Diogenes

Well too did Diogenes say to the man who marvelled that he had found the serpent coiled about the pestle:

Very neatly did Diogenes, finding written over the house of a worthless man, "The glorious victor Heracles dwells here;

For I shall go through the land-dog and the sea-dog and the star in heaven called the Dog, and also Diogenes and the rest of the dogs in turn.

"Not for that reason," said Diogenes.

Or have you not heard the Libyan myth?

For no foolish and wicked man knows himself.

Harder was Diogenes, who, though of the same mind, yet as a Cynic spoke more roughly:

Here Socrates is mentioned, here Diogenes, here that line of Caecilius:

But Diogenes, more freely, as a Cynic, to Alexander asking that he should say if he needed anything, \"For now, indeed,\" he said, \"a little out of the sun.

But concerning good repute — for that which they call eudoxia is more aptly called in this place \"good repute\" than \"glory\" — Chrysippus indeed and Diogenes used to say that, usefulness being taken away, not even a finger should be stretched out for its sake;

I assent to Diogenes, who defined the good as that which is by nature complete.

But Diogenes thinks that riches have only this force, that they may be, as it were, guides to pleasure and to good health;

The prosperity and good fortune of the wicked, therefore, refute, as Diogenes said, all the force and power of the gods.

Diogenes the Cynic, indeed, was wont to say that Harpalus, who in those days was held a fortunate robber, bore witness against the gods, because he lived so long in that fortune.

Following him, Diogenes of Babylon, in the book entitled On Minerva, by referring the birth of Jupiter and the origin of the virgin goddess to natural science, severs them from the fable.

Hence about Diogenes, and no less about the other Cynics, who made indiscriminate use of their freedom and admonished all they met, it is usually doubted whether they ought to have done so.

Do you not know at what age Hecuba began to serve, at what age Croesus, at what age the mother of Darius, at what age Plato, at what age Diogenes?

How, I pray you, does it agree, that you should admire both Diogenes and Daedalus?

But Diogenes too makes some sport with Hercules, and the Roman Cynic Varro brings in three hundred Joves — or Jupiters, as they should be called — without heads.

Of us, no doubt, was the saying of Diogenes spoken:

I know of Phryne too, the harlot, yielding to the ardour of Diogenes as he reclined above her;

And Diogenes she never ceased to admire, who took pride in being content with only what nature provides, so that he threw away even his drinking-cup, when he had been taught by a child to drink by stooping with his hollowed hands.

So that you may not yourself say to us what Diogenes said to Alexander, that the distance from you to here is the same as from here to you.

for he had learned dialectic from that Stoic, and this was the fee of the dialecticians.

I read in Clitomachus that, when Carneades and the Stoic Diogenes were standing before the senate on the Capitol, Aulus Albinus — who was then praetor, in the consulship of Publius Scipio and Marcus Marcellus, the man who was consul with your grandfather, Lucullus, a learned man indeed, as his own history written in Greek shows — said jestingly to Carneades:

Alexander, Gaius, and Pompey — what are they beside Diogenes, Heraclitus, and Socrates?

After tragedy the old comedy was brought in, with its instructive frankness, reminding men, not unprofitably, of freedom from conceit by its very plainness of speech;

But Diogenes too made some sport, I know not what, of Hercules;

Diogenes, consulted as to what is done in the heavens:

Alcibiades, Niciades, Meletus, Archebiades, Archippus, Diogenes, Polystratus, Aristomenes, Oeonias, Panaetius.

To busy oneself with haircuts and clothing beyond what is necessary belongs, by the saying of Diogenes, either to the unfortunate or to the unjust.

" And I admire too the contempt of Diogenes for all human things together—he who showed himself richer even than the Great King, by needing fewer things than that king for his life.

and Anaximenes, himself also a Milesian, air, whom Diogenes of Apollonia afterward followed.

And in this manner may be explained the observation of Diogenes the Babylonian, who in discussing this topic said, it is not every degree of silence, which amounts to concealment;

The practice is vindicated by Diogenes in the passage of Cicero alluded to, he says, “I carried my commodities and offered them to sale, in selling them I demanded no greater price than others did;

Was it greater than the one done to Diogenes the Stoic philosopher, upon whom, at the very moment he was discoursing on anger, an insolent youth spat?

I must needs be conquered in benefits by Socrates, must needs be conquered by Diogenes, who walked naked through the midst of the treasures of the Macedonians, having trampled the king's wealth.

This Diogenes saw, a man of vast spirit, and he so arranged matters that nothing could be snatched from him.

'It would be a disgrace,' he said, 'that Manes can live without Diogenes, but Diogenes cannot live without Manes.

If anyone doubts the happiness of Diogenes, he can equally doubt the state of the immortal gods—whether they live in too little blessedness, because they have no estates nor gardens nor costly lands worked by a tenant farmer nor great usury in the forum.

For that cynic Diogenes wanted to find a man, carrying his lantern about at midday;

But if even then, in those places, Diogenes from his tub had barked, not with mud-fouled feet, as the couches of Plato know, but he would have carried the whole Empedocles, mud and all, into the shrines of Cloacina — Empedocles, who in his madness had declared himself a heaven-dweller, that as a god he might first salute his sisters, then men.