Abstract
Abstract
After setting out the ancient sources for Diogenes’s life and thought, both textual and figural, this chapter traces his transformation from a banker’s son in the Black Sea town of Sinope to an itinerant philosopher living a life of permanent exile, detachment, and renunciation. Citizens in the two urban centers that he most frequented, Athens and Corinth, were well familiar with his uncompromising honesty and contempt for social convention, his espousal of extreme poverty, and his unrestrained freedom in speech and action. No doubt they were dumbfounded by a foreigner’s claim to be a citizen of the world and not a member of any particular community, since this made him vulnerable to random violence, enslavement, and contempt—all of which he experienced, but endured with indifference and mordant wit.
Publisher
Oxford University PressNew York
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