The Philosopher Who Laughed in the Face of Kings

Dive into the wild life of Diogenes, the philosopher who wasn’t afraid to challenge norms or even Alexander the Great. In today’s episode, discover how his bold actions and sharp wit left an enduring legacy and why historians still debate his famous sunbathing encounter with the young conqueror. Pick up a copy of Inger Kuin’s new book Diogenes: The Rebellious Life and Revolutionary Philosophy of the Original Cynic https://www.amazon.com/Diogenes-Rebellious-Revolutionary-Philosophy-Original/dp/1541606477. Thanks to Basic Books for allowing us to run this audio excerpt. 🎟️ Come seeRyan Holiday LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/: https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ Seattle, WA - December 3, 2025 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/daily-stoic-live-onstage-with-ryan-holiday-tickets-1830976292379?aff=oddtdtcreatorSan Diego, CA - February 5, 2026 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/daily-stoic-live-onstage-with-ryan-holiday-tickets-1527497619499?aff=oddtdtcreatorPhoenix, AZ - February 27, 2026 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/daily-stoic-live-onstage-with-ryan-holiday-tickets-1830981698549?aff=oddtdtcreator 📚 If you’re interested in learning more about Diogenes and Cynicism, check out these books: The Cynic Philosophers: From Diogenes to Julian https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/the-cynic-philosophers-from-diogenes-to-julian-penguin-classics?_pos=1&_sid=333ffa06d&_ss=r How to Say No: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Cynicism https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/how-to-say-no-an-ancient-guide-to-the-art-of-cynicism?_pos=2&_sid=333ffa06d&_ss=r 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast onInstagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en:https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store:https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

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

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Here on Sundays, we like to mix it up. We run different things. Last week, during the week, you probably heard my interview with Professor Inger Kuin, who is an expert and biographer of Diogenes the Cynic, one of the most interesting rebellious, I would say, punk rock of all of the ancient philosophers. Stoicism would not exist without the cynics. Just like the Stoics, that word having some negative connotations to people, the cynics struggled with that too, which is a shame because Diogenes, as I said, was a badass and has a lot to teach us. And certainly, the cynics were greatly influential to the Stoics.

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  Crates, Zeno's philosophy teacher, was a cynic, and so was his wife. So I wanted to bring you some more on Diogenes. So I asked Professor Kuhn and her publisher if they would let us run a little excerpt about Diogenes. And this is a chunk called "In Search of a Human Being." Thanks to Basic Books for letting us run this. And Diogenes is just someone you need to know. He's just a fascinating, controversial, provocative figure. That's kind of what he is. He's a philosopher slash provocateur. You don't have to agree with everything he says, but he makes you think. He challenges your assumptions, and I think you will really like.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  This, as I said in my intro to the interview with Inger, she's a researcher, writer and teacher focused on the intellectual history of ancient Greece and Rome. She's professor of classics at the University of Virginia. She publishes in both English and Dutch. And her new book, Diogenes, The Rebellious Life and Revolutionary Philosophy of the Original Cynic, is available in physical and, as you'll hear today, as a wonderful ebook. So grab that wherever you get your books and be cynical in the Diogenes sense of the word and report back. Talk soon.

• 2:48Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. I'm doing a bunch of live dates, including one coming up soon. I'm going to be in Seattle, Washington on December 3rd, San Diego, California on February 5th, and Phoenix, Arizona on February 27th. The talk I just did in Austin sold out, so this will almost certainly sell out too. I would love to see you there. Go grab tickets at DailyStoicLive.com.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Diogenes lived his philosophy, and to understand his ideas, we must start by learning about his life. That this is not a straightforward matter has already been illustrated by the fact that the most famous event of his life, his meeting with Alexander, is strongly disputed, with most historians arguing that it never happened. This raises the question of how we know what we know about Diogenes in the first place? Where do the reports about him come from? How have they been passed down and preserved? And what kind of information do we have? To answer these questions, we will begin by tracing the earliest scattered references to Diogenes,

• 3:54Speaker 01

  starting with his lifetime, and consider how they relate to the much more abundant reports about him from the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. We will then zoom in specifically on the chain of information that preserved Diogenes' encounter with Alexander for the historical record, before placing this particular event on the timeline of Diogenes' life.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Diogenes' philosophy consisted of intentionally spectacular deeds and equally memorable quips. The followers who attended him remembered these deeds and sayings and made every effort to pass them down, both orally and in written form. In Diogenes' lifetime and for many centuries afterward, all sorts of information—reports about battles, family histories, love poetry, jokes, and so on and so forth—was shared and transmitted both ways: orally through recitation, storytelling, and performance, as well as through writing and copying texts. Generations of scholars have taken it for granted that what little information we have

• 5:00Speaker 01

  about Diogenes is not to be trusted. But once they understand that Diogenes did and said surprising things on purpose, that these things would have been memorable precisely because they were surprising, and that both followers and foes passed them on through rich and diverse strategies of information transfer, it follows that we can know much more about Diogenes than modern historians have allowed for. As a non-writer, Diogenes is in good company. The Athenian philosopher Socrates, who was two generations older than Diogenes, famously did not produce any works either. But—and this is not true for Diogenes—we can read extensively about Socrates in surviving

• 5:45Speaker 01

  works by men who knew him: the historian Xenophon, the comedy writer Aristophanes, and Socrates' influential disciple Plato. As we read, however, we must always bear in mind that what Plato writes is not necessarily an accurate representation of Socrates' ideas. It is primarily a representation of Plato's thinking about Socrates. Still, the availability of several early and extensive accounts undeniably puts us on surer footing with Socrates than with Diogenes. Tracing and reconstructing his thinking is a difficult and sometimes frustrating task.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  In using reports about him, we must always be mindful of what has been forgotten, exaggerated, or distorted. But abandoning this effort and dismissing all the ancient quotes and anecdotes as fictions is as good as writing Diogenes out of the history of philosophy, foregoing his still urgent exhortation to a good, self-directed life according to reason and with, not in spite of, our bodies.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Spartan Cafeterias The earliest reference to Diogenes, as brief as it is, comes from the work of a contemporary. The multi-talented philosopher Aristotle was born about twenty-five years after Diogenes. Aristotle does not exactly mention him by name, but the epithet he uses was so closely associated with Diogenes that we can assume it refers to him. In a discussion of metaphors in his rhetoric, Aristotle says that the sculptor Cephalosodotis calls Tryrems decorated windmills, and that the dog describes the taverns of Attica as "Spartan Cafeterias."

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Diogenes reportedly received the nickname "The Dog" from Plato, and it stuck. We will return later to how this happened. Attica is the peninsula where Athens is located, and Diogenes' quip was probably intended to make fun of the overly luxurious stylings of the Athenians and to praise the frugality of the Spartans, which aligned with his own austere way of life. Diogenes liked using humorous and confusing paradoxes, and the comment fits well into that pattern. It is uncertain whether Aristotle and Diogenes knew each other personally, but they did move in similar circles.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Aristotle was the teacher of young Alexander and a student of Plato, with whom Diogenes butted heads several times. Aristotle's successor as head of his philosophical school, Theophrastus, reportedly compiled a collection of anecdotes about Diogenes. Unfortunately, it does not survive in its original form, but later authors frequently refer to it. The second oldest source about Diogenes is an anonymous work preserved on a papyrus that dates from the mid third century BCE, less than seventy years after Diogenes' death. This means that the person who compiled the several anecdotes and conversations that

• 8:55Speaker 01

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

• 9:39Speaker 01

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

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Because Diogenes expressed much of his thought through witty quips, in tracing his ideas, we also have to develop a sensibility for his style of humor and for the social dynamics of joking. Just as during his meeting with Alexander, Diogenes was not at all impressed by the authorities and their threats of punishment. The witticism itself, at the moment when the guards asked their question, he was obviously going nowhere, fits well with one of Diogenes' core precepts.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  To live in the here and now. Because this text was written so soon after his lifetime, and most likely by someone close to Diogenes, we have good reasons to trust it. It also allows us to be a bit more confident about later accounts that paint a similar picture of Diogenes: a traveler and a stranger wherever he went, but never at a loss for words. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, Diogenes did not himself found a philosophical school, but he had his followers, who came to be considered a distinct philosophical movement in their own right. They were called kounikos in Greek, derived from the Greek word for dog, koun, genitive

• 11:38Speaker 01

  kounos. In Latin, this was spelled kounikos, which in English became cynic. Telleus of Megara lived in the mid-third century BCE, was a contemporary of Metrakles, and like him, followed the teachings of Diogenes. He also wrote several texts on cynic philosophers. Excerpts of these have been preserved by the scholar Stobias, who produced a voluminous anthology of ancient Greek authors in the fifth century CE with a special emphasis on philosophy. Telleus devotes a handful of passages to Diogenes. In the longest of them, Diogenes meets with someone who complains that Athens has become an expensive city.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  They visit several shops together and ask the prices of perfume, meat, and a sheepskin. Each time Diogenes agrees with the complainer, the city is indeed expensive. Then they go to the stalls for lupini beans and dried figs, where the prices are much lower. Now Diogenes exclaims how cheap the city is. He was trying to show that Athens was expensive for those who lived an expensive life, but cheap for those who did not, Telleus explains. The message: Life is far easier if you practice living well on beans and figs like Diogenes than if you accustom yourself to luxuries.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  This narrative, like the previous two, can be taken as fairly reliably grounded in fact, since Telleus compiled it around the same time when the papyrus was written. In addition to cynicism, two other major philosophical movements emerged in the third century BCE: Epicureanism, named after its founder Epicurus, and Stoicism, named after the Sto apoikyle in Athens where it was first taught. The differences between these movements and the influence of Diogenes on both of them will be of interest later on. For now, as we track the posthumous reports about Diogenes through the centuries, we

• 13:44Speaker 01

  turn to the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus from Gadara in modern-day Jordan. He lived at the beginning of the first century BCE, and after Tellies is the next author to discuss Diogenes in his polemical treatise on the Stoics. Philodemus's works have been preserved only on charred papyrus scrolls found in a villa at Herculaneum, which together with Pompeii was burned under lava from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. The text consequently is severely damaged and fragmentary. As he discusses Diogenes's ideas on politics, Philodemus challenges the notion that Diogenes wrote nothing during his lifetime.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  He defends the view that Diogenes, just like Plato, wrote a political philosophical work titled "Republic," politia in Greek, which also means "constitution." We can assume that the ideas Philodemus attributes to Diogenes's "Republic" derive from texts written by Diogenes's followers about his thinking, though the summary of Diogenes's "Republic" that Philodemus offers reads as rather polemic and extreme. Philodemus mentions the following views and proposals: "Weapons are useless; bones should serve as money instead of coins; there is nothing wrong with cannibalism; and there should be complete sexual freedom, including incest and sharing spouses."

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Some of these he also attributes to Zeno, disciple of Crates and the founder of Stoicism. In his text, he attempts to discredit the Stoics by linking them to cynicism, and we might wonder if he sacrifices accuracy in the interest of scoring points against his intellectual opponents. Nonetheless, we will see that all of these proposals are ultimately rooted in Diogenes' thought. Philodemus seems to have chosen some genuine ideas of Diogenes, for instance, his rejection of the institution of marriage, and exaggerated them to create a scandalizing caricature.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  The last of the early written sources about Diogenes is by the Roman orator and philosopher Cicero in the first century BCE. He is actually the one to give us the earliest preserved account of the meeting of Alexander and Diogenes. It is remarkably succinct. Diogenes really answered Alexander in a rather brash manner when the latter asked him if he needed anything: "Step aside, out of my sun." He had clearly disturbed Diogenes' sunbathing. Cicero places Diogenes' reply to Alexander in the context of exemplary asceticism. "The sage needs no material goods to be happy, since only virtue matters." Cicero uses so few words to describe the event

• 16:38Speaker 01

  that his readers must already have been familiar with it from other sources that have since been lost. From the first century CE onward, many extensive texts on Diogenes have survived complete and intact. Some of these are explicitly fictional. They concern Diogenes only in the sense that he is a character in the work. Other texts are polemical, like Philodemus' work, which means that Diogenes' ideas may be presented tendentiously. Both types of texts are useful for understanding the influence of and reactions to Diogenes over the centuries, but only rarely can we use them as sources for statements and anecdotes

• 17:21Speaker 01

  that may actually derive from the historical Diogenes. If we do so, we should proceed with great caution. In general, it is better to rely on other kinds of sources. Diogenes occasionally pops up in historical writing. These fortuitous glimpses of him are promising for reconstructing some parts of his life. An even more valuable resource is the so-called genre of doxography in this period, collections of philosophical views and statements of others. Diogenes features in the collections of several doxographical authors, but most importantly in the work of Diogenes Laertius.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  That the two men share a name is a coincidence, albeit a somewhat confusing one. In his work, Lives of the Philosophers, written in Greek in the 3rd century CE, Diogenes Laertius describes more than eighty thinkers. These lives are not conventional biographies, but rather compilations of sayings and events in roughly chronological order. The biography of Diogenes is one of the longer lives in the collection. The author draws from the work of numerous predecessors, many of whom he mentions by name, going as far back as Theophrastus, Aristotle's successor and Diogenes contemporary.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  In addition to relying on older sources, Diogenes Laertius selects and reports information largely without any apparent bias. Together with the earlier texts already mentioned, his biography is our best introduction to Diogenes' thought. Even if he does partake of some sensationalism on occasion, in using his texts, some caution is required too. An important virtue of his is the tendency to include alternative versions on genuine points of contention. For example, he gives a list of philosophical works and tragedies that Diogenes is said to have published, but also writes that the philosopher never wrote anything at all according to two of his sources.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Similarly, we find several conflicting accounts of Diogenes' death in Diogenes Laertius. And he writes about the time Diogenes got a visit from Alexander.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Did Diogenes meet Alexander?

• 19:47Speaker 01

  So, why are scholars so reluctant to believe Cicero, Diogenes, Laertius, and others, when they tell us of the meeting of Diogenes and Alexander? It is hardly likely, for instance, that Diogenes would ever have met Alexander, or that the king would have been either interested in him or impressed by him. This is the translator and author Robin Hard, who, in a recent publication, uses the story of the meeting to support his assessment that many of the anecdotes about Diogenes are surely fictional. His reasoning shows how much the reputation of Diogenes as a crazy philosopher has shaped the interpretation of the material.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  But we can throw the question right back: why would Alexander not have wanted to meet Diogenes? His own private teacher was the philosopher Aristotle, who, as we have seen, certainly knew of Diogenes, and perhaps even knew him directly. And we will see that there are still other connections between the young king and the old philosopher.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  A more serious challenge to the historicity of the episode has to do with the chronology of the respective lives of the two men. At the end of the 17th century, the Frenchman Pierre Béle turned his back on the Catholic Church and his home country and traveled via Switzerland to the Netherlands. He settled in Rotterdam, and in 1697 went on to publish his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, a hefty encyclopedia of intellectuals of the past and their ideas. In this work, Béle subjects the received narratives about the likes of Diogenes to a critical analysis. Up to this point, people had generally accepted the received narratives about such historical

• 21:47Speaker 01

  characters without asking many questions. By starting to do precisely this, Béle was ahead of his time. A large portion of Baal's lema about Diogenes deals with his relation with Alexander. He writes, "We cannot help but find greatness in the ways of Diogenes if we imagine that they have some sense to them, since Alexander, who certainly was able to judge such a thing well, found greatness in him, and there must have been some." Unlike Hard, Baal assumes that the two men met and that Alexander was impressed by Diogenes. In his extensive footnotes, however, he demolishes some of the main source texts that up to

• 22:31Speaker 01

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

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Diogenes trampled Alexander's wealth by rejecting it. Baal objects to Seneca's version of the episode, which he wrote around the middle of the first century CE, because of its problematic chronology. Diogenes and Alexander would have met before the Macedonian conquests in Asia, because afterward, Alexander never set foot in Greece again. So at the time of his conversation with Diogenes, Alexander did not yet rule the whole world, nor was he worshipped as a god, pride beyond human measure, not yet. Diogenes Laertius writes Baal, commits a similar error when he has Alexander introduce himself

• 23:57Speaker 01

  to Diogenes as "the great king." Alexander acquired that title only after his conquests.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  For Bell, doubts about the accuracy of the source texts for the interactions between Diogenes and Alexander could go hand in hand with full confidence regarding the historicity of the meeting itself. He even justified Diogenes' worth as a philosopher by means of Alexander's opinion, as in his eyes, the Macedonian king was unassailable. But Bell's misgivings about the source texts would take on a life of their own centuries later. At the start of the 20th century, the standard encyclopedia on classical antiquity, the German work Paule's Real Encyclopedia der Klassischen Althutumwissenschaft, references the clumsy

• 24:47Speaker 01

  anachronism as demonstrated by Bell of the story of the meeting of Alexander and Diogenes. It goes on to conclude, "It is probably best to leave open whether the encounter has any basis in history or not." A few decades later, an article that would influence scholars for decades to come, claims that "the narratives of the meeting have been blown to pieces too often to notice," without citing Bell, or in fact, anyone else. If Seneca and Diogenes Laertius were our only ancient sources for Diogenes' meeting with Alexander, with both of them dating it to a moment when the two men could not have been

• 25:28Speaker 01

  in the same place, it would be difficult to maintain its historicity. But this is not at all the case. In Cicero's version, which is about a century older than Seneca's, Alexander does not use any honorific titles during the meeting. Cicero goes on to narrate in the same passage how Diogenes "used to argue that while he had no needs, nothing would ever be enough for the king," in order to show how far superior he was to the king of Persia in life and fortune. Here, Diogenes does describe Alexander as having defeated the Persians already, but this is at a later point in time, long after their encounter.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  In addition to Diogenes Laertius, there are other Greek authors who report on their conversation, and it is in their works that we find clues as to who recorded the event in the first place. Plutarch was a historian and philosopher who lived in the second half of the first century and the early part of the second century CE. He wrote a biography of Alexander in Greek. A generation later, another historian named Arian did the same. Both authors described the young king's meeting with Diogenes, placing it at Corinth before his campaigns in Persia and beyond. Both authors also repeatedly reference a much earlier author by the name of Onisecritus.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  This Onisecritus was a follower of Diogenes, served in Alexander's army as chief helmsman, and wrote a work titled "On the Education of Alexander." Several long fragments of this piece have been preserved, and these indicate that the work also covered Alexander's campaigns. It seems unavoidable that Onisecritus described the meeting between Alexander and Diogenes, and that Plutarch and Arian based their accounts on his, even if this part of the work does not remain today. Alexander shared two connections with Diogenes: Aristotle and Onisecritus, and had an interest in philosophy. So he had a clear motive in wanting to meet him.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  He also had the opportunity. The two men were in the same place at the same time. Since Diogenes had arrived in Corinth around the middle of the fourth century BCE and stayed there for a long time, proof of the meeting was provided by Onisecritus himself in his account of Alexander's young life. And this is how a report of this remarkable event entered the historographical tradition. Some scholars accept that Onisecritus indeed wrote about the meeting of Alexander and Diogenes, and that he was the source later authors used, but still consider a literary origin more plausible because the contrast between these two diametrically opposed but

• 28:19Speaker 01

  paradoxically parallel personalities would have been so appealing to explore. In other words, the story of their meeting is so good that Onisecritus must have made it up. This seems like an example where the shock value of Diogenes' way of life—did he really meet Alexander and tell him to get out of his son—works against him and prevents him from taking up his rightful place in history. We have every reason to be apprehensive about what we can really know about someone who lived and died more than two millennia ago. But sometimes such skepticism goes too far. In reconstructing Diogenes' life, we always have to ask, how we know what we think we

• 29:03Speaker 01

  know, and whether the source, or a string of sources, is good enough? In the case of the philosopher's meeting with the king, we can answer this question affirmatively: So yes, the two did meet. And keeping this strategy close to hand, we are now ready to see how Diogenes became Diogenes.

• 29:24Speaker 01

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

• 30:09Speaker 01

  is much better represented than ordinary people. The wealthy could build temples and have their names inscribed on them. Someone who ran a small workshop hung up a wooden sign. When it comes to durability, the inscription in stone wins practically every time. Diogenes was born in Sinope, a prosperous, independent city-state on the Black Sea that served as a hub for international trade. Today, Sinope is called Sinope, and it is located in what we now know as northern Turkey. Diogenes Laertius offers us two clues about Diogenes' birth date: He was ninety years

• 30:49Speaker 01

  old when he died, and he died in the same year as the Macedonian king Alexander. Since Alexander died in 323 BCE, this gives us 413 BCE as the year of Diogenes' birth.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  The Suda, a voluminous encyclopedia in ancient Greek compiled in the tenth century CE, seems to differ on this point. It says Diogenes was born in 404 BCE, and it attributes various tragedies to him. These are also mentioned by Diogenes Laertius, though he does not commit himself to Diogenes authorship. This poses a problem for the chronology of Diogenes' later life. It would mean that he could have overlapped only barely with some older philosophers in Athens whom he did meet, according to most sources. The Suda also calls Diogenes an Athenian, so we must conclude that the notice is about

• 31:47Speaker 01

  someone else, and that "he" wrote those tragedies and not Diogenes of Sinope. Going back to the age that Diogenes Laertius gives for him, we should note that the neat round number ninety is somewhat suspect. We know from ages listed on tombstones that people commonly rounded these up or down in antiquity, simply because they did not know exactly how old they were. It is therefore safest to say that Diogenes was born sometime between 413 and 408 BCE, in other words, around 410 BCE. Diogenes' hometown, Sinope, was founded in the seventh century BCE.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  According to the historian Herodotus, its founders were Chimerians, a nomadic people believed to have come from present-day Iran, though other historians credit people from Thessaly in Greece, and assumed that Sinope was only later taken over by Chimerians, and later still by settlers from Miletus. Archaeological remains indicate some presence of Melians in Sinope as early as the seventh or sixth century BCE. Located in what is now western Turkey but was then known as Ionia, Miletus dated back to at least the Bronze Age, and Melians spoke the Ionian dialect of ancient Greek that Herodotus also used.

• 33:13Speaker 01

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

• 33:54Speaker 01

  men to help the Sinopians overthrow their ruler Timosilius in 436 BCE. But how welcome this intervention was, we do not know. Afterward, 600 Athenians remained in Sinope and settled in the homes of the expelled supporters of the old government. In early September 400 BCE, when Diogenes would have been about 10 years old, a motley army of around 10,000 mercenaries under the command of an Athenian general named Xenophon, passed through Sinope. The troops were on their way back from their attempt to help the brother of the Persian king overthrow his sibling and take the throne for himself.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  The pretender to the throne had been killed in his first major battle, and now the mercenaries faced the difficult task of getting themselves safely back to the Ionian coast after their failed mission. We have a detailed account of the march, because the general Xenophon was also a historian and recorded their experiences in the famous work Anabasis, literally "March Up Country", sometimes also called "March of the 10,000". Xenophon's report on his encounter with ambassadors from Sinope gives us a brief glimpse of what life was like there during Diogenes' youth. Xenophon's men are met by the ambassadors when they are encamped at the nearby town

• 35:19Speaker 01

  of Kotiora, which was one of the three colonies of Sinope. Their spokesman is named Hecatonomus, and he implores the soldiers to stop pillaging the town. In his speech, he appeals to their shared Greek-ness. "Because of their Milesian roots, the Sinopians are Greeks like Xenophon himself, and the soldiers should treat them and the Kotiorites well. But if they will not," Hecatonomus immediately launches into a threat, "the Sinopians will call in the Paphlagonians and make an alliance with them against Xenophon's army." Xenophon responds that he does not care one bit whether or not the cities and communities

• 36:01Speaker 01

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

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

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  together with an army of men who hailed from all over the ancient Mediterranean. By choosing allies on an ad hoc basis, Sinope managed to hold on to its independence in the following decades. But around the year 370 BCE, the Persian general Datamis took control of the city after several sieges. This remained the status quo until the start of the campaigns of Alexander. In a relatively recent biography, Diogenes has been called "purely Greek" with respect to his language and heritage, because he came from the same Milesian stock from which philosophers like Phaeles, Anaximander, and Anaximenes did, referencing three famous thinkers

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  from the city of Miletus. But being a philosopher did not necessarily make Diogenes Milesian or Greek, let alone purely so. To call Diogenes Greek is an oversimplification that fails to do justice to his background and experiences. Although he spent much of his time in prominent Greek cities like Athens and Corinth, he always remained an outsider there, without civic rights in those places. As Xenophon's account shows so clearly, Diogenes's birthplace was in the middle of "the barbarian territory of the Phafligonians," on the fault line between the Greek and Persian spheres of influence, and we can only guess at the precise origins and ethnicity of Diogenes's family.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Moreover, as this book will document, Diogenes was influenced by philosophical traditions flowing into Sinope from several directions, west and east.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Diogenes' father was named Icassius, and his mother's name, as we already said, is lost to us. She is not mentioned at all in Diogenes' Laertius biography, though there is one statement attributed to Diogenes in which his mother appears that has been handed down in a Byzantine collection of quotations. Upon finding out that someone had written something negative about her, Diogenes said that "one tear from his mother could erase all allegations." The precise meaning is hard to grasp out of context, but it suggests, if indeed he said this, that he felt the need to defend his mother and was unimpressed by the allegations against her.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Icassius was a banker, and in that capacity responsible for the coinage in Sinope. Given the likelihood that Diogenes received some form of education as a young man, it seems that he came from a fairly well-to-do family. The name Diogenes means "son of Zeus" in Greek. "Dio" is the genitive of the name Zeus, and "genies" is derived from the verb meaning "to be born," "gignomai." "Son of Zeus" seems like an impressive name, but it was quite common, and in the reported sayings, Diogenes never discusses it. Laertius biography does quote a short poem by one Kerkidos, who explains the etymology

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  of the name and writes that "Diogenes was rightly called 'son of Zeus and heavenly dog' because of his fortitude." The poet wrote this in the third century BCE. The title "Heavenly Dog" for Diogenes stuck and would still be in use in cynic literature of the first centuries CE. Counterfeiter or revolutionary?

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Of Diogenes' youth, we know little. The major events of his time in Sinope are his possible involvement in defacing the currency, and shortly thereafter, his banishment from the city. In Greek, his father's job is called "tropezites," which basically means "someone with a table." Originally, the main task of tropezite was to exchange money and test the authenticity of coins. In the course of the fourth century BCE, they also began to take on the management of accounts and lines of credit. Tropezite usually did their work outdoors, setting up their tables in the busy marketplace. It makes sense that Icchessius would have been commissioned to oversee the mint in

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Sinope because of his expertise as a banker. Diogenes' leisius gives two alternative scenarios for exactly what happened in Sinope. Either Icchessius tampered with the coinage, and both he and his son Diogenes were exiled from the city as a consequence, or Diogenes was responsible for the disruption, and this led to exile for both father and son.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  When we think of counterfeiting in a modern context, we generally think of the production of false money. But the Greek term consistently used for what occurred at Sinope under Icchessius' watch has a broader meaning. "Parakaraso" can refer both to minting false coins with a fake stamp, and to damaging coins already in circulation as an act of vandalism, or to cause unrest. Compared to other types of sources, coins from the ancient Mediterranean have survived in great numbers and relatively well-preserved. No fewer than nine coins minted in Sinope in the early 4th century BCE with the name Icesius on them have been found.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  It was common at the time for the mint master to put his name in the legend, which is the text on the coin. From roughly the same period, we have dozens of coins that imitate Sinopian money, but seem to have been minted elsewhere because they contain Aramaic instead of Greek letters, or Greek letters with many errors. Most of them were rendered unusable with a chisel shortly after they were minted. These finds make the story of Icesius' involvement in a disruption of the currency plausible, but the exact circumstances remain a matter of speculation. Perhaps the goal was to drive up the value of the coins minted in Sinope to make a profit.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  There may also have been a political reason to destroy coins coming from elsewhere, possibly against a larger background of unrest leading up to the Persian takeover by the Tamis. It was, in any case, common for a son to have the same profession as his father, so Icesius and Diogenes may well have acted together and faced exile together. Later generations looked to the affair of the coinage as an explanation for Diogenes' exile and his departure from Sinope. But from early on, the episode was also assigned metaphorical significance, perhaps first by Diogenes himself.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Diogenes Laertius connects the story of the defaced coins with a later visit by Diogenes to one of the oracles of the god Apollo. Again, he gives two scenarios. In the first, Diogenes was pressured by the man working at the mint to deface the currency and turn to the oracle for advice. There he was told that it was permissible to disrupt the public nomisma. Nomisma can mean coin as well as institution or accepted custom in a broader sense. The word derives from nomos, which can mean law as well as custom. In this scenario, Diogenes' offense stems from a mistake.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  He thought the oracle gave him permission to disturb the coinage when actually he was supposed to go after the institutions and customs. Because of his mistake, Diogenes is banished, or else flees out of fear. In the second version, Diogenes is responsible, but his father winds up in prison because he entrusted the minting to Diogenes. After his father dies, Diogenes goes to the oracle to ask how he can become famous. The oracle's answer is the same: disrupt the accepted customs. Both scenarios connect the oracle to the exile and the metaphorical disruption of the nomisma, and thereby turn Diogenes into a man with a divine mission.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  The question remains whether it all really happened that way. The episode closely resembles an event from the life story of another famous philosopher, so it may be a borrowing that was incorporated into Diogenes' biography erroneously. Socrates, in the defense speech recorded by Plato known as Apology, also claims that he performed his philosophical interrogations because of an oracle from Apollo. The god said that no one was wiser than Socrates, who "knows that he knows nothing," so Socrates tried to show that others also "know nothing" to prove the oracle right. Another issue is Diogenes' often disparaging attitude toward religion.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Would he really have let Apollo dictate his actions? But perhaps he had an ambivalent relationship to the divine. In any case, with or without encouragement from the oracle, Diogenes managed to reemploy the potentially negative reputation of counterfeiter he carried with him to Athens as a pithy metaphor for his philosophical rallying cry of subverting societal norms.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  In Exile After leaving Sinope, Diogenes struck out for Athens, a trip that would have taken about ten or eleven days by sailboat, which was the fastest way to go. Athens was the intellectual center of the Greek-speaking world at the time, and the city presented itself as a refuge for those who had been forced to leave their homeland. But this did not mean that newcomers had the same rights as male, free-born Athenians. They were not allowed to vote in the public assembly, nor to own land. Exile was a lifelong punishment, unless the banishment was officially revoked, but it was one that Diogenes embraced.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Diogenes proclaimed that he became a philosopher thanks to his exile, hinting at the many philosophers before him who also left their native land, forced or not, and praising Athens for offering him such a stimulating environment. In another quote reported by Diogenes Laertius, "Diogenes taunted the Sinopians. Sure, they condemned him to exile, but he condemned them to stay home." With this playful inversion, the philosopher probably meant to say that although Sinope was an important city, it could not match Athens' intellectual climate. Upon his arrival in Athens, Diogenes contacted someone who was supposed to have a small

• 48:30Speaker 01

  house for him, but the man did not immediately come through. Diogenes did not want to wait, and moved into a pithos instead, a large earthenware pot normally used for storing wine. Some accounts erroneously refer to this as a barrel or a bathtub. Placed on its side, a pithos forms a small, humble cave. In the many, many depictions of Diogenes and his pot, from the first century BCE to the present, he sits up front in the opening, framed perfectly by the rim. Diogenes hardly could have foreseen how clever his selection of a pot would be as iconography,

• 49:11Speaker 01

  but ever since then, the pithos has embodied the distinctive paradox of lonely seclusion in the middle of the marketplace. According to Diogenes Laertius, Diogenes' Pythos stood in the Metron, a temple complex for the goddess Methe, the mother bordering the marketplace in Athens. This information is problematic because this complex was not built until two centuries after Diogenes' lifetime. Perhaps at some point in the oral tradition, on the site where the Metron now stands, was shortened to "in the Metron", or Diogenes may have lived in the ruins of an older temple

• 49:52Speaker 01

  to the mother that was destroyed during the Persian Wars in the 5th century BCE. Either way, the marketplace was the beating heart of the city, the center of commercial activity, and a great place to meet a lot of people. Here, Diogenes could exhibit his life of seclusion and self-sufficiency to as many passersby as possible. Living in a Pythos was also a way of signaling austerity and humility. A short reference in the Comedies of Aristophanes renders it plausible that poor Athenians indeed used large pots as dwellings. One of the characters in Knights describes how people lived in pots, nooks and sheds

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  during the Peloponnesian War, fought by Athens and Sparta and their respective allies at the end of the 5th century BCE. So Diogenes was probably one of many who had made a makeshift shelter for himself in the city in this way, but his Pythos would become the most famous one by far. In Athens, Diogenes became a follower of Antisthenes, who had been one of Socrates' disciples. Like Diogenes, Antisthenes led an unconventional and sober life. Already in antiquity, some pointed to him as the actual founder of cynic philosophy. Because of the undogmatic nature of cynic thought, it is better to see Antisthenes

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  as an inspiring example to Diogenes than as his teacher. Antisthenes died around 365 BCE, so if they met, Diogenes must have arrived in Athens at least before then. It was also in Athens that Diogenes clashed with most of the philosophers of his own generation, Plato foremost among them.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Diogenes did have followers during his lifetime, but as mentioned, he did not establish a formal school. He must have undertaken some travels. Diogenes Laertius places him in Olympia and Megara, among others, but otherwise spent his time on the streets of Athens. It was expected of philosophers that they would spend time in public spaces since intellectual life took place in the marketplace, on the steps of temples, and in open-air sports facilities, the famous gymnasia. A major difference between Diogenes and his peers, however, was that his peers went home at the end of the day.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Diogenes slept in his pythos and lived off alms and dinner invitations. In Athens, Diogenes also acquired his nickname. According to Diogenes Laertius, Plato at one point insulted him by calling him a dog. The specific reason remains unmentioned, but it must have occurred in the context of their larger rivalry. Diogenes took it in stride and quickly adopted the name, reminding others of it constantly, as we already saw in the Papyrus text. In the biography, he explains his moniker as follows: "I wag my tail when someone gives me something, I bark when someone gives me nothing, and when someone is a bad person, I bite."

• 53:04Speaker 01

  In Greek, just as in English, "to bite," doukno, can have a metaphorical meaning, and Diogenes uses it here to refer to his verbal aggressiveness. Dogs have been loyal friends to humans for millennia, and yet, "dog" is an insult in many cultures. Freud explained this apparent contradiction as a consequence of repressed sexuality. Dogs defecate and masturbate shamelessly in public. According to his analysis, in this way, they remind us humans of our own barely-contained impulses. Dog became an insult for those who did not conform to the generally-accepted standard of civilization.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Diogenes thought it nonsense that we eat in the company of others while we hide anxiously to fulfill other bodily needs, and he was not afraid of acting on that conviction.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  To Corinth. At some point after moving from Sinope to Athens, Diogenes was traveling to Agina, an island strategically located between Athens and the Peloponnese. Citing two different sources, Diogenes Laertius describes how on this trip he was ambushed and captured by pirates who took him to Crete. There, Diogenes was offered for sale as a slave. He was reportedly bought by a wealthy Corinthian merchant named Seniades. We will go into the details of this episode and Diogenes' ideas about slavery later, but for now, it suffices to note that the story of his abduction and sale at the slave market is plausible enough.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  During the 4th century BCE, and for a long time afterward, the Mediterranean was plagued by pirates. One of their pursuits was human trafficking. Those who ventured on a sea voyage ran a real risk of ending up as merchandise in a slave market. Diogenes must have arrived in Corinth, possibly enslaved by Seniades, at some point in the 340s BCE, and wound up living there for many years. According to Diogenes Laertius, he stayed in the household into old age and served as a teacher for Seniades' sons. This would not have been unusual. Raising and teaching children was often left to enslaved workers.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Diogenes Laertius nowhere mentions release. In the Greek world, an owner could free an enslaved person in various ways and for various reasons, but it was not common. There are several anecdotes suggesting that after a while, Diogenes stopped living in Seniades' household, including the one about his meeting with King Alexander. In most versions, the encounter takes place in the Cronion in Corinth, where Diogenes is said to have lived in Epithos again. Alternatively, Seniades may have given him a lot of freedom of movement without formally releasing him. According to the biography, he said of Diogenes, "A good deity, Agathos demon, has entered

• 56:12Speaker 01

  my house." Several different stories circulated about Diogenes' death at about ninety years old. He is said to have died either by holding his breath from a cholera-like disease after eating a piece of raw octopus, or from a dog bite after one of his dogs attacked him while he was feeding them octopus. As is often the case in Diogenes' Laotius, there is a connection between the cause of death listed and the philosophy of the biography's subject. In the second scenario, Diogenes behaves like a dog by eating raw food. In the third, the dog is killed by his own dogs.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  The first scenario clearly taps into Diogenes' radical autonomy and self-control. He took the end of his life into his own hands by voluntarily renouncing even the most basic necessity of life: oxygen. In the account of this scenario, Diogenes' friends found him in the croneion in Corinth wrapped in his cape. When he did not wake up, his friends attributed his death to suicide and started spreading the story of him holding his breath. In fact, committing suicide in this way is physiologically impossible. A more plausible explanation would be that Diogenes went into cardiac arrest in his sleep. For Diogenes to have lived to around ninety is impressive, especially considering the

• 57:37Speaker 01

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

• 58:19Speaker 01

  In the second century C E, the writer Pausanias recounts seeing the tomb in that location, though he gives no further details. The Sinopians reportedly set up several bronze statues of Diogenes with inscriptions thanking him for demonstrating the virtue of a self-sufficient way of life. Of those bronze statues, no remains have been recovered. But today, his birthplace does honor its most famous son with a white stone monument standing nearly eighteen feet tall. The monument was designed by the Turkish sculptor Turan Bosch and installed in 2006. It depicts Diogenes twice, standing on top of a barrel and on the front of the same barrel,

• 59:04Speaker 01

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

• 59:49Speaker 01

  In antiquity, however, portable oil lamps were terracotta, like a Roman one on which Diogenes himself is depicted, or occasionally bronze. The way Diogenes is framed by a window on the front of the barrel evokes works of art that depict him sitting in the round opening of his pythos. At the base of the barrel stands a plaque in the form of an open book. In Turkish, its inscription reads: "Stand out of my son, that is the only thing you can do for me." Yolga etme bashkai san istemam. This version of Diogenes' famous answer to Alexander is still used as an expression in Turkey today.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  It pretty much means "leave me alone", and is typically used to rebuff someone who offers unsolicited help. In collective memory, the phrase, found in song lyrics as the title of a self-help book and in political speeches, is still known to derive from Diogenes. In 2017, there was an attempt to have the monument removed on account of its being an effort to pin Greek philosophy and Greek ideology on Sinop. The campaign seems to have been motivated by a mix of nationalist sentiment that saw Diogenes as not being Turkish enough and religious conservatism uncomfortable with Diogenes' radical views on the family and sexuality.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

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

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  It was a philosophical rebuttal by means of an absurdist performance with a serious message behind it. For Diogenes, Plato's search for sophisticated definitions and theoretical abstractions to capture the world was the opposite of what philosophy should be about. What mattered to him was the ethical problem: "How can we be good humans?" Judging by their behavior, Diogenes felt "so few people know the answer to the latter question that they are very hard to find, even with a lamp in broad daylight."

• 1:02:39Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.