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Cynicism

Diogenes of Sinope

Διογένης ὁ Σινωπεύς · Διογένης ὁ Κυνικός

c. 412 BCE – c. 323 BCEHistorically documented person

Greek philosopher (c. 412–323 BCE), the central figure of Cynicism. Exiled from Sinope after a scandal over debased coinage, he lived in Athens and Corinth in deliberate poverty, sleeping in a clay storage jar and practising in public a life "according to nature" against convention. Nothing he wrote survives: we know him through hundreds of sayings and anecdotes, many of them legendary, collected above all by Diogenes Laertius. He called himself a "citizen of the world".

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Mosaico de Diógenes (Colonia)

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In their words

«Diogenes the Dog called taverns "the mess-rooms of Attica".»

Aristóteles, Retórica III 10, 1411a24, como ejemplo de metáfora. Es el único dicho de Diógenes atestiguado por un contemporáneo. Griego: Wikisource griega (Ρητορική/3); inglés: W. Rhys Roberts (1924); español: traducción propia.

Sayings and anecdotes (chreiai) — Diogenes of Sinope

Their central idea

Defacing the currency (paracharattein to nomisma): Literally, the phrase names the offence that banished Diogenes from Sinope: defacing or debasing the coinage.

See in context

Biography

6 min read

A man made of anecdotes

Not a single secure line by Diogenes of Sinope survives. What we know comes almost entirely from one late source, Book VI of Diogenes Laertius' Lives of Eminent Philosophers, composed more than five centuries after his death, which gathers reports from Hellenistic biographers and, above all, hundreds of chreiai: short, witty, memorable sayings that passed from mouth to mouth, entered the schools of rhetoric and were often attributed to several figures at once. The only certain contemporary witness is Aristotle, who in the Rhetoric quotes a quip by "the Dog" about the taverns of Athens. Writing his life therefore means patiently separating what is attested from what tradition kept hanging on him.

Sinope and the coinage

He was born in Sinope, a Milesian colony on the southern shore of the Black Sea, around 412 BCE: the date is inferred from his death in 323 "at nearly ninety", according to Laertius, though Censorinus gives eighty-one. He was the son of Hicesias, a banker (trapezites) who handled public funds. Laertius records several versions of a scandal: according to Diocles, the father debased the coinage and the son had to go into exile; according to Eubulides, Diogenes did it himself and admitted it in his dialogue Pordalus. Another version adds an oracle of Apollo telling him to "alter the currency" (paracharattein to nomisma), advice he took literally before discovering that it referred to customs. Sinopean coins of the mid-fourth century BCE defaced with a chisel, and others bearing the name of Hicesias, lend some substance to the scandal; the oracle, by contrast, looks like a later construction modelled on Socrates' own.

Athens: the master and the jar

As an exile he came to Athens. Laertius relates that he sought out Antisthenes, a companion of Socrates, who did not accept pupils; when Antisthenes raised his staff to drive him off, Diogenes offered his head: he would find no wood hard enough to keep him away while he had something to teach. The meeting is uncertain, since Antisthenes died around 366 and Diogenes' exile may have come later; some scholars suspect that the chain Socrates–Antisthenes–Diogenes was built afterwards to give Cynicism, and later Stoicism, a Socratic pedigree. As the friend he had asked for a cottage was slow about it, he took up residence in a storage jar (pithos) in the Metroon, the sanctuary of the Mother of the Gods beside the agora. It was not a wooden barrel, a container foreign to the Greece of his day, but a large clay vessel for grain or oil; Juvenal still calls it a testa, earthenware. The barrel is a later image fixed by modern painting.

Living according to nature

What Diogenes taught was a way of life. Laertius credits him with the idea that there are two kinds of training, of the body and of the soul, and that constant practice (askesis) can overcome anything; that one should choose the labours nature requires over the useless ones custom imposes; and that contempt for pleasure, once habitual, is more pleasant than pleasure itself. He opposed, he said, courage to fortune, nature to convention and reason to passion. Hence his shamelessness (anaideia): he ate in the agora and did in public what was considered private, arguing that what is not shameful at home is not shameful in the square. Hence too his frankness, parrhesia, which according to Laertius he called "the most beautiful thing among men". Asked where he came from, he answered with a word of long fortune: kosmopolites, citizen of the world.

Plato, Alexander and the lamp

Many of his anecdotes set him against philosophers and the powerful. On learning that Plato defined man as a "featherless biped", he brought him a plucked fowl: "Here is Plato's man." He lit a lamp in broad daylight and went about saying "I am looking for a man"; no ancient source adds "honest". And at the Craneum in Corinth, when Alexander stood before him and offered him whatever he wished, he asked him to stand out of his sun. Cicero, Plutarch, Arrian and Laertius all tell the scene, and Plutarch adds that the king said that, were he not Alexander, he would have wished to be Diogenes. They may have met in 336 or 335, when Alexander was at the Isthmus; but the exchange has the perfect shape of a chreia and served for centuries as a school commonplace on the sage and the king, so its historicity cannot be taken for granted.

Corinth and the slave market

He spent his last years in Corinth. According to a story Laertius draws partly from Menippus' satire The Sale of Diogenes, pirates captured him on the way to Aegina and sold him in Crete; when the auctioneer asked what he could do, he answered "govern men" and pointed to a rich Corinthian, Xeniades: "Sell me to that man; he needs a master." Xeniades entrusted him with the education of his sons. The satirical origin of the story and its exemplary character—the slave freer than his owner—invite suspicion, and different versions already circulated in antiquity on whether he was freed or grew old in his buyer's house.

A death in several versions

He died around 323 BCE, by the most widespread tradition at the Craneum, the gymnasium at the gates of Corinth. Laertius gives three causes: colic from eating a raw octopus, a dog's bite while sharing an octopus with the dogs, or voluntarily holding his breath, the version already celebrated by the poet Cercidas and inferred by his followers when they found him dead wrapped in his cloak. Demetrius of Magnesia claimed he died on the same day as Alexander in Babylon, a synchronism too neat to be believed. Cicero relates that he asked to be thrown out unburied and that, when his friends objected that wild beasts would devour him, he asked for a stick to drive them off: if he would feel nothing, what could it matter to him?

What he wrote, or did not

Laertius lists thirteen dialogues, letters and seven tragedies, but adds that Sosicrates and Satyrus denied Diogenes had written anything and that Satyrus assigned the tragedies to his pupil Philiscus of Aegina; Sotion gave a different list. All that remains are titles and testimonies. The most disputed work is the Republic (Politeia), which advocated the community of wives and children, the use of knucklebones as currency and indifference to taboos such as cannibalism. Some Stoics, uneasy with a text that had inspired their own founder, declared it spurious; Philodemus of Gadara, in a treatise preserved among the Herculaneum papyri, replied that Cleanthes and Chrysippus cited it as genuine, and most specialists today accept it. The fifty-one Letters bearing his name are, by contrast, rhetorical exercises of the Roman period.

The Dog's legacy

His pupil Crates of Thebes passed the Cynic way of life on to Zeno of Citium, who would found the Stoa; through the Stoics Diogenes reached Epictetus, who holds him up as the model of the free philosopher, and Marcus Aurelius, who places him with Heraclitus and Socrates above Alexander and Caesar. Cynicism flourished again under the Empire, and the figure of Diogenes—the lamp, the jar, Alexander's sun—passed into painting, from Gérôme to Waterhouse, and into modern philosophy: in his last lectures, in 1984, Michel Foucault read in him parrhesia taken to its limit, truth spoken with one's own life.

Sources: Hard, Robin (trad.). Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes, with Other Popular Moralists. Oxford University Press (Oxford World's Classics), Oxford, 2012. · Diógenes Laercio. Vidas y opiniones de los filósofos ilustres, libro VI, 20–81 (Diógenes), 85–93 (Crates) y 104–105 (doctrina cínica), s. III d. C. Trad. inglesa de R. D. Hicks, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library 185, Heinemann / Harvard University Press, 1925 (Wikisource en inglés); texto griego en Wikisource griega; trad. de C. D. Yonge, Bohn, Londres, 1853 (Project Gutenberg n.º 57342). · Diógenes Laercio. Los diez libros de Diógenes Laercio sobre las vidas, opiniones y sentencias de los filósofos más ilustres, trad. de José Ortiz y Sanz, tomo II (libros VI–X). Imprenta Real, Madrid, 1792 (ejemplar de la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Sevilla en Internet Archive). · Plutarco. Vida de Alejandro 14, en Vidas paralelas, s. I–II d. C. Trad. inglesa llamada «de Dryden», revisada por Arthur Hugh Clough, Plutarch's Lives, 1864 (Project Gutenberg n.º 674). · Cicerón. Disputaciones tusculanas I 104 y V 92, 45 a. C. Texto latino en The Latin Library; trad. inglesa de C. D. Yonge, Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, Harper, Nueva York, 1877 (Project Gutenberg n.º 14988).

Timeline

A life, year by year

Each point is a documented event. Click to read it, with its source and degree of certainty.

  1. c. 412 BCE · age 0

    Birth

    Born in Sinope, son of the banker Hicesias. The date is inferred from his death in 323 "at nearly ninety" (Diogenes Laertius VI 76); Censorinus gives eighty-one, which would point to 404. Wikidata records 412, 403 and 400. Years BCE are expressed as negative numbers.

    Probable

  2. c. 362 BCE

    The coinage scandal and exile

    He or his father debases the coinage of Sinope and Diogenes goes into exile (Diogenes Laertius VI 20–21, in contradictory versions). Sinopean coins of the mid-fourth century BCE defaced with a chisel support a historical core; the exact date is unknown and it is debated whether it preceded or followed Antisthenes' death (c. 366).

    Disputed

  3. c. 360 BCE

    Arrival in Athens and the jar in the Metroon

    He settles in Athens, adopts the doubled cloak and the wallet and lives in a clay jar (pithos) in the Metroon beside the agora (Diogenes Laertius VI 22–23). His link with Antisthenes (VI 21) is uncertain on chronological grounds.

    Probable

  4. 338 BCE

    Prisoner of Philip

    According to Dionysius the Stoic (in Diogenes Laertius VI 43), after the battle of Chaeronea he is brought before Philip II; asked who he is, he answers "a spy upon your insatiable greed" and is set free.

    Tradition

  5. c. 336 BCE

    The encounter with Alexander

    Alexander, chosen at the Isthmus as leader of the expedition against Persia, visits him at the Craneum and receives the answer "stand out of my sun" (Plutarch, Alexander 14; Arrian, Anabasis VII 2.1; Cicero, Tusculans V 92; Diogenes Laertius VI 38). An episode of disputed historicity.

    Disputed

  6. c. 330 BCE

    Aristotle quotes "the Dog"

    In the Rhetoric (III 10, 1411a24), written in these years, Aristotle records a metaphor by "the Dog": taverns are "the common messes of Attica". It is the only certain contemporary testimony about Diogenes.

    Probable

  7. c. 323 BCE

    Death

    He dies at a great age. Diogenes Laertius (VI 76–79) gives three causes—raw octopus, dog bite, holding his breath—and the report by Demetrius of Magnesia that he died on the same day as Alexander (10–11 June 323). He is buried by the gate to the Isthmus, beneath a pillar topped by a marble dog.

    Probable

  8. c. 312 BCE

    Zeno of Citium, pupil of Crates

    Zeno of Citium reaches Athens and becomes a pupil of Crates of Thebes, Diogenes' pupil (Diogenes Laertius VII 2–4); his Republic, written "on the dog's tail", continues Diogenes' own.

    Probable

  9. c. 225 BCE

    Diogenes Laertius writes his life

    Diogenes Laertius writes the Lives of Eminent Philosophers; Book VI (20–81) is the main source on Diogenes and preserves the list of his writings. The date of the work is approximate (first half of the third century).

    Probable

  10. c. 108 BCE

    Epictetus and the ideal Cynic

    In the Discourses recorded by Arrian (III 22, "On Cynicism"), Epictetus presents Diogenes as the model of the free philosopher and messenger of the gods. Years BCE are negative; this one, CE, is positive.

    Probable

  11. c. 50 BCE

    Philodemus defends Diogenes' Republic

    In his treatise On the Stoics (PHerc. 155 and 339), Philodemus of Gadara maintains, against the Stoics who held it spurious, that Diogenes' Republic is genuine and that Cleanthes and Chrysippus quoted it.

    Documented

  12. 1860

    Gérôme's Diogenes

    Jean-Léon Gérôme paints Diogenes seated in his clay jar lighting his lamp, surrounded by dogs; the painting is now in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

    Documented

  13. 1984

    Foucault and Cynic parrhesia

    In his last course, The Courage of Truth (February–March 1984), Michel Foucault devotes several lectures to Cynicism and to Diogenes as a radical form of telling the truth with one's own life.

    Documented

Works

Essential works

The works without which their legacy cannot be understood.

Sayings and anecdotes (chreiai) — Diogenes of Sinope

Later compilation · c. 300 BCE

Sayings and anecdotes (chreiai)

Χρεῖαι / Ἀποφθέγματα Διογένους

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.

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Republic (Politeia) — Diogenes of Sinope

Traditional attribution

Republic (Politeia)

Πολιτεία

A political treatise known only from testimonies, chiefly Philodemus and Diogenes Laertius (VI 72–73). It proposed a community without marriage—the free union of the man who persuades with the woman who consents—with children held in common, knucklebones instead of coinage, indifference to dietary and religious taboos, cannibalism included, and the idea that the only right constitution is that of the cosmos. It inspired the Republic of Zeno of Citium, written according to tradition "on the dog's tail", and stands at the origin of ancient cosmopolitanism.

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2 editions · amazon.es

Complete works (33)

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Quotations

Quotations located in a specific work. Each carries its provenance and its level of confidence.

I am looking for a man.

Ἄνθρωπον ζητῶ.

ProbableDiógenes Laercio VI 41: lo decía mientras recorría la ciudad con una lámpara encendida a pleno día. Dicho transmitido como chreía, sin fuente nombrada. Griego: Diógenes Laercio, ed. de Wikisource griega; inglés: R. D. Hicks (Loeb, 1925, dominio público); español: traducción propia.

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Apocryphal quotes or disputed attributions (2)

  • «I am looking for an honest man.»

    The ancient saying (Diogenes Laertius VI 41) is "I am looking for a man" (anthropon zeto), that is, a human being worthy of the name. The adjective "honest" is a modern addition found in no Greek or Latin source.

  • «Diogenes lived in a barrel.»

    Not a quotation but a commonplace that often accompanies his sayings. Greek sources speak of a pithos, a large clay storage jar (Diogenes Laertius VI 23 and 43), and Juvenal calls it a testa, earthenware (Satires XIV 308–310). The wooden barrel is a later image spread by modern iconography.

Last words

Contradictory versions

«"How am I then injured by being torn by those animals, if I have no sensation?"»

quid igitur mihi ferarum laniatus oberit nihil sentienti?

There are no reliable last words. What is transmitted are instructions about his body, in versions that do not agree. Cicero (Tusculans I 104) relates that he ordered himself to be thrown out unburied; when his friends objected—"to the birds and beasts?"—he asked them to leave a stick beside him to drive them off, and when they said he would not perceive them, he answered with the sentence quoted. Diogenes Laertius (VI 79) records other variants: that he be cast out unburied for any beast to feed on, thrust into a ditch with a little dust over him, or thrown into the Ilissus to be useful to his brethren; and, according to Eubulus (VI 32), that he asked to be buried face down because what was below would soon be on top. The circumstances of his death also vary (raw octopus, dog bite, holding his breath, VI 76–77), and Antisthenes of Rhodes' version says his friends found him already dead, wrapped in his cloak, which would rule out any final words. English: C. D. Yonge (1877); Spanish: own translation.

Source: Cicerón. Disputaciones tusculanas I 104 y V 92, 45 a. C. Texto latino en The Latin Library; trad. inglesa de C. D. Yonge, Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, Harper, Nueva York, 1877 (Project Gutenberg n.º 14988).

Ask

What their work answers

Twelve great human questions and what their texts allow us to answer, with references. We never put words in their mouth.

  • What is the Absolute? Does God exist?

    The gods exist, but the Dog's philosophy is played out in conduct

    Reserve before the transcendentInferred from their doctrine

    Diogenes left no theology, and his writings were lost; what survives are sayings and anecdotes collected centuries later, above all by Diogenes Laertius. In them the gods appear as a model of self-sufficiency: it belongs to the gods to need nothing, and to those like them to need little. Laertius also attributes to him a syllogism by which everything belongs to the gods, the wise are friends of the gods and friends hold their goods in common, so everything belongs to the wise. At the same time he mocks votive offerings and ritual purifications. The divine serves as a horizon; attention is set on living according to nature.

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  • Who am I? Is there a true self?

    He did not theorise the self: he tested it by stripping off conventions

    Did not address it

    The sayings and anecdotes Diogenes Laertius collects about Diogenes of Sinope contain no theory of the soul and no answer to the question of who I am. What they do show is a practice: reducing what one needs in order to discover what remains once wealth, reputation and customs are removed. That is why he throws away his cup on seeing a child drink with his hands, answers “citizen of the world” to someone asking where he is from, and looks for a man with a lamp in broad daylight. The Cynic self is defined by what it does not need and by the frankness with which it speaks, not by a substance to be known.

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  • Why do we suffer?

    Whoever needs much suffers; free is whoever comes close to needing nothing

    Craving and attachmentInferred from their doctrine

    The anecdotes Diogenes Laertius transmits sketch a consistent diagnosis. Humans make themselves wretched by depending on the superfluous: wealth, comforts, honours, other people's opinions. The gods need nothing and whoever resembles them needs little; that is why Diogenes lived in a jar and threw away his cup on seeing a child drink with his hands. Against fortune he set courage, against convention nature, and against passion reason. Suffering comes not from things but from attachment to needs that convention has created; the remedy is training, a daily exercise of privation that makes light what once seemed indispensable.

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  • What happens after death?

    How can something be an evil if we do not feel it?

    Silence or reserveStated explicitly

    The anecdotes collected by Diogenes Laertius show Diogenes treating death with the same nonchalance as other conventions. Asked whether death was an evil, he replied how could it be, since we do not feel it when it is present. He asked to be thrown out unburied when he died so that the beasts could have their share, and when told they would tear him apart he suggested leaving him a stick to drive them off; if he would not feel them, what did it matter. None of the sayings describes a life after death. Attention is directed to living now without fear, and funeral rites appear as one more convention.

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  • How is liberation or salvation attained?

    Nothing is achieved without training, of body and soul together

    Through disciplined practiceStated explicitly

    Diogenes Laertius attributes to Diogenes a doctrine of training (askesis) that is the closest thing to a method in Cynicism. There is a twofold exercise, of body and soul, and neither suffices without the other; nothing in life succeeds without training, and training can overcome everything. That is why Diogenes rolled in hot sand in summer and embraced frozen statues in winter, and begged from statues to get used to refusal. The aim is self-sufficiency and freedom: to be prepared for any fortune, as he said when asked what he had gained from philosophy. To be freed is to strip oneself, by daily exercise, of the needs imposed by convention.

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  • Is a teacher necessary?

    He followed Antisthenes against his will, but taught by example

    Helpful but not indispensableInferred from their doctrine

    Tradition relates that Diogenes wished to become a disciple of Antisthenes, who admitted no one, and that when Antisthenes raised his staff against him he offered his head, saying he would find no stick hard enough to drive him off while he had something to say. Later, sold as a slave, he offered to govern men and educated the sons of his buyer, Xeniades, teaching them to live simply. But his pedagogy is above all demonstrative: showing with his own body that one can live without the superfluous. The teacher orients and provokes; the training, however, each person does, and Diogenes distrusted any authority not proved by conduct.

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  • Is the world real?

    I see the table, not “tableness”: the real is what is before us

    Natural order in transformationInferred from their doctrine

    Diogenes elaborated no cosmology, but the anecdotes passed down by Laertius show his attitude. When Plato spoke of the Forms and named “tableness” and “cupness”, Diogenes replied that he saw the table and the cup but not tableness or cupness. To a sophist proving by arguments that motion does not exist, he answered by getting up and walking about. His ethical programme — to live according to nature, not convention — presupposes that nature is real and holds the measure. The world is not an appearance over another reality but the only stage, to be inhabited with the least.

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  • What is love?

    Erotic love, a pastime of the idle; frankness, the most beautiful thing

    Did not address it

    Diogenes wrote an Erotic dialogue, now lost, and what survives about love in his sayings is scant and disdainful. According to Diogenes Laertius, he called erotic love the occupation of those with nothing to do, and treated sexual desire as a natural need to be satisfied without fuss or convention. In the surviving material there is no doctrine of love as a path, nor an ethic of compassion. The closest is his cosmopolitanism — being a citizen of the world — and his idea that the most beautiful thing among humans is frankness, exercised precisely towards those one wishes to improve. Later tradition made the Cynics physicians of humanity.

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  • Are we free, or is everything determined?

    Setting courage against fortune: freedom is won by training

    Real free willInferred from their doctrine

    Diogenes did not theorise about determinism, but freedom (eleutheria) is one of the axes of Cynicism. According to Diogenes Laertius, he said he set courage against fortune, nature against convention and reason against passion; and he declared that he preferred freedom above all. When he was sold as a slave, he asked to be sold to someone who needed a master, reversing the roles. Philosophy had at least given him readiness for any fortune. That freedom is not metaphysical but practical: that of one who, needing little, depends on no one. Fortune exists and strikes, but the response to it lies in each person's hands.

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  • Why meditate or pray?

    He mocks purifications and votive offerings; his practice is training

    Did not address it

    The anecdotes attribute to Diogenes no positive teaching on prayer or meditation; what they transmit is mockery. To someone purifying himself with water he said that errors of life were not washed off that way, any more than errors of grammar. Before the votive offerings at Samothrace, dedicated by those who had been saved, he remarked that there would have been many more if those who were not saved had offered them too. He criticised people for asking the gods for what seemed good to them and not for what truly is. His daily exercise is not prayer or contemplation but the training of body and soul to need little.

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  • Can reason know the ultimate?

    He cared for reason to live by, not to speculate on the ultimate

    Did not address it

    Diogenes did not pronounce on whether reason can know the ultimate, and the anecdotes show a deliberate lack of interest in such questions. He marvelled that grammarians investigated the ills of Odysseus and ignored their own, that musicians tuned the lyre and left their souls out of tune, and that mathematicians gazed at the sun and moon without seeing what lay at their feet. At the same time, he valued reason as a practical guide: he said that to live one needed reason or a halter. Cynic reason serves to unmask conventions and live according to nature; speculation about the ultimate seemed to him time wasted.

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  • Withdraw from the world or transform it?

    Defacing the currency: overturning the city's values through one's own life

    The revolution is innerInferred from their doctrine

    Diogenes did not withdraw to the desert: he lived right in the street, in Athens and Corinth, in full view. But neither did he seek to govern or reform the laws. His motto, according to tradition, was “deface the currency”, an allusion to an episode of counterfeiting at Sinope that he turned into a programme: to discredit current values — wealth, fame, lineage, conventional modesty — and replace them with those of nature. He declared himself a citizen of the world and said that the only right constitution is the one that embraces the cosmos. His method was provocative example and frankness. The transformation he sought was not political but a revolution in each person's way of living.

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Affinities & tensions

Affinities and tensions

Calculated question by question from their positions. The reason for each agreement or clash, on click.

Anecdotes and stories

Anecdotes and stories

Disputed336–335 a. C. (si ocurrió)

Stand out of my sun

Alexander had just been proclaimed at the Isthmus leader of the Greeks against Persia, and philosophers and statesmen came to congratulate him. Diogenes, then living in Corinth, did not stir from the Craneum, the wooded gymnasium outside the city. The king went to see him with his retinue and found him lying in the sun. Diogenes raised himself a little, looked at him and, when Alexander asked whether he needed anything, said yes: that he should stand a little out of the sun. On the way back, while his companions mocked the old man, Alexander told them that, were he not Alexander, he would wish to be Diogenes. The scene became the emblem of the sage's self-sufficiency before power, and Laertius surrounds it with other retorts to the king: "I am Diogenes the dog", "who is afraid of the good?". Tradition even had them die on the same day.

Origin of the story: Plutarch, Alexander 14 (with the line "were I not Alexander…"); Arrian, Anabasis VII 2.1; Cicero, Tusculans V 92; Diogenes Laertius VI 32, 38, 60 and 68. The sources date from the first century BCE to the third CE. The meeting is chronologically possible, but the reply has the shape of a school chreia and circulated as a rhetorical exercise; most historians regard it as of uncertain historicity or legendary. The same-day death comes from Demetrius of Magnesia (Diogenes Laertius VI 79).

Source: Plutarco. Vida de Alejandro 14, en Vidas paralelas, s. I–II d. C. Trad. inglesa llamada «de Dryden», revisada por Arthur Hugh Clough, Plutarch's Lives, 1864 (Project Gutenberg n.º 674).

Testimonyc. 360–340 a. C.

The jar in the Metroon (and the barrel that never was)

Newly arrived in Athens, Diogenes wrote to someone asking him to find him a cottage. As the matter dragged on, he settled in a jar in the Metroon, the sanctuary of the Mother of the Gods beside the agora, where the public archives were also kept. In summer he rolled in burning sand and in winter embraced snow-covered statues, to harden himself. Laertius adds that the Athenians were fond of him: when a youth broke his jar, they flogged the youth and gave Diogenes another. The vessel was a pithos, a large clay jar half sunk in the ground to store grain, wine or oil, and Juvenal, centuries later, still speaks of a testa, a piece of earthenware that does not burn and, if broken, is mended with lead. The hooped wooden barrel, so familiar from paintings and engravings, did not exist in fourth-century Greece.

Origin of the story: Diogenes Laertius VI 23, citing Diogenes' own (lost) letters, and VI 43; Juvenal, Satires XIV 308–314. Life in the pithos is well attested in the ancient tradition; its transformation into a barrel comes from later readings of the Latin dolium and from medieval and modern iconography (Roubineau 2023).

Source: Diógenes Laercio. Vidas y opiniones de los filósofos ilustres, libro VI, 20–81 (Diógenes), 85–93 (Crates) y 104–105 (doctrina cínica), s. III d. C. Trad. inglesa de R. D. Hicks, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library 185, Heinemann / Harvard University Press, 1925 (Wikisource en inglés); texto griego en Wikisource griega; trad. de C. D. Yonge, Bohn, Londres, 1853 (Project Gutenberg n.º 57342).

Oral traditions. IV a. C.

The lamp in broad daylight

One day Diogenes lit a lamp at noon and walked through the city holding it up. To those who asked what he was doing he answered: "I am looking for a man." He was not looking for an honest man, as modern versions say, but for a human being in the full sense, someone who lived according to reason and nature rather than as a slave of custom. Laertius tells a twin gesture elsewhere: Diogenes shouted "Men!" and, when people gathered, drove them off with his stick, saying he had called for men, not scoundrels. And returning from Olympia, asked whether there had been a great crowd, he replied: a great crowd, but few men. The lamp condenses the Cynic critique into an image: crowds abound, humanity is scarce.

Origin of the story: Diogenes Laertius VI 41 (the lamp), VI 32 (citing Hecato's Chreiai: "I called for men") and VI 60 (Olympia). Laertius gives no source for the lamp. It is a chreia of oral and school transmission; its meaning is certain, its historicity is not. The adjective "honest" is modern.

Source: Diógenes Laercio. Vidas y opiniones de los filósofos ilustres, libro VI, 20–81 (Diógenes), 85–93 (Crates) y 104–105 (doctrina cínica), s. III d. C. Trad. inglesa de R. D. Hicks, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library 185, Heinemann / Harvard University Press, 1925 (Wikisource en inglés); texto griego en Wikisource griega; trad. de C. D. Yonge, Bohn, Londres, 1853 (Project Gutenberg n.º 57342).

Oral traditionc. 360–347 a. C.

Plato's man

Plato had defined man as a "featherless biped" and the definition had been applauded in the Academy. Diogenes plucked a fowl, brought it into the school and said: "This is Plato's man." In consequence, Laertius says, "with broad nails" was added to the definition. The anecdote sums up the relationship between the two as tradition wished it: the Cynic opposing the visible thing to the abstraction. Laertius piles up others: Diogenes trampling Plato's carpets—"I trample on Plato's pride", "with pride of another sort", Plato replies—mocking the "tablehood" and "cuphood" of the Forms, and Plato calling him "a Socrates gone mad". Plato's jokes about definitions by division really exist: in the Statesman (266e) the class of featherless bipeds appears as a playful classification.

Origin of the story: Diogenes Laertius VI 40 (the fowl), VI 26 (the carpets, with a variant attributed to Sotion), VI 53 ("tablehood") and VI 54 ("a Socrates gone mad", a phrase Aelian, Varia Historia XIV 33, puts in Plato's mouth). They are chreiai with no contemporary source; the playful definition of featherless bipeds is in Plato, Statesman 266e.

Source: Diógenes Laercio. Vidas y opiniones de los filósofos ilustres, libro VI, 20–81 (Diógenes), 85–93 (Crates) y 104–105 (doctrina cínica), s. III d. C. Trad. inglesa de R. D. Hicks, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library 185, Heinemann / Harvard University Press, 1925 (Wikisource en inglés); texto griego en Wikisource griega; trad. de C. D. Yonge, Bohn, Londres, 1853 (Project Gutenberg n.º 57342).

Disputedfecha desconocida

Sell me to that man; he needs a master

Sailing to Aegina, Diogenes fell into the hands of pirates who took him to Crete to be sold as a slave. When the auctioneer asked him what he could do, he answered: "Govern men", and asked him to announce whether anyone wished to buy himself a master. Forbidden to sit down, he remarked that fish are sold in any position. On seeing a Corinthian with a purple-bordered robe, Xeniades, he said: "Sell me to that man; he needs a master." Xeniades bought him, took him to Corinth, entrusted him with the education of his sons and the running of his house, and used to say that a good genius had entered it. When his friends wanted to ransom him, Diogenes called them simpletons: lions are not the slaves of those who feed them, but the other way round.

Origin of the story: Diogenes Laertius VI 29–31 and 74–75, citing The Sale of Diogenes by the satirist Menippus of Gadara (third century BCE), a work of the same title by Eubulus and Cleomenes' On Pedagogues. The origin in a satire, the exemplary tone and the contradictory versions of his release lead many specialists to regard it as literary fiction; others accept a historical core. Lucian took up the motif in Philosophies for Sale.

Source: Diógenes Laercio. Vidas y opiniones de los filósofos ilustres, libro VI, 20–81 (Diógenes), 85–93 (Crates) y 104–105 (doctrina cínica), s. III d. C. Trad. inglesa de R. D. Hicks, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library 185, Heinemann / Harvard University Press, 1925 (Wikisource en inglés); texto griego en Wikisource griega; trad. de C. D. Yonge, Bohn, Londres, 1853 (Project Gutenberg n.º 57342).

Disputedmediados del s. IV a. C.

Defacing the currency

Hicesias, Diogenes' father, was a banker in Sinope in charge of public funds. Something happened to the city's coinage: according to Diocles, the father debased it and the son had to leave; according to Eubulides, the son did it and both went into exile; according to others, the father died in prison and the son fled. A more elaborate version says that Diogenes, in charge of the mint workers, consulted Apollo and the god authorised him to "alter the political currency"; he took it literally. Later, when the crime was thrown in his face, he would answer: "There was a time when I was such as you are now; such as I am now, you will never be." The Greek phrase, paracharattein to nomisma, plays on nomisma (coin) and nomos (law, custom), and Laertius concludes that Diogenes truly altered the currency by granting convention none of the authority he granted nature.

Origin of the story: Diogenes Laertius VI 20–21, 56 and 71, with contradictory sources (Diocles, Eubulides and Diogenes' own lost Pordalus). Sinopean coins of c. 350–340 BCE defaced with a chisel and issues bearing the name of Hicesias (Hikesio) support a historical core, according to Navia and Branham; the oracle is generally considered a later invention inspired by Socrates' own.

Source: Navia, Luis E. Diogenes the Cynic: The War Against the World. Humanity Books, Amherst (Nueva York), 2005.

Disputedc. 323 a. C.

Three deaths and a marble dog

Diogenes died in Corinth, a very old man. No one knew quite how. Some said from colic after eating a raw octopus; others that, while sharing an octopus with the dogs, one bit the tendon of his foot; his followers, according to Antisthenes of Rhodes, that he had ended his life by holding his breath: they went to look for him at the Craneum, found him wrapped in his cloak as if asleep, though he never slept by day, and on drawing back the cloak found him dead. The poet Cercidas celebrated this voluntary end in verse. His followers came to blows over the honour of burying him, until their fathers and the notables intervened. He was buried by the gate to the Isthmus, beneath a pillar crowned with a dog of Parian marble, and Sinope, the city that had exiled him, raised bronze statues to him with an epigram: time ages bronze, but not your glory.

Origin of the story: Diogenes Laertius VI 76–79, with multiple sources (Cercidas, Antisthenes of Rhodes, Demetrius of Magnesia). The tomb with the marble dog is also mentioned by Pausanias (II 2.4) at the entrance to Corinth. The causes of death are mutually incompatible and several have a symbolic intent (the dog, self-mastery); the synchronism with Alexander is legendary.

Source: Diógenes Laercio. Vidas y opiniones de los filósofos ilustres, libro VI, 20–81 (Diógenes), 85–93 (Crates) y 104–105 (doctrina cínica), s. III d. C. Trad. inglesa de R. D. Hicks, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library 185, Heinemann / Harvard University Press, 1925 (Wikisource en inglés); texto griego en Wikisource griega; trad. de C. D. Yonge, Bohn, Londres, 1853 (Project Gutenberg n.º 57342).

Teachings

Teachings

The notions that structure their thought, explained in context.

Defacing the currency (paracharattein to nomisma)paracharattein-to-nomisma
Literally, the phrase names the offence that banished Diogenes from Sinope: defacing or debasing the coinage. Tradition turned it into the motto of his philosophy through a pun: *nomisma*, coin, shares its root with *nomos*, law or custom. To deface the currency comes to mean revaluing current values, withdrawing from circulation what the city holds valuable—wealth, fame, lineage, modesty—and putting in its place what is valuable by nature. Diogenes Laertius says so explicitly when summing up his doctrine: he truly defaced the currency by granting convention none of the authority he granted nature. The oracle that, in one version, ordered him to do it is probably a later elaboration, but the formula captures the Cynic programme well: not to found a school or a system but to discredit, through one's own conduct, the counterfeit coins of social life.

Diogenes Laertius VI 20–21, 56 and 71. It is the key through which ancient tradition read his whole life, and the one modern studies take up (Desmond, Roubineau).

Source: Diógenes Laercio. Vidas y opiniones de los filósofos ilustres, libro VI, 20–81 (Diógenes), 85–93 (Crates) y 104–105 (doctrina cínica), s. III d. C. Trad. inglesa de R. D. Hicks, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library 185, Heinemann / Harvard University Press, 1925 (Wikisource en inglés); texto griego en Wikisource griega; trad. de C. D. Yonge, Bohn, Londres, 1853 (Project Gutenberg n.º 57342).

Askesis (training)askesis
For Diogenes, virtue is not learned from books but through training. Laertius credits him with an explicit theory: there are two kinds of training, of body and of soul, and neither is complete without the other; just as craftsmen, flute-players and athletes reach astonishing skill through practice, whoever transferred that effort to the soul would attain virtue. Nothing in life succeeds without training, and training can overcome anything. But the training must be what nature requires, not the useless labours imposed by ambition or custom. Hence voluntary exposure to cold, heat, hunger and contempt, which is not religious mortification but training for freedom: whoever grows used to hardship ceases to depend on fortune. The final paradox is hedonistic: contempt for pleasure, once habitual, is more pleasant than pleasure itself.

Diogenes Laertius VI 70–71, a passage studied by Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé (L'Ascèse cynique, 1986). The notion passed into Stoicism and, by other routes, into the vocabulary of Christian monasticism.

Source: Diógenes Laercio. Vidas y opiniones de los filósofos ilustres, libro VI, 20–81 (Diógenes), 85–93 (Crates) y 104–105 (doctrina cínica), s. III d. C. Trad. inglesa de R. D. Hicks, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library 185, Heinemann / Harvard University Press, 1925 (Wikisource en inglés); texto griego en Wikisource griega; trad. de C. D. Yonge, Bohn, Londres, 1853 (Project Gutenberg n.º 57342).

Self-sufficiency (autarkeia)autarkeia
Self-sufficiency is the goal of the Cynic life: to need as little as possible in order to depend as little as possible. Diogenes, Laertius says, held that it is the privilege of the gods to need nothing and of god-like men to need little. The anecdotes translate this into gestures: the doubled cloak serving as garment and bed, the wallet, the jar as a house, the cup thrown away on seeing a child drink from his hands, the reply to Alexander. The epigram on the statues at Sinope sums it up: Diogenes taught mortals the lesson of self-sufficiency and the easiest path of life. It is not poverty for its own sake but freedom: one who needs nothing cannot be bought, threatened or humiliated, which is why Diogenes the slave could say his buyer needed a master.

Diogenes Laertius VI 37, 78 and 105. The idea has Socratic roots (Xenophon, Memorabilia I 6.10) and will be central to Stoicism and Epicureanism, though with different content.

Source: Diógenes Laercio. Vidas y opiniones de los filósofos ilustres, libro VI, 20–81 (Diógenes), 85–93 (Crates) y 104–105 (doctrina cínica), s. III d. C. Trad. inglesa de R. D. Hicks, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library 185, Heinemann / Harvard University Press, 1925 (Wikisource en inglés); texto griego en Wikisource griega; trad. de C. D. Yonge, Bohn, Londres, 1853 (Project Gutenberg n.º 57342).

Shamelessness (anaideia)anaideia
Diogenes' most scandalous conduct—eating in the agora, satisfying bodily needs in public, mocking modesty—had an argument behind it. If something is not shameful in private, it is not shameful in public; if breakfasting is not absurd, neither is breakfasting in the square. Shame, on this reading, is a product of convention rather than nature, and submitting to it is a form of slavery. Cynic shamelessness thus works as both test and teaching: it forces the onlooker to ask why he is scandalised by what is natural and not by what is unjust. Laertius credits him with the idea that most people are so nearly mad that a finger makes the difference: whoever walks with the middle finger stretched out is thought mad, but not with the little finger. The adjective "Cynic", from *kyon*, dog, was born precisely from that life lived in full view.

Diogenes Laertius VI 35, 58, 61 and 69. The early Stoics inherited part of this programme, as Zeno's Republic shows; the Stoics of the imperial age softened it.

Source: Diógenes Laercio. Vidas y opiniones de los filósofos ilustres, libro VI, 20–81 (Diógenes), 85–93 (Crates) y 104–105 (doctrina cínica), s. III d. C. Trad. inglesa de R. D. Hicks, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library 185, Heinemann / Harvard University Press, 1925 (Wikisource en inglés); texto griego en Wikisource griega; trad. de C. D. Yonge, Bohn, Londres, 1853 (Project Gutenberg n.º 57342).

Frankness (parrhesia)parresia
*Parrhesia* is the right and duty to say everything. In democratic Athens it was a privilege of the citizen in the assembly; Diogenes, exiled and stateless, exercised it without title against everyone, from the market vendor to Philip and Alexander. Asked what was the most beautiful thing among men, he answered frankness. His retorts—to the king, to Plato, to the rich, to the superstitious—are exercises in parrhesia, and their force depends on the speaker having nothing to lose: without house, goods or fear, no one can punish him. Michel Foucault devoted his last course at the Collège de France (1984) to this notion and saw in Cynicism the most radical form of ancient parrhesia, one in which truth is not only spoken but lived and displayed in one's own body, at the risk of scandal.

Diogenes Laertius VI 69; Foucault, Le Courage de la vérité (2009). Cynic parrhesia became a commonplace of imperial-age moral literature (Epictetus, Dio of Prusa, Lucian).

Source: Foucault, Michel. Le Courage de la vérité. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II. Cours au Collège de France, 1983–1984, ed. Frédéric Gros. Gallimard / Seuil (Hautes Études), París, 2009.

Citizen of the world (kosmopolites)kosmopolites
Asked where he came from, Diogenes answered: *kosmopolites*, citizen of the world. It is the first known occurrence of the word. In the mouth of an exile it has an obvious negative charge: I belong to no city, I recognise neither the borders nor the particular laws of the poleis. But it also has a positive sense, which Laertius records in summarising his Republic: the only right constitution is that of the cosmos. The sage lives according to nature, which is common to all, and not according to the nomoi of his city. The Stoics, starting with Zeno, turned this negation into a theory of the universal community of rational beings, and by that route the idea reached Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and, much later, Kant's Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. In Diogenes, however, it is less a political programme than a form of freedom: owing nothing to any homeland.

Diogenes Laertius VI 63 and 72; Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City (1991). It is one of Cynicism's legacies most studied by contemporary political philosophy.

Source: Schofield, Malcolm. The Stoic Idea of the City. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991 (cap. 1 y apéndices sobre la República de Diógenes y la de Zenón).

Nature versus convention (physis and nomos)physis-nomos
The opposition between what is by nature (*physis*) and what is by law or custom (*nomos*) came from fifth-century sophistry, but Diogenes made it a rule of life. He claimed to oppose nature to convention, and the anecdotes show him taking animals and children as models: a mouse running about without seeking a bed or fearing the dark taught him to adapt to any circumstance; a child drinking from his hands, to get rid of his cup. His Republic draws the most radical consequences: if marriage, property, coinage or even dietary taboos are conventions, the sage is not bound by them. That radicalism was the main obstacle to the reception of Cynicism and explains why later Stoics tried to distance themselves from his Republic.

Diogenes Laertius VI 22, 37, 38 and 71–73. The tension between Cynic radicalism and its Stoic domestication is well documented in Philodemus (On the Stoics) and in Diogenes Laertius VII 32–34.

Source: Diógenes Laercio. Vidas y opiniones de los filósofos ilustres, libro VI, 20–81 (Diógenes), 85–93 (Crates) y 104–105 (doctrina cínica), s. III d. C. Trad. inglesa de R. D. Hicks, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library 185, Heinemann / Harvard University Press, 1925 (Wikisource en inglés); texto griego en Wikisource griega; trad. de C. D. Yonge, Bohn, Londres, 1853 (Project Gutenberg n.º 57342).

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Videos

Recordings, interviews and documentaries. Videos play from YouTube; they are not hosted here.

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  • Thomas W. Laqueur: Diogenes and His "Preposterous" Views on the Dead || Radcliffe Institute

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  • Hellenistic Philosophy 2.3.2 Diogenes of Sinope and Cynicism (version 1)

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Gallery

Gallery

Images with verified licences. Each keeps its authorship and attribution.

Manuscripts

Manuscripts

Manuscript witnesses and ancient texts, with their custodian and conditions of access.

  • GRC · Minúscula griega · Obra de c. 225 d. C.; copia del s. XII

    Βίοι καὶ γνῶμαι τῶν ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ εὐδοκιμησάντων (Codex Borbonicus, «B»)

    Surviving witness
    Uno de los tres testimonios principales y completos de la obra, con el Parisinus graecus 1759 (P) y el Laurentianus 69.13 (F), según la edición crítica de Tiziano Dorandi.
    Custodian
    Biblioteca Nazionale «Vittorio Emanuele III», Nápoles · Neapolitanus III B 29

  • GRC · Mayúscula griega (papiro) · s. I a. C.

    Φιλοδήμου Περὶ τῶν Στωικῶν (PHerc. 155 y 339)

    Surviving witness
    Rollos de papiro carbonizados en la erupción del Vesubio del 79 d. C., hallados en la Villa de los Papiros de Herculano.
    Custodian
    Biblioteca Nazionale «Vittorio Emanuele III», Officina dei Papiri Ercolanesi, Nápoles · PHerc. 155; PHerc. 339
Manuscripts →

Connections

Connections

Influences, discipleships and affinities. Documented relations are distinguished from similarities identified by analysis.

  • Influenced by

    Socrates

    Cynicism claimed descent from Socrates through Antisthenes; Plato reportedly called Diogenes "a Socrates gone mad" (Diogenes Laertius VI 54; Aelian, Varia Historia XIV 33).

    Documented relation

  • Disciple of

    Antístenes

    Diogenes Laertius (VI 21) relates that Antisthenes accepted him as a pupil after trying to drive him off with his staff; the relationship is doubtful on chronological grounds (Antisthenes died around 366).

    Documented relation

  • Disagreed with

    Plato

    Diogenes Laertius (VI 24–26, 40, 53–54, 58) transmits many jibes between them—the plucked fowl, the carpets, "tablehood"; they are anecdotes of late tradition, but reflect a real opposition between Cynicism and the Academy.

    Documented relation

  • Contemporary of

    Aristotle

    Aristotle quotes in the Rhetoric (III 10, 1411a24) a metaphor by "the Dog" about taverns: the only certain contemporary testimony on Diogenes. Diogenes Laertius (V 18) adds an anecdote about figs between them, of doubtful historicity.

    Documented relation

  • Teacher of

    Crates de Tebas

    Crates, the "door-opener", was his most famous pupil according to Diogenes Laertius (VI 85–87) and passed Cynicism on to Zeno of Citium.

    Documented relation

  • Influenced

    Zeno of Citium

    A pupil of Crates (Diogenes Laertius VII 2–4); his Republic, which an ancient joke says he wrote "on the dog's tail", continues Diogenes', as Philodemus stresses in On the Stoics.

    Documented relation

  • Contemporary of

    Epicurus

    Epicurus (b. 341 BCE) did his ephebic service in Athens around 323, the year Diogenes died; there is no report that they met. Epicurean ethics expressly rejected the Cynic life: the sage, according to Epicurus, "will not play the Cynic" (Diogenes Laertius X 119).

    Similarity identified by analysis

  • Influenced

    Epictetus

    Epictetus devotes Discourse III 22 ("On Cynicism") to the ideal Cynic and holds up Diogenes as a model of freedom and frankness.

    Documented relation

  • Influenced

    Marcus Aurelius

    In the Meditations (VIII 3) he places Diogenes, with Heraclitus and Socrates, above Alexander, Caesar and Pompey; in XI 6 he compares his freedom of speech with that of Old Comedy.

    Documented relation

  • Met

    Alejandro Magno

    The encounter at the Craneum is transmitted by Plutarch, Arrian, Cicero and Diogenes Laertius; it is chronologically possible (336–335 BCE), but its historicity is debated.

    Similarity identified by analysis

  • Ideas akin to

    Jesus of Nazareth

    Some scholars (F. Gerald Downing, John Dominic Crossan) have compared Jesus' itinerancy, poverty and social critique with those of the Cynics; the hypothesis is much debated and implies no direct influence.

    Similarity identified by analysis

  • Ideas akin to

    Zhuangzi

    A typological parallel: rejection of convention, humour and a preference for the natural over the artificial bring them together, without any historical contact.

    Similarity identified by analysis

Linked from other profiles

Sources

Sources

Bibliography and catalogues consulted for this profile.

  1. Hard, Robin (trad.). Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes, with Other Popular Moralists. Oxford University Press (Oxford World's Classics), Oxford, 2012.
  2. Wikidata, entidad Q59180 «Diogenes of Sinope» (122 enlaces entre wikis; P31=Q5). Registra nacimiento en 412, 403 o 400 a. C. y muerte en 323 a. C. (precisión: año); lugar de muerte, Corinto.
  3. Diógenes Laercio. Vidas y opiniones de los filósofos ilustres, libro VI, 20–81 (Diógenes), 85–93 (Crates) y 104–105 (doctrina cínica), s. III d. C. Trad. inglesa de R. D. Hicks, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library 185, Heinemann / Harvard University Press, 1925 (Wikisource en inglés); texto griego en Wikisource griega; trad. de C. D. Yonge, Bohn, Londres, 1853 (Project Gutenberg n.º 57342).
  4. Diógenes Laercio. Los diez libros de Diógenes Laercio sobre las vidas, opiniones y sentencias de los filósofos más ilustres, trad. de José Ortiz y Sanz, tomo II (libros VI–X). Imprenta Real, Madrid, 1792 (ejemplar de la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Sevilla en Internet Archive).
  5. Plutarco. Vida de Alejandro 14, en Vidas paralelas, s. I–II d. C. Trad. inglesa llamada «de Dryden», revisada por Arthur Hugh Clough, Plutarch's Lives, 1864 (Project Gutenberg n.º 674).
  6. Cicerón. Disputaciones tusculanas I 104 y V 92, 45 a. C. Texto latino en The Latin Library; trad. inglesa de C. D. Yonge, Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, Harper, Nueva York, 1877 (Project Gutenberg n.º 14988).
  7. Aristóteles. Retórica III 10, 1411a24 («el Perro» llama a las tabernas «los comedores comunes del Ática»). Trad. inglesa de W. Rhys Roberts, Oxford, 1924 (Internet Classics Archive, MIT); texto griego en Wikisource griega (Ρητορική/3).
  8. Malherbe, Abraham J. (ed. y trad.). The Cynic Epistles: A Study Edition. Scholars Press para la Society of Biblical Literature, Missoula, 1977 (Sources for Biblical Study, 12).
  9. Giannantoni, Gabriele (ed.). Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae, 4 vols. Bibliopolis, Nápoles, 1990; vol. II, sección V B: testimonios y fragmentos de Diógenes de Sinope.
  10. Dorandi, Tiziano. «Filodemo, Gli Stoici (PHerc. 155 e 339)». Cronache Ercolanesi 12 (1982). Edición del tratado de Filodemo que defiende la autenticidad de la República de Diógenes y discute la de Zenón.
  11. Schofield, Malcolm. The Stoic Idea of the City. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991 (cap. 1 y apéndices sobre la República de Diógenes y la de Zenón).
  12. Dudley, Donald R. A History of Cynicism from Diogenes to the 6th Century A.D. Methuen, Londres, 1937.
  13. Navia, Luis E. Diogenes the Cynic: The War Against the World. Humanity Books, Amherst (Nueva York), 2005.
  14. Desmond, William D. Cynics. Acumen, Stocksfield, 2008 (Ancient Philosophies, 3); ed. estadounidense University of California Press, 2008.
  15. Roubineau, Jean-Manuel. Diogène. L'antiphilosophe. Presses Universitaires de France, París, 2020; trad. inglesa: Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic, Oxford University Press, Nueva York, 2023.
  16. Piering, Julie. «Diogenes of Sinope». Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ISSN 2161-0002), Universidad de Tennessee en Martin.
  17. Branham, R. Bracht y Goulet-Cazé, Marie-Odile (eds.). The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996.
  18. Epicteto. Disertaciones recogidas por Arriano III 22 («Sobre el cinismo»), c. 108 d. C. Trad. inglesa de George Long, A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus with the Encheiridion (Project Gutenberg n.º 10661).
  19. Marco Aurelio. Meditaciones VIII 3 y XI 6 (numeración estándar; en la traducción de Casaubon, VIII 3 y XI 5), c. 170–180 d. C. Trad. inglesa de Meric Casaubon (1634), Meditations (Project Gutenberg n.º 2680).
  20. «Diogenes», Wikipedia en inglés, y «Diógenes de Sinope», Wikipedia en español (consultadas para contrastar datos y bibliografía; texto propio).
  21. Open Library (Internet Archive): ediciones de Diógenes Laercio y de los cínicos verificadas por ISBN.
  22. García Gual, Carlos. La secta del perro. Diógenes Laercio: Vidas de los filósofos cínicos. Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1987.
  23. Juvenal. Sátiras XIV 308–314 («dolia nudi non ardent Cynici… testa cum vidit in illa magnum habitatorem»), comienzos del s. II d. C. Texto latino en The Latin Library.
  24. Arriano. Anábasis de Alejandro VII 2.1, s. II d. C. Trad. inglesa de E. J. Chinnock, The Anabasis of Alexander, Hodder and Stoughton, Londres, 1884 (Project Gutenberg n.º 46976).
  25. Foucault, Michel. Le Courage de la vérité. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II. Cours au Collège de France, 1983–1984, ed. Frédéric Gros. Gallimard / Seuil (Hautes Études), París, 2009.
  26. Wikimedia Commons: Jean-Léon Gérôme, «Diogenes» (1860), Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, n.º 37.131; ficha del fichero con la descripción del museo.
  27. Juliano. Discursos «Contra los cínicos ignorantes» y «Al cínico Heraclio», 362 d. C. Trad. inglesa de Wilmer Cave Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library, 1913 (Wikisource en inglés).
  28. Dorandi, Tiziano (ed.). Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries, 50), Cambridge, 2013 (edición crítica; introducción sobre la tradición manuscrita: B, P y F).
  29. Martín García, José Antonio (ed. y trad.). Los filósofos cínicos y la literatura moral serioburlesca, 2 vols., revisión de Cristóbal Macías Villalobos. Akal (Clásica), Madrid, 2008.
Rights holder
Textos antiguos en dominio público; cada traducción y edición moderna pertenece a su traductor o editorial

Pending confirmation

What this profile has not yet been able to settle. We would rather say so than fill it in.

  • Fecha de nacimiento: se adopta c. 412 a. C. (muerte en 323 «casi a los noventa», Diógenes Laercio VI 76); Censorino da 81 años (c. 404) y Wikidata registra 412, 403 y 400. Fecha y lugar exactos de la muerte, inciertos (Corinto según la tradición mayoritaria).
  • Tradiciones: el catálogo (content/traditions.json) no tiene «cinismo»; se asigna provisionalmente «stoicism» por la filiación Diógenes–Crates–Zenón. Valorar dar de alta una tradición «cynicism».
  • Edición española con ISBN de la República y de los testimonios: solo se ha verificado el ISBN de Akal (2008), que Open Library registra sin tomo; confirmar si corresponde al vol. I o al II.
  • Manuscritos: no se ha verificado digitalización oficial del Neapolitanus III B 29 de Diógenes Laercio ni de los papiros PHerc. 155 y 339; añadir también el Parisinus gr. 1759 (P) y el Laurentianus 69.13 (F) con sus enlaces cuando se comprueben.
  • Numismática: citar la publicación original sobre las monedas de Sinope desfiguradas y con el nombre de Hicesias (se ha usado la síntesis de Navia y Branham).
  • Programas de afiliación: ninguno verificado (Alianza, Akal, OUP, Harvard). Lista vacía.
  • Vídeos: no se ha encontrado un documental de televisión pública dedicado a Diógenes en un canal oficial; el curso de Foucault y la conferencia de García Gual proceden de canales no oficiales.

Researched on 2026-10-25