I spy on your absence of wisdom and common sense, which is the only thing forcing you to go and gamble your kingdom and your life in a single moment.”Īccording to Epictetus in his Discourses (at 3.22.92), at the time of the encounter in Corinth, Diogenes was asleep when Alexander approached. According to Plutarch (at Moralia 70d), upon being asked by Philip whether he was a spy, Diogenes had said, “I most certainly am a spy, Philip. The philosopher had supposedly been taken captive by his father King Philip II during an earlier campaign against the Greeks. Most likely Alexander was well aware of who Diogenes was. Different versions of the story of the meeting are found in various ancient sources,* most notably in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander (at 14) and Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (at 6.38). Alexander would have been twenty at the time, and Diogenes would have been around seventy. The only occasion on which Alexander visited Corinth was soon after the death of his father in 336 BCE. The brief encounter of the two is generally said to have taken place in Corinth, where Diogenes lived in his later years. Caricatures of him in later times often included a lighted lamp that he is said to have carried even in the daytime, as he went in futile search for an honest man. It was widely known that he urinated, defecated, and masturbated in public, to show his contempt for the conventions of society. He is usually portrayed as almost naked and unkempt, with long hair and a beard. He can be assumed to have been dressed at the time of the meeting in regal attire befitting his status and to have been accompanied by a retinue of attendants.ĭiogenes was the antisocial, ascetic philosopher who lived in a barrel and rejected all of the norms of civilized behavior. Alexander was the brash young king of Macedonia, who had conquered Greece and was on his way to conquering the world. It is hard to imagine a more unlikely pair. Wikimedia Commons includes more than fifty artistic renderings of an apocryphal meeting of the young Alexander of Macedonia (later to be known as “the Great”) and the much older Diogenes of Sinope (later to be known as “the Cynic”). It is suggested that this sentence also is an insertion by Diogenes, which interrupts the real sequence of the narrative.For centuries of European art, it was one of the most frequently portrayed moments from classical antiquity. Note inserted by Diogenes Laertius from a different author. Proposed to emend the next sentence by bracketing the words

Next he proceeded to Cyrene on a visit to Theodorus the mathematician, thence to Italy to see the Pythagorean philosophers Philolaus and Eurytus, and thence to Egypt to see Then at the age of twenty-eight, according to Hermodorus, he withdrew to Megara to Euclides, with certain other disciples of Socrates. When Socrates was gone, he attached himself to Cratylus the Heraclitean, and to Hermogenes who professed the philosophy of Parmenides. dįrom that time onward, having reached his twentieth year (so it is said), he was the pupil of Socrates. Afterwards, when he was about to compete for the prize with a tragedy, he listened to Socrates in front of the theatre of Dionysus, b and then consigned his poems to the flames, with the words c:Ĭome hither, O fire-god, Plato now has need of thee. aĪt first he used to study philosophy in the Academy, and afterwards in the garden at Colonus (as Alexander states in his Successions of Philosophers), as a follower of Heraclitus.

And the next day Plato was introduced as a pupil, and thereupon he recognized in him the swan of his dream. It is stated that Socrates in a dream saw a cygnet on his knees, which all at once put forth plumage, and flew away after uttering a loud sweet note.

He had, they say, a weak voice this is confirmed by Timotheus the Athenian in his book On Lives. That he applied himself to painting and wrote poems, first dithyrambs, afterwards lyric poems and tragedies.

Diogenes laertius life of plato