DIOGENES the Cynic remains a widely familiar figure, even if very little is remembered about him among people who have no special interest in the ancient world. He is popularly known for having lived in a barrel or tub and for his barbed utterances. But Diogenes was more than a picturesque eccentric, and it is only when such stories are considered in their wider context, as part of the very full surviving record of what Diogenes was supposed to have said and done, that it becomes apparent that he was trying to convey a serious message through his disconcerting behaviour and caustic wit.
Diogenes’ makeshift home was more accurately a very large ceramic jar, of a kind that was used for storing grain or water. Since he had deliberately chosen to live as a beggar in the streets of Athens, he had no house to return to, and would have taken shelter at night wherever he could, in doorways, temples, or public arcades. It need not be thought that he used a particular jar as his regular home, this is merely one form of shelter that was mentioned among others, even if it became especially memorable for its emblematic value. It is not in fact as highly stressed in ancient sources as one might suppose—more emphasis was placed on Diogenes’ Cynic uniform and accoutrements. To be prepared for any kind of weather, he would wear a rough cloak folded double, which would enable him to keep warm in winter and cool in summer; and since he owned no more than what he could lug around with him, he would carry a knapsack (pera) for his provisions and scanty possessions. Perhaps there was even room in it for a few books and for writing materials.
It was a commonplace of Socratic thought that one can be rich by being satisfied with little, and so achieve a measure of invulnerability to fortune. Diogenes radicalized this idea, taking it to the utmost extreme. If one takes into account only one’s most basic needs and desires, putting everything else aside as mere fancy and illusion, and is content to satisfy those needs in the simplest and most direct way possible, one needs hardly anything at all; and if one divests oneself of all that one possesses to live as a vagrant, one can anticipate the very worst and become inured to any hardship, and so achieve complete invulnerability to fortune. Dismissing almost everything that people value and pursue, not only luxury and pleasure but also civic and cultural endeavour, as being utterly worthless, one can achieve assured contentment, so Diogenes thought, by living like an animal in the streets, without any concern for the future. According to an anecdote recorded by a younger contemporary of his, he claimed to have drawn this lesson by observing the behaviour of a mouse (see 9a1).
Someone who lives in the open in this way has to do everything in public; Diogenes would eat such food as he could gain out in the streets, and the story even went that he would masturbate in public (for what easier way could there be to satisfy his sexual desires). The Cynic life was thus of necessity a shameful one, and far from playing that down, Diogenes deliberately behaved in a shocking manner to show his contempt for conventional social attitudes. This brings us to the meaning of the Cynic name, which was derived from a nickname bestowed on Diogenes because of the shameless manner of his life. He came to be called the Dog (Kuōn; Aristotle could refer to him by that name without need for further specification, see 189), and those who followed his example by choosing to live like dogs came to be known accordingly as Cynics (kunikos being the corresponding adjective). Diogenes is presented in anecdotes as having welcomed the name with glee, putting his own constructions on it to make points of his own.
The name could also be interpreted as referring to the way in which he accosted people to force his ideas on them, through cutting wit and acerbic humour. He yapped like a dog and had a biting tongue. In taking his philosophy into the streets, he adopted a very different procedure from that of Socrates, and instead of causing people to reflect on their moral assumptions by questioning them and engaging in reasoned discussion, he resorted to shock tactics both in the manner of his speech and in his behaviour. It does him no discredit to say that he put on a constant performance, playing his chosen role as dog and mad Socratic. His approach is summed up in two anecdotes in which he provokes a response by assuming a contrary path to the crowd. He walked into a theatre against the flow of the emerging crowd, and when asked why, said that he spent his entire life doing that; he walked backwards in a public arcade, and when people laughed at him, retorted that it was they who should be ashamed for taking the wrong direction in life.
To become a true individual and proper human being, so he thought, one must turn aside from conventional society and reject all its values, to live in accordance with nature, and nature at a very basic level; otherwise one will simply remain a member of the crowd. It is this thought that is expressed in what is perhaps his best-known anecdote. He lit a lamp in daylight and walked through the streets of Athens with it; and when asked why, replied that he was looking for a man. Since lighting a lamp in daylight was a proverbial expression for a futile exercise, this was a symbolic action which was designed to suggest that it is pointless to expect to be able to find a man in Athens. An honest man? A good one? No, the thought is more radical than that. The mass of people, who accept conventional social values, not knowing what human nature is and what it means to live in accordance with nature, are not really proper human beings at all, but anonymous members of the crowd, or slaves, or scum (to use the expressions that Diogenes applies to such people in anecdotes in Section IV).
A man who could suggest such a thing was not remotely cynical in the modern sense of the word, but in deadly earnest. He was convinced that people should utterly change their lives, just as he had done, if they were to fulfil their nature as human beings and so become fully human. The shift in meaning in the word ‘cynicism’ reflected the way in which Diogenes came to be perceived after he was rediscovered during the Renaissance, from translations of Diogenes Laertius and other writings. As he became a familiar figure in the wider culture, people seem to have been particularly struck by the biting tone of his humour, and thus to have interpreted his sallies as being purely negative in intent. ‘It cannot be helped that dogs bark and vomit their foul stomachs’, wrote William Harvey in the seventeenth century, ‘and that Cynics should be numbered among philosophers.’ If Cynicism could be seen in this way as the expression of a bilious and misanthropic spirit, it is understandable that the term should have come to describe the attitude of those who are disaffected with the world, and are thus determined always to put the worst construction on human motives. But one has to put such thoughts aside in approaching Diogenes; he attacked conventional attitudes because he wanted to restamp the currency, replacing false values with those which would (according to his conception) enable human beings to fulfil their true nature.
Diogenes was, then, a man who took everything to extremes, with regard not only to the arduous and (according to conventional standards) shameful manner of his life, but also to the provocative way in which he set out to advance his ideas. Plato is supposed to have remarked, when asked about Diogenes, that he was Socrates gone mad. If this saying points to the way in which he flouted normal rules of behaviour, it acknowledges at the same time that his ideas and mode of action represented an extreme development of certain Socratic ideas, and could be interpreted as meaningful in that light. He was perceived as being something more than a mere eccentric.
If the Cynic life was to be practicable, it was in fact necessary that its practitioners should be able to rely on the understanding and complicity of the public. For a paradox lay at the very heart of Diogenes’ enterprise. Although the Cynic may have claimed to achieve complete independence by reducing his needs to a minimum and living in the streets, it was nonetheless true that by dispossessing himself in such a way, he was depriving himself of all means of support in the environment in which he was living. Cynicism was an urban phenomenon. Its practitioners would not withdraw from human society, like some later Christian ascetics, to support themselves in the countryside or wilderness by their own labour. They had to rely instead on alms from people who valued them for providing a moral example or performing a beneficial service as moral preachers. Their activities had to be perceived accordingly as having some relevance to the moral lives of ordinary people, even if few would choose to adopt the Cynic life. According to the anecdotal tradition, Diogenes had no compunction about begging because he was confident that he was offering something far more valuable in return; he was thus said to have refused an invitation to a meal because the man who was offering the invitation had not been properly grateful to him on a previous occasion.
To appreciate how Diogenes fitted into the Socratic tradition, we must consider the chronology. He lived long enough into the fourth century for it to be plausible that he should have met Alexander as king. The two came to be associated in the apophthegmatic tradition as symbolic opposites, Alexander being a man possessed by such insatiable desires that he could barely find satisfaction in the conquest of much of the known world, while Diogenes could find contentment in what nature offered in any particular moment, a contrast expressed in the famous story in which he could find nothing else to ask of Alexander than that he should stand out of his sun. Although the notion that he died on the same day as Alexander, in June 323, was surely an idea inspired by this symbolic connection, he does seem to have died in that general period. If he was old in the 113th Olympiad, i.e. 328–325, as is reported, and lived to an advanced age, seventy or eighty in different accounts, he would have been born at or near the end of the fifth century, not long before the death of Socrates in 399. He might thus have been able to meet immediate followers of Socrates, even if not the master himself, and he died at the threshold of the Hellenistic age, during which Stoicism would become the dominant moral philosophy in the Socratic tradition. The dates to keep in mind, then, are 399, when Socrates died, and 301, when Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, began teaching his philosophy in the Stoa Poikile at Athens.
Cynicism and Stoicism were interrelated. Although Zeno studied with masters from a number of schools, having broader interests and greater speculative ambitions than could be satisfied by any Cynic, it was above all by becoming acquainted with Cynic ideas through Crates, the foremost follower of Diogenes, that he was inspired to develop the austere ethical doctrines that would be central to his system; and early Stoicism had a distinctly Cynic flavour, even if later Stoics generally sought to disown the more scandalous and anti-social features of Cynicism. Diogenes was highly regarded among the Stoics, not only as a predecessor but also as a link in the succession that led back to Socrates. As has been noted, he was separated from Socrates by a generation, just as he was from Zeno. If he arrived at Athens before he was much beyond the threshold of middle age, he could have learned about Socrates and his ideas from men who had known him. There are many anecdotes that show him jousting with Plato (died 349), but we have to look to a less familiar figure, Antisthenes, to find a friend of Socrates with whom he would have had some affinity. For it was Antisthenes who took the lead in developing the ascetic strain in Socratic thought; and it was he who, rightly or wrongly, came to be regarded as having been the master of Diogenes, so forming the first link in the chain that led from Socrates to the Stoics: Socrates–Antisthenes–Diogenes–Crates–Zeno.
The moral thought of Socrates is too subtle and elusive to be open to brief discussion. The essential point for present purposes is that he introduced a revolution in moral ideas by questioning traditionally accepted values, suggesting that our highest and essential good lies in the good of the soul, as our moral centre and best self, and that all external goods, such as bodily pleasure, health, and social reputation, are correspondingly of subordinate value. If Socrates truly believed in this way that our essential good is to be sought within rather than in externals, it might be expected that he would have set no store on luxury or appearances, and he was in fact famous for the simplicity of his way of life. He would walk around bare-footed and his shabby cloak was something of a joke. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia, a critic accuses him of living a life that no slave would put up with: ‘Your food and drink are of the cheapest sort, your cloak is only a wretched one, but you wear one and the same winter and summer, without ever donning shoes or a tunic…. You should consider yourself to be a professor of wretchedness.’ But one gains the impression that this was as much an expression of idiosyncrasy as a deliberately chosen course of action; Socrates seems to have been absent-minded with regard to matters which were of subordinate interest to him. It was Antisthenes who developed this asceticism into a deliberate programme, and made it central to his endeavour.
One can conveniently gain an impression of Antisthenes’ general outlook from a speech that is put into his mouth by his contemporary Xenophon (see 534). He declares that he prides himself on his wealth even though he does not have a penny in the world. For while many who own a fortune remain unsatisfied and desire ever more, someone like himself, who is satisfied with a bare sufficiency, and recognizes that true wealth lies in one’s soul, cannot discover the bounds of his riches. What is more, he can pass on the wealth of his soul to anyone who desires it, and finds his greatest pleasure in conversing at leisure with like-minded people. This accords with sayings in which Antisthenes praises frugality and self-control, and pours scorn on physical enjoyment (‘I’d rather be mad than feel pleasure’; see further under 533).
After becoming acquainted with such ideas from the Socratic tradition, Diogenes radicalized them in such a way as to transform their very nature. For someone like Antisthenes, poverty meant nothing more than being satisfied to live modestly on limited private means, while Diogenes thought that one should anticipate the very worst that fate can bring by plunging into a life of complete destitution. He came to believe, furthermore, that a positive value can be put on hardship, because it not only serves as a form of training which enables a person to rise above any suffering, but also makes it possible for him to find a positive pleasure in self-abnegation. ‘For in fact the very despising of pleasure is itself a very great source of pleasure provided that one has exercised oneself in that beforehand; and just as those who have become habituated to a life of pleasure find it most disagreeable to cross over to a contrary form of life, so those who have undertaken the opposite course of training find greater pleasure in scorning pleasure than in the pleasures themselves’ (from 105).
In the second place, Diogenes’ course entailed a complete rejection of ordinary civilized life. He had nothing but contempt for civic society and almost every aspect of Greek culture. To him literature, music, mathematics, science, and philosophical investigation and discussion were a distraction and a waste of time. By comparison to more conventional Socratics, he had an uncomplicated, naturalistic, and (one might say) diminished view of human nature. We have to put aside the illusions that are propagated within the social order, so he thought, to live a simple animal life, being contented to satisfy our basic needs in the simplest way possible. How far this takes us from the views of Antisthenes as presented in Xenophon’s discourse, as a man who wanted to suppress any excessive desires for external goods to be able to concentrate on his inner wealth, and so enjoy a cultivated life of leisure centring around discussion and shared pursuits with his friends. Diogenes was a great simplifier who lost sight of an entire dimension of human life by scorning it as a tissue of illusion.
While it is meaningful and illuminating to view the ideas of Diogenes in relation to those of Socrates and Antisthenes, it is far from certain that he was really a pupil of Antisthenes as the tradition suggested. In view of the importance that came to be attached to philosophical pedigrees, the idea of a formal pupil–master relationship could well have been a figment of Hellenistic authors who wrote about the philosophical successions. This is a matter which we must consider in relation to the biographical tradition.
Diogenes came from a city that was very much at the fringes of the Greek world, the Milesian colony of Sinope about half-way along the southern coast of the Black Sea. This was a prosperous merchant-city which lay at the end of a caravan route from the upper Euphrates valley, and traded in a wide variety of goods including salt-fish, timber for ship-building, and the ochre known as Sinopean red earth. We may assume that Diogenes was a fairly well-educated man who would not have been born into poverty, and tradition stated that he belonged to a family of some importance, as the son of a banker called Hicesias, who was responsible for the issuing and supervision of the Sinopean currency. As it happens the inscription ‘HIKESIO’ can be found on the Sinopean coins issued between about 360 and 320 BC; and although it is hardly likely that these marks refer to Diogenes’ father, since the coins date to the latter part of Diogenes’ own lifetime, they do serve to confirm the biographical tradition if it can be assumed that their issuer belonged to the same family, perhaps as a cousin or nephew of his.
If he really was born into such high circles in his home city, it is all the more surprising that he should have ended up in exile in Athens. Legend suggested that this came about precisely because his father occupied the position that he did, since it furnished a tempting opportunity for fraud. While supervising the mint on his father’s behalf, so the story went, Diogenes adulterated the coinage, or else Hicesias himself did, but the malpractice was discovered and he had to flee into exile, either on his own or along with his father. As confirmation of the truth of this story, it was pointed out that Diogenes himself had admitted to adulterating the currency in a book that was attributed to him. Whether or not the book was genuinely written by him, he really does seem to have spoken in such terms, but applying the words in a figurative rather than a literal sense; he was setting out to ‘restamp the currency’ by rejecting conventional values to embrace those more in accord with nature, at its most basic level. In all probability, the idea that he had been exiled for altering the currency arose because this metaphorical expression came to be interpreted in a literal sense.
It is true that numismatic evidence has been put forward in support of the historicity of the tale, but to provide independent corroboration it would have to be shown that the coinage had been altered with fraudulent intent. Although coins were apparently defaced in unusually high proportion in the 340s, the cancellations would have served the beneficial purpose of putting bad coinage out of circulation, and they could only account for the exile of Diogenes and discrediting of his father if enemies had exploited them as a pretext for unfounded accusations. Since this is a mere hypothesis which would never have been suggested if it had not been for the prior existence of the biographical legend, the argument is a circular one. It provides the sole basis for the common assumption than Diogenes did not arrive in Athens until he was over fifty (and well after the death of Antisthenes). The only other specific suggestion that can be offered is that his departure from Sinope was connected with a major upheaval in 370 or somewhat earlier, when the Persian satrap Datames seized control of the city. But it is quite possible that he initially travelled to Athens for reasons of his own, out of cultural curiosity or for commercial reasons.
If Diogenes’ exile was explained by the story of the coinage, his conversion to philosophy, and more specifically an ascetic way of life, was explained through an encounter with Antisthenes. There was doubtless an element of truth in this, in so far as he would have been inspired to set out on his peculiar path by becoming acquainted in Athens with the moral thought of Socrates, and especially the ascetic strain of it that was expounded above all by Antisthenes, both in person and in his writings; but whether he really became a pupil of Antisthenes in a formal and direct sense is more doubtful.
In late Hellenistic and later sources Antisthenes is sometimes imagined as initiating Diogenes directly into the Cynic life. Thus in an apocryphal letter of Diogenes (see 641), Antisthenes shows him the short cut to virtue (see below) and prepares him for that arduous path by fitting him out with the standard Cynic accoutrements, dressing him in a doubled cloak and hanging a knapsack around his shoulders. After Antisthenes came to be regarded by many as the founder of Cynicism as a result of the place assigned to him in the succession, some people did in fact come to believe that he himself had worn a rough cloak of that kind and perhaps even carried a knapsack (see under 533 and note); but what use would they have been to a married man who owned a house, however modest, in Athens? The notion that Antisthenes initiated Diogenes into specifically Cynic ideas and practices, and was thus the founder of Cynicism, can safely be discounted.
It is among the anecdotes that one can generally find the best evidence for the early legend of Diogenes. Remarkably enough there are only two in which he appears in the company of Antisthenes. One presents him as vainly suggesting suicide to an ailing Antisthenes, who is plainly regarded as being of relatively weak character, while the other purports to explain how he initially managed to become a pupil of Antisthenes. Antisthenes tried to drive him away at first, so we are told, because he was generally unwilling to accept pupils, but when Diogenes persisted and refused to be intimidated when threatened with a blow from his stick, he was so impressed that he relented and accepted him as a pupil (see 6). There is no reason to think that the historical Antisthenes was in any way surly or unsociable. Xenophon portrays him as an urbane character who is happy to engage in discussion with like-minded people; after having been generously endowed with spiritual wealth by Socrates he in his turn (so he is presented as saying, p. 121) is not mean or grudging with anyone, but passes on the wealth that he has in his soul to anyone who would like to share it. He is recorded as having had followers, furthermore, who were known as Antistheneians (not Cynics!). Our anecdote reflects a problem that arose when Antisthenes came to be regarded as the original founder of Cynicism. If that was the case, why did Diogenes stand at the head of the entire subsequent succession, as the only Cynic to be recorded from the generation after Antisthenes? It was surely this consideration that prompted the invention of a story in which Antisthenes is imagined as being so cantankerous (a familiar Cynic trait) that only Diogenes has sufficient strength of mind to force his way into his company. The anecdote itself is not even original but simply a reworking of a well-known story that was recounted about Themistocles, as explained in a note to 6.
The lack of tales connecting the two figures suggests that they were not associated in any special way when the anecdotal tradition first crystallized during Diogenes’ lifetime and shortly afterwards, especially as the main story was plainly of relatively late fabrication. How Diogenes first became acquainted with the currents of thought in Athens, and through what circumstances he came to devise and adopt the full Cynic way of life, are matters that are fated to remain a mystery to us. Biographical tales of another kind which portray him as learning from the example of animals or children probably do go back to the early tradition.
Our best single source for Diogenes, and indeed the only one to provide a comprehensive account of the early Cynics and Cyrenaics, is Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions of the Ancient Philosophers, dating from the third century ad. This is an uncritical compilation by an author whose intellectual resources were plainly limited; but in the case of sages like Diogenes and Aristippos, whose messages were conveyed mainly through records of their actions and sayings, his limitations became a virtue, since he liked nothing better than a good story or witty saying, and was happy to accumulate any number of them without alteration or elaboration.
It may be useful to examine how he constructed his account of Diogenes, because it will give an idea of the nature of the material from which we have to form our understanding of him, and of the relative richness and value of the different kinds of material.
Our author begins with a summary of his earlier life-history, which is our main source for the matter summarized above. Since such biographies tend to concentrate on the main turning-points that are relevant to a philosopher’s calling, one would not expect to find much about the accidents of his life, but this history of Diogenes is thin and schematic even by normal standards, covering only his exile and conversion. His life then assumed an unchanging pattern, and his activities are indicated through a multitude of apophthegms, which are set at no specific point in time and do not form part of the biography proper. At some stage in the latter part of his life, however, he was supposed to have been captured by pirates and sold into slavery, to serve in Corinth as a masterful slave; although this was almost certainly a fiction invented in the third century BC (see Section IX and notes), it was adopted into his biography to form the concluding part of it, along with the stories of his death, which was sometimes placed in Corinth. Rightly or wrongly, Corinth came to be regarded as having been something of a second home for him. He may not have spent his whole time in Athens in any case, and there are stories that show him as travelling abroad, especially to the games, where he could have found a large audience for his moral preaching.
In accordance with his usual practice, Diogenes Laertius passes without break from the beginning of this life-history to a collection of sayings and anecdotes. Although these are of course biographical in a sense, in so far as they show Diogenes living the life that he has chosen and trying to convince others of its virtues, the material belongs to a distinctive genre, that of the apophthegm, consisting either of pithy sayings or of brief anecdotes centred around such a saying, often delivered as repartee. The nature of this material will be considered further below. Our author had a special love for it, always trying to gather together a good selection for his philosophers, and one can sense the delight that he felt in having such a gold-mine to draw on in the case of Diogenes, for whom it was all-important. He recounts one short anecdote after another, page after page, piling them together higgledy-piggledy in no sort of order. And it is here that Diogenes comes to life, and the meaning of his message becomes apparent, rather than through teachings and arguments and a body of ideas, as with any ordinary philosopher.
Although primarily a biographer, Diogenes Laertius did also try to offer an account of the opinions and doctrines, doxai, of his philosophers in the form of a doxography. This was a more demanding task than cobbling together life-histories or collecting anecdotes, and the results were not always very satisfactory; but he could provide clear and useful summaries, as for the Cyrenaics. When it came to Diogenes and the Cynics, however, he plainly had real difficulty, and could come up with nothing better than a rag-bag of ill-assorted material, not so much as a result of his own incapacity as of the fact that Cynic teaching was not conveyed through abstract ideas. The centre of gravity lay elsewhere.
There are two Cynic doxographies to consider, one specifically Diogenean and the other relating to the teaching of the early school as a whole. We will cast an eye on the latter (96) because it raises some basic points about the nature of Cynicism, indicating at the start that there was dispute as to whether it was really a philosophy at all or just a way of life. If it was accepted as being a philosophy, it had to be acknowledged that the Cynics did not attempt to provide any thorough or elaborate theoretical foundation for their moral teachings. By contrast to the Stoics, they devoted no attention to ‘logic’ and ‘physics’, thinking it a waste of time to develop a theory of knowledge and discourse, or to try to establish the place of man in the order of nature and the world as a whole.
If they resembled Socrates in concentrating on the moral issues alone, the Cynics differed from him in thinking that it was equally a waste of time to engage in subtle and extensive moral investigation and discussion. Action of a very simple kind was what was demanded: to plunge into a life of deprivation and hardship. To live in accordance with virtue was the end and chief good for them as for the Stoics, but they had adopted their own special route to that end, which could be described as a short cut to virtue. This notion has an interesting background. Prodicos, a contemporary of Socrates, had devised a little allegory in which Heracles was made to choose between two paths in life, the easy one that leads to a life of pleasure and self-indulgence, or the difficult one that leads to virtue; the path to virtue may be hard at first, but nothing worthwhile can be achieved without toil and effort, and that is the sole route to true happiness. This idea and image, which was taken up by Antisthenes, was altered in the Cynic context, so that the choice now had to be made between an easier or harder route to the same destination, namely to virtue and the happiness that is grounded in it. In this form the image summarized very neatly how Cynicism came to be viewed, especially in relation to Stoicism, and became so familiar that authors writing for a general audience could refer to ‘the short cut’ without need for further explanation. If understood in such a way, Cynicism could be regarded as representing an alternative route to the same goal as the Stoics were aiming to reach, a strenuous and unintellectual route which might be appropriate for some and not for others.
We must now pass on to the all-important sayings and anecdotes. These belonged to a specific genre of literature, that of the apophthegm, which formed part of the wisdom literature along with proverbs, fables, and the like. Apophthegms depended on their brevity for their expressive power. They could consist just of a pithy saying, ‘the roots of education are bitter but their fruit is sweet’; the Greek term for this was a gnomē (hence our word ‘gnomic’). Or a saying could be presented as an answer to a question. ‘When asked how the educated differ from the uneducated, Aristotle replied, “As do the living from the dead.”’ Although the answer is put into the mouth of Aristotle, one senses at once that the thought originated as anonymous wisdom in the oral tradition, as in the case of the preceding saying, which was also ascribed to Aristotle. A question and answer could be simply a different way of presenting gnomic wisdom; indeed the response could already be fully implicit in the question (see e.g. 314). In many cases, however, the response would be set in a more definite context, within a brief anecdote; and this could help to bring out the idiosyncrasies of the speaker, or to set his character or outlook in contrast with the questioner who appears with him in the anecdote. The pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, for instance, devoted himself to the study of nature and the universe, and so gained a reputation for otherworldliness, as expressed in the following anecdote: ‘When someone asked, “Have you no concern for your native land?”, he replied, “Hush now, I have the very greatest concern for it”, pointing up to the sky.’
The basic unit of currency within this genre was, then, the gnomē or the apophthegm (in the narrow sense). Although many of these were enjoyed simply for their wit and lacked any serious content, they could also serve a useful purpose by expressing moral ideas in a pungent form and helping to propagate them. The word chreia, effectively meaning a ‘useful’ saying or anecdote, thus came to be employed as a collective term for them, especially in regard to their usefulness. First recorded in the title of a work by the early Cynic Metrocles (see 188), this usage may actually have originated within Cynic circles, and it reflects the value that was attached to the apophthegm as a mode of expression within that tradition. If the chreiai of Diogenes are sometimes regarded nowadays as being no more than a collection of funny stories, that was in no way the ancient view of the matter.
Originating for the most part in the oral tradition (although they could also make their first appearance in written works as variants or original inventions), such sayings and apophthegms came to be set down in writing in anthologies, which could either be general in scope or more specialized. In addition to sayings of philosophers and sages, those of a wide range of other people were also collected, as can be seen in Plutarch’s anthologies of the sayings of kings and commanders and of the laconic wit of the Spartans. These collections were partly designed to furnish immediate enjoyment or edification, and partly to provide a resource for those who might want to make use of chreiai in their own compositions, such as speeches or moral treatises. When putting apophthegms to use in such a context, authors would often present them in an elaborated form, as can be seen in examples from Aelian and Plutarch below (e.g. 70a and 236); but the core would remain unchanged, and nothing essential would be added in the process.
Even if Diogenes Laertius did not confine his attention to the chreiai of his philosophers, he devoted a section of his biographies to them, in so far as they were available. In doing so, he acted essentially as an anthologist, making no attempt to elaborate them or order them into a coherent narrative. On the whole they are of marginal interest for those who would wish to gain a better understanding of the character or thought of the philosopher in question. As can be seen from the examples cited for Aristotle above, the ascriptions tend to be arbitrary and the thoughts expressed tend to be too commonplace to reveal anything about the specific ideas of the supposed speaker. Anecdotes which are more personal in nature, like the one about Anaxagoras, are usually of interest primarily for what they reveal about later attitudes to the thinkers in question. To form a conception of their own ideas, one has to turn to what is recorded of their teachings and arguments. In the case of Diogenes, however, the situation is very different, because he himself set out to communicate his message through his wit and odd behaviour, rather than through a body of argument, and the stories that came to circulate about him in the oral tradition, whether true or happily invented, were creations or reflections of his own propaganda. Terse wit and repartee were his main medium of expression. His chreiai came to be collected in writing, moreover, at a very early period, especially in Cynic and Stoic circles, because people who attached value to his teaching were aware that these were his main legacy, and thus needed to be preserved if it was to be conveyed to future generations. Metrocles, the brother-in-law of Diogenes’ main follower Crates, compiled the first recorded collection of chreiai, which presumably concentrated on Cynic material with Diogenes to the fore.
From the more typical anecdotes and sayings, as collected in Sections III–VIII, one can form a remarkably clear and definite picture of the man, and of his way of life, and of the ideas on which it was founded. And since this picture almost certainly crystallized within a century of his own lifetime, by the time of the early Stoics, it is reasonable to assume that it does reflect, without undue distortion, the true nature of the historical Diogenes.
The chreiai preserved under his name are of varied nature and origin, however, and have to be approached with some discrimination. It is always a problem with apophthegms that all too many of them are only loosely attached to the person to whom they are attributed. Anonymous material from the oral tradition would be arbitrarily ascribed to well-known people, and material would be transferred from lesser-known people to more familiar ones; and a figure like Diogenes, as a special hero of the genre, acted like a magnet in this regard, attracting all kinds of foreign matter. Even if some of it may be sufficiently appropriate to be scarcely distinguishable from what was originally Diogenean, much is devoid of any Cynic character or is even positively unsuitable. Since he was noted for his wit, any number of jokes with no moral content at all, either of anonymous origin or properly connected with wags like the musician Stratonicos (see e.g. 346 and note), were put into his mouth; and as with other moralists, moral commonplaces of indefinite origin came to be ascribed to him, and even hoary proverbial wisdom of the kind associated with the Seven Sages. Although this material can be interesting or entertaining, and has to be taken into account if one is to understand how Diogenes came to be popularly regarded in antiquity, it has no proper connection with him or his teaching, and is liable to confuse our idea of him. All the more definitely foreign material has therefore been placed separately in Sections X and XI. That does not mean, of course, that all the other chreiai originally belonged to Diogenes, but they are at least appropriate and can be interpreted in a Cynic light.
A second point that needs to be stressed is that among the chreiai that are typically Diogenean, there are many that are surely fictional. 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. One can go further and say that most or all of the anecdotes that place Diogenes in confrontation with a named individual, whether a ruler, orator, or philosopher, would have been invented by others to convey an idea of the contrasting attitudes of the two figures. That does not mean that they cannot reveal anything worthwhile about Diogenes. We have to rely quite as much on anecdotes of this nature, which convey other people’s interpretation of him, as we do on those which could possibly have a historical basis.
As can be seen from the diagram on p. xxvii, the Cynic succession can be traced for only three generations, with the last named successor of Diogenes living no later than the end of the third century BC. Cynicism then disappeared from sight and was perhaps even extinct in the second and first centuries BC (except as a strain within Stoicism). It came back to life, however, in a most remarkable way by the first century AD, and the Cynic street-preacher would remain a familiar if not always welcome sight through much of the Roman Empire until the fifth century.
The Cynicism of Diogenes could all too easily have turned out to be a dead end. Not only did it demand exceptional fortitude and nerve to cast everything aside to live in destitution, but since the Cynic way of life was so closely associated with Diogenes, anyone who adopted it must have run the risk of appearing to be no more than a pale imitation of him. One such imitator was indeed known as Dog-collar. Diogenes was said to have remarked that even if people praised the Dog, none dared to accompany him on the hunt. Seven disciples are recorded by name, however, of whom Crates of Thebes was by far the most important. A man of gentler and more conciliatory character than Diogenes, he gave the creed a more human stamp and helped to ensure its survival. All the subsequent early Cynics who are named in the succession were either immediate followers of his or pupils of those followers; and most crucially, it was he who set Zeno on his Stoic path (see 463–6). Cynic ideals would then be transmitted as a strain within Stoicism, to be available for revival in their pure form. Of the Cynic followers of Crates, Hipparchia, who became his wife, was the most noteworthy.
Among the early Socratics, there is another founder of a school apart from Diogenes who is known to us primarily through sayings and anecdotes, namely Aristippos of Cyrene, and the second part of the book is devoted to him and his school. He belonged to an earlier generation than Diogenes, having been born in about 435, and was a friend and immediate associate of Socrates. His attitude to life could hardly have been more different from that of Diogenes and Antisthenes, since he regarded pleasure, in the form of immediate sensual gratification above all, as being our chief end, and so introduced a hedonistic strain into the Socratic tradition.
In his understanding of the end of human life and his basic conception of human nature, Antisthenes evidently followed Socrates quite closely, while Aristippos had ideas of his own. If Aristippos is to be counted as a Socratic nonetheless, the influence of the master is to be sought elsewhere, in his notion of the spirit in which one should seek for pleasure. He believed that one should not allow oneself to become enslaved by it or ever lose one’s self-control, but should, on the contrary, maintain a sort of ironic detachment, enjoying pleasure on the wing in so far as it is available, but not being distressed if it should cease to be available. It should then be possible to grasp such pleasure as one can without sacrificing one’s inner freedom, and to maintain one’s cheerfulness and poise in all circumstances. For an appreciation of his character and the art of life that he cultivated, we have to rely largely on the anecdotes. Whether or not they give a reliable impression of the historical figure, which is more doubtful than in the case of Diogenes, a personality of distinctive and memorable character is revealed in them, and one who has evoked contrasting responses. W. K. C. Guthrie remarks in distaste that the anecdotes ‘show that mixture of a kind of cockney wit with sheer boorish rudeness which also characterized Diogenes the Cynic’.2 Others are disarmed by his humour and raffish charm. When asked what philosopher was most to his taste, Demonax, a Cynic of the Roman period, replied, ‘I admire them all: Socrates I revere, Diogenes I admire, Aristippos I love.’
Although Aristippos spent much of his time abroad, notably at the court of Dionysios I of Syracuse, it seems likely that he finally returned to his native city of Cyrene in North Africa, where his Cyrenaic school would be mainly centred. In all probability he did not attempt to establish a theoretical basis for his ideas, and such doctrines as are recorded for the school, for instance those that relate pleasure to different kinds of movement, were formulated at a later period in any case. Aristippos transmitted his philosophy to his grandson of the same name through his daughter Arete (‘Virtue’), and it was apparently Aristippos ‘the Mother-taught’ who developed the standard doctrines of the school, while Hegesias and Anniceris, two Cyrenaics who belonged to another line (see the diagram on p. xxviii), formed somewhat different ideas. The basic ideas of all three are clearly summarized in doxographies compiled by Diogenes Laertius (see 619, 625, and 630 respectively). Hegesias is of interest for the way in which his hedonistic premises led him into the direst pessimism; concluding that a predominance of pleasure cannot generally be assured, he came to believe that suicide can often be the best option in life, and so came to be known as ‘the Death-persuader’. The Cyrenaics were sceptical in their epistemological outlook, arguing that sense-impressions provide no reliable information about anything that lies beyond our immediate sense-experience (see 621–4). Our survey of the school concludes with Theodoros the Atheist, who studied under Anniceris but was more eclectic in his views.
The book concludes with a selection from the apocryphal letters of the Cynics and of Aristippos, in Part 3. The Cynic letters cannot be dated with any certainty, but it is generally believed that most were written in around the first century BC or AD, or somewhat later in the case of those ascribed to Crates (which are of poorer quality than those of Diogenes, and are partly dependent on them). This was an unsophisticated form of literature, in which familiar stories and themes were dramatized without any attempt at originality. This mediocrity of ambition is an advantage for present purposes, since the letters remain true to the early tradition, and do not present an amended or idealized image of Diogenes as is the case with authors like Epictetus or Dio Chrysostom. The letters addressed to Hipparchia, which combine to build up a narrative, provide a welcome supplement to the little that is recorded about her elsewhere; but the picture of her life that emerges from them should not be regarded as being in any way authentic.
The correspondence of Aristippos from 667 onward is drawn from another collection, the Letters of Socrates and the Socratics; it probably dates to the third century BC or thereabouts. In 667 he expresses his final wishes to his daughter Arete, while the following group presents him as crossing swords with sages who belonged to the ascetic wing of the Socratic movement. Although he generally gains the advantage over his opponents, with the help of liberal doses of irony and sarcasm, the author of the letters was probably more interested in the portrayal of character than in the relative value of the moral ideas of the two parties.
The selection of material included in the following translations begins with Lucian’s humorous portraits of Diogenes and Aristippos. That of Diogenes remains quite faithful to the tradition, even if the matter is presented in an exaggerated and satirical form; but that of Aristippos has to be taken with a heavy dose of salt—he may have thought that our happiness is to be found in pleasure but he was not a dissolute drunkard.
The chreiai and biographical matter collected in Sections II and III describe how Diogenes came to adopt his distinctive way of life, and show the basic nature of his everyday life, while the anecdotes and sayings in IV indicate the various ways in which he presented himself, as a true man as opposed to a member of the crowd, as a true victor who had gained mastery over himself, as a contrarian, and of course as a dog. The attitude that he assumed toward philosophy and culture is indicated in the testimonies and anecdotes in Section V. Sections VI to VIII are devoted to what might be described as his campaigns, against self-indulgence, illusion, and false values. The remaining biographical material, relating to the legend of his enslavement and to his old age and death, is collected in Sections IX and XII respectively, while sayings and anecdotes which have no proper Cynic content, and cannot be regarded for the most part as having been originally connected with Diogenes, have been segregated into Sections X and XI. Reports about the writings ascribed to Diogenes can be found in the latter part of Section VII.
Sections XIII to XV are devoted to the other early Cynics. By way of a postscript, most of the anecdotes and sayings of Bion of Borysthenes (c.325–250) have been translated in Section XVI. Although Bion studied under masters from a variety of schools and did not adopt the Cynic way of life, except perhaps temporarily, the ideas expressed in his chreiai have a distinctly Cynic flavour, as does his mode of expression. Passing backwards in time, part of Diogenes Laertius’ account of Antisthenes is translated in Section XVII, along with the discourse from Xenophon mentioned above, to give some idea of his moral outlook for comparison with that of Diogenes.
Sections XVIII to XX cover Aristippos and other Cyrenaics, including Hegesias and Theodoros, with a selection from the apocryphal letters of Diogenes, Crates, and Aristippos in Sections XXI–XXII.