Diogenes

Diogenes was born in Sinope, a Greek port on the Black Sea. According to ancient accounts, he and his father were exiled after being implicated in debasing the city's currency, and Diogenes made his way to Athens, where, per ancient sources including Diogenes Laërtius, he became a follower of Antisthenes, a Cynic philosopher and disciple of Socrates.

He reduced his possessions to almost nothing; tradition holds that he lived in a large storage jar (or tub) in Athens, owning only a cloak, a bag, and a staff. He sought virtue not in speech but in action and manner of living, openly challenging social norms, property, and even ordinary manners. The most famous anecdote about him tells of his walking through Athens in broad daylight carrying a lamp, saying he was searching for an "honest man."

His thought was never set down as a systematic treatise; instead, it took shape through action, biting humor, and dramatic confrontations with the philosophers and rulers of his time, including recorded encounters with Plato and Alexander the Great. His Cynicism rested on the principles of askēsis (deliberate self-discipline) and autarkeia (self-sufficiency): human beings should free themselves from artificial social conventions and live according to nature.

No writings of his survive, and what we know comes largely through later accounts, especially that of Diogenes Laërtius, making it difficult to separate historical fact from legend. Nevertheless, his legacy persisted through the Cynic tradition and later Stoicism (notably via Crates of Thebes and Zeno of Citium), and philosophers such as Epictetus later held him up explicitly as a model of a life lived in virtue.