"The nude Cynic fears no fire for his tub; if broken, he will make himself a new house to-morrow, or keep it repaired with clamps of lead."
Juvenal, Satires (XIV.308ff)
Diogenes of Sinope (fourth century BC) is too irascible a character not to share some anecdotes about him from the compendium of Diogenes Laertius on the lives of the philosophers. They illustrate the precepts by which he lived: that personal happiness is satisfied by meeting one's natural needs and that what is natural cannot be shameful or indecent. His life, therefore, was lived with extreme simplicity, inured to want, and without shame. It was this determination to follow his own dictates and not adhere to the conventions of society that he was given the epithet "dog," from which the name "cynic" is derived. Sold as a slave, he pointed and said, "Sell me to this man; he needs a master." The man heeded the advice, and entrusted Diogenes with his household and the education of his children.
Seeing a child drinking from his hands, Diogenes threw away his cup and remarked, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living." When invited to the house of Plato, he trampled upon his carpet, saying that he thereby trampled on the vanity of Plato, to which Plato retorted "How much pride you expose to view, Diogenes, by seeming not to be proud." To Plato's definition of a man as an animal, bipedal and featherless, Diogenes plucked a chicken and declared, "Here is Plato's man."
Alexander the Great was reported to have said, "Had I not been Alexander, I should have liked to be Diogenes." Once, while Diogenes was sunning himself, Alexander came up to him and offered to grant him any request. "Stand out of my light," he replied (also Arrian, VII.2; indeed, there are dozens of references to this incident]. When asked why he went about with a lamp in broad daylight, Diogenes confessed, "I am looking for a [honest] man."
Why do people give to beggars, he was asked, but not to philosophers? "Because they think they may one day be lame or blind, but never expect that they will turn to philosophy." To a young man who complained that he was ill suited to study philosophy, Diogenes said "Why then do you live, if you do not care to live well?"
When asked what wine he found most pleasant to drink, Diogenes replied, "That for which other people pay." Reproached for behaving indecently in public, he lamented only that he wished it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing one's stomach.
Of the golden statue of Phrynê at Delphi, Diogenes was said to have written upon it: "From the licentiousness of Greece." And, when he saw the child of a courtesan, whom he compared to a "deadly honeyed potion," throwing stones at a crowd, he cried out: "Take care you don't hit your father."
Chided as an old man who ought to rest, he replied, "What, if I were running in the stadium, ought I to slacken my pace when approaching the goal?" When asked from where he came, Diogenes said, "I am a citizen of the world," and, when someone was queried as to what sort of man Diogenes was, the reply was given, "A Socrates gone mad."
| In the detail above from Diogenes (1882) by John William Waterhouse, the artist dutifully shows the lamp and the broken tub (and the diet of onions). But he also positions the philosopher next to a staircase, just as Raphael places him on the stairs in the The School of Athens. And the young woman substitutes for Alexander, standing between the sulking Diogenes and the sun. Too, she is painted to resemble the many terracotta figurines from Tanagra that had been discovered in the early 1870s in Boeotia and displayed in the British Museum. The pull of the drapery over the body, traces of color, and the individual expressions and casual poses all provoked a sensation at the time. One sees, too, the influence of Alma-Tadema in the use of the staircase to compress movement downward and the figures in deep perspective. |
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In his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius also writes about Epicurus (341-270 BC), who proposed that the purpose of philosophy was to secure a happy life: "I know not how to conceive the good, apart from the pleasures of taste, sexual pleasures, the pleasures of sound and the pleasures of beautiful form." His mistress was the hetaira Leontion.
References: Diogenes Laertius: Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (1925) translated by R. D. Hicks (Loeb Classical Library); Juvenal and Persius (1940) translated by G. G. Ramsay (Loeb Classical Library); J. W. Waterhouse (2002) by Peter Trippi.
