Many people have been able to cure their anger simply by looking into a mirror.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In the first century CE, the Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote a short book called On Anger, which to this day, in my view, remains the best book on anger management.
The first thing we should know about anger is that it is both learnt and highly contagious. Seneca tells the story of a child who was raised in Plato’s house. When the child was returned to his parents, he saw his father shouting, and remarked, ‘I never saw this at Plato’s house.’
If you are surrounded by angry people, it is hard not, in turn, to become angry—and conversely, calm people tend to calm us. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle remarks that even wild animals grow gentle in the company of the calm—although I wouldn’t go to the zoo to test this out.
So our first defence against anger is the company that we keep. Avoid the angry, seek out the calm.
Why We Get Angry
Beyond this, it is important to understand why we get angry. Anger feels powerful because it converts injury or helplessness into reaction and aggression. But it is in fact a sign of weakness, revealing the very injury or helplessness that gave rise to it.
And it is often irrational: we assume the worst about people, exaggerate the harm they have done us, and interpret their incompetence or lack of thought as contempt.
We sometimes rationalise our anger as moral courage, that is, as a spur to virtue. But even in the face of terrible injustice, anger is not required to obtain redress or do the right thing. Indeed, anger may impair our ability to act effectively.
How Anger Defeats Us
If anger arises from an injury, it often inflicts a second injury of its own making. Whereas other vices impel the mind, anger overthrows it. Anger, said Horace, is a short-lived madness. It is from anger that Alexander the Great killed the friend who saved his life—the conqueror of kings, himself conquered by madness.
We get angry because we seek reparation. But often, we make things much worse than if we hadn’t got angry. If someone has wronged us, we would do much better to calmly explain this to them, rather than lose our temper, and, with it, their ear.
The Surest Cure for Anger
Anger begins with a judgement: someone has wronged me, and I must punish them. But it is easier to revise our judgement than to rage against the world, to rage against how things are.
Before that judgement carries us away, there is a little space. Maybe we can’t prevent the first flash of irritation. But we can refuse to go with it. In that little space that we have, we can ask ourselves three things:
Am I expecting too much of the world?
How is getting angry going to help me?
Who will remember this tomorrow, or in a year’s time, or in a hundred years’ time?
That’s why the surest cure for anger is delay.
When he retired from the imperial court, the Stoic philosopher Athenodorus advised the emperor Augustus: ‘Whenever you become angry, Caesar, say or do nothing until you have repeated the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet.’ At this, Augustus seized his departing teacher by the hand and replied, ‘I still have need of your presence here.’
Perhaps we all do. The surest way to prevent anger from ruling us is to refuse to act while it is on the throne.
How the Son of a Court Physician Became the Most Influential Philosopher in History
In Raphael’s School of Athens (1509–1511), Plato holds his Timaeus and points towards the heavens; Aristotle holds his Ethics and gestures towards the world before him.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Few people have shaped the world as profoundly as Aristotle. Yet, for all his influence, surprisingly little is known about the man himself. As one historian remarked, all that can be said with certainty is that ‘the man was born, worked, and then died’. Even so, the surviving fragments reveal an extraordinary life, which transformed the son of a provincial court physician into the most influential philosopher in the West.
Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in Stageira, on the Chalcidice peninsula of north-eastern Greece. In 348, Philip II of Macedon occupied and destroyed the city, but then had it rebuilt and repopulated in honour of Aristotle, who had been his childhood friend and whom he had appointed to tutor his son, Alexander, the future King of the Oikouménē, or Known World.
The Stagirite’s father, Nicomachus, served as physician to Philip’s father, Amyntas III of Macedon, and descended, purportedly, from the god of medicine, Asclepius—as did his mother, Phæstis. With the healing arts running so thickly in his blood, Aristotle would have been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. Certainly, his medical background, and the empiricism of physicians such as Hippocrates, informed his method and philosophy.
Aristotle had a brother and sister, and was probably the youngest of the three siblings. At about the age of thirteen, he lost both his parents and became the ward of Proxenus of Atarneus (in Æolis, Asia Minor), who rounded whatever medical training he had received from his late father. Proxenus married Aristotle’s sister, Arimneste. Together, they had a daughter, Hero, and a son, Nicanor. Hero in turn had a son, the historian Callisthenes of Olynthus, great nephew to Aristotle.
Plato’s Most Brilliant Student
In 367, Proxenus sent the seventeen-year-old Aristotle to study at Plato’s Academy, which had by then become a pre-eminent centre of learning. If Diogenes Laertius is to be believed, the grown-up Aristotle had small eyes and slender calves, dressed fashionably, and spoke with a lisp.
Aristotle remained at the Academy for nearly twenty years, only leaving after Plato’s death in 347. The reasons for his departure are unclear: he may have felt slighted at being passed over for the scholarchship of the Academy in favour of Plato’s nephew, Speussipus; or he may have fled, possibly even before Plato’s death, for fear of the growing anti-Macedonian feeling. In 351, the orator Demosthenes had delivered his First Philippic denouncing Philip II’s imperial ambitions, and in 348, the year before Plato’s death, Philip had razed Athenian ally Olynthus to the ground.
Twenty years at the Academy convinced Aristotle not only of philosophy’s power, but also of its limits. Where Plato sought truth by looking beyond the visible world, Aristotle increasingly sought it within it.
The Philosopher and the Tyrant
Then in his thirty-seventh year, Aristotle travelled with fellow Platonist Xenocrates of Chalcedon to Assos (in the Troad, Asia Minor) to join the court of Hermias of Atarneus, who had studied at the Academy. Aristotle may or may not have gone to Assos as an ambassador of Philip, who wished to have Hermias for an ally. In either case, it seems that he exerted a moderating influence on Hermias, who softened his harsh tyrannical rule—enabling him, in short succession, to win over neighbouring peoples and expand his territory.
In 344, Hermias was captured by a mercenary in the service of Artaxerxes III of Persia and tortured for information about the invasion plans of his ally Philip. But Hermias held his silence, his dying words being that he had done nothing shameful or unworthy of philosophy. Aristotle honoured the memory of his perfect friend with a statue at Delphi and a still extant hymn to virtue.
At around this time, he married Hermias’ niece and adoptive daughter, Pythias, who helped him in his work and bore him a daughter, also Pythias.
Paradise on Lesbos
After the death of Hermias, Aristotle and his student Tyrtamus crossed over to Lesbos to research the flora and fauna of the island and its remarkable lagoon, then known as the Pyrrha lagoon, now known as the Gulf of Kalloni.
Tyrtamus went down in history as Theophrastus [‘Divinely-speaking’], the nickname given to him by Aristotle. Supposedly, the more empirical Theophrastus concentrated on the flora while the more speculative Aristotle concentrated on the fauna, so that the one is remembered as the father of botany and the other as the father of zoology. In fact, Theophrastus also wrote on animals, and Aristotle on plants, but these works have been lost, as have almost all of Theophrastus’ wide-ranging works.
Aristotle was not simply doing biology for the sake of biology, but for the sake of philosophy. Like Plato, he was searching for universals, but this time from the ground up. ‘We should’ he said, ‘venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful.’
Teaching Alexander
Aristotle spent no more than two years on Lesbos.
In 343, King Philip commissioned him to tutor his son Alexander, who was then around thirteen years old, promising in return to rebuild his native Stageira and repatriate its former citizens. In the Temple of the Nymphs at Mieza, near the Macedonian capital of Pela, Aristotle taught not only Alexander but also his close friend or lover Hephæstion, and two other future rulers, Ptolemy and Cassander.
It is said that Aristotle prepared for Alexander an annotated copy of the Iliad, which inspired the prince to model his life on that of the demy-divine Achilles. Even if the story is invented, Aristotle’s influence over Alexander is indicated by the crowd of zoologists and botanists that accompanied him on his Eastern conquests, and by the official chronicler of these conquests, who was none other than Aristotle’s great nephew, Callisthenes of Olynthus.
According to both Plutarch and Aulus Gellius, upon hearing that Aristotle had published some of his teachings, Alexander wrote to him from Asia:
Alexander to Aristotle, greeting. You have not done well to publish your books of oral doctrine; for what is there now that we excel others in, if those things which we have been instructed in be laid open to all? For my part, I assure you, I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion. Farewell.
Later, as pharaoh in Egypt, Ptolemy built the Great Library of Alexandria, turning the city, which had been founded by Alexander, into a major centre of learning. Alexander, and Ptolemy after him, did much to disseminate Greek culture, so that three centuries later Greek seemed like the natural choice of language for the New Testament.
Aristotle’s Great Project: Organising All Human Knowledge
In around 339, Speussipus suffered a stroke and died, and Xenocrates became the third scholarch of the Academy, with Aristotle passed over for a second time. Among those who frequented the lectures of Xenocrates at the Academy were Zeno of Citium, founder of the Stoic school, and Epicurus of Samos, founder of the Epicurean school.
In 334, Aristotle, now returned to Athens, established his own school in a public exercise and training ground dedicated to the god Apollo Lyceus [‘Apollo the Wolf-god’], whence its name, the Lyceum. A temple had once stood on the expansive site, which in Aristotle’s time had different areas dedicated to different purposes. Both Socrates and Plato had spoken or taught there, to the extent that the Lyceum is the setting of Plato’s Euthydemus, which features Socrates and Cleinias, the grandson of Alcibiades, in conversation with Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, a pair of moronic brothers and sophists.
Aristotle taught in the morning, and in the afternoon would sometimes give a public lecture. He often did his thinking and teaching while walking along the Lyceum’s shaded paths, or peripatoi, so that his students, who doubled up as his colleagues and researchers, came to be known as the peripatetics.
Over the next twelve years, Aristotle wrote many of his works and collected the West’s first great library, including copies of the constitutions of 158 cities. He also developed the world’s first botanical garden and zoological park from the plant and animal specimens that Alexander kept returning from the East.
After the death of his wife Pythias, he became involved with Herpyllis of Stageira, who bore him a son whom he named Nicomachus after his father. To this son, he dedicated his major work of ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics. According to the Suda, he also had an eromenos [younger male lover], the historian Palæphatus of Abydus.
Aristotle’s school lived or limped on until 86 BCE, when Athens was sacked by Sulla, the only man in history to have occupied both Athens and Rome. According to Plutarch, Sulla felled the ancient planes of the Academy and Lyceum to build siege engines. In antiquity, the Lyceum had stood to the east of the city wall. In 1996, its remains were uncovered in a park behind the Hellenic Parliament, while clearing space for the new Museum of Modern Art.
Exile and Death
In the East, Callisthenes had become increasingly critical of Alexander’s adoption of Persian customs, especially those, such as proskynesis (falling down before the king and kissing the ground or his feet), which fed into his mounting megalomania.
When a former pupil implicated Callisthenes in a regicidal plot, Alexander left Aristotle’s great nephew to perish in prison. According to Diogenes Laertius, Callisthenes was ‘confined in an iron cage and carried about until he became infested with vermin through lack of proper attention; and finally he was thrown to a lion and so met his end.’ The death of his great nephew soured Aristotle’s relationship with Alexander, and prompted Theophrastus to write a treatise on grief, the now lost Callisthenes.
Even so, Aristotle’s long-time association with Alexander had led the Athenians to perceive him as Macedonian. After Alexander’s death in Babylon in 323, anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens flared up, and Demophilius and Eurymedon the Hierophant charged Aristotle with impiety, possibly for praying to his late friend Hermias rather than anything in the Physics or Metaphysics. Aristotle fled to the solitude, or loneliness, of his country house at Chalcis in Eubœa, an island off the Attic coast and the homeland of his mother’s family. Referencing the trial and execution of Socrates, he explained, ‘I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.’
In the event, Aristotle died within the year, in 322, aged sixty-two, possibly from an abdominal condition. Theophrastus, who was not Macedonian but Lesbian, had remained in Athens as scholarch of the peripatetic school. In his will, Aristotle named him as his successor and bequeathed him his works and library. On the family side, he left a furnished house, three female slaves, and a talent of silver to his wife or concubine Herpyllis, and appointed his nephew Nicanor as guardian to the still young Nicomachus. Nicomachus became a pupil of Theophrastus and, according to Aristippus, his eromenos. He died in battle while still young.
Theophrastus inherited not only Aristotle’s school but also the intellectual legacy of the man who, for centuries to come, would simply be known as ‘The Philosopher’.
Alexander the Great bows before Diogenes the Cynic.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 18 August 2026.
Plato is said to have called Diogenes the Cynic ‘a Socrates gone mad’. It is easy to see why. Diogenes lived in a storage jar, begged for his food, masturbated in public, mocked Plato to his face, and told Alexander the Great to get out of his sunshine.
But there was a philosophy behind the madness. Diogenes did not merely question the conventions by which people lived. He attempted to strip them away altogether—and to live out the consequences.
Exiled to Athens
Diogenes (c. 412–323 BCE) was born in Sinope, a Greek colony on the Black Sea coast of modern-day Turkey. After being exiled for having defaced the city’s coinage, he moved to Athens, took up the life of a beggar, and made it his mission to metaphorically deface the coinage of custom and convention—which, he maintained, was the false currency of morality.
The story about defacing coinage may have been no more than a play on words, since, in Greek, the word for ‘money’, nomisma, sounds like, and is derived from, the word for ‘custom’, nomos. However, archaeologists have unearthed defaced mid-fourth-century coins from Sinope, making the literal story harder to dismiss.
In Athens, Diogenes attached himself to Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates who taught that virtue, rather than wealth or pleasure, is sufficient for happiness. According to tradition, Antisthenes initially tried to drive him away, even threatening him with his staff. Like all the best students, Diogenes simply refused to leave.
If Socrates had shown that a good life required examining our assumptions, Diogenes went further. He asked what might happen if, having examined our assumptions, we outright discarded them.
The Philosophy of the Dog
Diogenes disdained the need for conventional shelter and other corrupting ‘dainties’ and chose instead to sleep in a large storage jar and get by on a diet of chickpeas, lupins, and assorted vegetables. He used to beg for the bare necessities, including from statues—explaining to passers-by that he was thereby practising for rejection.
According to another famous story, he possessed a wooden cup until he saw a boy drinking water from his cupped hands. ‘A child has bested me in simplicity,’ he exclaimed, throwing away his cup.
Diogenes held that human beings had much to learn from the artlessness of dogs, which, unlike us, had not ‘complicated every simple gift of the gods’. The term ‘Cynic’ derives from the Greek for ‘dog-like’, kynikos—or perhaps from Antisthenes’ association with the Cynosarges, a gymnasium near the Temple of Herakles for the use of Athenians born of foreign mothers.
He placed nature and reason firmly above custom and convention, which he held to be incompatible with happiness. It is natural for human beings to act in accordance with reason, and reason dictates that human beings ought to live in accordance with nature. Instead of wasting our substance in the pursuit of wealth or renown, we ought to have the sense and courage to live like animals or gods, revelling in life’s simplest pleasures, which are also its greatest, without bond or fear.
When people called him a dog, he took this as a badge of pride—for the less he needed from the world, the less the world could take from him.
The Philosophy of Shamelessness
His freedom extended even to shame. Diogenes taught that, if an act is not shameful in private, it should not become shameful merely because it is performed in public. Convention had taught people to be ashamed of things that were natural while remaining remarkably unashamed of vices such as greed and vanity.
Thus, upon being challenged for masturbating in the marketplace, in full view of everyone, he replied, ‘If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly.’
This was not simple exhibitionism, but an extreme form of philosophical training, or askesis. Like later Cynics, Diogenes deliberately exposed himself to discomfort, rejection, ridicule, heat, cold, and hunger to strengthen himself against them.
In the deep winter, he would strip naked and embrace bronze statues. One day, upon seeing this, a Spartan asked him whether he was cold. When he said that he was not, the Spartan replied, ‘Well, then, what’s so impressive about what you’re doing?’ A contempt for comfort is one of the many things that the Spartans and the Cynics held in common.
Diogenes vs Plato
Although he privileged reason, Diogenes despised abstract philosophy of the kind practised at Plato’s Academy.
When, to great acclaim, Plato defined a human being as ‘an animal, biped, and featherless’, Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it to the Academy with the words, ‘Behold! I have brought you Plato’s man.’ Plato consequently refined his definition, adding ‘with broad nails’—even though he would probably have known of monkeys, and perhaps even seen one.
One day, Diogenes asked Plato for a handful of figs from his garden. When Plato had a whole bushel sent out, he muttered, ‘Typical Plato.’
Like Socrates, Diogenes favoured living dialogue over the dead word. When a certain Hegesias asked to borrow one of his writing tablets, he replied, ‘You are a simpleton, Hegesias; you do not choose painted figs, but real ones; and yet you pass over the true training and would apply yourself to written rules.’
For Diogenes, philosophy was not something you read or wrote about. It wasn’t even something you believed in. It was something that you courageously enacted and lived out.
Diogenes’ greatest argument was not a tome like Plato’s Republic, but himself, the life that he led. The jar, the begging, the public masturbation were demonstrations designed to expose the absurdity of blind convention. Whereas Socrates had questioned people, Diogenes interrogated life itself.
Looking for a Human Being
Diogenes was not easily impressed by his fellow men and women.
He used to stroll around Athens in broad daylight brandishing an ignited lamp. Whenever curious people stopped to ask what he was doing, he would reply, ‘I am looking for a human being.’ It was a case of a dog searching for a supposedly rational being—and finding one only in himself.
On other occasions, Diogenes would walk backwards through the streets or enter the theatre against the flow of people leaving. When a large enough crowd had gathered to laugh at him, he would turn on them: ‘Why do you mock, when you’ve spent your whole life walking backwards? I, at least, am able to turn around.’
Nietzsche’s parable of the madman in The Gay Science is almost certainly inspired by Diogenes. In both cases, the madman carries a lamp in broad daylight and is laughed at by the crowd—but it is, of course, the madman who has the last laugh.
Diogenes and Alexander
The most famous encounter in the history of Cynicism, though it may be apocryphal, perfectly captures Diogenes. Alexander the Great came to visit him one morning while he was basking in the sun. The most powerful man in the Greek world, and soon the entire known world (oikoumenē, ‘the inhabited earth’), stood before the bedraggled philosopher and asked whether there was anything he might do for him.
‘Yes,’ replied Diogenes. ‘Stand out of my sunshine.’
According to the story, Alexander was so impressed that he declared, ‘If I were not Alexander, I should wish to be Diogenes.’
Diogenes, for his part, would never have wished to be Alexander.
Citizen of the World
Diogenes’ rejection of convention extended beyond wealth, status, and respectability to political identity itself.
Asked where he came from, he reportedly answered, kosmopolitēs—‘a citizen of the world’—thereby coining the Greek word that became our ‘cosmopolitan’.
This would sound radical in some parts of modern-day Britain or America, let alone in a Greek world organised around city-states, in which citizenship determined a person’s identity, loyalties, rights, and obligations. Diogenes had been driven out of his own city, and sublimed his exile into universal citizenship.
Diogenes influenced Crates of Thebes, a wealthy man who abandoned his fortune to become a Cynic. Crates in turn taught Zeno of Citium, who went on to found Zenonism—better known as Stoicism. The Cynic ideal of living according to nature, freedom from external goods, and cosmopolitanism thus passed, in modified form, into one of the most influential movements of the ancient world. The inheritance of the man who inhabited a jar lived on in the emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations remain, today more than ever, a bestseller.
A Socrates Gone Mad?
Diogenes eventually settled in Corinth, where he died in 323 BCE—the same year as Alexander the Great in Babylon.
Asked how he wished to be buried, he replied that his body should simply be thrown outside the city wall. When his friends protested that wild animals would devour it, he told them to leave him a stick to drive them away. ‘But you will be dead,’ they objected. ‘Then what harm can the animals do me?’
After his death, the Corinthians honoured him with a pillar surmounted by a dog of Parian marble.
Plato’s alleged description of Diogenes as ‘a Socrates gone mad’ captured something real. Like Socrates, Diogenes challenged received opinion, cared little for wealth or status, practised philosophy in public, and believed that the state of one’s soul mattered more than conventional success. But Diogenes removed almost every restraint that remained in Socrates. He turned philosophical independence into homelessness, Socratic questioning into public theatre, simplicity into radical poverty, and indifference to opinion into shamelessness.
Did he take philosophy too far? I often think that, had I lived in a warmer climate, I too might have had the courage of a Diogenes.
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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Stoic Stories.
Diogenes of Sinope or Diogenes the Cynic was a contemporary of Socrates’ pupil Plato, whom Plato described as ‘a Socrates gone mad’. Like Socrates and, to a lesser extent, Plato, Diogenes favoured direct verbal interaction over the written account. When a man called Hegesias asked to be lent one of his writing tablets, he replied, ‘You are a simpleton, Hegesias; you do not choose painted figs, but real ones; and yet you pass over the true training and would apply yourself to written rules.’ After being exiled from his native Sinope for having defaced its coinage, Diogenes moved to Athens, took up the life of a beggar, and made it his mission to metaphorically deface the coinage of custom and convention, which, he maintained, was the false coin of morality. He disdained the need for conventional shelter or any other such ‘dainties’ and elected to live in a tub and survive on a diet of onions. He proved to the later satisfaction of the Stoics that happiness has nothing whatever to do with a person’s material circumstances, and held that human beings had much to learn from studying the simplicity and artlessness of dogs, which, unlike human beings, had not ‘complicated every simple gift of the gods’. The terms ‘cynic’ and ‘cynical’ derive from the Greek kynikos, which is the adjective of kyon or ‘dog’.
Diogenes placed reason and nature firmly above custom and convention, which he held to be incompatible with happiness. It is natural for a human being to act in accord with reason, and reason dictates that a human being should live in accord with nature. Accordingly, he taught that, if an act is not shameful in private, then it should not be shameful in public either. Upon being challenged for masturbating in the marketplace, he replied, ‘If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly’. Upon being asked, on another occasion, where he came from, he replied, ‘I am a citizen of the world’ (cosmopolites), a radical claim at the time and the first recorded use of the term ‘cosmopolitan’. Although Diogenes privileged reason, he despised the sort of abstract philosophy that was being practiced elsewhere and in particular at Plato’s Academy. When, to great acclaim, Plato defined a human being as an animal, biped, and featherless, Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it to the Academy with the words, ‘Behold! I have brought you Plato’s man.’ Plato consequently revised his definition, adding to it ‘with broad nails’.
Diogenes was not impressed with his fellow men, not even with Alexander the Great, who came to meet him one morning while he was lying in the sunlight. When Alexander asked him whether there was any favour he might do for him, he replied, ‘Yes, stand out of my sunlight.’ Much to his credit, Alexander still declared, ‘If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes.’ In another account of the conversation, Alexander found Diogenes looking attentively at a pile of human bones. Diogenes explained, ‘I am searching for the bones of your father (King Philip of Macedon), but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave.’ Diogenes used to stroll about in broad daylight with a lamp. Whenever curious people asked him what he was doing, he would reply, ‘I am just looking for a human being.’ Much to his chagrin, all he ever found were rascals and scoundrels. When asked how he wished to be buried, he left instructions to be thrown outside the city wall so that wild animals could feast upon his body. After his death in the city of Corinth, the Corinthians erected to his memory a pillar upon which they rested a dog of Parian marble. Diogenes taught by living example that wisdom and happiness belong to the person who is independent of society. He was, I think, a shining example of the art of failure.
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Diogenes of Sinope or Diogenes the Cynic was a contemporary of Socrates’ pupil Plato, whom Plato described as ‘a Socrates gone mad’. Like Socrates and, to a lesser extent, Plato, Diogenes favoured direct verbal interaction over the written account. When a man called Hegesias asked to be lent one of his writing tablets, he replied, ‘You are a simpleton, Hegesias; you do not choose painted figs, but real ones; and yet you pass over the true training and would apply yourself to written rules.’ After being exiled from his native Sinope for having defaced its coinage, Diogenes moved to Athens, took up the life of a beggar, and made it his mission to metaphorically deface the coinage of custom and convention, which, he maintained, was the false coin of morality. He disdained the need for conventional shelter or any other such ‘dainties’ and elected to live in a tub and survive on a diet of onions. He proved to the later satisfaction of the Stoics that happiness has nothing whatever to do with a person’s material circumstances, and held that human beings had much to learn from studying the simplicity and artlessness of dogs, which, unlike human beings, had not ‘complicated every simple gift of the gods’. The terms ‘cynic’ and ‘cynical’ derive from the Greek kynikos, which is the adjective of kyon or ‘dog’.
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