Lesesaal

Sayings and anecdotes (chreiai)

Diogenes of Sinope

Hundreds of short replies and exemplary scenes that in effect make up Diogenes' surviving work: the lamp lit in broad daylight, the plucked fowl shown to Plato, the "stand out of my sun" said to Alexander, the cup thrown away on seeing a child drink, the sale into slavery, the "citizen of the world". The genre, the chreia, was a school exercise in rhetoric, which explains its polished form and its ease in migrating from one figure to another. Read together, they sketch a coherent ethic: self-sufficiency, training, frankness and mockery of convention.