Diogenes the Cynic (c.404-323 BC)

Martin Jenkins recalls what we know for sure about the philosopher in the barrel.

- By Martin Jenkins. Photographs by Alexei Talimonov

Socrates notoriously never wrote anything down, but we at least have dialogues written by his contemporaries Plato and Xenophon claiming to record what he said. Diogenes may or may not have written something: later sources quote the titles of lost works attributed to him. We also have letters alleged to be by him, although these are generally agreed to be fakes. But he had no contemporary recorder of his thoughts. We have to reconstruct his life and ideas from quotations and anecdotes in sources long after his lifetime. Some are probably genuine, others less so. It’s like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle without a picture to work from, knowing that you probably don’t have all the pieces, and that some of the pieces that you do have might not belong to the puzzle at all.

Let us start with what seems to be reasonably certain. Diogenes the Cynic was born in the Greek city of Sinope, on the southern shore of the Black Sea, at the very edge of the Hellenic world. Go any further east and you encountered the Scythians, horse-borne nomads whom the Greeks considered barbarians. Sinope was a major trading centre. It lay at the end of a trade route from Mesopotamia and forwarded luxury goods to the heart of the Hellenic world.