When asked where he was from, Diogenes said, “I’m a citizen of the world.” The word he used was kosmopolites, from which our ‘cosmopolitan’ derives, so strictly speaking he was expressing allegiance with the cosmos, but the term is usually translated as ‘citizen of the world’. The only real commonwealth is the whole world. We have complicated every simple gift from the gods. Why not whip the teacher when the pupil misbehaves? Love of money is the marketplace for every evil. We are more curious about the meaning of dreams than about things we see when awake.
Happy the man who thinks to marry and changes his mind, who plans a voyage he does not take, who runs for office but withdraws his name, who wants to belong to the circle of an influential man, but is excluded.įor three thousand drachmas you can get a statue, for two coppers a quart of barley.Īgainst fate I put courage, against custom nature, against passion reason. I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.īefore begging it is useful to practice on statues. Here they are, my personal choice of his words of wisdom, of humor, of insight, so clear as a lightning, so impressive as a thunderclap. What remains are his comments as passed down through folklore to be recorded by various writers, among others by Diogenes Laërtius and Plutarch. He released it into one of the classrooms, saying, “Behold – Plato’s human being.” Plato was then forced to add “with broad, flat nails” to his definition.Īll of Diogenes’ writings are lost. When Plato defined a human being as a “featherless biped,” Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it to Plato’s Academy. Some of the most amusing anecdotes about him are those relating his continual feud with Plato, whom he considered a pretentious, prattling snob. To be true to oneself, then, no matter how ‘mad’ one may appear, was to pursue a life worth living. He owned a cup which served also as a bowl for food, but threw it away when he saw a boy drinking water from his hands and eating food off a piece of bread, realizing one did not even need a bowl for sustenance.įor Diogenes, a ‘reasonable life’ is one lived in accordance with nature and with one’s natural inclinations. He owned nothing, lived on the streets of Athens, and seems to have subsisted on the charity of others. He was so ardent in his beliefs that he lived them very publicly in the market place of Athens.
He lived in the cask his entire time in Athens.ĭiogenes believed in the rejection of all that was considered unnecessary in life, such as personal possessions and social status. He had written to a friend to rent him a small house there but, when this friend failed to find a place, Diogenes threw his cloak into a large, empty, wine cask outside the temple of Cybele near the Agora and called it ‘home’. He was driven into exile from his native city of Sinope and settled in Athens. “A benevolent spirit has entered my house,” Xeniades said.ĭiogenes taught by being a living example: his own behavior was his teaching. He became the teacher of Xeniades’ sons and a member of the family. “Sell me to that man,” Diogenes had said at the slave market, “he needs a master.” He seems to have welcomed slavery.
Mark, The Life of Diogenes of Sinope in Diogenes Laertius, published in the World History Encyclopedia.ĭiogenes was a slave, belonging to Xeniades. My main guides and sources for this article are a little book by Guy Davenport, who translated his words from the Greek in Herakleitos and Diogenes, published by Gray Fox Press, and an article by Joshua J. Today I feel so ‘high’ on Diogenes that I can’t wait to savour his words myself and to share them with you. Osho’s book on Herakleitos, The Hidden Harmony, was my first taste of Osho. It wasn’t until I heard Osho speak on him in my thirties that I at least began to understand something about this wonderful man and about ‘Lao-Tzu-an’ Herakleitos as well. We just scratched the surface of this fascinating man’s life. Of course, being so young, we couldn’t fully grasp the insights of these writers and poor Diogenes remained the most obscure figure of all of them. So, both Diogenes and Herakleitos were occasional guests during our Greek classes, dominated by Herodotus’ Histories, Plato’s Dialogues and, above all, Homer’s Odyssey and Ilias. I spent most my teenage years learning to translate classical Greek and Latin into proper Dutch. An essay by Shanti on “a fascinating man’s life.” Diogenes by Jean-Léon Gerôme (1860)
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