The philosopher who lived in a jar and told Alexander the Great to move.
When the most powerful man in the world asked Diogenes if he wanted anything, the ragged philosopher reportedly replied: yes, stand out of my sun. Diogenes slept in a storage jar, begged for food, carried a lamp in daylight 'looking for a man', and called himself a citizen of the world.
Diogenes was born around 413 to 403 BC in Sinope, a Greek colony on the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey. His father was a money-changer, and the family was comfortable until a scandal over debasing the city's coinage. Ancient sources disagree about who was to blame, and modern scholars are divided on whether the episode really happened, though debased Sinopean coins from the period exist. Either way, Diogenes ended up in exile, and later made 'defacing the currency' a motto for his mission: to challenge the value of society's conventions.
In Athens he lived with deliberate poverty, begging and sheltering in a large ceramic storage jar. He became a founder of Cynicism, from the Greek word for dog, a label he embraced: he said he fawned on those who gave him something and barked at those who didn't. Plato reportedly called him 'Socrates gone mad'. When Plato defined a human being as a featherless biped, Diogenes is said to have brought a plucked chicken to Plato's school and announced, 'Here is Plato's man.' When a follower of Zeno argued that motion was impossible, he simply got up and walked off.
The famous meeting with Alexander probably took place around 336 BC near Corinth. According to Plutarch, when Alexander asked if he could do anything for him, Diogenes asked him to stand out of his sun, and Alexander told his laughing courtiers that if he were not Alexander, he would be Diogenes. Like much of Diogenes's life, the story comes to us as anecdote, and some of it is surely legend. The claim that he died on the same night as Alexander, in 323 BC, is probably one such tale.
Behind the theatre lay a serious philosophy: virtue matters more than custom, freedom comes from needing little, and nature is a better guide than convention. Asked where he came from, he answered with a single word, kosmopolitēs, 'citizen of the world', which may be the origin of the idea of cosmopolitanism. Raphael painted him sprawled on the steps in The School of Athens.
Source: Wikipedia — Diogenes · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
