Vitae philosophorum

After seeing a stupid wrestler practising as a doctor he inquired of him, What does this mean? Is it that you may now have your revenge on the rivals who formerly beat you? Seeing the child of a courtesan throw stones at a crowd, he cried out, Take care you don’t hit your father.

A boy having shown him a dagger that he had received from an admirer, Diogenes remarked, A pretty blade with an ugly handle. When some people commended a person who had given him a gratuity, he broke in with You have no praise for me who was worthy to receive it. When some one asked that he might have back his cloak, If it was

On being asked what he had gained from philosophy, he replied, This at least, if nothing else—to be prepared for every fortune. Asked where he came from, he said, I am a citizen of the world.[*](If this answer is authentic, it apparently shows that the famous term cosmopolitan originated with Diogenes.) Certain parents were sacrificing to the gods, that a son might be born to them. But, said he, do you not sacrifice to ensure what manner of man he shall turn out to be? When asked for a subscription towards a club, he said to the president:

Despoil the rest; off Hector keep thy hands.[*](There is no such line in our mss. of Homer; it is unknown to the Scholiasts and to Eustathius. Joshua Barnes, in his edition of the Iliad, introduced it as xvi. 82a. Pope rendered it, about 1718, as follows (Il. xvi. 86): Rage uncontrolled through all the hostile crew, But touch not Hector, Hector is my due. In Clarke’s edition of 1740 it is expelled from the text and relegated to a footnote. J. H. Voss, however, making a German translation of the Iliad, probably between 1781 and 1793, still regarded it as Homeric, but found a fresh place for it, after xvi. 90. )

The mistresses of kings he designated queens; for, said he, they make the kings do their bidding. When the Athenians gave Alexander the title of Dionysus, he said, Me too you might make Sarapis.[*](Sarapis was represented, like Pluto, as seated with an animal by his side having the head of a dog, lion, or wolf combined (according to Baumeister) in a three-headed Cerberus.) Some one having reproached him for going into dirty places, his reply was that the sun too visits cesspools without being defiled.

When he was dining in a temple, and in the course of the meal loaves not free from dirt were put on the table, he took them up and threw them away, declaring that nothing unclean ought to enter a temple. To the man who said to him, You don’t know anything, although you are a philosopher, he replied, Even if I am but a pretender to wisdom,

Seeing a young man behaving effeminately, Are you not ashamed, he said, that your own intention about yourself should be worse than nature’s: for nature made you a man, but you are forcing yourself to play the woman. Observing a fool tuning a psaltery, Are you not ashamed, said he, to give this wood concordant sounds, while you fail to harmonize your soul with life? To one who protested that he was ill adapted for the study of philosophy, he said, Why then do you live, if you do not care to live well? To one who despised his father, Are you not ashamed, he said, to despise him to whom you owe it that you can so pride yourself? Noticing a handsome youth chattering in unseemly fashion, Are you not ashamed, he said, to draw a dagger of lead from an ivory scabbard?

Being reproached with drinking in a tavern, Well, said he, I also get my hair cut in a barber’s shop. Being reproached with accepting a cloak from Antipater, he replied:

The gods’ choice gifts are nowise to be spurned.[*](Il. iii. 65.)

When some one first shook a beam at him and then shouted Look out, Diogenes struck the man with