The Daily Stoic - The Philosopher Who Laughed in the Face of Kings

Episode Date: November 23, 2025

Dive into the wild life of Diogenes, the philosopher who wasn’t afraid to challenge norms or even Alexander the Great. In today’s episode, discover how his bold actions and sharp wit left an enduring legacy and why historians still debate his famous sunbathing encounter with the young conqueror.Pick up a copy of Inger Kuin’s new book Diogenes: The Rebellious Life and Revolutionary Philosophy of the Original Cynic. Thanks to Basic Books for allowing us to run this audio excerpt. 🎟️ Come see Ryan Holiday LIVE: https://www.dailystoiclive.com/Seattle, WA  - December 3, 2025 San Diego, CA - February 5, 2026 Phoenix, AZ - February 27, 2026 📚 If you’re interested in learning more about Diogenes and Cynicism, check out these books:The Cynic Philosophers: From Diogenes to JulianHow to Say No: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Cynicism👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy. and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday.

Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. Here on Sundays, we like to mix it up. We run different things. Last week, during the week, you probably heard my interview with Professor Inger Kuhin, who is an expert and biographer of Diogenes, the cynic, one of the most interesting rebellious, I would say punk rock of all of the ancient philosophers. Stoicism would not exist without the cynics. Just like the Stoics, that we're having some negative connotations to people, the cynics struggle with that too, which is a shame because

Diogenes, as I said, was a badass and has a lot to teach us. And certainly the cynics were greatly influential to the Stoics. Cretes, Zeno's philosophy teacher, was a cynic, and so was his wife. So I wanted to bring you some more on Diogenes, so I asked Professor Kuhin and her publisher if they would let us run a little excerpt about Diogenes, and this is a chunk called In Search of a Human Being. Thanks to basic books for letting us run this, and Dhanes is just someone. you need to know. It's just a fascinating, controversial, provocative figure. That's kind of what he is. He's a

philosopher slash provocateur. You don't have to agree with everything he says, but he makes you think. He challenges your assumptions. And I think you will really like this. As I said in my intro to the interview with Inger, she's a researcher, writer, and teacher focused on the intellectual history of ancient Greece and Rome. She's a professor of classics at the University of Virginia. She publishes in both English and Dutch. And her new book, Diogenes, The Rebellious Life and Revolutionary Philosophy of the Original Cynic, is available in physical and, as you'll hear today,

as a wonderful e-book. So grab that wherever you get your books and be cynical in the Diogenes sense of the word. And report back. Talk soon. Hey, it's Ryan. I'm doing a bunch of live dates, including one coming up soon. I'm going to be in Seattle, Washington on December 3rd, San Diego, California on February 5th, and Phoenix, Arizona on February 27th.

The talk I just did in Austin sold out, so this will almost certainly sell out too. I would love to see you there. Go grab tickets at DailyStoiclive.com. Diogenes lived its philosophy, and to understand his ideas, we must start by learning about his life. That this is not a straightforward matter has already been. illustrated by the fact that the most famous event of his life, his meeting with Alexander, is strongly disputed, with most historians arguing that it never happened. This raises the question of how we know what we know about Diogenes in the first place. Where do the reports about him come from? How have they been passed down and preserved? And what kind of information do we have?

To answer these questions, we will begin by tracing the earliest scattered reference. to Diogenes, starting with his lifetime, and consider how they relate to the much more abundant reports about him from the second and third century CE. We will then zoom in specifically on the chain of information that preserved Diogenes' encounter with Alexander for the historical record, before placing this particular event on the timeline of Diogenes' life.

Diogenes' philosophy consisted of intentionally spectacular deeds, and equally memorable quips. The followers who attended him remembered these deeds and sayings and made every effort to pass them down, both orally and in written form. In Diogenes' lifetime and for many centuries afterward, all sorts of information,

reports about battles, family histories, love poetry, jokes, and so on and so forth, was shared and transmitted both ways, orally through recitation, storytelling, and performance, as well as through writing and copying texts. Generations of scholars have taken it for granted that what little information we have about Diogenes is not to be trusted. But once they understand that Diogenes did and said surprising things on purpose, that these things would have been memorable precisely because they were surprising, and that both followers and foes pass them on through rich and diverse strategies of

information transfer, it follows that we can know much more about Diogenes than modern historians have allowed for. As a non-writer, Diogenes is in good company. The Athenian philosopher Socrates, who was two generations older than Diogenes, famously did not produce any works either. But, and this is not true for Diogenes, we can read extensively about Socrates in surviving works by men who knew him. the historian Xenophon, the comedy writer Aristophanes, and Socrates' influential disciple Plato. As we read, however, we must always bear in mind that what Plato writes is not necessarily an accurate representation of Socrates's ideas. It is primarily a representation of Plato's thinking about Socrates. Still, the availability of several early and extensive accounts undeniably puts us on sure footing with Socrates than

with Diogenes. Tracing and reconstructing his thinking is a difficult and sometimes frustrating task. In using reports about him, we must always be mindful of what has been forgotten, exaggerated, or distorted. But abandoning this effort and dismissing all the ancient quotes and anecdotes as fictions is as good as writing Diogenes out of the history of philosophy, foregoing his still urgent exhortation to a good, self-directed life according to to reason, and with, not in spite of, our bodies. Spartan Cafeterias The earliest reference to Diogenes, as brief as it is, comes from the work of a contemporary.

The multi-talented philosopher Aristotle was born about 25 years after Diogenes. Aristotle does not exactly mention him by name, but the epithet he uses was so closely associated with Diogenes, that we can assume it refers to him. In a discussion of metaphors in his rhetoric, Aristotle says that the sculptor Kifisodotus calls Triremes decorated windmills and that the dog describes the taverns of Attica as Spartan cafeterias. Diogenes reportedly received the nickname the dog from Plato, and it stuck. We will return later to how this happened.

Attica is the peninsula where Athens is located, and Diogenes' quip was probably intended to make fun of the overly luxurious stylings of the Athenians and to praise the frugality of the Spartans, which aligned with his own austere way of life. Diogenes liked using humorous and confusing paradoxes, and the comment fits well into that pattern. It is uncertain whether Aristotle and Diogenes knew each other personally, but they did move in similar circles. Aristotle was the teacher of young Alexander and a student of Plato, with whom Diogenes butted head several times.

Aristotle's successor as head of his philosophical school, Theophrastus, reportedly compiled a collection of anecdotes about Diogenes. Unfortunately, it does not survive in its original form, but later authors frequently refer to it. The second oldest source about Diogenes is an anonymous work, preserved on a papyrus that dates from the mid-third century BCE, less than 70 years after Diogenes' death. This means that the person who compiled the several anecdotes and conversations that make up the text

could have received the information directly from someone who overlapped with Diogenes. Its most likely author, Metrocolese, was a student of Diogenes disciple, Crotis. So he was, in a sense, an intellectual grandson to the elusive philosopher. All the anecdotes compiled in this text feature Diogenes outwitting the authorities. In one of them, he is staying in an inn somewhere, the exact location is not mentioned. When guards of the governors ask him who he is and where he comes from, he says, I am a Melossian Mastiff. Here, as in subsequent sources, Diogenes embraces the nickname Plato gave him,

identifying specifically with a breed of dog known for its ferocenees. and large size. Next, the guards ask him where he is going. He does not answer, and the guards hand him over to the governors. A hearing follows where the guards question him. Does he, as a stranger, despise the city and its laws so much that he does not even answer questions? Diogenes says that he answered the guards first questions nicely, but by the last one he thought they had gone mad. They asked me where I was going, seeing me sitting at the table.

Though their accusation that Diogenes despised the city and its laws is true, he tripped up his accusers with a savvy logical joke. Because Diogenes expressed much of his thought through witty quips, in tracing his ideas we also have to develop a sensibility for his style of humor and for the social dynamics of joking. Just as during his meeting with Alexander, Diogenes was not a good idea of, at all impressed by the authorities and their threats of punishment. The witticism itself, at the moment when the guards asked their question he was obviously

going nowhere, fits well with one of Diogenes' core precepts to live in the here and now. Because this text was written so soon after his lifetime, and most likely by someone close to Diogenes, we have good reasons to trust it. It also allows us to be a bit more confident about later accounts. that paint a similar picture of Diogenes, a traveler and a stranger wherever he went, but never at a loss for words. Unlike Plato and Aristotle,

Diogenes did not himself found a philosophical school, but he had his followers, who came to be considered a distinct philosophical movement in their own right. They were called Kunikos in Greek, derived from the Greek word for dog, Kuon, genitive Kunos. In Latin, this was spelled Kunicus, which in English became cynic.

Telis of Megara lived in the mid-third century B.C.E. was a contemporary of metropolis, and like him, followed the teachings of Diogenes. He also wrote several texts on cynic philosophers. Excerpts of these have been preserved by the scholar Stobius, who produced a voluminous anthology of ancient Greek authors in the 5th century C.E. with a special emphasis on philosophy. Telius devotes a handful of passages to Diogenes. In the longest of them, Diogenes meets with someone who complains that Athens has become an expensive city. They visit several shops together and ask the prices of perfume, meat, and a sheepskin. Each time Diogenes agrees with the complainer, the city is indeed expensive.

Then they go to the stalls for lupini beans and dried figs, where the price is, are much lower. Now Diogenes exclaims how cheap the city is. He was trying to show that Athens was expensive for those who lived in expensive life, but cheap for those who did not, Tellyce explains. The message, life is far easier if you practice living well on beans and figs like Diogenes than if you accustom yourself to luxuries. This narrative, like the previous two, can be taken as fairly reliably grounded in fact, since Thelis compiled it around the same time when the papyrus was written. In addition to cynicism, two other major philosophical movements emerged in the 3rd century

B.C.E. Epicureanism, named after its founder Epicurus, and Stoicism, named after the Stoa poikile in Athens, where it was first taught. The differences between these movements and the influence of Diogenes on both of them will be of interest later on. For now, as we tracked the posthumous reports about Diogenes through the centuries, we turn to the Epicurean philosopher Philidemus from Gadara in modern-day Jordan. He lived at the beginning of the first century BCE, and after Telly's is the next author to discuss Diogenes in his polemical treatise on the Stoics. Philidemus works have been preserved only on charred papyrus scrolls found in a villa at Herculaneum,

which together with Pompeii was burned under lava from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79C.E. The text consequently is severely damaged and fragmentary. As he discusses Diogenes ideas on politics, Philidemus challenges the notion that Diogenes wrote nothing during his lifetime. He defends the view that Diogenes, just like Plato, wrote a political philosophical work titled Republic, Politya in Greek, which also means Constitution. We can assume that the ideas Philidemus attributes to Diogenes Republic derive from texts written by Diogenes followers about his thinking, though the summary of Diogenes Republic that Philidemus offers reads as rather polemic and extreme. Philidimus mentions the following views and proposals.

Weapons are useless. Bones should serve as money instead of coins. There is nothing wrong with cannibalism, and there should be complete sexual freedom, including incest and sharing spouses. Some of these he also attributes to Zeno, disciple of Cradies, and the founder of Stoicism. In his text, he attempts to discredit the Stoics by linking them to cynicism, and we might wonder if, he sacrifices accuracy in the interest of scoring points against his intellectual opponents. Nonetheless, we will see that all of these proposals are ultimately rooted in Diogenes' thought. Philidemus seems to have chosen some genuine ideas of Diogenes, for instance, his rejection of the

institution of marriage, and exaggerated them to create a scandalizing caricature. The last of the early written sources about Diogenes is by the Roman Orchene, is by the Roman an orator and philosopher Cicero in the first century B.C.E. He is actually the one to give us the earliest preserved account of the meeting of Alexander and Diogenes. It is remarkably succinct. Diogenes really answered Alexander in a rather brash manner when the latter asked him if he needed anything.

Step aside, out of my son. He had clearly disturbed Diogenes sunbathing. Cicero places Diogenes replied to Alexander in the context of exemplary asceticism. The sage needs no material goods to be happy, since only virtue matters. Cicero uses so few words to describe the event that his readers must already have been familiar with it

from other sources that have since been lost. From the first century C.E. onward, many extensive texts on Diogenes have survived complete and intact. Some of these are explicitly fictional. They concern Diogenes only in the sense that he is a character in the work. Other texts are polemical, like Philidemus' work, which means that Diogenes' ideas may be presented tendentiously.

Both types of texts are useful for understanding the influence of and reactions to Diogenes over the centuries, but only rarely can we use them as sources for statements and anecdotes that may actually derive from the historical Diogenes. If we do so, we should proceed with great caution. In general, it is better to rely on other kinds of sources. Diogenes occasionally pops up in historical writing. These fortuitous glimpses of him are promising for reconstructing some parts of his life. An even more valuable resource is the so-called genre of doxography in this period,

collections of philosophical views and statements of others. Diogenes features in the collections of several doxographical authors, but most importantly in the work of Diogenes Laertius, that the two men share a name is a coincidence, albeit a somewhat confusing one. In his work, Lives of the Philosophers written in Greek in the 3rd century C.E., Diogenes Laertius describes more than 80 thinkers. These lives are not conventional biographies,

but rather, compilations of sayings and events in roughly chronological order. The biography of Diogenes is one of the longer lives in the collection. The author draws from the work of numerous predecessors, many of whom he mentions by name, going as far back as Theophrastus, Aristotle's successor and Diogenes contemporary. In addition to relying on older sources, Diogenes Laertius selects and reports information largely without any apparent bias. Together, with the earlier texts already mentioned,

his biography is our best introduction to Diogenes' thought, even if he does partake of some sensationalism on occasion. In using his text, some caution is required, too. An important virtue of his is the tendency to include alternative versions on genuine points of contention. For example, he gives a list of philosophical works and tragedies that Diogenes is said to have published, but also writes that the philosopher never wrote anything at all according to two of his sources.

Similarly, we find several conflicting accounts of Diogenes' death in Diogenes Laecius. And he writes about the time Diogenes got a visit from Alexander. Did Diogenes meet Alexander? So why are scholars so reluctant to believe Cicero Diogenes Laertius and others, when they tell us of the meeting of Diogenes and Alexander. It is hardly likely, for instance, that Diogenes would ever have met Alexander, or that the king would have been either interested in him or impressed by him. This is the translator and author Robin Hard, who, in a recent publication,

uses the story of the meeting to support his assessment that many of the anecdotes about Diogenes are surely fictional. His reasoning shows how much the reputation of Diogenes as a crazy philosopher has shaped the interpretation of the material. But we can throw the question right back. Why would Alexander not have wanted to meet Diogenes? His own private teacher was the philosopher Aristotle, who, as we have seen, certainly knew of Diogenes, and perhaps even knew him directly. And we will see that there are still other connections between the young king and the old

philosopher. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker, they had a snow cone, and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. out. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she found a good

inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q&A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky.

She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And daily stoic listeners can join for 15% off with code Stoic 15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events. A more serious challenge to the historicity of the episode has to do with the chronology of the respective lives of the two men. At the end of the 17th century, the Frenchman Pierre Béle turned his back on the Catholic Church and his home country and traveled via Switzerland to the Netherlands.

He settled in Rotterdam, and in 1697 went on to publish his Dictionaire Historic and Critique, a hefty encyclopedia of intellectuals of the past and their ideas. In this work, Bale subjects the received narratives about the likes of diogenes to a critical analysis. Up to this point, people had generally accepted the received narratives about such historical characters, without asking many questions. By starting to do precisely this, Bale was ahead of his time. A large portion of Bail's lemma about Diogenes deals with his relation with Alexander.

He writes, we cannot help but find greatness in the ways of Diogenes if we imagine that they have some sense to them, since Alexander, who certainly was able to judge such a thing well, found greatness in him, and there must have been some. Unlike hard, Bale assumes that the two men met and that Alexander was impressed by Diogenes. In his extensive footnotes, however, he demolishes some of the main source texts that up to that point had gone unchallenged.

The Roman philosopher Seneca, who at some point served as tutor and advisor to Emperor Nero, mentions Diogenes twice in his treatise on benefits. In both passages, he connects him to Alexander who was puffed up with pride beyond human measure on the day he met Diogenes. The king was overcome by the philosopher because he was neither able to give him anything nor to take anything away from him. Diogenes stomped naked through the riches of the Macedonians and trampled the wealth of the king,

who then ruled the whole world. In this last part, Seneca is speaking figuratively. Diogenes trampled Alexander's wealth by rejecting it. Val objects to Seneca's version of the episode, which he wrote around the middle of the first century CE, because of its problematic chronology. Diogenes and Alexander would have met before the Macedonian conquests in Asia, because afterward Alexander never set foot in Greece again.

So at the time of his conversation with Diogenes, Alexander did not yet rule the whole word. nor was he worshipped as a god, pride beyond human measure, not yet. Diogenes Laertius, writes Bell, commits a similar error when he has Alexander introduce himself to Diogenes as the great king. Alexander acquired that title only after his conquests. For Bell, doubts about the accuracy of the source texts for the interactions between Diogenes and Alexander could go hand in hand with full

confidence regarding the historicity of the meeting itself. He even justified Diogenes' worth as a philosopher by means of Alexander's opinion, as in his eyes the Macedonian king was unassailable. But Bell's misgivings about the source texts would take on a life of their own centuries later. At the start of the 20th century, the standard encyclopedia on classical antiquity, the German work Pauli's real encyclopedia der Classiche. references the clumsy anachronism as demonstrated by Bell of the story of the meeting of Alexander and Diogenes. It goes on to conclude, it is probably best to leave open whether the encounter has any basis in history or not.

A few decades later, an article that would influence scholars for decades to come claims that the narratives of the meeting have been blown to pieces too often to notice without citing Bell or, in fact, anyone else. If Seneca and Diogenes Laertius were our only ancient sources for Diogenes meeting with Alexander, with both of them dating it to a moment when the two men could not have been in the same place, it would be difficult to maintain its historicity. But this is not at all the case. In Cicero's version, which is about a century older than Seneca's, Alexander does not use any honorific titles during the meeting.

Cicero goes on to narrate in the same passage how Diogenes used to argue that while he had no needs, nothing would ever be enough for the king, in order to show how far superior he was to the king of Persia in life and fortune. Here Diogenes does describe Alexander as having defeated the Persians already, but this is at a later point in time, long after their encounter. In addition to Diogenes Laertius, there are other Greek authors who report on their conversation, and it is in their works that we find clues as to who recorded the event in the first place. Plutarch was a historian and philosopher who lived in the second half of the first century

and the early part of the second century C.E. He wrote a biography of Alexander in Greek. A generation later, another historian named Arian did the same. Both authors described the young king's meeting with Diogenes, placing it at Corinth before his campaigns in Persia and beyond. Both authors also repeatedly reference a much earlier author by the name of Onisicritus. This Onisicritus was a follower of Diogenes, served in Alexander's army as chief helmsman, and wrote a work titled On the Education of Alexander. Several long fragments of this piece have been preserved,

and these indicate that the work also covered Alexander's campaigns. It seems unavoidable that Onisacritus described the meeting between Alexander and Diogenes, and that Plutarch and Aryan base their accounts on his, even if this part of the work does not remain today. Alexander shared two connections with Diogenes, Aristotle and Oni Secretus, and had an interest in philosophy. So he had a clear motive in wanting to meet him. He also had the opportunity.

The two men were in the same place at the same time, since Diogenes had arrived in Corinth around the middle of the 4th century BCE, and stayed there for a long time. Proof of the meeting was provided by Oni Secretus himself in his account of Alexander's young life, and this is how a report of this remarkable event entered the historiographical tradition. Some scholars accept that Onisicritus indeed wrote about the meeting of Alexander and Diogenes and that he was the source later authors used, but still consider a literary origin more plausible

because the contrast between these two diametrically opposed but paradoxically parallel personalities would have been so appealing to explore. In other words, the story of their meeting is so good that Oni Secretus must have made it up. This seems like an example where the shock value of Diogenes' way of life, did he really meet Alexander and tell him to get out of his son, works against him, and prevents him from taking up his rightful place in history. We have every reason to be apprehensive about what we can really know about someone who lived and died more than two millennia ago,

but sometimes such skepticism goes too far. In reconstructing Diogenes' life, we always have to ask, how we know what we think we know, and whether the source, or a string of sources, is good enough. In the case of the philosophers meeting with the king, we can answer this question affirmatively. So yes, the two did meet. And keeping this strategy close to hand,

we are now ready to see how Diogenes became Diogenes. On the Black Sea. For Diogenes, thinking and lived experience were inseparable. His way of life was his philosophy, and that is why this book must begin with an outline of his life. The following sketch is based on Diogenes-Layercius biography and is necessarily incomplete. The only remaining physical objects related, indirectly to Diogenes, are some coins bearing his father's name. Still, even if that was all we had, we would already know more about him than about the vast majority of people. who were alive at the time.

Across all the available types of ancient source material, the sociocultural elite is much better represented than ordinary people. The wealthy could build temples and have their names inscribed on them. Someone who ran a small workshop hung up a wooden sign. When it comes to durability, the inscription in stone wins practically every time. Diogenes was born in Sinope, a prosperous, independent city stayed on. the Black Sea that served as a hub for international trade. Today, Sinopee is called Sinope, and it is located in what we now know as northern Turkey.

Diogenes Laertius offers us two clues about Diogenes' birth date. He was 90 years old when he died, and he died in the same year as the Macedonian King Alexander. Since Alexander died in 323 BCE, this gives us 413 BCE as the year of Diogenes' birth. The Suda, a luminous encyclopedia in ancient Greek compiled in the 10th century CE, seems to differ on this point. It says Diogenes was born in 404 BCE, and it attributes various tragedies to him. These are also mentioned by Diogenes Laertius, though he does. not commit himself to Diogenes authorship. This poses a problem for the chronology of Diogenes later life. It would mean that he could have overlapped only barely with some

older philosophers in Athens, whom he did meet, according to most sources. The Sudha also calls Diogenes an Athenian, so we must conclude that the notice is about someone else and that he wrote those tragedies and not Diogenes of Sinope. Going back to the age that Diogenes liarshius gives for him, we should note that the neat round number 90 is somewhat suspect. We know from ages listed on tombstones that people commonly rounded these up or down in antiquity, simply because they did not know exactly how old they were. It is therefore safest to say that Diogenes was born sometime between 413 and 408 BCE, in other words, around 410 BCE.

Diogenes' hometown, Sinope, was founded in the 7th century BCE. According to the historian Herodotus, its founders were Comerians, a nomadic people believed to have come from present-day Iran, though other historians credit people from Thessaly in Greece, and assume that Sinope was only later taken over by Comerians, and later still by settlers from Miletus. Archaeological remains indicate some presence of Milesians in Sinope as early as the 7th or 6th century B.C.E. Located in what is now Western Turkey, but was then known as Ionia, Mileas dated back to at least the Bronze Age, and Milesians spoke the Ionian dialect of ancient Greek that Herodotus also used.

This became the common language in Sinope, and was most likely either Diogenes' native language, or one of his native languages. Sinope was part of the region of Paflagonia, which was almost certainly under Persian rule in the 5th century BCE. It was also during this time that the Persian king Darius and his son Xerxes after him tried and failed to add the cities of mainland Greece to their empire. In the decades before the birth of Diogenes,

there were close contacts between Sinope and Athens. Pericles, the Athenian general immortalized by the historian Thucydides, sent ships and men to help the synopians overthrow their ruler Timosilius in 436 BCE. But how welcome this intervention was we do not know. Afterward, 600 Athenians remained in Sinope and settled in the homes of the expelled supporters of the old government. In early September 400 BCE, when Diogenes would have been about 10 years old, a motley army of around 10,000 mercenaries under the command of an Athenian general named Xenophon passed through Sinope. The troops were on their way back from their attempt to help the brother of the Persian king

overthrow his sibling and take the throne for himself. The pretender to the throne had been killed in his first major battle, and now the mercenaries face the difficult task of getting themselves safely back to the Ionian coast after their failed mission. We have a detailed account of the march, because the general Xenophon was also a historian and recorded their experiences in the famous work, Anabasis, literally March Up Country, sometimes also called March of the Ten Thousand. Xenophon's report on his encounter with ambassadors from Sinope gives us a brief, glimpse of what life was like there during Diogenes youth.

Xenophon's men are met by the ambassadors when they are encamped at the nearby town of Cotiora, which was one of the three colonies of Sinope. Their spokesman is named Hecatonimus, and he implores the soldiers to stop pillaging the town. In his speech, he appeals to their shared Greekness. Because of their Milesian roots, the Sinopians are Greeks like Xenophon himself, and the soldiers should treat them and the Cotiorites well. But if they will not, Hecatonimus immediately launches into a threat, the synopians will call in the Paphligonians and make an alliance with them against Xenophon's army. Xenophon responds that he does not care one bit,

whether or not the cities and communities they pass through can claim Greek origins. Whoever welcomes him and his soldiers peacefully will be treated in kind and vice versa. This is just as true for the barbarians, Barbaroi they meet with, he says, applying the term Greeks used to lump all non-Greeks together. Given that Xenophon's men had already begun pillaging the land of the Cotiorites before meeting with the ambassadors, it is clear that he did not always live up to this stated ideal of reciprocity, and it turns out that the Greekness of the Synopians was rather superficial, something that could be invoked when it seemed opportune to do so,

but that was just as easily put aside when circumstances changed. In the end, both sides decided to proceed on friendly terms, and in this instance further violence was averted. The meeting between the Sinopians and Xenophon's mercenaries tells us something about Sinope's prominence in the region, but also something about the messiness of geopolitics and ethnic identity at the time. Sinopians saw themselves both as Milesian Greeks and as Pathligonian barbarians, placing emphasis on one or the other of these, depending on the context and occasion.

Xenophon, the Athenian, was unequivocally Greek, but fought for a Persian-would-be usurper together with an army of men who hailed from all over the ancient Mediterranean. By choosing allies on an ad hoc basis, Sinope managed to hold on to its independence in the following decades. But around the year, 370 BCE, the Persian general De Tommies took control of the city after several sieges. This remained the status quo until the start of the campaigns of Alexander. In a relatively recent biography, Diogenes has been called purely Greek, with respect to his language and heritage, because he came from the same Milesian stock from which philosophy.

like Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximines did, referencing three famous thinkers from the city of Miletus. But being a philosopher did not necessarily make Diogenes-Milesian or Greek, let alone purely so. To call Diogenes Greek is an oversimplification that fails to do justice to his background and experiences. Although he spent much of his time in prominent Greek cities like Athens and Corinth, he always remained an outsider there. without civic rights in those places. As Xenophon's account shows so clearly, Diogenes' birthplace was in the middle of the barbarian territory of the Paphligonians, on the fault line between the Greek and Persian spheres of influence,

and we can only guess at the precise origins and ethnicity of Diogenes' family. Moreover, as this book will document, Diogenes was influenced by philosophical traditions, flowing into Sinope from several directions west and east. Diogenes' father was named Ekesius, and his mother's name, as we already said, is lost to us. She is not mentioned at all in Diogenes' laertius biography, though there is one statement attributed to Diogenes in which his mother appears that has been handed down in a Byzantine collection of quotations.

Upon finding out that someone had written something negative about her, Diogenes said that one tear from his mother could erase all allegations. The precise meaning is hard to grasp out of context, but it suggests, if indeed he said this, that he felt the need to defend his mother and was unimpressed by the allegations against her. Ekesius was a banker and in that capacity responsible for the coinage in Sinope.

Given the likelihood that Diogenes received some form of education as a young man. It seems that he came from a fairly well-to-do family. The name Diogenes means Son of Zeus in Greek. Dio is the genitive of the name Zeus, and Jenis is derived from the verb meaning to be born. Gigno my. Son of Zeus seems like an impressive name,

but it was quite common, and in the reported sayings, Diogenes never discusses it. Leirschi's biography does quote a short poem by one Kerkidas, who explains the etymology of the name and writes that Diogenes was rightly called Son of Zeus and Heavenly Dog because of his fortitude. The poet wrote this in the 3rd century B.C.E. The title, Heavenly Dog for Diogenes stuck, and would still be in use in cynic literature

of the first century's CE. Counterfeiter or Revolutionary Of Diogenes' youth, we know little. The major events of his time in Sinope are his possible involvement in defacing the currency, and shortly thereafter his banishment from the city. In Greek, his father's job is called trapezites, which basically means someone with a table. Originally, the main task of trapezite was to exchange money and test the authenticity of coins. In the course of the 4th century BCE, they also began to take on the management of accounts and lines of credit.

Trapezite usually did their work outdoors, setting up their tables in the busy marketplace. It makes sense that Ikesius would have been commissioned to oversee the mint in Sinope because of his expertise as a banker. Diogenes Laertius gives two alternative scenarios for exactly what happened in Sinope. either Ekesias tampered with the coinage, and both he and his son Diogenes were exiled from the city as a consequence, or Diogenes was responsible for the disruption, and this led to exile for both father and son. When we think of counterfeiting in a modern context, we think of counterfeiting in a modern context, We generally think of the production of false money, but the Greek term consistently used for what occurred at Sinope under Ekesias watch

has a broader meaning. Paracaroso can refer both to minting false coins with a fake stamp and to damaging coins already in circulation as an act of vandalism or to cause unrest. Compared to other types of sources, coins from the ancient Mediterranean have survived in great numbers and relatively well-preserved. No fewer than nine coins minted in Sinope in the early 4th century BCE, with the name Ekesius on them, have been found.

It was common at the time for the mint master to put his name in the legend, which is the text on the coin. From roughly the same period we have dozens of coins that imitate Sinopean money, but seem to have been minted elsewhere because they contain Aramaic instead of Greek letters, or Greek letters with many errors. Most of them were rendered unusable with a chisel shortly after they were minted. These fines make the story of Ekesius involvement in a disruption of the currency plausible,

but the exact circumstances remain a matter of speculation. Perhaps the goal was to drive up the value of the coins minted in Sinope to make a profit. There may also have been a political reason to destroy coins coming from elsewhere, possibly against a larger background of unrest leading up to the Persian takeover by Tatamis. It was, in any case, common for a son to have the same profession as his father, so Ekesias and Diogenes may well have acted together and faced exile together. Later generations looked to the affair of the coinage as an explanation for Diogenes' exile and his departure from Sinope.

But from early on, the episode was also assigned. metaphorical significance, perhaps first by Diogenes himself. Diogenes Laertius connects the story of the defaced coins with a later visit by Diogenes to one of the oracles of the god Apollo. Again, he gives two scenarios. In the first, Diogenes was pressured by the man working at the mint to deface the currency and turn to the oracle for advice. There he was told that it was permissible to disrupt the public no mesey.

Nomizma. Nomizma can mean coin as well as institution or accepted custom in a broader sense. The word derives from nomos, which can mean law as well as custom. In this scenario, Diogenes' offense stems from a mistake. He thought the oracle gave him permission to disturb the coinage when actually he was supposed to go after the institutions and customs. Because of his mistake, Diogenes is banished, or else flees out of fear. In the second version, Diogenes is responsible, but his father winds up in prison because he entrusted the minting to Diogenes.

After his father dies, Diogenes goes to the Oracle to ask how he can become famous. The Oracle's answer is the same. Disrupt the accepted customs. Both scenarios connect the Oracle to the exile and the metaphorical disruption of the nomizma and thereby turn Diogenes into a man with a divine mission. The question remains whether it all really happened that way. The episode closely resembles an event from the life story of another famous philosopher, so it may be a borrowing that was incorporated into Diogenes' biography erroneously. Socrates, in the defense speech recorded by Plato known as Apology,

also claims that he performed his philosophical interrogations because of an oracle from Apollo. The god said that no one was wiser than Socrates, who knows that he knows nothing. Socrates tried to show that others also know nothing to prove the oracle right. Another issue is Diogenes' often disparaging attitude toward religion. Would he really have let Apollo dictate his actions?

But perhaps he had an ambivalent relationship to the divine. In any case, with or without encouraging him, from the Oracle, Diogenes managed to re-employ the potentially negative reputation of counterfeiter he carried with him to Athens as a pithy metaphor for his philosophical rallying cry of subverting societal norms. In exile. After leaving Sinope, Diogenes struck out for Athens, a trip that would have taken about 10 or 11 days by sailboat, which was the fastest way to go.

Athens was the intellectual center of the Greek-speaking world at the time, and the city presented itself as a refuge for those who had been forced to leave their homeland. But this did not mean that newcomers had the same rights as male free-born Athenians. They were not allowed to vote in the public assembly, nor to own land. Exile was a lifelong punishment, unless the banishment was officially revoked, but it was one that Diogenes embraced. Diogenes proclaimed that he became a philosopher thanks to his exile, hinting at the many philosophers before him who also left their native land, forest or not,

and praising Athens for offering him such a stimulating environment. In another quote reported by Diogenes Laeerchus, Diogenes taunted the synopians. Sure, they condemned him to exile, but he condemned them to stay home. With this playful inversion, the philosopher probably meant to say that although Sinope was an important city, it could not match Athens intellectual climate.

Upon his arrival in Athens, Diogenes contacted someone who was supposed to have a small house for him, but the man did not immediately come through. Diogenes did not want to wait and moved into a pithos instead, a large earthenware pot normally used for storing wine. Some accounts erroneously refer to this as a barrel or a bathtub. Placed on its side, a pithos forms a small, humble cave.

In the many, many depictions of Diogenes and his pot, from the first century BCE to the present, he sits up front in the opening, framed perfectly by the rim. Diogenes hardly could have foreseen how clever his selection of a pot would be as iconography, but ever since then, the pithos has embodied the distinctive paradox of lonely seclusion in the middle of the marketplace. According to Diogenes Laertesius, Diogenes Pithos stood in the Metron, a temple complex for the goddess Metter, the mother, bordering the marketplace in Athens.

This information is problematic because this complex was not built until two centuries after Diogenes' lifetime. Perhaps at some point in the oral tradition, on the site where the metron now stands was shortened to in the metron, or Diogenes may have lived in the ruins of an older temple to the mother that was destroyed during the Persian wars in the 5th century BCE. Either way, the marketplace was the beating heart of the city, the center of commercial activity, and a great place to meet a lot of people.

Here, Diogenes could exhibit his life of seclusion and self-sufficiency to as many passers-by as possible. Living in epithos was also a way of signaling austerity and humility. A short reference in the comedies of Aristophanes renders it plausible that poor Athenians indeed used large pots as dwellings. One of the characters in knights describes how people lived in pots, nooks, and sheds during the Peloponnesian War, fought by Athens and Sparta and their respective allies at the end of the 5th century B.C.E. So Diogenes was probably one of many who had made a makeshift shelter for himself in the city in this way, but his pithos would become the most famous one by far. In Athens, Diogenes became a follower of Antisthenes, who had been one of Socrates' disciples.

Like Diogenes, Antisthenes led an unconventional and sober life. Already in antiquity, some pointed to him as the actual founder of cynic philosophy. Because of the undogmatic nature of cynic thought, it is better to see Antisthenes as an inspiring example to Diogenes than as his teacher. Antisthenes died around 365 BCE, so if they met, Diogenes must have arrived in Athens at least before then. It was also in Athens that Diogenes clashed with most of the philosophers of his own generation, Plato, foremost among them. Diogenes did have followers during his lifetime,

but as mentioned, he did not establish a formal school. He must have undertaken some travels. Diogenes Laertes places him in Olympia and Megara, among others, but otherwise spent his time on the streets of Athens. It was expected of philosophers that they would spend time in public spaces since intellectual life took place in the marketplace, on the steps of temples, and in open-air sports facilities, the famous gymnasia.

A major difference between Diogenes and his peers, however, was that his peers went home at the end of the day. Diogenes slept in his pithos and lived off alms and dinner invitations. In Athens, Diogenes also acquired his nickname. According to Diogenes Laertius, Plato at one point insulted him by calling him a dog. This specific reason remains unmentioned,

but it must have occurred in the context of their larger rivalry. Diogenes took it in stride and quickly adopted the name, reminding others of it constantly, as we already saw in the papyrus text. In the biography, he explains his moniker as follows. I wag my tail when someone gives me something, I bark when someone gives me nothing, and when someone is a bad person, I bite.

In Greek, just as in English, to bite, dachno, can have a metaphorical meaning, and Diogenes uses it here to refer to his verbal aggressiveness. Dogs have been loyal friends to humans for millennia, and yet dog is an insult in many cultures. Freud explained this apparent contradiction as a consequence of repressed sexuality. dogs defecate and masturbate shamelessly in public. According to his analysis, in this way they remind us humans of our own barely contained impulses. Dog became an insult for those who did not conform to the generally accepted standard of civilization. Diogenes thought it nonsense that we eat in the company of others, while we hide anxiously to fulfill other bodily needs.

And he was not afraid of acting on that conviction. To Corinth. At some point, after moving from Sinope to Athens, Diogenes was traveling to Agena, an island strategically located between Athens and the Peloponnese. Citing two different sources, Diogenes Laertius describes how on this trip he was ambushed and captured by pirates, who took him to Crete. There Diogenes was offered for sale as a slave. He was reportedly bought by a wealthy.

the Corinthian merchant named Senyadis. We will go into the details of this episode and Diogenes' ideas about slavery later, but for now it suffices to note that the story of his abduction and sale at the slave market is plausible enough. During the 4th century BCE, and for a long time afterward, the Mediterranean was plagued by pirates. One of their pursuits was human trafficking. Those who ventured on a sea voyage ran a real risk.

of ending up as merchandise in a slave market. Diogenes must have arrived in Corinth, possibly enslaved by Sinaites at some point in the 340s BCE, and wound up living there for many years. According to Diogenes Laertius, he stayed in the household into old age and served as a teacher for Seniades' sons. This would not have been unusual.

Raising and teaching children was often left to enslaved workers, Diogenes Laeusus nowhere mentions release. In the Greek world, an owner could free an enslaved person in various ways and for various reasons, but it was not common. There are several anecdotes suggesting that, after a while, Diogenes stopped living in Sinaiti's household, including the one about his meeting with King Alexander. In most versions, the encounter takes place in the Cronion in Corinth, where Diogenes is said to have lived in epithos again. Alternatively, Senyadis may have given him a lot of freedom of movement

without formally releasing him. According to the biography, he said of Diogenes, A good deity, Agathos Demon, has entered my house. Several different stories circulated about Diogenes' death, at about 90 years old. He is said to have died either by holding his breath from a cholera-like disease after eating a piece of raw octopus, or from a dog bite after one of his dogs attacked him while he was feeding them octopus. As is often the case in Diogenes-Layerschus, there is a connection between the cause of death listed and the philosophy of the biography's subject.

In the second scenario, Diogenes behaves like a dog by eating raw food. In the third, the dog is killed by his own dogs. The first scenario clearly taps into Diogenes' radical autonomy and self-control. He took the end of his life into his own hands by voluntarily renouncing even the most basic necessity of life, oxygen. In the account of this scenario, Diogenes' friends found him in the cronion in Corinth, wrapped in his cape. When he did not wake up, his friends attributed his death to suicide, and started spreading the story of him holding his breath. In fact, committing suicide in this way is physiologically impossible. A more plausible explanation would be that Diogenes went into cardiac arrest in his sleep.

For Diogenes to have lived to around 90 is impressive, especially considering the average life expectancy at the time of around 40. If he really lived that long, he would have been an unlikely outlier, though that is not impossible. In antiquity, several philosophers were said to have grown very old, and a long life was considered proof of the strength of one's philosophy. There is a chance that his followers exaggerated Diogenes' longevity for this reason. All in all, we cannot be sure exactly how old he was when he died. Diogenes was buried at Corinth next to the gate of the isthmus that connected the Peloponnese to mainland Greece.

On his tomb stood a column topped with a marble. statue of a dog. In the second century CE, the writer Pausanius recounts seeing the tomb in that location, though he gives no further details. The synopians reportedly set up several bronze statues of Diogenes, with inscriptions thanking him for demonstrating the virtue of a self-sufficient way of life. Of those bronze statues, no remains have been recovered. But today his birthplace does honor its most famous sun, with a white stone monument standing nearly 18 feet tall. The monument was designed by the Turkish sculptor Turan Bosh, and installed in 2006. It depicts Diogenes twice, standing on top of a barrel and on the front of the same barrel, sitting in a round window.

The Diogenes on top of the barrel is accompanied by a seated dog and is holding a lantern. The Diogenes on the front of the barrel is reading a piece of papyrus, and a name played above his head bears his name in Latin capitals. Both Diogenes are bald, bearded, and dressed in a loose-fitting cape. The Diogenes standing on top of the barrel is remarkably muscular for a middle-aged beggar. It is clear that the monument took inspiration from earlier Diogenes iconography. Many paintings from the early modern and modern periods show Diogenes living in a barrel instead of a pot and with a similar glass lantern in his hand.

In antiquity, however, portable oil lamps were terracotta, like a Roman one on which Diogenes himself is depicted, or occasionally bronze. The way Diogenes is framed by a window on the front of the barrel evokes works of art that depict him sitting in the round opening of his pithos. At the base of the barrel stands a plaque in the form of an open book.

In Turkish, its inscription reads, Stand out of my son. That is the only thing you can do for me. This version of Diogenes' famous answer to Alexander is still used as an expression in Turkey today. It pretty much means, leave me alone, and is typically used to rebuff someone who offers unsolicited help. In collective memory, the phrase, found in song lyrics, as the title of a self-help book, and in political speeches,

is still known to derive from diogenes. In 2017, there was an attempt to have the monument removed, on account of its being an effort to pin Greek philosophy and Greek ideology on Cenoop. The campaign seems to have been motivated by a mix of nationalist sentiment that saw Diogenes as not being Turkish enough and religious conservatism uncomfortable with Diogenes' radical views on the family and sexuality. Pride in the homegrown but world-famous philosopher

who stood up to Alexander of Macedon prevailed, however, and at the time of this writing Diogenes still stands on his barrel. Equipped with a sense of what there is to know about Diogenes' life and how we know these things, we are now able to grasp what he himself viewed as his most important accomplishment, to redefine the nature of philosophical inquiry. Plato was becoming well known for his attempts to answer conclusively the question, what is a human? In response, Diogenes reached, among other things, for an oil lamp

and set out on his own to search in broad daylight. It was a philosophical rebuttal by means of an absurdist performance, with a serious message behind it. For Diogenes, Plato's search for sophisticated definitions and theoretical abstractions to capture the world was the opposite of what philosophy should be about. What mattered to him was the ethical problem, how can we be good humans?

judging by their behavior, Diogenes felt, so few people know the answer to the latter question that they are very hard to find, even with a lamp in broad daylight. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode. Thank you.