The Man Who Told a King to Move
Diogenes of Sinope—“Cynicism”
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orinth. 336 BCE. A young king stepped off his horse and walked toward a man lying in the dirt. The man did not get up. He barely looked interested. |
The man was Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404–323 BCE), a Greek philosopher exiled from his hometown after some kind of scandal involving defaced coins. He drifted to Athens with nothing, and there fell in with Antisthenes, a former student of Socrates. Antisthenes tried, several times, to chase him off with a stick. Diogenes kept coming back.
He ended up sleeping in a large ceramic storage jar in the Athens marketplace. He owned almost nothing, ate scraps, and walked around in broad daylight holding up a lit lamp, telling anyone who asked that he was searching for one honest man. Athenians nicknamed him “the Dog,” kyon in Greek. His followers took the insult and kept it: Cynic, from kynikos, dog-like.
This is how one painter, two thousand years later, imagined that life.
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| Jean-Léon Gérôme, “Diogenes,” 1860. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. |
Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) was a French academic painter, later a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He shows Diogenes seated inside his jar-home, dogs curled around him, lighting his lamp in full sun. Nobody in the scene seems to think this is strange. That was rather the point.
Back to Corinth. The young king was Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE), fresh off uniting Greece under Macedonian rule. He had heard of Diogenes and sought him out in person, expecting gratitude. He found the philosopher sunning himself and offered him anything at all.
Diogenes answered in four words: “Stand out of my light.” Alexander’s friends laughed at the old man’s nerve. Alexander, by most accounts, did not. He is said to have told them afterward that if he were not Alexander, he would want to be Diogenes.
The first time I read that line, I took it as pure rudeness, an old man showing off in front of a king. It took me years to notice what it actually meant: Alexander could offer cities, armies, gold. Diogenes wanted none of it, because he had already arranged his life so that nothing could be taken from him.
Diogenes never founded a school and left behind almost no writing. It didn’t matter. His way of living became a philosophy in itself, Cynicism: reject convention, own as little as possible, say exactly what you think. One of his followers, Crates, later taught a young merchant named Zeno of Citium, who took those ideas and built Stoicism on top of them.
A king who could have anything… a philosopher who wanted nothing but sunlight.
Only one of them got what he asked for that afternoon.
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