![]() Antisthenes has a walk-on part in Xenophon’s Symposium and is recorded as not being ‘of pure Athenian birth’ – so, like Diogenes, he was something of an outsider. He studied under Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates. This gave rise to the first great one-liner attributed to him: when someone said, “The Sinopeans have condemned you to exile”, he allegedly replied, “Yes, and I’ve condemned them to stay where they are.”ĭiogenes went into exile at Athens, then the intellectual centre of the Hellenic world. In any case, Diogenes was exiled from Sinope. Has this term been read back into the scandal, or did he adopt the term in remembrance of the scandal? The latter would be perfectly in character. Later, Diogenes would describe his aim as to ‘re-stamp’ human beings. It is usually said that someone ‘re-stamped’ the currency. This led to a scandal involving either Diogenes or his father, or both. It lay at the end of a trade route from Mesopotamia and forwarded luxury goods to the heart of the Hellenic world.ĭiogenes’ father Hikesias was a banker and also in charge of the Sinopean mint. Go any further east and you encountered the Scythians, horse-borne nomads whom the Greeks considered barbarians. ![]() Diogenes the Cynic was born in the Greek city of Sinope, on the southern shore of the Black Sea, at the very edge of the Hellenic world. Let us start with what seems to be reasonably certain. It’s like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle without a picture to work from, knowing that you probably don’t have all the pieces, and that some of the pieces that you do have might not belong to the puzzle at all. Some are probably genuine, others less so. We have to reconstruct his life and ideas from quotations and anecdotes in sources long after his lifetime. But he had no contemporary recorder of his thoughts. We also have letters alleged to be by him, although these are generally agreed to be fakes. Diogenes may or may not have written something: later sources quote the titles of lost works attributed to him. Socrates notoriously never wrote anything down, but we at least have dialogues written by his contemporaries Plato and Xenophon claiming to record what he said. SUBSCRIBE NOW Brief Lives Diogenes the Cynic (c.404-323 BC) Martin Jenkins recalls what we know for sure about the philosopher in the barrel.
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