophy of the deed. Diogenes releasing his plucked chicken in Pato’s lecture.Īs a non-Athenian, Diogenes would not have been permitted to speak in most of the public halls. He didn’t take pupils, but the legend has it that Diogenes’ dogged persistence wore him down. In good keeping with modern scientific thinking, he believed that you could never prove anything, only disprove things – this is where the modern definition of “cynic” comes from. He regarded pleasure as evil, as it drew men away from virtue, and he disdained Plato’s idea of universals. Similarly, he said that virtue was the one true nobility. Antisthenes taught that virtue was not an inherent quality, but could be learned.

In the same category is the story that he was the pupil of Antisthenes, the philosopher considered to have pioneered the Cynical approach to philosophy that Diogenes would perfect. This is probably an ahistorical way to show his disdain for those who relied on slaves, of course.

If Manes can live without Diogenes, Diogenes can certainly live with Manes. Diogenes didn’t report this, as he is supposed to have said: However this slave took advantage of the arrival to escape his master. Lies were the currency of political dealing, and those lies were what he would debase.ĭiogenes arrived in Athens, according to legend, with a single slave named Manes. Regardless, Diogenes decided that henceforth he would take the advice symbolically. According to one story, he had debased the currency on the advice of the Oracle of Delphi, while another account has it that he received this advice from her after his banishment. Diogenes was banished from Sinope as a result of this. At some point the father and son got involved in a plot to debase the currency and mint coins mixed with base metal, and when it was discovered they were blamed for it. Diogenes’ father Hicesias was a banker involved in the Sinopian mint, and Diogenes was originally brought up in the family tradition. This made the city wealthy, wealthy enough to mint its own coins. It was a wealthy port on the southern coast of the Black Sea, acting as a place for trading caravans from the south to meet with ships and exchange their cargoes. The fact that we don’t know what he looked like makes Diogenes a popular pose for portraits – just add lamp.ĭiogenes was born around 412 BC in the Greek colony of Sinope. So if the following seems somewhat far-fetched and occasionally overly dramatic, know that there’s a reason. And worse is that in many cases (especially with a figure as iconic as Diogenes became), they swiftly get co-opted as symbols for whatever the later author wishes to write about. One pitfall there though is that we lose the context of their original source – whether it was a hostile biography or fawning praise, we just don’t know. Mostly we wind up relying on ancient (to us) but more recent writings, which we have to hope were based on reliable lost sources. Of what was, little has survived to this day. People didn’t keep great records back then, of course, and not much was written down. Diogenes was born over twenty-four hundred years ago, which is more of a problem than historians like to admit.

Diogenes of sinope cause of death