It was open to foreigners and the lower classes, and thus to Diogenes. He studied philosophy under Antisthenes, a crusty type who hated students, emphasized self-knowledge, discipline, and restraint, and held forth at a gymnasium named The Silver Hound in the garden district outside the city. Diogenes made his way to Athens, where he took up the jibe of being an outcast’s son by saying that he, too, was a debaser of the coinage: meaning that, as a philosopher, his business was to assay custom and convention and sort the counterfeit from the solid currency. ![]() His father, an official at the mint, was convicted of debasing the coinage, and the family was disgraced and exiled. “A benevolent spirit has entered my house,” Xeniades said.ĭiogenes was born in 404 BC in Sinope on the Black Sea, the modern Sinop in Turkey. He became the teacher of Xeniades’ sons, a member of the family. ![]() Diogenes was a stray, a citizen of no city-state, a man without property or kin. In the world at that time, as now, kidnapping for ransom was a Mediterranean enterprise. “Sell me to that man,” Diogenes had said at the slave market, “he needs a master.” Diogenes had come up for sale when he was captured at sea, on his way to Aigina. He died at Corinth in his eighty-first year (some say ninetieth), a slave belonging to Xeniades, who bought him from the pirate Skirpalos (or, according to Cicero, Harpalus). Among the tombs that line the road into Corinth, Pausanias says in his Travels, you can see in a stand of cypress and pine near the city gate the grave of Diogenes of Sinope, the philosopher whom the Athenians called The Dog, “a Sokrates gone mad.” If you want to see how Davenport handled Diogenis (and Herakleitos), you’ll have to get hold of his book Herakleitos and Diogenes in the meantime, and to whet your appetite, I’ll throw in a few dog biscuits in the form of his introduction to the Diogenes section of the book:ĭIOGENES OF SINOPE. The late Guy Davenport did a masterly job of extracting the practical words of this Athenian street philosopher from the apochryphal anecdotes in which they have come down to us. On the other hand, poets are free to chase after anything that might add to the existing body poetic-so long as they are careful not to let their art go to the dogs in the process. MELIGALAS, Greece-( Weekly Hubris)-7/26/10-So much has been said about this famous meeting of singular souls that the poem above might seem superfluous, yea, even hapless-akin to a dog barking at a cat that has escaped the cur’s clutches by climbing up the nearest tree. This purebred jackanapes blocking his sun ![]() By Vassilis Zambaras Alexander Meets Diogenes
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