And the man had the gift of persuasion in a wonderful degree; so that he could easily overcome anyone by his arguments. Accordingly, it is said that an Aeginetan of the name of Onesicritus, having two sons, sent to Athens one of them, whose name was Androsthenes, and that he, after having heard Diogenes lecture, remained there; and that after that, he sent the elder, Philiscus, who has been already mentioned, and that Philiscus was charmed in the same manner. And last of all, he came himself, and then he too remained, no less than his son, studying philosophy at the feet of Diogenes. So great a charm was there in the discourses of Diogenes. Another pupil of his was Phocion, who was surnamed the Good; and Stilpon the Megarian, and a great many other men of eminence as statesmen.
He is said to have died when he was nearly ninety years of age, but there are different accounts given of his death. For some say that he ate an ox’s foot raw, and was in consequence seized with a bilious attack of which he died; others, of whom Cercidas, a Megalopolitan or Cretan, is one, say that he died of holding his breath for several days; and Cercidas speaks thus of him in his Meliambics:
He, that Sinopian who bore the stick, Wore his cloak doubled, and in th’ open air Dined without washing, would not bear with life A moment longer: but he shut his teeth, And held his breath. He truly was the son Of Jove, and a most heavenly-minded dog, The wise Diogenes.
Others say that he, while intending to distribute a polypus to his dogs, was bitten by them through the tendon of his foot, and so died. But his own greatest friends, as Antisthenes tells us in his Successions, rather sanction the story of his having died from holding his breath. For he used to live in the Craneum, which was a Gymnasium at the gates of Corinth. And his friends came according to their custom, and found him with his head covered; and as they did not suppose that he was asleep, for he was not a man much subject to the influence of night or sleep, they drew away his cloak from his face, and found him no longer breathing; and they thought that he had done this on purpose, wishing to escape the remaining portion of his life.
On this there was a quarrel, as they say, between his friends, as to who should bury him, and they even came to blows; but when the elders and chief men of the city came there, they say that he was buried by them at the gate which leads to the Isthmus. And they placed over him a pillar, and on that a dog in Parian marble. And at a later period his fellow citizens honored him with brazen statues, and put this inscription on them:
E’en brass by lapse of time doth old become, But there is no such time as shall efface Your lasting glory, wise Diogenes; Since you alone did teach to men the art Of a contented life: the surest path To glory and a lasting happiness.
We ourselves have also written an epigram on him in the proceleusmatic meter.
A.: Tell me, Diogenes, tell me true, I pray, How did you die; what fate to Pluto bore you?
B.: The savage bite of an envious dog did kill me.
Some, however, say that when he was dying he ordered his friends to throw his corpse away without burying it, so that every beast might tear it, or else to throw it into a ditch and sprinkle a little dust over it. And others say that his injunctions were that he should be thrown into the Ilissus; that so he might be useful to his brethren. But Demetrius, in his treatise on Men of the Same Name, says that Diogenes died in Corinth the same day that Alexander died in Babylon. And he was already an old man, as early as the hundred and thirteenth olympiad.
The following books are attributed to him. The dialogues entitled the Cephalion; the Icthyas; the Jackdaw; the Leopard; the People of the Athenians; the Republic; one called Moral Art; one on Wealth; one on Love; the Theodorus; the Hypsias; the Aristarchus; one on Death; a volume of Letters; seven Tragedies, the Helen, the Thyestes, the Hercules, the Achilles, the Medea, the Chrysippus, and the Oedipus.
But Sosicrates, in the first book of his Successions, and Satyrus, in the fourth book of his Lives, both assert that none of all these are the genuine composition of Diogenes. And Satyrus affirms that the tragedies are the work of Philiscus, the Aeginetan, a friend of Diogenes. But Sotion, in his seventh book, says that these are the only genuine works of Diogenes: a dialogue on Virtue; another on the Good; another on Love; the Beggar; the Tolmaeus; the Leopard; the Cassander; the Cephalion; and that the Aristarchus, the Sisyphus, the Ganymede, a volume of Apothegms, and another of Letters, are all the work of Philiscus.
There were five persons of the name of Diogenes: The first a native of Apollonia, a natural philosopher; and the beginning of his treatise on Natural Philosophy is as follows: “It appears to me to be well for everyone who commences any kind of philosophical treatise, to lay down some undeniable principle to start with.” The second was a Sicyonian, who wrote an account of Peloponnesus. The third was the man of whom we have been speaking. The fourth was a Stoic, a native of Seleucia, but usually called a Babylonian, from the proximity of Seleucia to Babylon. The fifth was a native of Tarsus, who wrote on the subject of some questions concerning poetry which he endeavors to solve.
Athenodorus, in the eighth book of his Conversations, says that the philosopher always had a shining appearance, from his habit of anointing himself.
Monimus was a Syracusan and a pupil of Diogenes, but also a slave of some Corinthian money-changer, as Sosicrates tells us. Xeniades, who bought Diogenes, used often to come to him, extolling the excellency of Diogenes both in actions and words, till he excited a great affection for the man in the mind of Monimus. For he immediately feigned madness, and threw about all the money and all the coins that were on the table, until his master discarded him, and then he straightway went to Diogenes and became his pupil. He also followed Crates the Cynic a good deal, and devoted himself to the same studies as he did; and the sight of this conduct of his made his master all the more think him mad.
And he was a very eminent man, so that even Menander the comic poet speaks of him accordingly; in one of his plays, namely in the Hippocomus, he mentions him thus:
There is a man, O Philo, named Monimus, A wise man, though but little known, and one Who bears a wallet at his back, and is not Content with one but three. He never spoke A single sentence, by great Jove I swear, Like this one, “Know thyself,” or any other Of the oft-quoted proverbs: all such sayings He scorned, as he did beg his way through dirt; Teaching that all opinion is but vanity.
But he was a man of such gravity that he despised glory, and sought only for truth.
He wrote some jests mingled with serious treatises, and two essays on the Appetites, and an Exhortation.
Onesicritus is called by some authors an Aeginetan, but Demetrius the Magnesian affirms that he was a native of Astypalaea. He also was one of the most eminent of the disciples of Diogenes.
And he appears in some points to resemble Xenophon. For Xenophon joined in the expedition of Cyrus, and Onesicritus in that of Alexander; and Xenophon wrote the Cyropaedia, and Onesicritus wrote an account of the education of Alexander. Xenophon, too, wrote a Panegyric on Cyrus, and Onesicritus one on Alexander. They were also both similar to one another in style, except that a copyist is naturally inferior to the original.
Menander too, who was surnamed Drymus, was a pupil of Diogenes, and a great admirer of Homer; and so was Hegesaeus of Sinope, who was nicknamed Cloeus, and Philiscus the Aeginetan, as we have said before.
Crates was a Theban by birth, and the son of Ascondus. He also was one of the eminent disciples of the Cynic. But Hippobotus asserts that he was not a pupil of Diogenes, but of Bryson the Achaean.
There are the following sportive lines of his quoted:
The waves surround vain Peres’ fruitful soil, And fertile acres crown the sea-born isle; Land which no parasite e’er dares invade, Or lewd seducer of a hapless maid; It bears figs, bread, thyme, garlic’s savoury charms, Gifts which ne’er tempt men to detested arms, They’d rather fight for gold than glory’s dreams.