“Alexander/Alexandra Meets Diogenes Going To The Dogs”

VazamBam

by Vassilis Zambaras

“Alexander Meets Diogenes” — Alexander Meets Diogenes

gone to the dogs all right
and cynical a cur as any he knew
this purebred jackanapes blocking his sun
light would soon find his ass jumping
through hoops clearly over a barrel.

MELIGALAS, Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—7/26/10—So much has been said about this famous meeting of singular souls that the poem above might seem superfluous, yea, even hapless—akin to a dog barking at a cat that has escaped the cur’s clutches by climbing up the nearest tree. On the other hand, poets are free to chase after anything that might add to the existing body poetic—so long as they are careful not to let their art go to the dogs in the process.

The late Guy Davenport did a masterly job of extracting the practical words of this Athenian street philosopher from the apochryphal anecdotes in which they have come down to us. If you want to see how Davenport handled Diogenis (and Herakleitos), you’ll have to get hold of his book Herakleitos and Diogenes; in the meantime, and to whet your appetite, I’ll throw in a few dog biscuits in the form of his introduction to the Diogenes section of the book:

DIOGENES OF SINOPE. Among the tombs that line the road into Corinth, Pausanias says in his Travels, you can see in a stand of cypress and pine near the city gate the grave of Diogenes of Sinope, the philosopher whom the Athenians called The Dog, “a Sokrates gone mad.”

He died at Corinth in his eighty-first year (some say ninetieth), a slave belonging to Xeniades, who bought him from the pirate Skirpalos (or, according to Cicero, Harpalus). “Sell me to that man,” Diogenes had said at the slave market, “he needs a master.” Diogenes had come up for sale when he was captured at sea, on his way to Aigina. In the world at that time, as now, kidnapping for ransom was a Mediterranean enterprise. Diogenes was a stray, a citizen of no city-state, a man without property or kin.

He seems to have welcomed slavery. He became the teacher of Xeniades’ sons, a member of the family. “A benevolent spirit has entered my house,” Xeniades said.

Diogenes was born in 404 BC in Sinope on the Black Sea, the modern Sinop in Turkey. His father, an official at the mint, was convicted of debasing the coinage, and the family was disgraced and exiled. Diogenes made his way to Athens, where he took up the jibe of being an outcast’s son by saying that he, too, was a debaser of the coinage: meaning that, as a philosopher, his business was to assay custom and convention and sort the counterfeit from the solid currency.

He studied philosophy under Antisthenes, a crusty type who hated students, emphasized self-knowledge, discipline, and restraint, and held forth at a gymnasium named The Silver Hound in the garden district outside the city. It was open to foreigners and the lower classes, and thus to Diogenes. Wits of the time made a joke of its name, calling its members stray dogs, hence cynic (doglike), a label that Diogenes made into literal fact, living with a pack of stray dogs, homeless except for a tub in which he slept. He was the Athenian Thoreau.

All of Diogenes’ writings are lost: some dialogues, a Republic, and his letters. What remains are his comments as passed down through folklore to be recorded by various writers. These have obviously been distorted, misascribed, and reworked. The ones I have chosen are from Diogenes Laërtius and Plutarch.

He was a public scold, a pest, a licensed jester. He was also powerfully influential as a moral and critical force. It was at a school of Cynics in Tarsus that a Roman Jew named Shaul Paulus learned to command rhetoric, logic, and rigorous candor. We can even hear the sharp voice of Diogenes in his turns of phrase. Diogenes had said that the love of money was the metropolis of evil; Paul, that the love of money was the root of all evil.

Diogenes and Alexander the Great died on the same day: a traditional belief that shows a curious affinity. Alexander said, “If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes,” meaning, one supposes, that if he could not have all the world, he would have none of it. Neither knew anything of compromise. They were perfect specimens of their kind.

Athens in Diogenes’ long life changed from the brilliant epoch of Euripides and Sophokles, to a city in the Alexandrian empire, soon to be replaced as the intellectual center by Alexandria. Sokrates drank the hemlock when he was five. Plato, aged 80, died when Diogenes was 57. He was 48 when Alexander was born, 68 when Alexander came to the throne. He was a contemporary of Praxiteles, Skopas, and Apelles. He invented the word cosmopolitan, to designate himself a citizen of the world.

Those of you interested in finding out more about Diogenes may enlighten yourselves by basking in the sunlight of his cantankerous wisdom here and here but, before doing that, you might like to take a look at a “catty” male chauvinist twist to this portentous meeting:

“Alexandra Meets Diogenes, circa 1960”

Don’t deprive me of what you can give me.

This is number 48 from a humorous series of postcards published in the 60’s by M. Toumbis. The words on the reverse are a macho Greek sexist take on what the philosopher was supposed to have barked to Alexander when the General asked the crusty old dog of a cynic if there was any favor he could do for him. Mind you—what the drooling Diogenes of this postcard wants from this Nordic-looking “Alexandra” is plain as the lecherous gleam in his eyes and has nothing to do with the sunlight she is blocking from his emaciated but still robust body . . . and dirty mind!