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”).
For centuries of European art, it was one of the most frequently portrayed moments from classical antiquity.
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