Diogenes of Sinope

There is a problem with Diogenes that has to be stated before anything else: we do not have a single word he wrote.

Not a fragment, not a quoted sentence with a reliable chain of custody. What survives is roughly two hundred anecdotes and retorts, collected by Diogenes Laertius some five and a half centuries after the man died, from sources that were themselves collecting gossip. Some of the stories contradict each other. Several are attributed elsewhere to other Cynics. A few are clearly jokes that acquired an author.

This ought to make him unreconstructable. It does the opposite, and the reason is worth pausing on. Diogenes was the first philosopher to make his own life the argument, and a life lived as an argument transmits by anecdote in a way that a treatise never does. He built a philosophy specifically designed to survive without a text. It worked.

What can be known about Diogenes, and what cannot

The evidence is thinner here than for anyone else at this table, and the shape of the thinness matters more than the quantity.

Nobody who met him left an account of him. The earliest surviving mention is a single joke. In the Rhetoric, finished within a generation of Diogenes’ death, Aristotle credits a figure he names only as the Dog with the metaphor that taverns are the mess-halls of Attica. Even that much is contested: some readers take the Dog to be Antisthenes. One line, one metaphor, one disputed identification, from a contemporary living in the same city.

After that, effectively nothing for half a millennium.

The book that carries the rest is Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book VI, sections 20 to 81. Its author cannot be dated precisely. He names nobody later than the second century CE and shows no awareness of Neoplatonism, which places him in the first half of the third century, five and a half centuries after his subject. He was a compiler rather than an investigator. He cites his authorities constantly, among them Diocles, Eubulides, Sotion, Sosicrates, Satyrus, Menippus, Hecato, Favorinus and Demetrius of Magnesia, and there is little sign he read most of them at first hand rather than through intermediate collections of the same anecdotes.

What he was compiling was not biography. It was chreiai.

A chreia is a defined literary form: a compressed anecdote that sets its scene in a clause and closes on a saying or a gesture. The word means something like a useful thing, and it was useful in a precise institutional sense. The chreia was one of the first exercises in the progymnasmata, the Greek school sequence, third in Aphthonius and first of all in Theon, and Diogenes was its favourite subject. Pupils were given one and told to decline it through the grammatical cases, to state it briefly, to expand it, to argue for it and against it. Aelius Theon, whose handbook survives, permits the pupil to recite a chreia in other words than the ones received.

That permission is the whole source problem in a sentence. For several hundred years, across the Greek-speaking world, schoolchildren were being trained to rewrite Diogenes anecdotes in their own words as a graded exercise, and the corpus that eventually reached Diogenes Laertius had passed through that machine on its way.

The damage is visible in the text. Diogenes Laertius preserves the disagreements rather than smoothing them, which is his one great virtue as a witness. On the currency at Sinope he gives four incompatible accounts in two sections. On the death he gives four more. Sayings recur under different names; the same retort is credited to Diogenes in one place and to Aristippus, Antisthenes or Crates in another.

Three further layers sit on top of the chreia problem.

The letters are forgeries, and known to be. Fifty-one letters circulated under Diogenes’ name. Abraham Malherbe’s study edition dates most of them to the first century BCE, with the Crates letters a century later. They are not evidence about Diogenes. They are evidence about what later Cynics needed him to have said.

The most vivid ancient portraits are declamations. Dio Chrysostom’s Orations 4, 6, 8, 9 and 10 stage Diogenes as a speaker in fully composed scenes, including the longest surviving version of the meeting with Alexander. Dio was a first-century orator writing for an audience under the Roman empire, and the Diogenes in those speeches is a character with Dio’s arguments in his mouth.

The teaching lineage may itself be an invention. Diogenes Laertius has Diogenes as the pupil of Antisthenes and the teacher of Crates, who taught Zeno of Citium. Donald Dudley argued in 1937 that Antisthenes was a follower of Socrates and nothing more, and that the succession was manufactured by Alexandrian writers of Successions in order to give Stoicism a clean descent from Socrates. The chronology is awkward on any reading: Diogenes probably reached Athens near the end of Antisthenes’ life or after it, and Aristotle refers to the circle around Antisthenes as Antistheneans, never as Cynics. The dispute is unresolved and the majority position still accepts the succession, but nobody now treats it as secure.

So the standard used in what follows. Where a claim can be argued from a document, an object or a datable event, it is stated as fact. Where it comes out of the anecdote tradition, it is attributed to the tradition, which is what the phrases is reported and is said to have are doing on this page. Where the versions conflict, the conflict is given rather than the most attractive version.

That is a smaller article than the confident one, and it is the only honest one available.

Sinope, and the coin

He was born in Sinope, a Greek colony on the Black Sea coast, around 412 BCE. His father Hicesias was, by most accounts, a banker or the official in charge of the city’s mint.

Something happened with the currency. The sources agree on the fact and disagree on everything else: Diogenes defaced or adulterated the coinage - paracharattein to nomisma - and either he or his father or both were exiled or imprisoned. Archaeology has turned up defaced Sinopean coins from roughly the right decades, which is suggestive without settling anything.

The phrase itself became the slogan of his entire philosophy, because nomisma - coin, currency - is the same root as nomos: custom, convention, law. To deface the currency is to deface the convention. Whether he committed a financial crime and later reinterpreted it as a philosophical mission, or whether the story was constructed backwards out of the slogan, cannot be recovered. In one version he consulted the oracle at Delphi first and was told to deface the currency, which is either the origin of the whole project or a very good piece of later publicity.

What is certain is that he arrived in Athens as an exile with nothing, and that he decided to keep it that way.

The four versions are worth laying out, because they are the clearest sample of how this tradition behaves. Diogenes Laertius gives all of them in two consecutive sections and adjudicates none.

In the first, from Diocles, the father held the state money and adulterated it, and the son went into exile because of what the father did. In the second, from Eubulides, Diogenes did it himself and left with his father. In the third, Diogenes was made overseer of the mint workers, was talked into it by them, and consulted the god first:

When the god gave him permission to alter the political currency, not understanding what this meant, he adulterated the state coinage, and when he was detected, according to some he was banished, while according to others he voluntarily quitted the city for fear of consequences. Diogenes Laertius, VI.20, trans. Hicks

In the fourth the order is reversed and the oracle comes after the crime:

One version is that his father entrusted him with the money and that he debased it, in consequence of which the father was imprisoned and died, while the son fled, came to Delphi, and inquired, not whether he should falsify the coinage, but what he should do to gain the greatest reputation; and that then it was that he received the oracle. Diogenes Laertius, VI.21, trans. Hicks

Between them these versions cannot all be true, and the differences are not incidental. One makes him an innocent, one an accomplice, one a man following an oracle he misread, and one a fugitive who found his slogan afterwards. Diogenes Laertius also notes that Diogenes admitted the coinage business in a work of his own called the Pordalus, which would settle it, except that the work is lost and other ancient scholars denied he wrote anything.

The physical evidence is real and does not reach as far as it is often made to. Large numbers of Sinopean coins from the middle of the fourth century BCE have been found defaced, struck through with a chisel punch in a way that voids them as legal tender, and other Sinopean issues of the period carry the name of a mint official read as Hicesias. C. T. Seltman set out the numismatic case in 1938. What the coins establish is that Sinope had a currency scandal in roughly the right decades and that a man of the right name was involved in minting. They do not establish which of Diogenes Laertius’ four stories is the true one, or that any of them is.

The pun holds regardless of the history. Nomisma is what a community agrees to treat as valuable; nomos is what it agrees to treat as right. Greek makes the two words neighbours, and a philosophy that begins by striking through a coin has announced its programme before it has said anything.

Athens, and the method

He attached himself to Antisthenes, an older follower of Socrates who had pushed the Socratic emphasis on virtue toward asceticism. Antisthenes reportedly wanted nothing to do with him and once raised a stick. Diogenes offered his head: strike, for you will find no wood hard enough to keep me away while you have something to say.

Then he began the demonstrations, and it is important to see that they were demonstrations rather than eccentricities. Each one is an argument compressed into an action.

He lived in a pithos - a large ceramic storage jar, the kind used for grain and sometimes for burial - in a public part of the city. The point is not discomfort. The point is that shelter, a thing everyone works their life to secure, turns out to be available for nothing to anyone willing to be seen.

He owned a cup, carried in his wallet. He saw a boy drinking from his cupped hands, and threw the cup away, saying the boy had beaten him in simplicity. Then he saw a boy who had broken his dish eating lentils out of a hollowed crust of bread, and threw away his bowl as well.

He walked through the market in daylight with a lit lamp. Asked what he was doing, he said he was looking for a human being - anthropos. The usual English, “an honest man”, is a softening. He was not conducting a survey of morals. He was saying that the creatures around him did not qualify as the thing they claimed to be.

He ate in the marketplace, which was not done. He masturbated there, which was very much not done, and said he wished hunger could be relieved as easily by rubbing his stomach. He is said to have spat in a rich man’s face, having looked around the spotless house for the least valuable place to spit.

The label came from all this. Kynikos - dog-like - was an insult about a man who lived as an animal does, in the open, without shame. He kept it. Asked why he was called a dog: I fawn on those who give me something, I bark at those who refuse, and I bite scoundrels.

The training had a source outside human society, and the tradition names it. Diogenes Laertius reports, on the authority of a dialogue by Theophrastus, that the whole method came from watching a mouse:

Through watching a mouse running about, says Theophrastus in the Megarian dialogue, not looking for a place to lie down in, not afraid of the dark, not seeking any of the things which are considered to be dainties, he discovered the means of adapting himself to circumstances. Diogenes Laertius, VI.22, trans. Hicks

Theophrastus succeeded Aristotle at the Lyceum and was alive while Diogenes was alive, which makes this the closest thing in the whole corpus to a contemporary source, and it reaches us only because Diogenes Laertius quotes a lost book at second hand five hundred years later. That is the best the evidence gets.

The equipment was standardised and became the Cynic uniform: a rough doubled cloak worn in all weathers, a staff, and a leather wallet for food. Later Cynics were recognisable in the street by those three objects for the next seven hundred years, which is longer than most schools kept a doctrine.

The jar Diogenes lived in was a pithos, not a barrel

The Greek word at Diogenes Laertius VI.23 is pithos. It is not a barrel, and the difference is not pedantry.

A pithos is a storage jar of fired clay, often taller than a person, with a wide mouth and a rounded body, sunk partway into the ground in a storeroom and used for grain, oil, wine or salted fish. Pithoi were also used for burials, in Crete and elsewhere, which gives the choice of dwelling an extra edge that a wooden cask cannot carry. Empty or broken ones stood about in cities as ordinary municipal debris, which is the point: he took a discarded object that nobody wanted and turned out to have solved the housing problem with it.

Diogenes Laertius places it at the Metroon, the sanctuary of the Mother of the Gods in the Athenian agora, which also housed the state archives. The most public building in the most public square in Greece, with a philosopher living in a broken pot outside it.

The barrel is a translation problem with a date. Coopered wooden casks were a Celtic and Roman technology, and classical Athens did not have them. Latin readers were still getting it right four hundred years later: Juvenal, in the fourteenth satire, has the naked Cynic in an earthenware jar that no fire can harm, and notes that if it breaks he will find another tomorrow or mend this one with clamps of lead. Mending pottery with lead clamps is exactly what was done to a cracked pithos, and not what is done to a cask.

The wooden version arrives with the vernaculars of early modern Europe, where translators reached for the container their readers actually owned: tonneau in French, Tonne in German, tub or barrel in English. R. D. Hicks, translating for the Loeb edition in 1925, still wrote tub. Painters followed the words rather than the archaeology, and the Diogenes who sits in a wooden barrel with staves and hoops is a European invention many centuries younger than anything in the evidence.

Nothing philosophical rests on the material. What rests on it is the accuracy of everything else in the same sentence, and the correction is a small demonstration of the larger point about this tradition: an object was mistranslated once and the mistranslation is now the most famous fact about the man.

Diogenes and the lamp, and what the search in daylight was for

The whole episode is one sentence, in one section, with no context before it and none after:

He lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, “I am looking for a man.” Diogenes Laertius, VI.41, trans. Hicks

The Greek is anthropon zeto. Anthropos is the species word, a human being, as against aner, an adult male. There is no adjective in the sentence. Honest is not there.

The word arrived later, in retelling, and it changes the act into something much smaller. A man searching for an honest man is running a moral audit of his neighbours and finding them fraudulent, which is an unremarkable thing for a moralist to do and would not have been remembered. A man searching for anthropos in a crowded marketplace full of people is making a categorical claim: that the beings around him have the shape of the thing and not the substance, and that the species is so far unfilled. The lamp is not for finding fraud in the dark. It is the instrument a person uses when the thing being looked for is not there.

It also has a target, which the honest-man version loses. One section earlier, at VI.40, Plato is reported defining man as an animal, biped and featherless. The lamp and the plucked chicken are the same argument delivered twice: whatever the definition of a human being turns out to be, the people in this square do not meet it, and the philosophers writing the definitions have not noticed.

The line has kept its shape for two and a half thousand years because it works without a text, which is the property Diogenes built everything for. It is why the lamp is the one object that appears in almost every painted Diogenes, from the Renaissance onward, and why it survived into a language that had lost the philosophy attached to it.

The best-known modern reuse is Nietzsche’s. In The Gay Science §125 a madman lights a lantern in the bright morning, runs into the marketplace and cries that he is looking for God, and the crowd, who do not believe in God, laugh at him. The staging is Diogenes’ staging exactly: the lamp in daylight, the market, the laughter of people who think the joke is on the man holding the light. What Nietzsche does with it is a different argument, and the borrowed apparatus is not accidental.

Diogenes against Plato: the plucked chicken and the featherless biped

The quarrel with Plato is the best-documented relationship in Diogenes’ life, which is not saying much, and the tradition treats it as the central intellectual contest of his career.

The most famous exchange:

Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, “Here is Plato’s man.” Diogenes Laertius, VI.40, trans. Hicks

Diogenes Laertius adds the repair in the same breath, at VI.40: in consequence of which, he writes, there was added to the definition the words having broad nails. He does not say who added them, and the attribution to the Academy is a later guess. Whether the amendment is historical or a joke about how definitions get repaired is not recoverable, and the fact that a repair is even imaginable is what the plucked bird was for. A definition assembled out of external marks can always be met by producing something that has the marks, and the argument had a live target: Plato’s method proceeds by division into kinds, and a Cynic could show, in one gesture and without a word of theory, what happens when the divisions are taken at face value.

The other reported collisions run the same way. Diogenes Laertius has him calling Plato’s lectures a waste of time. At a dinner in Plato’s house he walked over the expensive floor coverings saying I trample upon Plato’s vainglory, and Plato answered that the trampling exposed a pride of its own, which is the better line of the two and is usually left out. The pattern in all of them is the same: Plato brings a definition, a school and an audience, and Diogenes answers by putting an object on the floor.

Plato’s own reported verdict is the sharpest sentence in the corpus, and Diogenes Laertius puts it as an answer to a question, not as an insult thrown in a quarrel:

On being asked by somebody, “What sort of a man do you consider Diogenes to be?” “A Socrates gone mad,” said he. Diogenes Laertius, VI.54, trans. Hicks

The same line appears in Aelian’s Varia Historia XIV.33, which suggests it was circulating independently. It is also, considered as criticism, extremely precise. Socrates went about Athens asking people questions they could not answer and refusing to leave. Diogenes did the same thing without the questions, and without the courtesy that made the questions bearable. The word mad is doing the work of naming what was removed rather than what was added.

None of this can be dated, and one strand of it is chronologically strained: if Diogenes reached Athens late, the overlap with Plato is short. The exchanges are best read as the tradition’s way of staging a real philosophical opposition rather than as a record of conversations. The opposition itself is not in doubt. Plato held that the visible world is a copy and that thought climbs away from it. Diogenes held that there is nothing to climb to and that the climbing is what allows a man to own a house with expensive floors.

The one story everyone knows

Alexander, either newly acclaimed as leader of the Greeks at Corinth in 336 BCE or on campaign, sought Diogenes out. The philosopher was lying in the sun. Alexander stood over him and offered him anything he wanted.

Stand out of my light.

Alexander’s companions laughed. Alexander is supposed to have said: If I were not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes.

The story appears in Plutarch, in Diogenes Laertius, in Dio Chrysostom, and in several later versions, which means it was circulating early and widely. Whether it happened cannot be established.

What can be established is why it lasted. The exchange is a complete philosophical position in nine words. Alexander arrives with the maximum a human being can offer another human being - the entire disposable wealth and power of the known world - and it turns out to be worth less than an unobstructed patch of sunlight, because the sunlight was already free and the offer was not. And Alexander, who by every account was not a stupid man, understands immediately that he has lost the exchange, and says so.

There is a second Alexander story, less famous and more brutal. Alexander finds him sorting through a heap of human bones and asks what he is doing. I am searching for the bones of your father, but I cannot distinguish them from those of a slave.

The two fullest ancient tellings do not agree, and reading them side by side is a useful lesson in how this material behaves. Diogenes Laertius gives the whole thing in one sentence:

When he was sunning himself in the Craneum, Alexander came and stood over him and said, “Ask of me any boon you like.” To which he replied, “Stand out of my light.” Diogenes Laertius, VI.38, trans. Hicks

Plutarch, writing his Life of Alexander around 400 years after the supposed event, sets the scene at the gathering of the Greeks at the Isthmus, where Alexander was proclaimed general against Persia. Statesmen and philosophers came to congratulate the new commander; Diogenes, who was at Corinth, did not. Alexander went to him, and found him lying in the sun.

I would have you stand from between me and the sun. Plutarch, Life of Alexander 14, trans. Dryden

Plutarch adds that Alexander was struck by the greatness of a man who had nothing but contempt for him, and told his mocking followers that if he were not Alexander, he would choose to be Diogenes.

Dio Chrysostom’s fourth Oration expands the same meeting into a long philosophical dialogue in which Diogenes explains to Alexander what a real king is: a son of Zeus in the sense of character rather than descent, which is a Cynic argument delivered in a Roman imperial setting to a Roman imperial audience, and probably to Trajan on his birthday.

Two things about the story hold up, and two do not.

The setting is plausible. Alexander was in Corinth in 336 BCE for the meeting of the Greek states, and the Craneion, the cypress grove outside the city walls where Diogenes is reported to have lived his last years, was in Corinth. There is nothing in the geography or the calendar that prevents it.

The variants multiply in the direction that anecdotes always multiply. Other versions have Alexander announce himself as the great king and Diogenes answer that he is Diogenes the dog. Others move the meeting, or change what is offered. Philip Bosman’s 2007 study of the tradition argues that the meeting is a construction rather than a memory, built because the confrontation between the most powerful man in the world and the man who wanted nothing from him was too useful for the Cynic tradition to leave alone.

The line’s own logic argues against its being invented, and this is the strongest thing that can be said for it. A fabricated retort would be a better retort. What Diogenes is reported to have said is not clever; it is a request to move slightly to the left. The whole force comes from its being an ordinary inconvenience rather than an epigram, and inventors of philosophical anecdotes reach for epigrams.

What cannot be defended is the certainty with which it is repeated. Nobody who was present wrote anything down, and everyone who did write it down had a use for it.

Why Diogenes was called a dog

Kyon is dog. Kynikos is dog-like. Everything in the movement’s name comes from the animal, and it began as abuse.

Three explanations circulated in antiquity and the ancient sources do not agree. One derives the name from the Kynosarges, a gymnasium and shrine of Heracles outside the Athenian walls, open to those without full citizen descent, where Antisthenes is said to have taught. The derivation is suspect: nothing firmly links Antisthenes or any other Cynic to that building, and it looks like a name manufactured afterwards on the model of the Stoics being named for the Stoa. A second traces it to a nickname for Antisthenes, Haplokyon, the dog pure and simple. The third, and the one the anecdotes support, is that it was said about Diogenes personally, about a man who ate, slept, argued and relieved himself in public exactly as a dog does.

He took it. Diogenes Laertius records the acceptance in the form of a joke about the auction where he was sold:

When Plato styled him a dog, “Quite true,” he said, “for I come back again and again to those who have sold me.” Diogenes Laertius, VI.40, trans. Hicks

And he built the insult out into a description of a function:

Being asked what he had done to be called a hound, he said, “I fawn on those who give me anything, I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals.” Diogenes Laertius, VI.60, trans. Hicks

The animal was well chosen and he seems to have known it. A dog is shameless in the exact technical sense the Cynics needed, doing in the street what humans have agreed to do indoors. A dog is indifferent to property, discriminating in its loyalties, unimpressed by rank, capable of great hardship and entirely without a theory. It also eats what it finds. Every element of the Cynic programme has a canine equivalent, which is why the insult was worth keeping rather than deflecting.

The word outlived the argument and became the school’s formal name in Greek, then in Latin, then in every European language. When Diogenes’ friends buried him at Corinth they put a dog carved in Parian marble on the pillar over the grave, which means the label had completed its journey from insult to epitaph inside a single lifetime.

What the anecdotes are actually arguing

Strip the theatre and a coherent position is underneath.

Convention is not nature. Almost everything a person believes they need - property, reputation, marriage, citizenship, table manners, the burial of the dead - is nomos, a local human agreement, not physis, the way things are. The Cynic move is to notice that the agreements are optional, and that most human suffering comes from wanting things one has merely been trained to want.

Virtue is the only good, and it is enough. This is Socratic and Antisthenic, and Diogenes takes it to its terminus. If virtue is sufficient for a good life, then everything else - health, wealth, honour, even freedom in the political sense - is genuinely indifferent, and a person who has understood that cannot be threatened with anything.

Training, not theory. The Cynic word is askesis - exercise, in the athletic sense, from which “ascetic” comes. Diogenes rolled in hot sand in summer and embraced snow-covered statues in winter, and the point was not endurance for its own sake but the same point an athlete makes: capacity is built by practice, and a person who has practised having nothing cannot be frightened by the prospect of losing something. Philosophy is a physical discipline. It is why nothing needed writing down.

Shamelessness as a tool. The word is anaideia, and it is the most misunderstood part of the programme. He performed in public precisely the acts that convention says must be hidden, and the discomfort produced in the onlooker is the argument: if this act is natural, the shame attached to it is manufactured, and if the shame is manufactured then it was installed by someone, for some purpose, and that purpose is worth examining.

Cosmopolitanism. Asked where he came from, he said: I am a citizen of the world - kosmopolites. As far as anyone can trace, this is the earliest recorded use of the word, on the attribution Diogenes Laertius makes six centuries later. A stateless exile invented the idea of world citizenship, and it was not a warm sentiment about human brotherhood. It was a refusal: the polis, which every Greek took to be the frame of a complete human life, was another currency he declined to accept at face value.

Freedom of speech as a way of life. Parrhesia - saying everything, holding nothing back - was a political right in democratic Athens. Diogenes turned it into a practice performed at personal cost against anyone at all, including men who could have him killed. Michel Foucault spent his final lecture course on precisely this, and treated Diogenes as the limit case: the person for whom truth-telling is not an act but a form of existence.

Self-sufficiency. Autarkeia is the state the training is for: needing nothing that another person controls. The reported test of it is the begging, which was not a livelihood but an exercise. He is said to have asked alms of a statue, and to have explained that he was getting practice in being refused. A man who has rehearsed refusal cannot be governed by the fear of it.

Money is the mother-city of the rest. Diogenes Laertius has him naming the love of money as the metropolis of all evils, and the word matters: not the root or the source but the mother-city, the place a colony comes from and continues to obey. Every other convention he attacked has a financial version, and he thought the financial version came first.

The obscenity of Diogenes, and the argument behind it

The public indecency is the part of the record most often skipped, and skipping it removes the argument that holds the rest together.

Diogenes Laertius reports it twice, flatly, in the middle of ordinary lists of sayings:

When behaving indecently in the marketplace, he wished it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing an empty stomach. Diogenes Laertius, VI.46, trans. Hicks

The same line recurs at VI.69, which is itself a sign of how the collection was assembled. The joke is a syllogism. Hunger and sexual appetite are both bodily needs. One of them can be settled in public at no cost to anyone, and the other cannot, and the difference between them is a matter of anatomy rather than morality. The remark regrets the anatomy. It does not defend the display.

The general principle behind it is anaideia, shamelessness, and the Cynic version of it is narrower than the word suggests. It is not a claim that nothing is shameful. It is a claim that shame attaches to the wrong list. Killing in war, taking a fee to flatter a tyrant, living off inherited money: none of these produced a blush in fourth-century Athens. Eating in the street did. A philosophy that wants to argue the list is arbitrary can do it in a treatise nobody reads, or it can perform the least defensible item on the list in the busiest square in the city and let the crowd’s reaction supply the evidence.

Diogenes Laertius pushes it further, into territory the later tradition found difficult:

He advocated community of wives, recognizing no other marriage than a union of the man who persuades with the woman who consents. Diogenes Laertius, VI.72, trans. Hicks

The next section removes the prohibition on eating human flesh, on the ground that some peoples do it and nothing follows.

These positions are attributed to the lost Republic, and the fullest account of that book’s contents comes from Philodemus, an Epicurean writing in the first century BCE with every reason to make the Cynics look monstrous, in a treatise attacking Zeno of Citium for having borrowed from them. Brian Hook’s study of the material shows incest and cannibalism recurring across Cynic and early Stoic writing as a standing test case rather than a recommendation: the question being asked is whether an act is wrong in itself or wrong because a community has agreed to forbid it, and Oedipus and Thyestes are the two examples every Greek reader already knew. Later Stoics were embarrassed by their own founder’s version of the argument and tried to have the book disowned.

Two cautions belong here. The first is that a tradition transmitted by hostile summarisers and by schoolboys competing to shock will amplify exactly this material, so the extremity of the reports is not strong evidence of the extremity of the man. The second is that the argument does not depend on the examples. Whether or not Diogenes wrote a page about Thyestes, the position under it is the one thing in Cynicism that everybody agrees was his: that the line between the forbidden and the permitted is drawn by a community, that the community cannot say why it drew the line where it did, and that being unable to say why is not the same as having a reason.

Diogenes and the word cosmopolitan

The exchange is one line and the word in it had not existed before:

Asked where he came from, he said, “I am a citizen of the world.” Diogenes Laertius, VI.63, trans. Hicks

The Greek is kosmopolites, made by welding kosmos, the ordered world, onto polites, a citizen of a polis. As far as the surviving record goes this is its first appearance in any language, and it is a coinage in the strict sense: two familiar words forced into a compound that ought not to work, since a polis is bounded, walled and exclusive and the kosmos is none of those things.

The usual caution applies with more than usual force. The line reaches us only through Diogenes Laertius, and a tradition capable of inventing four deaths is capable of inventing a word and backdating it. What can be said is that nobody earlier is recorded using it, that it is attributed to Diogenes consistently, and that the sentiment fits a man with no city better than it fits anyone who had one.

The question put to him was the ordinary Greek question, and the ordinary Greek answer would have been Sinope. Sinope had expelled him. What he says instead is not a consolation for exile but a refusal of the frame: the identity being requested is one he declines to have.

Scholars divide over how much the word is carrying. The deflationary reading, which John Moles’ study of Cynic cosmopolitanism sets out in order to argue against it, notes that the word enters Stoicism a century later as a positive doctrine about a universal community of rational beings under a common law, and that nothing in the Cynic evidence supports that content. On this reading Diogenes’ answer is negative: not a claim to belong everywhere, but a denial that belonging anywhere means anything. It is the same move as the defaced coin, applied to citizenship. The maximalist reading takes the word to imply a positive fellow-feeling with all human beings, and points to Cynic philanthropia elsewhere in the tradition.

The negative reading fits the rest of the evidence better and costs the idea nothing. A stateless man in a world organised entirely around city membership announced that the membership was not real. The word is now ordinary in every European language and carries a substantial literature in political philosophy behind it, and it began as a piece of insolence from someone with nothing to lose by saying it.

What it cost him is the part worth holding on to. The exile was permanent and the alternative to a polis in the fourth century BCE was not a wider community but no protection of any kind: no court that would hear him, no assembly that owed him anything, no obligation on anyone to bury him. He said the word from inside that condition, not from above it.

The pirates, the slave market, and the end

Sailing to Aegina he was captured by pirates and sold as a slave in Crete. Asked at the auction what he could do, he said: govern men - and told the auctioneer to announce whether anyone in the crowd wished to buy a master.

A Corinthian called Xeniades bought him, and Diogenes ran the household and tutored the sons. Told that he was a slave, he replied that lions are not the slaves of those who feed them. He appears to have stayed with the family for the rest of his life, which is either a happy ending or evidence that the whole story was constructed to make a point about who is actually free.

He died at Corinth around 323 BCE, at nearly ninety, and the sources cannot agree on how: of colic after eating a raw octopus, of a bite from a dog he was feeding, or by holding his breath - which is physiologically impossible and is exactly the death the tradition would want him to have.

He is said to have asked to be thrown outside the walls unburied, for the animals. Asked whether he meant the birds and beasts, he asked for a stick to drive them off. Told he would not be able to feel anything, he asked what harm the animals could do him then.

His friends quarrelled over the right to bury him until the leading men of the place stepped in, and a dog carved in Parian marble was put over the grave.

The version of the auction that Diogenes Laertius preserves has the sharpest form of the joke, and it is worth noting that the buyer is identified in the same breath:

When the auctioneer asked in what he was proficient, he replied, “In ruling men.” Thereupon he pointed to a certain Corinthian with a fine purple border to his robe, the man named Xeniades above-mentioned, and said, “Sell me to this man; he needs a master.” Diogenes Laertius, VI.74, trans. Hicks

The tutoring at the Xeniades house is described in some detail at VI.30 and VI.31, and it is the only sustained account anywhere of Cynicism applied to somebody else’s children. The boys were taught to ride, to shoot with the bow, to use the sling and to throw the javelin, and given only as much athletic training as kept them in condition. They memorised passages of poetry and history, and passages of Diogenes. They waited on themselves, ate plain food, drank water, cropped their hair short, wore nothing ornamental, and went barefoot and silent through the streets without looking about them.

Whether any of it happened is unknowable. What it shows is that the tradition wanted a Diogenes who could run a household competently, which is a strange thing for a movement of beggars to have needed, and suggests the anecdote is answering the charge of uselessness rather than reporting a job.

The same passage also contains a quiet contradiction of the more famous ending. Diogenes Laertius says at VI.31 that he grew old in the house of Xeniades and was buried by the sons. At VI.77 he says the friends found him dead outside the walls, and at VI.78 that they fought over who had the right to bury him. Both are in the same life, forty-six sections apart.

The three incompatible deaths of Diogenes

Diogenes Laertius gives the accounts of the death at VI.77, one after another, in a single section, and adjudicates none of them.

Old age. He was nearly ninety. On the chronology usually given, that puts his birth around 412 BCE and makes him a man in his mid-seventies when Alexander came to Corinth.

The raw octopus. He was seized with colic after eating one, and died of it. This is the version most compatible with his own doctrine, since a man who ate what he found was always going to be killed by what he found.

The dog bite. He was distributing an octopus among dogs and was bitten so badly on the tendon of the foot that the wound killed him. The Cynic dying of a dog is either an unusually good joke by fate or an unusually good joke by whoever wrote it down.

Holding his breath. He is said to have ended his own life by suppressing respiration. Diogenes Laertius attributes this to the poet Cercidas of Megalopolis, who wrote it in verse: Diogenes soared aloft with his lip pressed tight against his teeth, holding his breath. It cannot be done. Consciousness is lost before the breathing can be stopped, and the reflex resumes. It is nevertheless the version the tradition liked best, because it makes even dying a demonstration of askesis.

Three incompatible deaths is more than a compiler’s untidiness. It is the clearest available measurement of how far the tradition had drifted by the third century CE, and it argues that the drift had begun almost at once, since Cercidas was writing within a century of the death, at a point when the facts should still have been recoverable.

The burial has the same problem. Diogenes Laertius says the friends found him wrapped in his cloak at the Craneion gymnasium outside Corinth, quarrelled about who had the right to bury him, and were separated by the intervention of local men of standing. He was buried by the gate on the road to the Isthmus, under a pillar carrying a dog in Parian marble. His fellow citizens at Sinope, who had exiled him, later put up bronze statues with an inscription saying that time ages bronze and will never destroy his glory.

The request to be left out for the animals, which is the best-loved part of the ending, is not in Diogenes Laertius in that form. It comes from Cicero, in the first book of the Tusculan Disputations, written at Rome in 45 BCE, where it is used as an argument that death is nothing to fear because the dead have no sensation:

“Place my staff near me, that I may drive them away.” “How can you do that,” they answer, “for you will not perceive them?” “How am I then injured by being torn by those animals, if I have no sensation?” Cicero, Tusculan Disputations I.43, trans. Yonge

Cicero is three centuries closer to Diogenes than Diogenes Laertius is, and he is quoting the story to win a Latin philosophical argument rather than to record a Greek life. That is the condition of the entire biography in one footnote.

Diogenes Laertius closes with the date, and the date is the last of the improvements. He reports, on Demetrius’ authority, that the death fell on the very day Alexander died at Babylon, and adds that Diogenes was an old man in the 113th Olympiad, which ended before Alexander did. Alexander died on 10 or 11 June 323 BCE. The coincidence is exact, symmetrical and almost certainly manufactured, and a tradition that ends its subject’s life on the same morning as his most famous interlocutor has told the reader what kind of document it is.

What Diogenes wrote, and why nothing survives

The bibliography is at Diogenes Laertius VI.80, and it does something no bibliography should: it contradicts itself inside one paragraph.

The first list gives dialogues, among them Cephalion, Ichthyas, Jackdaw, Pordalus, The Athenian Demos, Republic, Art of Ethics, On Wealth, On Love, Theodorus, Hypsias, Aristarchus, On Death and a collection of letters, followed by seven tragedies: Helen, Thyestes, Heracles, Achilles, Medea, Chrysippus and Oedipus.

The second list, credited to Sotion, gives a shorter set of titles as the only genuine ones, and it does not match the first.

And then the denial:

Sosicrates in the first book of his Successions, and Satyrus in the fourth book of his Lives, allege that Diogenes left nothing in writing, and Satyrus adds that the sorry tragedies are by his friend Philiscus, the Aeginetan. Diogenes Laertius, VI.80, trans. Hicks

So the position in antiquity was already threefold: a long list, a short list, and a flat denial that any of it existed. Philiscus of Aegina, named there as the real author of the tragedies, appears earlier in the same book as one of Diogenes’ pupils, which is either the ordinary way a disciple’s work gets absorbed into a master’s name or the ordinary way a scholar disposes of a text he dislikes.

Of the lost works only the Republic has left a trace, and the trace is hostile. Philodemus summarises it in the first century BCE in order to attack Zeno of Citium for having copied it. What can be recovered from that summary and from the scattered reports in Diogenes Laertius is a book that held wives and children in common, recognised no marriage beyond the agreement of the two people in it, and treated the prohibitions on incest and on eating human flesh as local conventions rather than laws of nature. Whether the man wrote it, whether it was meant as a serious constitution or as a demonstration, and whether an Epicurean polemicist is describing it fairly are three questions with no answers.

The silence has a better explanation than accident, and it is the same explanation as everything else in this article. A philosophy whose content is a way of standing in a marketplace does not need to be written, and its founder said as much by living the way he did. The Cynics who came after him wrote a great deal and almost none of it survives either, which suggests the tradition was carried by imitation rather than by libraries. When a school is transmitted by copying a man’s behaviour, it needs no manuscripts, and it also has no defence against people who copy the behaviour and drop the reason for it. Both halves of that arrangement show up in what happened next.

Cynicism as a school, from Antisthenes to Zeno

The standard genealogy runs in a straight line: Socrates taught Antisthenes, Antisthenes taught Diogenes, Diogenes taught Crates, Crates taught Zeno of Citium, and Zeno founded the Stoa in the painted colonnade at Athens around 300 BCE.

The line is too clean and its cleanliness is the objection. Donald Dudley’s 1937 history argued that it was assembled by Alexandrian writers of Successions who needed Stoicism to descend from Socrates, and that Antisthenes was a Socratic and nothing more. The chronology is uncomfortable, the earliest sources call Antisthenes’ circle Antistheneans rather than Cynics, and even the story of Zeno’s conversion has the shape of a story: a shipwrecked merchant reads Xenophon in an Athenian bookshop, asks where men like Socrates are to be found, and Crates walks past the door at that moment.

What survives the objection is the transmission itself, whoever the links actually were, because the content moved and the movement can be traced.

Antisthenes (c. 445 to c. 365 BCE) held that virtue is teachable, that it is sufficient for happiness, and that it shows in deeds rather than in argument. Everything Cynic is present in that except the theatre.

Crates of Thebes (c. 365 to c. 285 BCE) is the pivot, and the only figure in the chain with an independent documentary reputation. He inherited a substantial fortune and disposed of it, in one version by making it over to his fellow citizens, in another by handing it to a banker with instructions to give it to his sons unless they turned out to be philosophers, in which case it should go to the public, since a philosopher would need nothing. He was popular in a way Diogenes was not: Athenians called him the door-opener because he walked into houses uninvited and was welcomed, and he settled family quarrels. He wrote parodies in verse. Cynicism passes through him with the aggression turned down and the argument intact.

Zeno of Citium (c. 334 to c. 262 BCE) took the ethics and built the rest of a system around them. The Stoic claims that virtue is the only good, that health, wealth and reputation are indifferent, that the wise person lives according to nature, and that the world is a single city, are Cynic claims with a physics and a logic attached. Zeno’s own Republic was Cynic enough to embarrass later Stoics, who spent centuries explaining that he wrote it when he was young.

The later Stoics never let go of the ancestry. Epictetus devotes a long discourse to the Cynic vocation, praises it as the highest calling, and warns his students not to attempt it, which is roughly how a respectable institution talks about the founder’s disreputable teacher.

What became of Cynicism after Diogenes

Cynicism ran for something close to nine hundred years, and it is the only ancient school that managed it with no premises, no curriculum and no fees, which is a large part of the explanation.

The generation after Diogenes is the best attested. Metrocles of Maroneia left the Lyceum for Crates and is said to have burned his own writings. Monimus of Syracuse was a banker’s slave who feigned madness in order to be dismissed and join. Onesicritus came to Diogenes late in life, sailed with Alexander as a helmsman, and was sent ahead to interview the naked philosophers of India; he wrote them up in Cynic vocabulary and produced the first sustained European account of Indian asceticism, which he seems to have understood as Cynicism in a different climate.

Then the literary Cynics. Bion of Borysthenes is credited with the diatribe, the popular moral address that runs through Horace and Seneca and into the Christian sermon. Menippus of Gadara gave his name to the mixed prose-and-verse satire that reaches modern literature through Lucian, Varro, Erasmus and Swift. Cercidas of Megalopolis, the poet who supplied Diogenes with the breath-holding death, was also a lawgiver, and commanded the Megalopolitan contingent at Sellasia. Teles left the earliest surviving Cynic prose, in fragments quoted by Stobaeus.

Under the Roman empire the school revived and became visible enough to be a public nuisance. Demetrius the Cynic was a friend of Seneca and was exiled by Nero and again by Vespasian for insulting emperors to their faces. Demonax of Cyprus lived at Athens to almost a hundred and was given a public funeral, according to Lucian, who knew him. Oenomaus of Gadara wrote an attack on oracles. Peregrinus Proteus burned himself alive on a pyre at Harpina, just outside Olympia, immediately after the games of 165 CE, and Lucian, who was there and detested him, wrote the account.

The final surviving evidence is a complaint. In 362 CE the emperor Julian wrote two orations against the Cynics of his own day, one of them provoked by a Cynic who had insulted the memory of Diogenes. Julian’s charge is precise and modern: the men in the cloak had taken the shamelessness and dropped the discipline; they were unlettered, they flattered the powerful, they lived off other people, and they had none of the autarkeia that made Antisthenes, Diogenes and Crates worth admiring.

Seven hundred years after the marketplace, an emperor was arguing that the real Cynics were the old ones and that the current ones were frauds. The word was already halfway to its modern meaning, and it got there by the route Julian describes.

Crates and Hipparchia, and the woman who chose the Cynic life

Hipparchia of Maroneia is the only woman with her own entry among the eighty-two lives in Diogenes Laertius, and the only named female philosopher of the Cynic school.

She was born around 350 to 330 BCE, into a wealthy family in Thrace, and came to philosophy through her brother Metrocles, who had left the Lyceum to follow Crates of Thebes. She decided to marry Crates, who was much older, disfigured by a curvature of the spine, and voluntarily destitute. Her parents asked him to talk her out of it. Diogenes Laertius says he tried every argument, failed, and then made the offer in the only currency he had:

This is the bridegroom, here are his possessions; make your choice accordingly; for you will be no helpmeet of mine, unless you share my pursuits. Diogenes Laertius, VI.96, trans. Hicks

He had taken his clothes off while saying it. She chose, put on the same cloak, and lived the rest of her life in public with him, which in Cynic terms meant everything that phrase implies and which later sources report with some relish.

The other episode Diogenes Laertius preserves is an argument at a dinner given by Lysimachus, where a woman had no business being. Theodorus the Atheist quoted Euripides at her, to the effect that she had abandoned the loom. She answered with a syllogism: what is not wrong for Theodorus to do is not wrong for Hipparchia to do; it is not wrong for Theodorus to strike himself; therefore it is not wrong for Hipparchia to strike Theodorus. On the loom she is reported to have said that she had spent on education the time she would otherwise have wasted at it. Theodorus tried to pull her cloak off, and the account says she was not disconcerted.

She is credited with letters, philosophical refutations and jokes. None of them survive.

Two things make the entry worth its space. The first is that Cynicism is the only ancient school that admitted a woman on the same terms as the men, and the reason is structural rather than generous: a philosophy that owns nothing and belongs nowhere has no property to transmit and therefore no reason to control who marries whom. The second is that Hipparchia is the strongest counter-evidence to the charge that the whole thing was theatre. Diogenes had been exiled into poverty and could be said to have made a virtue of it. Hipparchia had money, family and a settled future, and put on the cloak anyway.

Why the name changed meaning

The modern word “cynic” means someone who assumes the worst about human motives and does nothing. Diogenes was the opposite: he assumed people were capable of far more than they were doing, and he spent forty years in the marketplace making that point in public at continuous personal cost.

The drift happened slowly, and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did most of it. What survived into modern usage was the contempt without the discipline - the sneer detached from the jar. Peter Sloterdijk drew the distinction sharply enough to need two words for it: ancient kynicism, which was embodied, cheerful and expensive to the person practising it, and modern cynicism, which is a mood available at no cost to anyone with an opinion.

The drift is datable, and the sequence is legible in the dictionary record.

Cynic enters English in the 1550s, meaning a member of the ancient school. Within about forty years, by the 1590s, it is already being used for a sneering or sarcastic person with no reference to Greek philosophy at all. Cynical appears in the 1580s in the philosophical sense and by the 1660s carries the general modern one: disposed to disbelieve in human sincerity and to say so. Cynicism is recorded from the 1670s as the name of the doctrine, and only in 1847 in the sense of a personal disposition. The word for the school is a century older in English than the word for the mood, and the mood took three hundred years to detach itself completely.

What travelled during those three centuries was the outward behaviour and not the reason for it. A Cynic in the ancient sense was recognisable by an action performed at cost: giving away a fortune, sleeping outdoors, saying to a king’s face the thing everyone else swallowed. A cynic in the modern sense is recognisable by an attitude expressed at no cost. The two are connected by a single visible feature, contempt for the respectable, and everything that made the contempt worth having was left behind.

The eighteenth century did the decisive work, and it did it deliberately. Louisa Shea’s study of the Cynic Enlightenment traces the attempts of Rousseau, Diderot, Wieland and Sade to bring Diogenes into the salon: to keep the truth-telling and drop the body, to produce a Cynic who could be received in company. Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew is the sharpest result, a portrait of a man who sees through everything, says whatever he likes, and uses the freedom to sponge off the people he despises. That character is the modern cynic in his first complete form, and he is what the ancient position becomes when the askesis is removed and the parrhesia kept. Michel Foucault, in his last lecture course, treated the same book as the hinge in the history of the word.

Julian had described the same degeneration in 362 CE and blamed it on the Cynics of his own day. The complaint is durable because the failure mode is built into the position: the training is invisible and the insolence is not, so the insolence is what gets copied.

There is a second-order irony that the modern usage supplies for free. The person who says that all politicians are corrupt and all charity is self-interest is called a cynic, and Diogenes would have agreed with much of the content. What he would not have recognised is the posture, because the ancient position was not a conclusion about other people. It was a set of demands on the person holding it, and its whole force came from the speaker having already paid.

Whoever the actual links were, the content moved. Diogenes is said to have taught Crates of Thebes, who gave away a substantial fortune to live as a Cynic. Crates taught Zeno of Citium, who founded the Stoa. Nearly everything distinctive about early Stoicism - virtue as the only good, externals as indifferent, the wise person as a citizen of the world - arrives directly from the Cynics, with the public masturbation removed and a physics and a logic attached.

Which means that Marcus Aurelius, four seats along this table, writing privately to himself about indifference to fortune, is working in a tradition that begins with a homeless man shouting in a marketplace.

Diogenes syndrome, and why the name is wrong

In 1975 three clinicians, A. N. G. Clark, G. D. Mankikar and I. Gray, published a study in The Lancet of thirty elderly patients admitted to hospital in acute illness and found to be living in extreme squalor: filthy houses, accumulated refuse, no personal hygiene, and a consistent refusal of help. They called it Diogenes syndrome.

The name has been criticised almost since it was coined, and the criticism is straightforward.

Diogenes hoarded nothing. The single most repeated story about him, at Diogenes Laertius VI.37, is that he threw away his cup on seeing a child drink from cupped hands, and then threw away his bowl on seeing another eat lentils out of a hollowed crust of bread. A condition whose defining feature is the accumulation of rubbish has been named after a man whose defining feature was getting rid of things.

Diogenes chose the life. The patients in the study did not. Whatever is happening in severe self-neglect in old age, it is not a position held under argument and defended in public against the most powerful man in the world.

Diogenes was not withdrawn. Self-neglect of this kind is marked by isolation and refusal of contact. Diogenes lived in the busiest square in Athens and spoke to everyone who passed.

Clinicians have proposed severe domestic squalor as a replacement, and other names in circulation include senile squalor syndrome and social breakdown syndrome. The eponym persists anyway, partly because it is memorable and partly because the same collapse of meaning that turned cynic into a synonym for sneering had already turned Diogenes into a shorthand for a man living in filth, with the argument that put him there quietly discarded.

Where to read Diogenes

There is no book by him, so reading Diogenes means reading the people who reported him, in roughly this order.

Diogenes Laertius, Book VI, in R. D. Hicks’ Loeb translation of 1925, which is out of copyright and available in full online, or in Pamela Mensch’s 2018 Oxford version, which is better English. Sections 20 to 81 are the life, and the rest of the book covers the other Cynics. It takes an hour and is the source of nearly everything.

Plutarch, Life of Alexander 14, for the Corinth meeting in the form that made it famous.

Dio Chrysostom, Orations 4, 6, 8, 9 and 10, for the fullest ancient portrait, on the understanding that it is a portrait and not a record.

Lucian, for the Cynics as a live phenomenon in the second century CE, written by someone who found the good ones admirable and the bad ones ridiculous and could tell them apart.

Julian, Orations VI and VII, for the argument about who counts as a real Cynic, conducted by an emperor in 362 CE.

Of the modern books, William Desmond’s Cynics (2008) is the best short account of the movement, Donald Dudley’s A History of Cynicism (1937) remains the standard narrative and the origin of the scepticism about the succession, and the Branham and Goulet-Cazé collection The Cynics (1996) holds the essays that most working scholarship still argues with. For the afterlife of the word, Louisa Shea’s The Cynic Enlightenment (2010) and Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason (1983) are the two that matter.

The one thing worth carrying into all of it is the warning at the top of this page. Every text on that list is at least three centuries downstream of the man, most are much further, and each of them wanted Diogenes for something.

Why he is at this table

He is seat zero, at the far end of the left wing, and the position is right: he is the outer limit of what can be said at this table.

His function is to be the counsellor for whom nothing on the table is real. Every other seat here is invested in something - a state, a book, a doctrine, a body of work, a method, a God. Diogenes wrote nothing, built nothing, founded nothing he would admit to, and owned one cup until he saw a better way to drink. When the argument turns to what a person should do about their circumstances, he is the one who asks why the circumstances were accepted as the frame.

He is also, structurally, the table’s solvent. He does not build positions; he removes the ground under other people’s. Against Machiavelli he asks who the mask is protecting. Against Plato, whose lectures he heckled and whose Academy he disrupted by producing a plucked chicken when Plato defined man as a featherless biped, he asks what a Form has ever fed. Against Leonardo he asks what all the machines are for. Against the ascetic seats - Buddha, Jesus - he is uncomfortably close, and the closeness is more interesting than the distance: three men who gave up property and made a teaching out of it, one of whom did it without any promise attached at either end. Diogenes offers no enlightenment, no kingdom, no afterlife. He offers only the observation that a person who wants nothing cannot be governed.

What he is vulnerable to, and what the table puts to him, is the charge that the whole performance was parasitic. He ate food other people grew, in a city other people defended, and the freedom he demonstrated was underwritten by the conventions he mocked. A world of Diogeneses would starve in a season.

He has an answer, and it is not a rebuttal. He was never proposing a world. He was proposing one man, visible in the marketplace, as a permanent standing question to everyone who walked past him with somewhere to be.

And there is a second charge, particular to him, which the source problem creates and cannot resolve. The other seats can be checked against something they wrote. This one cannot. What sits at the end of the left wing is a figure assembled out of five hundred years of retelling by people who wanted him to say what they needed said, which makes him the least verifiable counsellor here and, by an accident that would have amused him, the purest example of his own thesis: a man who owned nothing, wrote nothing and left nothing, and is still in the room.