not in a house but in a clay wine jar as large as a tub. In order to inure himself to hardship, he rolled in hot sand in the summer and embraced statues covered in snow in the winter. He tried to live as naturally as possible. After watching a boy drink water from the hollow of his hand, he took out the cup he had been carrying in his knapsack and broke it, exclaiming, “Fool that I am, to have been carrying superfluous baggage all this time!”
His appearance was disheveled, his insignia was his staff, and they called him “the Dog” (kuon in Greek, or “cynic” in English). Once, when he was asked why he was called the Dog, he replied that “I fawn on those who give me anything, I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals.” Lacking any other source of income, he lived off alms. The beggars who copied his way of life were called doglike, or “cynics.” They were moralizing buskers, street people who survived on the indulgence of others, serious clowns supported by members of a social order they had chosen to mock in word and deed.
The number of Diogenes’ written works—indeed, whether he wrote anything at all—was disputed in antiquity. One author attributed thirteen dialogues to him, including a Republic, a Pordalos (with a title derived from the Greek word for “fart”), and seven tragedies, including an Oedipus that may, like many of these works, have been a parody (since Diogenes is shown elsewhere suggesting that Oedipus was an arrogant ignoramus who should simply have legalized incest in Thebes).
According to Philodemus (c. 110–35 B.C.), Diogenes broached a number of impious ideas in these written works. Arguing that nothing is good, beautiful, or just by nature, he defended such practices as cannibalism; incest; promiscuity, even with slaves; and the killing of one’s father. Philodemus argued that the content of this corpus was so scandalous that the works themselves had been deliberately suppressed and summaries often bowdlerized, especially by respectable Stoics who wished to count Diogenes, along with Socrates, as a forerunner and role model.
As a result, Diogenes became a creature of conflicting legends, and as the debate over his virtues and vices grew, his myth began to spread. He became a favorite figure for satirists, and also for Greek and Roman artists, and a number of representations survive, in marble, bronze, and terra-cotta, in wall paintings and figurines, on mosaics and coins and medallions. The sheer wealth of such material makes it clear that his example, however mythic, exerted a broad influence.
Most of the ancient accounts agree that Diogenes, unlike Socrates, did not seek out orators and Sophists in order to question their beliefs. Unlike Plato, he did not organize a group of philosophical friends to give public lectures or groom disciples in private, nor did he evince the slightest interest in public affairs or political power. Instead, he was a solitary man who kept largely to himself, other than venturing out on rare occasions to visit the great athletic venues and to join the crowds from the Greek-speaking world that flocked to the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games. “For it was his custom at the great assemblies to make a study of the pursuits and ambitions of men, of their reasons for being abroad, and of the things on which they prided themselves.” When curious bystanders gathered around him, he made a spectacle of himself with fearless speech and shameless antics, promising that “all who should follow his treatment would be relieved of folly, wickedness, and intemperance.”
Valuing freedom above everything, he exemplified a life of primitive independence, shorn of needless wants and material possessions. At the same time and perhaps with the same goal in mind, Diogenes routinely flouted what he took to be unnecessary rules and customs. In both of these ways, the Dog offered a model of conduct to a series of subsequent philosophers, from Zeno in ancient Greece to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in eighteenth-century France.
His behavior could seem gratuitously repulsive. He thought masturbating in public was a perfectly natural thing to do: “It was his habit to do everything in public, the works of Demeter and Aphrodite alike. He used to produce such arguments as this. ‘If taking breakfast is nothing out of place, then it is nothing out of place in the marketplace. But taking breakfast is nothing out of place, therefore it is nothing out of place to take breakfast in the marketplace.’