According to the historian Suetonius, the emperor Augustus wrote an invitation (or exhortation) to philosophy. If this is true, it would have been inspired by Cicero’s famous Hortensius, which was, in turn, informed by Aristotle’s Protrepticus. Tragically, all three protreptics have been lost, except for fragments of the Hortensius and Protrepticus—depriving us of antiquity’s most popular, and improving, genre of philosophy.
This short, readable book is an imaginative reconstruction of the first Roman emperor’s invitation to philosophy, based on arguments and anecdotes gleaned from other ancient authors, including Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Cicero, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. It features Augustus in conversation with his two young grandsons (who were also his adopted sons and heirs), Gaius and Lucius, in the forlorn hope that they might one day rise into philosopher-emperors.
At his trial, Socrates declaimed that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what are the arguments behind this slogan, and why should we, today, take up the study of philosophy?
The national motto of India, Satyameva Jayate (Truth Alone Triumphs), is from the Mundaka Upanishad.
“Upanishad” means something like “hidden connections”, “secret teaching”, or “esoteric doctrine”, literally, “a sitting at (the feet of the teacher)”. Upanishadic wisdom can only be transmitted to those who are fit to receive it, by those who are fit to teach it.
Although a part of the Vedas (the last or latest of its four layers), the Upanishads tend to take a dim view of what went before. “Of what use” asks the Shvestashvatara Upanishad, “is the Rig Veda to one who does not know the Spirit from whom the Rig Veda comes?”
The Great Forest Upanishad promises freedom from the very things valued by the Vedas and Vedic society: “It is when they come to know this self that Brahmins (priests) give up the desire for sons, the desire for wealth, the desire for worlds…”
In a passage known as the Udgitha of the Dogs, the Chandogya Upanishad satirizes the Brahmins as a procession of dogs, who chant, “Om, we will eat! Om, we will drink! O Lord of food, bring us food here. Bring us food here. Om.”
An Introduction to the Upanishads
By a restrictive definition, there are around 108 Upanishads. The first dozen or so are the most important, and referred to as the mukhya (main or major) Upanishads. Many “Upanishads” are much later sectarian texts (Vaishnavite, Shaivite…), claimed as Upanishads to lend them the force of revelation.In the Vedas, there are ten embedded Upanishads, with all ten regarded as mukhya. Some of the mukhya Upanishads are in mostly prose; others are in verse.
The earliest Upanishads are the Great Forest Upanishad and Chandogya Upanishad, which date from around or before the sixth century BCE. These two are also the longest Upanishads, with, respectively, 627 and 434 verses; while the shortest mukhya Upanishads are the Mandukya Upanishad and Isha Upanishad (often contracted to Ishopanishad), with only 12 and 18 verses.
The Mandukya Upanishad discusses Om, Brahman, and four states of consciousness. The Ishopanishad is often given pride of place at the beginning of Upanishadic anthologies. In an abridged form, it runs something like this:
Behold the universe in the glory of God: and all that lives and moves on earth. Leaving the transient, find joy in the Eternal … He who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings loses all fear … May life go to immortal life, and the body go to ashes, Om. O my soul, remember past strivings, remember! O my soul, remember past strivings, remember!
Parallels with Plato’s dialogues
The content of the Upanishads is very diverse, and may include mantras, rituals, creation myths, lineages of teachers, historical narratives, and the like. But at their best and most original, the Upanishads take the form of a philosophical dialogue, not unlike those of Plato, with named interlocutors presenting and debating various viewpoints.
For example, in the Great Forest Upanishad, the sage Yajnavalkya engages in philosophical debate with, among others, his wife Maitreyi, the sage Gargi (another, rare, woman), and King Janaka of Videha—who salutes Yajnavalkya with “namaste”.
In the Chandogya Upanishad, the sage Uddalaka Aruni—the guru or teacher of Yajnavalkya—engages in debate with his son, Shvetaketu. Uddalaka Aruni, Shvetaketu, Yajnavalkya, Maitreyi, and Gargi are among the first philosophers in recorded history.
The Essence of the Upanishads
This being philosophy, there is a tendency to abstraction, to grasp at “the truth behind the truth” (satyasya satyam). The central vision is one of pantheism (all is God) or panentheism (all is in God), with the Creator dissimulated in nature “even as the silkworm is hidden in the web of silk he made”.
God is Brahman, and the part or aspect of Brahman that is in us is Atman. The aim then becomes to achieve the knowledge and unity of Atman and Brahman, which is wisdom, salvation, and liberation.
Before the Upanishads, Brahmins sacrificed to the gods for society to prosper. After the Upanishads, Brahmins turned instead to the God within, to achieve their own liberation.
Some two hundred years later, Socrates would make a similar turn. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells Phaedrus that he sees no point in being curious about myths or anything else which is not his concern:
I must first know myself… to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.
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.
Tyranny is back on the table, but the ancients thought hard about how to avoid it. One of their most interesting arguments is that the one who suffers most in a tyranny is… the tyrant himself.
When Lydia (in modern-day Turkey) was conquered by Persia in around 540 BCE, the Greek cities of Ionia, along the Aegean coast, were ruled by tyrants nominated by the Persian satrap in Sardis, the former Lydian capital. These tyrants, backed by the Persian power, had no need to moderate their rule, and began to give tyranny, and Persia, a bad name to the Greeks.
King vs Tyrant
The definition of ‘tyrant’ is malleable, and has shifted many times over the centuries. All in all, a tyrant is an absolute ruler who is illegitimate and/or unrestrained by law. To maintain himself in such a precarious position, he (for it is invariably a ‘he’) usually resorts to oppression and cruelty. Even then, ‘the strangest thing to see is an aged tyrant’—as the philosopher Thales of Miletus (a city of Ionia) noted more than 2,500 years ago.
In On Clemency, written for the emperor Nero, the Roman philosopher Seneca (d. 65 CE) says that clemency is the quality that most distinguishes a king from a tyrant: ‘A tyrant differs from a king in his behaviour, not his title … It’s because of clemency that there’s a big difference between a king and a tyrant.’ For Seneca, a ruler’s glory depends not on his power, but on its proper exercise. Moreover, if people can see that their ruler is ‘for them as much as he is above them’, they will be loyal to him and act as his eyes and ears. Clemency, then, not only ennobles rulers but keeps them safe: ‘It is at one and the same time an adornment of supreme power and its surest security.’
Fear and Trembling
The calm and deliberate exercise of power, says Seneca, is like a clear and brilliant sky, but when the ruler is unrestrained all becomes murk and shadows: ‘People on every side tremble and start at sudden sounds, and not even the one who causes all the alarm is left unshaken.’ The tyrant is then caught in a vicious circle: he is hated because he is feared, and must make himself feared because he is hated. For everyone he kills, there are fathers and sons, brothers and friends, who will rise up in their stead. In time, the tyrant cannot travel freely, sleep soundly, eat confidently, speak openly, or trust even those closest to him.
In 68 CE, abandoned by the Praetorian Guard and declared a public enemy by the Senate, Nero fled Rome. As soldiers approached to arrest him, he preferred suicide to capture. But he did not have the courage to wield the dagger himself, and his freedman Epaphroditus helped him drive it into his throat. His last, deluded words were, Qualis artifex pereo: ‘What an artist dies in me!’
Socrates on Tyranny
One of Socrates’ most famous arguments is that no one ever knowingly does evil. People do wrong not because their ethics are overwhelmed by a desire for pleasure, as is often thought, but because they are unable to weigh up pleasures and pains. They act with recklessness or cowardice or foolishness or vice (which are really all one and the same thing) because, from their limited perspective, it seems like the right or best thing to do. But in the longer term, their actions undermine both their and our happiness—and never more so than if they happen to be a tyrant.
In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates makes the case that the tyrant is the most miserable of men because he is in a stronger position to harm himself and others—which is why those whom Homer has in Hades suffering eternal torment are not ordinary people but potentates such as Sisyphus, Tantalus, and Tityus.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates ranks people according to how much of the ideal Forms their souls are supposed to have seen, with philosophers, artists, and true lovers in the first class, followed by kings and generals in the second class … and tyrants in the ninth and final class.
In Book 9 of the Republic, Socrates calculates that the king is precisely 729 times happier than the tyrant. He derives this number, which happens to be the cube of 9, through some fanciful Platonic arithmetic, following his argument that there are three kinds of pleasure corresponding to the three parts of the soul.
Plato and Aristotle on Tyranny
The best rulers are those who are most reluctant to govern, and the most eager the worst—said Plato.
Plato did not care for Athenian democracy, but the tyranny of his own aristocratic relatives had proven much worse. In the Republic, he claims that the degeneration of the ideal state ends in democracy, followed by tyranny.
The transition from democracy to tyranny is one of the most striking passages in the Republic. Democracy prizes freedom above all else, until freedom itself becomes excessive: children cease to respect their parents, pupils their teachers, and citizens any form of authority or restraint. Into this disorder steps a popular champion who promises to protect people from their enemies. He accuses his opponents, disposes of rivals, redistributes property, and, when threatened in return, asks the people for a bodyguard. The protector has turned tyrant.
In Book 9 of the Republic, Plato gives a detailed account of the origins, mindset, and modus operandi of the tyrant, thereby demonstrating that this most unjust of men is also the most slavish and unhappy. The soul of the tyrant is so disordered that he is unable to do, or even know, what it truly desires—which is, of course, to be happy, and therefore good.
Plato begins his psychological portrait with our dreams. Even in respectable people, he says, there is a ‘terrible, savage, and lawless’ element that emerges during sleep, entertaining desires that reason would never permit in waking life. In the tyrannical man, these lawless desires have escaped from the night and taken command of the day.
At first, the tyrannical man spends his money satisfying them. When the money runs out, he borrows. When borrowing is no longer enough, he cheats and steals. He exploits his parents, betrays his friends, and eventually becomes capable of any crime. The man who appeared to be supremely free has become the slave of his strongest appetite.
And what happens within the individual, Plato argues, also happens within the state. The political tyrant must continually manufacture enemies, because conflict makes the people dependent upon their leader. He must remove anyone courageous, intelligent, wealthy, or independent enough to threaten him. As the better sort disappear, he becomes increasingly dependent upon flatterers, mercenaries, and slaves. Power progressively deprives him of the very people whom he might have trusted.
The tyrant has conquered everyone except himself.
The life of the political tyrant is even more wretched than that of the private tyrant, first, because the political tyrant is in a better position to feed his disordered desires, and, second, because he is everywhere surrounded and watched by his enemies, of whom he is, in effect, the prisoner.
The Republic ends with the Myth of Er, according to which the souls of tyrants and murderers are barred from reincarnation and condemned to an eternity in the underworld.
Aristotle too suggested that there is no worse criminal than the tyrant: ‘Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold; and hence honour is bestowed, not on him who kills a thief, but on him who kills a tyrant…’
In Book 2 of the Politics, Aristotle says that the Carthaginian constitution is so superior to any Greek one that the Carthaginians have never suffered a rebellion or been ruled by a tyrant.
How to Protect against Tyrants
So, what might the ancient philosophers have to say about today’s democracies?
First, we need to ensure that a life spent in politics remains an attractive prospect, or at the very least a tolerable one, or else sensible people will be put off from going into politics, hollowing out the centre and leaving us to be governed, or misgoverned, by disturbed and power-hungry fanatics.
Second, we need to think more carefully about education, and what it means to be educated. Unless we transform ourselves by carrying out the work of the mind, we could be rich, powerful, and famous, like Nero, or Putin, and still be utterly miserable. Playing the tyrant, and taking everyone down with us, is not, as Seneca reminds us, what human beings are for. The best bulwark against tyranny is the existence of a large and historically aware middle class.
It is not merely that educated people know more facts. A population with some knowledge of history is more likely to recognise the old methods when they return: the invention of internal enemies, the attack on independent institutions, the demand for personal loyalty, the contempt for established restraints, and the insistence that one man can save us. Tyranny changes its garb more readily than its methods.
The Internet once promised to become the greatest educational tool in history. Instead, it has also become the demagogue’s greatest megaphone, enabling him to bypass traditional institutions and appeal directly to the fears and resentments of millions.
Third, a country’s constitution or political settlement must contain sufficient safeguards to prevent or arrest the rise of a potential tyrant, or simply of a less than decent or competent leader. This is not the case in the U.S. and no longer the case in the U.K. where recent changes to how the main political parties select their leaders have enabled the rise of such improbable figures as Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson, who, as prime minister, purged his party of competent moderates and attempted to prorogue Parliament.
Of course, constitutions are only as strong as the people prepared to uphold them. Safeguards can be ignored or circumvented, offices captured, institutions intimidated. So it is not simply a matter of writing a fail-safe constitution.
Since the time of Plato, humanity has made great strides in science and technology, but far less progress in politics. The world, now armed with nuclear weapons, and faced with problems that Plato could scarcely have imagined, is still crying out for fail-safe systems of government.
Not content with discussing courage, Socrates also demonstrated it on the battlefield.
While discussing philosophy in the public square, Socrates would also have been training as a hoplite, a heavily armed foot soldier that fought in the close phalanx formation. Practicing maneuvers in heavy armor would have developed his strength and agility. The pyrrhike war dance, so ancient as to have been performed by Achilles around the burning pyre of Patroclus, is described by Plato in the Laws, and involved imitating movements of attack and defense “in a direct and manly style.”
In Plato’s Apology, Socrates proudly tells the jury that, just as he did not desert his post at the battles of Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis for fear of dying, so he will not now abandon the life of the philosopher. The earlier of the three battles, the Battle of Potidaea, took place in 432 B.C.E., when Socrates would have been around 38 years old, suggesting that he may also have taken part in other, earlier campaigns.
Unlike predecessors such as Pythagoras and Empedocles, who had a pacifist outlook, Socrates did not particularly question warfare, which he looked upon as his patriotic duty. However, he did refuse to carry out unjust orders, and, like Jesus four centuries later, rejected the ancestral law of retaliation, stating, in the Crito, that “we ought not retaliate or render evil to anyone, whatever evil we may have suffered from him.” In the Laws, Plato goes further still, arguing that war ought only to be waged for the sake of peace.
The Battle of Potidaea
The siege of Potidaea, a city-state that had rebelled against Athens, lasted until 429. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades says that Socrates singlehandedly saved his life at Potidaea, and took the hardships of the campaign “much better than anyone in the whole army.” At the same time, no one enjoyed a festival more than he did; if compelled, he could drink everyone under the table, yet no one had ever seen him drunk.
During a severe frost, he marched barefoot and, even then, outdid his shod comrades, who “looked daggers at him because he seemed to despise them.” Although Socrates had saved his life, it is Alcibiades, on account of his birth and rank, who received the prize for valour. When Alcibiades remonstrated with the generals that the prize ought to go to Socrates, he was more eager than anyone that Alcibiades should have it.
The Battle of Delium
The Battle of Delium, in Boetia, took place in 424, about five years after Potidaea, and ended in a costly defeat for Athens. In Plato’s Laches, the general Laches says that Socrates was his companion in the retreat from Delium, and that if only others could have been like him, “the honour of our country would have been upheld, and the great defeat would never have occurred.” In tribute to his valour at Delium, Laches invites Socrates to teach and contradict him as much as he likes, without regard for his superior age and rank.
During the retreat from Delium, Alcibiades, who was on horseback, chanced upon Socrates and Laches. In Plato’s Symposium, he says that, even in retreating, Socrates appeared so calm and confident and imposing that no one dared attack him or his companions, preferring instead to pursue those who had turned in headlong fight.
The Battle of Amphipolis
The Battle of Amphipolis took place in 422, two years after the Battle of Delium when Socrates would have been around 48 years old—very old for a shield-carrying hoplite. The year before, Aristophanes had staged a comedy, The Clouds, which lampooned Socrates as a subversive atheist, and it is possible that Socrates’ notoriety, especially among ordinary people, rested as much on his bravery in battle as on his more intellectual pursuits.
At Amphipolis, Athens was once again routed, but the deaths of Kleon on the Athenian side and Brasidas on the Spartan side prepared the ground for the Peace of Nicias and, for Socrates, a return to the philosophy of the street.
Socrates and Plato on Courage
In the Laches, also known as On Courage, the general Nicias concludes that courage amounts to knowledge of the fearful and hopeful in war and every other sphere and situation. Socrates says that if Nicias means that courage is knowledge of the grounds of fear and hope, then courage is very rare among men, while animals could never be called “courageous” but at most “fearless”—as ordinary language use seems to confirm. Nicias concurs, adding that the same is also true of children: “Or do you really suppose I call all children courageous, who fear nothing because they have no sense?”
Socrates next proposes to investigate the grounds of fear and hope. Fear, he says, arises from anticipated evil things, but not from evil things that have happened or that are happening; hope, in contrast, arises from anticipated good things, or, at least, anticipated non-evil things or less evil things.
But, in any field of study, there is not one science of the future, one science of the past, and one science of the present: knowledge of the past, present, and future are all the same type of knowledge. Therefore, courage is not merely knowledge of the fearful and the hopeful, but knowledge of all things, including those that are in the past and in the present. A person who had such knowledge could not be said to be lacking in courage, but neither could she be said to be lacking in any of the other virtues— justice, temperance, and piety.
Socrates points out that, in trying to define courage, he, Laches, and Nicias, have succeeded in defining virtue herself. Virtue is knowledge, which is why people with some measure of one virtue usually have a similar measure of the other virtues and of virtue in general—a thesis known as the Unity of the Virtues.
Laches and Nicias are suitably impressed, but Socrates insists that he does not as yet fully understand the nature of either courage or virtue.
In the Laches, then, Socrates defines courage as knowledge or knowledge of the good. But knowledge of the good is not enough. What we also need is the Socratic strength to persevere with our conviction through pleasures, desires, and, above all, fears. Thus, in the Republic, the mature Plato redefines courage as “the conservation of the conviction …. about fearful things.”
It’s quite a thought that, had Socrates fallen in battle, we today would be living in different minds.
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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