Anecdotes of the Cynics Read online

  The Athenians called Diogenes ‘the dog’ because he slept in fields, or in front of doorways when he was in town. Diogenes welcomed the name because he found it agreed with his habits. You know how Plato in the Republic [375e] describes a dog’s instincts: just by sight they learn in time to be on friendly, familiar terms with certain people. The philosopher, however, is endowed with reason, a faculty of discrimination superior to sight. With reason he learns to distinguish between friends and enemies so as to get closer to the former while scaring others off. His aim in getting close to friends is not to bite them or let loose upon them a shower of abuse, but to improve their character by giving them candid advice. As to enemies, even his savage attacks improved their character by exposing their faults to the light.

  DL 6. 61

  He used to flout convention by eating in full view of everyone, in the heart of Athens’ civic centre. People took offence at this once and stood around him, calling him ‘dog’. ‘It’s you who are dogs,’ he came back, ‘standing around me, watching me eat.’

  ANTH. PAL. 16. 333

  Satchel, cloak, a barley-cake soaked in water and squeezed tight, a staff to hold before him and lean upon, and a ceramic mug — these are all the accessories essential to a Cynic philosopher’s life. Anything else is superfluous. And even one of these turned out to be one too many. For seeing a ploughman taking a drink from his cupped hands, Diogenes addressed his mug, ‘Why was I lugging you around with me all this time?’

  DL 6. 22–3

  According to Theophrastus in his Megarian Dialogue, Diogenes discovered the means of dealing with circumstance by observing a mouse running about, with no need of a bed, no fear of the dark, no desire for commonly considered creature comforts. He was the first, some say, to fold his cloak, since he needed to sleep in it too. He carried a pack in which he kept his food. He would use any place for any purpose, whether it be eating, sleeping or conversing. He also used to say that the Athenians had furnished him with living quarters, meaning the Stoa of Zeus and the procession storehouse.

  The staff he first began to use for support following an illness. After that, however, it, and the satchel, were his constant accessories when he travelled, although he did without them in town. That is the testimony of Olympiodorus, an Athenian magistrate, of Polyeuctus the orator, and of Lysanius, son of Aeschrio. He wrote to someone to be on the lookout for a place for him to live. When the man was a long time about it, he took up quarters in the cask in the Metroön of Athens, as he tells the story himself in his letters. In summer he would roll around in scorching sand; in winter he embraced marble statues mantled in snow. He practised every kind of self-discipline.

  DL 6. 35

  He said he modelled himself on conductors of the tragic choruses: they also encourage the choristers to sing a little sharp, with the result that they end up singing right on key.

  DL 6. 71

  Nothing in life, Diogenes would say, has any chance of success without self-discipline. With it, however, anything was possible. So why not choose to be happy by avoiding vain effort and focusing only on what nature demands, instead of making ourselves miserable with needless exertion? You can even derive pleasure from despising pleasure once you get used to it. Then pleasure becomes as distasteful an experience as being deprived of pleasure is for people who have not gained self-discipline. That is what Diogenes said and what he did, defacing the moral currency by consulting nature and ignoring convention. He said his life had the stamp, as it were, of Heracles, since he valued nothing more than freedom.

  DL 6. 72–3

  He sneered at high birth, honours and all such worldly distinctions, calling them camouflage for vice. The only genuine country consisted of the world as a whole. He held that wives should be shared among men, and equated consensual sex with marriage. The sons of such unions were, in turn, sons of the state at large.

  He saw nothing wrong in robbing temples. Nor, in his opinion, was it wrong to eat the flesh of any animal. He did not even look upon cannibalism as immoral, citing its practice among foreign nations.

  DL 6. 63

  Asked where he was from, Diogenes responded, ‘I am a citizen of the world.’

  PLUT. MOR. 331F–332C

  When Alexander the Great met and spoke with the great Diogenes in Corinth, so struck and amazed was he was by the man’s worth and singular way of life that, in thinking back on their conversation, he would often say, ‘If I were not Alexander, I would like to be Diogenes.’ By which he meant, ‘I would gladly devote myself to a life of reason if I were not already putting philosophy into action’. Notice he did not say, ‘If I were not a king I would be Alexander’, or ‘If I were not rich and an Argead’. He did not prefer good fortune to wisdom, or value royal clothing and a crown above the Cynic cloak and satchel. In saying ‘If I were not Alexander I would be Diogenes’, he meant to say, ‘If it were not my purpose to fuse Greek with barbarian, to traverse and civilize every continent, to explore the limits of land and sea and extend Macedon’s borders to the edge of Ocean, to spread and disseminate Greece and its culture through Asia bringing peace and justice to every race, I would not sit idle and wallow in the prerogatives of power. I would instead contend with Diogenes in simplicity. But as it is you must forgive me, Diogenes, if I emulate Heracles, take after Perseus, and follow in the footsteps of Dionysus, the god by whom my royal family was established and from whom it descends. I want to see Greeks again celebrating a victory dance in India, and reviving the Bacchic revels among the wild mountain people beyond the Caucasus. There too we have report of holy men called gymnosophists, devoted to God and likewise inured to an ascetic way of life peculiarly their own.

  In frugality they outdo Diogenes since they manage without a rucksack and do not store food but gather and eat whatever the earth produces raw. For drink they have flowing rivers, while leaves and turf serve them for bedding. Through me they will get to know of Diogenes and Diogenes will learn about them. Like Diogenes, I am also under an obligation to deface the coinage, in my case by imprinting Greek civilization on the barbarian.

  PLUT. LIFE OF ALEXANDER 671D–E

  And now a general assembly of the Greeks was held at Corinth, where a vote was passed to mount an expedition against the Persian empire. Alexander was named commander. Many statesmen and philosophers came and congratulated him. He had hoped to find Diogenes among them since the philosopher happened to be in Corinth at the time. But Diogenes took not the slightest note of him and continued to spend his days in the suburb of Craneum. So Alexander personally called on the man, and found him lounging in the sun. Diogenes stirred a bit when he saw this entourage approach, and turned his gaze in their direction. The prince hailed him, and offered him anything within his power to bestow. ‘Get out of the way of the sun,’ the other replied. Such pride and nobility, evinced by his evident nonchalance, is said to have made a great impression on Alexander. His attendants just laughed as they wandered off, but for his own part Alexander was heard to say, ‘Truthfully, if I were not Alexander, I would choose to be Diogenes.’

  DL 6. 58

  On one occasion, when he was scolded for eating in public, he said, ‘But it was precisely while in public that I grew hungry.’ Some people also ascribe this anecdote to him. They say that Plato saw him scraping vegetables. Approaching him, he told him in a confidential tone of voice that he wouldn’t have to submit to such work if he would just join Dionysius’ entourage. To which Diogenes, likewise under his breath, said that he, Plato, would not have to be part of Dionysius’ entourage if he weren’t too proud to scrape vegetables.

  DL 6. 4I

  Once he stood some time under a driving rain. Observers took pity on him. But Plato happened by and told them to move on if they really pitied him — an allusion to what he took to be Diogenes’ wrong-headed vanity.

  DL 6. 40

  Plato defined Man as a featherless biped. The definition was generally well received. But Diogenes refuted it by plucking a chicken, bringing it
by Plato’s Academy, throwing it over the wall while yelling, ‘Here’s your man for you, Plato!’

  DL 6. 41

  In the full light of day, a lamp in hand, he used to go about crying, ‘I’m on the lookout for a man.’

  PHILO, ALL GOOD MEN ARE FREE, 121–3

  The Cynic philosopher Diogenes was possessed of such poise and dignity that when he was captured by pirates who barely fed him enough to live, rather than let circumstances get the better of him, or be intimidated by his captors, he challenged them with the following argument. ‘It is ridiculous, when pigs and sheep are provided with enough provender to make them sleek and fat before they’re taken to market, to reduce the best of animals, man, to nothing but skin and bones by starving us. It only means you’ll get less for us than you otherwise would.’

  So he was given a sufficient allowance. The day he was to be auctioned off with the other prisoners, he sat and ate in a cheerful mood, not forgetting to share some of his food with the other captives. One of them, however, was overcome to the point where he could not speak for anxiety and grief. Diogenes addressed the man thus: ‘Try to stop brooding, and take whatever we get. As Homer says,

  Even fair-haired Niobe thought of food again finally,

  She whose twelve children were slain in her palace,

  Six daughters and six sons still in the flower of youth.’

  [Il. 24.602–4]

  A motivated buyer questioned him as to what he could do. ‘I know how to govern men,’ he said with perfect frankness — his soul, it seems, giving spontaneous expression to the free, fine and royal element in his nature.

  DL 6. 76–9

  By report he was close to ninety when he died. Accounts differ as to the cause. One has him seized by colic after eating raw octopus. In another version he held his breath until he passed away … According to yet another tradition, he sustained a bad bite to his foot when feeding a dog pack with pieces of octopus, a wound that finally carried him off. But Antisthenes in his work On Philosophers and Their Disciples reverts to the view that he died of self-suffocation. The story is that he was camping in the Craneum, the exercise area outside Corinth, when his friends arrived as usual one day and found him wrapped in his mantle head to foot. They thought he was sleeping, although it was not like him to nap or doze during the day. Pulling the cloak away, they found his body inert. The consensus was that he had deliberately taken his leave of the world.

  Supposedly, though, his followers then fell to arguing over who should have the honour of burying him. It even came to blows. The young men’s parents and estate managers had to intervene, until the decision was made to bury the great man by the gate leading to the Isthmus. A pillar was placed on his burial mound, crowned with the likeness of a dog carved from Parian marble. Citizens of Corinth subsequently dedicated bronze statues on the site. On one the following verses were inscribed:

  Even this bronze will tarnish with time: but eternity itself

  cannot

  efface your name. For you alone pointed Man towards the path

  through life of greatest independence and least trouble or

  inconvenience.

  DL 10. 8, 119

  Epicurus branded the Cynics enemies of Greece … In the second chapter of his book on Ways of Life he says that no enlightened person would choose the Cynic way, or take up begging.

  JOANN. CHRYSOST. IN EPIST. I AD CORINTH. HOMIL. 35.4

  [The apostles performed acts of mercy from pure, selfless motives.] Not so the Greek philosophers. As threats and enemies to our common nature, they acted in a spirit of perversity. [Crates], like any fool or madman, threw all his property into the sea on no good grounds … Everything they did they did with a view to being admired. The apostles, in contrast, both accepted what was given them and in turn gave so freely to the poor that they endured a constant state of hunger … Consider their laws also, how sensible they were and without a trace of vanity. ‘Having food and shelter,’ he said [I Tim. 6:8], ‘let us therefore be content.’ Compare the man of Sinope, Diogenes, who dressed in rags and lived in a barrel on no rational grounds. And while he certainly amazed the masses, no one profited from this arrangement. Paul, in contrast, did not behave like this since he did not want anyone’s admiration. He wore normal, decent clothes, lived in a house like most people, and practised all the virtues without exception. The Dog sneered at such behaviour, lived scandalously and shamed himself in public, driven by a mad passion for notoriety. For if anyone looks into the reason why he chose to live in a barrel, he must conclude that ostentation alone will account for it.

  CRATES AND HIPPARCHIA

  (fl. 326 BC)

  As Diogenes’ first pupil, it is not surprising that Crates occasionally displays some of his master’s abrasive manners and acerbic wit. But what stands out in the tradition concerning him are deeds of supererogatory good will, especially in restoring peace to warring households. He is the most conspicuous representative of the philanthropic strain in Cynicism. In the account of his relations with Hipparchia we find the same pattern of gruffness, alternating with and finally yielding to warmth and intimacy. Their story is significant not only as highlighting the more benign side of Cynicism but, in Hipparchia’s case, demonstrating the school’s willingness to extend women the same respect with regard to every value that they recognized that mattered to them.

  DL 6. 87–9

  According to Antisthenes in his book Successions of Greek Philosophers, Crates was converted to Cynic philosophy when he witnessed the performance of a tragedy in which King Telephus of Mysia was shown dressed in rags, carrying a satchel. He was moved to sell his property and distribute the sizeable proceeds (he came from a rich family) to his native city of Thebes at large. And so seriously did he commit to philosophy that he is memorialized in verses by the comic poet Philemon, who describes a person who aped his ways: ‘In summer he wore a shaggy coat so as to be another Crates, and in winter dressed in rags.’ Diodes relates how Diogenes himself induced him to sell his grazing lands, then toss the proceeds into the sea. He also says that he entertained Alexander the Great for a time, much as Hipparchia had welcomed Philip, Alexander’s father, into her home. He often had to use his Cynic staff to drive off relatives bent on recalling him to his old, conventional way of life. But he stuck to his purpose. Demetrius of Magnesia says that he gave a sum of money to a banker, asking him to divide it among his children should they adopt a conventional, bourgeois existence. But if they followed him into Cynicism the banker was to donate the money to the city, since as philosophers his children would have no need of it. Eratosthenes has a colourful story to the effect that he had a son by Hipparchia (of whom more later). After the boy, Pasicles, reached adulthood and had completed his military service, Crates escorted him to a house of prostitution. It was here, he said, that he had been introduced to sex himself. Adultery, he said, led to tragedy, death or exile being the usual denouement. Intrigues with prostitutes, on the other hand, were matter for comedy, inducing madness through prodigal spending and merrymaking.

  APULEIUS, FLORIDA §14

  It was Diogenes’ words, and others that spontaneously suggested themselves to him, which influenced Crates to at last rush off to the centre of the city and publicly renounce all he owned as so much trash and excess baggage, more hindrance than help. When his actions drew a crowd, he announced in a loud voice, ‘Crates hereby grants Crates his freedom.’ And from then until the day he died he not only lived alone, but remained scantily clad, free of property — and content.

  APULEIUS, FLORIDA §22

  Crates, the well-known disciple of Diogenes, was honoured at Athens by men of his own day as though he had been a household god. No house was ever closed to him, no head of a household ever had so great a secret as to consider Crates an awkward intruder. He was always welcome to help settle a quarrel or a lawsuit among relatives. The poets celebrate how, in the past, Hercules by his bravery subdued all the wild monsters and savage men of legend, ridding the w
orld of them. Even so our philosopher proved Hercules’ equal in overcoming anger, greed, envy, lust and all the monstrous vices of the human psyche. He rid them of all these sins, purified families and conquered vice.

  Like Hercules, too, he went half-naked and carried his own distinctive club; he even came from Thebes, where men say Hercules was born. Even before becoming Crates, as he is now known, he was numbered among the city’s leaders, from a prominent family whose house had many slaves and was conspicuous for its large, open court. His lands were rich and his clothing sumptuous. Later, however, he realized that the wealth he had inherited was no safeguard against life’s realities, nor was it something on which he could consistently rely, since nothing is certain and everything is subject to change, and all the riches in the world were of no consequence when it came to living honourably.

  PLUTARCH, MORALIA 69 C–D

  It is said that Demetrius of Phalerum was exiled to Thebes, living in disgrace and humble circumstances. He was not especially pleased one day to see the philosopher Crates making his way towards him, since he expected he would be treated to a sample of the candour and harsh words Cynics were notorious for. But Crates greeted him politely and consoled him on the subject of exile, saying that there was nothing shameful or trying about it. Instead, it released him from matters inherently hazardous and uncertain. He encouraged him to rely on himself and his own resources of character. Feeling better and more optimistic Demetrius told his friends, ‘Now I regret those duties and concerns that kept me from making the acquaintance of a man like that sooner.’