Diogenes’ Lives, however, have survived almost intact, with the exception of the final part of Book 7. Diogenes’ collection of poems in different meters has been for the most part lost single poems that originally belonged to Diogenes’ Pammetros were later inserted into the narrative structure of the Lives by Diogenes himself. The Lives were dedicated to a woman who was an enthusiastic Platonist (Book 3, § 47 and Book 10, § 29) and whose identity is unknown. Baltimore, 1948.Diogenes Laertius (3rd century CE) is the author of a collection of poems entitled Pammetros and of a work in ten books known as the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Bibliography works on diogenes of sinopeĬr önert, W. See also Antisthenes Cynics Diogenes Laertius Hellenistic Thought Plato Zeno of Citium. Diogenes sought to make any man king, not of others, but of himself, through autonomy of will, and his own life was his main philosophical demonstration to this end. His famous remark that he was a citizen of the world is more probably antinational than international, for he was concerned with the individual rather than the community.

He is credited with tragedies illustrating the human predicament and with a Republic, which influenced Zeno the Stoic, that was notorious for its scandalous attack on convention. Some exaggeration here is due to the 'dog-cynic' shamelessness pedagogically employed to discount convention, and some is no doubt inherent in the uncompromising extremes of Diogenes' doctrines. Since for Diogenes virtue was revealed in practice and not in theoretical analysis or argument, the stories of, for example, his embracing statues in winter and his peering with a lantern in daytime for a human being, the tales of his fearless biting repartee and criticism of notables such as Alexander, however embroidered or apocryphal, correctly reflect his pointed teaching methods, which encouraged the development of a new didactic form, the chreia, or moral epigram.

The anecdotes illustrate Diogenes' philosophy in action. But doxographic traces (for example, Diogenes La ërtius, VI.70 –73) and, indeed, the tradition as a whole presuppose a serious teacher who, in disillusioned protest against a corrupt society and hostile world, advocated happiness as self-realization and self-mastery in an inner spiritual freedom from all wants except the bare natural minimum and who, in a bitter crusade against the corrupting influence of pleasure, desire, and luxury, extolled the drastic painful effort involved in the mental and physical training for the achievement of a natural and inviolable self-sufficiency. It is not easy to recover the philosopher from, on the one hand, the lurid fog of anecdotal tradition that represents the stunts of an eccentric tramp at Athens and Corinth defacing conventional human standards -as he or his father, Hicesias, was supposed to have defaced in some way the currency of Sinope -or, on the other, the idealized legend that grew after his death. Tradition held that on coming to Athens in exile, he was influenced by Antisthenes' teaching Diogenes' ascetic distortion of Socratic temperance gives some point to Plato's supposed remark that he was a 'Socrates gone mad.' Diogenes of Sinope, who lived in the fourth century BCE, was the prototype of the Cynics, who probably were so called from Diogenes' Greek nickname, the Dog ( kuon adjective form, kunikos ).

Diogenes philosophy