Part Two: Diogenes: The Greek Philosopher Who Pissed on the Rich

Margaret continues her dicussion with Dana El Kurd about Diogenes, the founder of the Cynics, who was kind of an edgelord and lived in a jar

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Whatever. The name of
the show is cool Stuff, which is a terrible thing
for me to forget, because everyone who ever talks to
me at a party says that they love my podcast
Cool People who are Doing Good Things, or some incarnation
something like that. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy. I
know the name of my show. I also know that

(00:25):
my guest this week is Dana. Hi. How are you Hi?

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Good? Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Yeah. Before I do anything else, I have to say
that we have a producer named Sophie who's not here
right now, but we also have an audio engineer who's
here in spirit because it's listening Eva, how are you?
I mean, Hi? Eva?

Speaker 1 (00:44):
Hi?

Speaker 2 (00:44):
I need to eat sugar or something, or maybe I don't.
Sometimes people can tell when I like, I don't drink caffeine,
and every now and then, when I'm like driving or something,
I drink a little bit of caffeine. And then when
I show up places, I talk completely differently.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
Like have you been on the coffee?

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Yeah? Exactly. So this is part two of a two
parter of diogenies of noopay just diogenies. Every other diogenes
is Diogenies something.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
But he's he's the original.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
He is, He's the main one we remember. And the
most famous image of Diogenies is that he lived in
a barrel. But barrels didn't exist, so he didn't live
in a barrel. This is the kind of shit I
live for. Barrels were invented by friend of the pod
that galls the Celtic barbarians of France.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
Do you know what I was gonna guess something up there? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:38):
Yeah, where there's like more wood and less pottery.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
Right exactly, or like the medieval Europe from my TV. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah, it comes with a portoclist that like, fucking I
pronounced this word. Yeah, There's no barrels in Greece, just jars,
and he lived in a jar a piece. These are
basically huge jars for storing food. They are essentially the
barrels of the time. I'm not some historians spent many,

(02:09):
many pages complaining about people saying he lived in a barrel,
and I'm.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
Like, it's fine, it's not a yeah, it's.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah, he lived in the barrel of the time, which
is the pithos. These are semi permanent structures. They're so
big and heavy, they were anchored to the ground, and
they were actually pretty expensive, and they were counted as
part of the real estate sale of a house. It's
like a storage yeah, it's like the outbuilding, right. And
whenever they cracked, they were patched up with lead, which

(02:39):
might be part of why he threw hands.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
I don't know, he's just living surrounded by lead.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Yeah, yeah, totally. And who put him up in this jar?
Because you're like, ah, he lived in a barrel, He's
Oscar of the grouse. He lived in trash. This is
an expensive thing to let him live in. Right. The
fact that he got to live in one meant someone
was like, you can have this fairly major piece of
our infrastructure. And who put him up in that jar?

(03:07):
But friends of the pod I covered them a couple
weeks ago. The trans priestesses of the Goddess Sibylly excellent,
And no one will actually talk about that because they're
just like, ah, the temple of Sibylly, and so you
actually have to like know that, like Sibylly was the
one who's the cultists that they use the word cult
differently in this context, like just literally means the priests
and stuff around a god and the temple are all

(03:30):
these trans ladies the galley. Have you ever heard of
these folks? I had only heard of them in passing.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
I have not.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
I clearly got really excited about them. They actually come
more from the Anatolian Peninsula, and they were imported into
Greece and then later into Rome. And sometimes trans women
will use it as like we used to be revered,
Like nah, the trans priestesses of Sivilly were like spit
on and hated and like worked as sex workers. But

(03:59):
they had each other and they had like some amount
of respect within society, and they had a temple right
there on the side of the Agora, I believe, and
Sibylly was like the mother of gods, you know, which
is kind of a little bit funny because she was
sort of an import But they were like, well, we
want this like real big important god from over there,
because it seems to be doing them a bunch of good.

(04:20):
And it's a shame in a way that like, like
I don't know how he interacted with these women. He
might have actually been like, oh, well, they're women, so
it's fine. Because the priestesses of Cibylly were like, no,
we're women, right, but he he is transphobic, right, but
he also is like he's shitty to effeminate men, and
he tells them that they should live as nature intended.

(04:40):
Like at one point he chastises a man for shaving.
He's like, ah, you're trying to be a woman, you know, Like.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
Isn't this guy like against norms? Like what are we doing?

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Exactly? But his two things of cynic culture and this
is where he could go either way. He's really into
living as nature intended and not as society tries to
make you be. And so overall I think this man
would not be right wing at all, but I could
totally see him falling down a weird rabbit hole in
the like a culture war.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
Like he'd like do like paleo diets and like yeah,
like he'd go down that route.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Yeah, absolutely cool. But yeah, the fucking transphrass is of sibylly,
save his fucking life. Give him a really nice place
to live. This jar is like, I mean whatever, it's
still open on the side and cold, but he likes
all that shit anyway, So but it's sturdy. Yeah, totally
ifip cracks just patch that sh it up with lead.
It's a very striking image living in a jar. But

(05:34):
he didn't invent living in these things. A couple decades
before he was born, there was this fuck off long
war between Athens and Sparta, and people suffered from illness,
and they like built two walls, and then they lived
between the walls in order to not die. And people
started living in jars in this like internal refugee situation.

(05:55):
So this isn't that he's been wildly unique eccentric. It's
like living in a walmart tent.

Speaker 1 (06:02):
I see.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
This was on the edge of the Agora, the big
public square where philosophers hung out and talk to the
crowds and all their should happen to besides philosophers. But
everything I read was just about the philosophers. He basically
worked in the Agora. He would ask for food he
would never beg and dispense advice and gather up a
crew of disciples. He hung out with the other mendicants too,
the other beggars. Once he was both better then and

(06:25):
had it rougher than.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
At the same time.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, And I actually don't know if he saw himself
as better than those people or not, but I know
he saw what he was doing is not begging. So
I kind of think he was a dick to people,
but I could be wrong. And he would hang out
by the temples and shit, because the temples would be
kind of the places where they like wouldn't run people out,
you know, And so he would like hang out, hide
from the rain under the awningings and things like that.

(06:49):
Not inside the temples, but the areas outside. He declared
that the people of Athens had made the temples in
his honor to provide him with a place to live.
And I kind of like that kind of arrogance. When
it's coming from a guy like this, You.

Speaker 1 (07:04):
Feel like he's trolling, yeah, exactly, controlling them. He's like,
oh this, you did it for me.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
Yeah. Yeah. He relied on the public baths and when
it was cold, he'd go visit forges to warm up.
He probably squatted empty houses and empty tombs, and like
the other beggars, sorry the askers, he stole what was
left unsacrificial altars to the gods, especially the god Hakat,
and he would sort through the trash at the end

(07:30):
of the market day. And he just he lived how
people live when they're living rough and his like voluntariness
is like I get the feeling it's like a little
bit like he could maybe work his way out of it,
but he also probably is like kind of making the
best with what he's got. Is a little bit how
I feel, because he is in exile and property lists
and you know, has no rights in this town.

Speaker 1 (07:51):
So I kind of read it the flipway, which is that, like,
is this guy claiming it's voluntary when he really doesn't
have other offs?

Speaker 2 (08:01):
I can't one hundred percent tell I think he probably
would have. I mean, later he's gonna well quote unquote
work as a tutor because he's owned by a guy. Later,
but like he's educated enough, I suspect he could have
found work and didn't want to.

Speaker 1 (08:14):
Okay, okay, but.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
I'm not certain everyone's like really strong opinions about him.
I clearly do too, But I get annoyed at other
people's strong opinions about him because I'm too much like
this man, and other people will kind of like dig
at him, being like, oh, he says he should live rough,
but he refused to work with his hands, And I'm like,
I don't know, and gives a shit. He's all about
being an animal. Animals don't work with their paws unless
they have to, like right, animals are notoriously lazy, they're

(08:39):
conserving energy. Yeah, he lived off of barley, cake, lentils,
fava beans, fruit olives, the occasional fish. And he would
talk shit on other people for eating a lot of meat,
not because killing animals was wrong, but because it was gluttony,
deep fancy things like meat especially, would talk shit on
the athlete. But he was obsessed with physical health and exercise,

(09:05):
but more in this like calisthetics, like lean muscle mass way,
which that's what's virtuous. And so he's like probably out
there just doing push ups and shit in public, which
I think is kind of cool, honestly.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
It's hilarious. But he doesn't want the people who are
like lifting weights, like being over.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
The top, Like yeah, yeah, because lifting weights just to
gain muscle mass is vanity, is my read of him.

Speaker 1 (09:31):
That's what I'm thinking.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, but like being fit, you know, and it's like
I lift weights, So I spend way too much of
my time, which is actually not very much of my time,
but it's still way too much time my time watching
YouTube videos about like fitness and shit. Right, and like
there is this tension between the like body weight exercise
people and the weightlifters. Yeah, all that he owned, by

(09:54):
popular accord at the time was a knapsack, a cloak,
a staff, and a clay cup. He later threw away
his cup when he watched a little kid drink by
cupping his hands. He was like, oh, nature made me
a cup.

Speaker 1 (10:08):
Oh I never realized. I never saw these, I know,
And that was like what I was like. You had
to see a kid do it.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
Come on, you had to have known that. But maybe
he was raised so rich, like he never had to
drink with his hands cupped. I don't know. But this
dude lived outside sometimes anyway, whatever, I don't know. That's
all he owned. The later Cynics are going to copy
a style. The Cynics were around for hundreds of years.
I'm not covering them as much, but and they're all
about their knapsacks. This is the mark of the Cynic

(10:36):
is you carry your pack with you everywhere. And I
love this because when I was a street kid, when
I was a traveler as I would have called it,
but not in the UK sense, when I was a
crosspunk whatever the fuck, you would always have your pack
on you. It was the thing that marked you as
a traveler, and leaving your pack at someone's house to
go out felt like wrong. So I'm like showing up

(10:57):
at punk shows and leaving my pack in the corner,
like the two other krusty kids leaving their packs in
the corner, but like, you always have your pack with you.
It's also a really good way to get police attention
to have your pack.

Speaker 1 (11:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:10):
No, it was this long standing thing where like I
don't do crime, and the reason I don't do crime
is that when I was younger, I would get searched
an id'd almost every day, and so it doesn't occur
to me that it's possible to do crime. Like I'm like,
it doesn't make sense in my head that you could
own drugs because clearly every single time you're searched. Right,

(11:31):
this hasn't happened to me in decades, But like, live
with a backpack outside and you're gonna get searched, and.

Speaker 1 (11:39):
Instead of like the cup and the staff, you have
like the slink shot.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah, yeah, totally. I absolutely had one for a while. Yeah,
that's so funny. Although then I started making my own
of by sewing little I would find dumpster pieces of
craft paper, and I was so booklets and I would
like make yeah, and I'd take fabric and i'd like
fabric bind and make these like books. And they were
like tiny, they were the size of my palm. And
I'd carry that in my pocket. So I always had

(12:06):
a notebook that I would keep my schedule and like
notes in. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:11):
See I knew it.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yeah yeah, yeah, and a spork. Of course, the can
opener on it so good. Yeah, because of the little
can opener, little p. Thirty eight on the end of
a sport, I could always open a can of Amy's
chili because I was absolutely a vegan person.

Speaker 1 (12:25):
Anyway, dude, I know exactly.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
Yeah you met me, or the equivalent of yeah, they
were my friends. Yeah. But Diogenes did take it a
step further because when I listed all the things that
he wore, you're thinking Margaret left out the clothes on
his back. I did not. He did not have clothes.

Speaker 1 (12:47):
He went around naked.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
He had a cloak, oh, a cloak, okay, yeah, and
he would make fun of the false aesthetics who wore sandals.

Speaker 1 (12:57):
This guy, he's so annoying, you know.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
And so none of the cynics. They wouldn't wear a
tunic under their cloak. He's also gonna be masturbating in public.
We'll get to that. Oh yeah, everyone kept telling me
about this guy. I'd like, this guy rules he's the
most punk rock philosopher and like he might be that,
but also went in the derogatory way, you know. And

(13:22):
he was famous for skipping the big public banquets because
he hated parties as wasteful. He loved critiquing people, but
he actually he felt it was a form of love
and affection to critique people. He wasn't like, there's something
wrong with you. He's like, the following thing is wrong
with you. I care about you. I actually don't know
his tone, but like he wrote about that, this is

(13:42):
what he was trying to do. He taught that it
was important to always tell people what was on your mind.
He's into that like radical honesty thing that's really annoying,
which is funny because I believe in honesty. I just
don't believe in being like like, I don't want someone
to tell me but my dress makes me look fat.
That's just not necessary.

Speaker 1 (13:59):
There's a social texts. Yeah, you know, we kind of
keep the context in mind.

Speaker 2 (14:03):
Yeah, So people called him the dog to insult him,
and he took that on with pride. He once quipped
that Diogenes was just a nickname, that the dog was
his real name, and to be a dog was to
be outside of society, and that suited him just fine.
One time at a banquet, people were mocking him by

(14:23):
throwing him bones, and they're like, ah, you're the dog.
So one he's at a banquet, maybe this is why
he stopped going. Honestly, I don't know. I'm like, I'm
with him on this one. I didn't expect to be
with him when he's okay. So they're throwing him bones
and I'm calling him the dog. So he walks over
to rich people, he lifts up his fucking leg and
peas on their legs.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
He's like, hey, I'm a dog.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
Yeah, that's so funny. The only quote I knew by
him before I started this research was in a rich
man's house, there is no place to spit but his face.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
Oh that's that is excellent. I know, that's excellent.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
I know, and I love it because it's like also like, well,
you gotta spit, but if you're in a fancy house.
You can't spit on the floor, you know.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
I mean we all have to spit at some point.
It's just like a normal function that we have to do. Yeah,
that's so funny. In Arabic language, it's similar, we insult
people by calling them dogh okay, and I love dogs
and so like, if my kid hears me say like dog,

(15:27):
like in a derogatory way, he'd be like, I don't understand.
So there's such a strange like.

Speaker 2 (15:34):
I'm the best friend you've ever.

Speaker 1 (15:35):
Had, You're so nice.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yeah totally.

Speaker 1 (15:40):
But also I could see the pink can be a problem.

Speaker 2 (15:42):
I see that now, Yeah yeah, no, yeah, totally. Yeah.
He claimed to be the richest man in the world
because he had nothing. He would walk to Corinth, where
it was cooler in the summers, and then to Athens,
where it was warmer in the winters. He liked how
he had two cities, and he liked cities in general
because quote, the sage should look to settle where fools

(16:04):
are most numerous, in order to prove them and correct
their stupidity.

Speaker 1 (16:10):
So just like to troll maximum effect.

Speaker 2 (16:12):
Yeah yeah, you gotta go to those places. Yeah yeah.
Whereas the later cynics were like, Oh, we don't want
to live in cities, but we're not quite back to
the Landers. We've got to kind of live outside the
cities and then come into the cities to yell at
people and then go back out to where we can
live simply and close to nature. But he's like, no,
I'm going to live close to nature by living in
the city. And I have a lot of respect for that.
That feeling rich while having nothing is a really powerful

(16:34):
and fascinating thing. I think about just an anecdote that
I think is fun to me. I was squatting in Amsterdam,
and I mostly lived in this building that had been
quote unquote abandoned by a mafia boss because he was
in prison, and so all of these like Dutch squads
had taken over this like kind of mansion ye row
home right in downtown Amsterdam, which was legal at the

(16:55):
time if a place had been empty for more than
a year, and they made a beautiful home out of
it and stuff heavily barricaded because every now and then
the mafia boss would send around as people to come
try and rouse to us. I wasn't very fighty, but
some of my friends were very fighty and so we
were never roused it. And then I moved into the
squad across the street across the canal, but I kind
of had both houses. And at one point I was

(17:16):
like hanging out with a bunch of folks from Spain
and they were like didn't speak much English, and I
like took him my one house and they took him
my other house across the street, and you know, and
all of them are like shared with multiple people. And
someone just like looks at me and goes like, you're
a and she's like looking for the words. She's like,
you're a king. And I have never felt richer in
my life than that moment where I got to occupy

(17:39):
two different stolen properties.

Speaker 1 (17:44):
Okay, I get that. I get that. You're like, actually,
I have so much to like access right now. Yeah,
but there's also this like you can feel rich in
the liberation from your things. Yeah, Like that is so
intriguing to me as someone who can never live like that.
It's intriguing to just like not have anything to weigh

(18:04):
you down.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
And so he gets to have because he compares himself
to I think the King of Persia or something I
can't remember where he's like, oh, that guy has a
summer home and a winter home, and so do I.
And he's like trolling, but he's also.

Speaker 1 (18:17):
Not right and like the experience he's having the same thing.

Speaker 2 (18:21):
Yeah, And like when you talk to people who like
live in vans not out of choice, they're like, yeah,
I've spent my winters down in Arizona and my summer's
up in the Pacific Northwest, and they like find a
lot of beauty and joy in that freedom, you know. Yeah,
But what I have chosen to find beauty and joy
and instead of living in abandoned buildings is selling advertisements on podcasts.

(18:45):
I found a letter from younger me to older me
that forgives me for this.

Speaker 1 (18:49):
By the way, Oh that's so funny. You can one
day work in advertising.

Speaker 2 (18:54):
I found a letter that was like, look, like, as
long as you hold your values, you don't have to
keep living in the same way. You don't have to
keep being a school water Like. I was basically like, look,
the lifestyle stuff isn't what matters, the like anti capitalism
and anti authoritarianism matters.

Speaker 1 (19:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
Yeah, oh that's so nice. I know. It's a nice
present I left for myself when you're twenty. If you're listening,
write a letter to older you to be nice to you.
But either way, go out and buy this stuff. Now,
do whatever you want. Here's that and we're back. And
so he's traveled all over Greece to spread his philosophy,

(19:30):
and he felt that his freedom was his wealth, and
I get it. He divided all actions into two things,
those that accomplish something that's useful, and going after useless things. Power, fame,
and money are all useless from his point of view.
I think this misunderstands how social change happens. But he
also he doesn't have politics. He is a life. He

(19:51):
has a philosophy for.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
Yeah, I don't think he has a theory of change
for radically changing society.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
No, absolutely not. One time he went to the Olympics
and he was like sports, what kind of value is that?
And he talked kind of shit on everyone who won,
Like at one point this like this guy wins wrestling
or whatever the fuck. But as he's like walking out,
he like turns his eyes because he like sees a
pretty woman, and Diogenes is like, ah see, he's not

(20:18):
really free or powerful because he's enslaved by his desire for.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
Like for a guy who really wants to be like
in touch with nature. Like it's such a contradiction, like, right,
you've got desires, yeah, Like especially that one. That's a
weird one to point out.

Speaker 2 (20:34):
I know, because he also he actually like, well, we'll
talk about it is if you was on sex and
a little bit okay, good. Yeah. One Greek writer from
a few centuries later, dio Christosum, wrote that unlike the
others who quote wished to see the athletes and fill
their stomachs, Diogenies instead came to quote observe men and
their folly. Basically, he showed up to hate on people

(20:56):
for liking sports ball, and a lot of intellectuals would
go to these games to give public lectures of their
ideas because this is where the people are, and public
lectures was the main way of getting ideas out until
like probably about fucking nineteen twenty or so, like until radio,
you know.

Speaker 1 (21:10):
So they'd be watching a game and then like they'd
start to like, you know, try to grab attention.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
I think it would be like because like you go
to the games and it's a big public air thing,
like not probably like while people are wrestling, but probably
like when people like walk out or mingling and stuff,
because I think I didn't quite understand toy, start reading
history just how important the street orator was to culture,
where like, instead of listening to podcasts, you go out

(21:37):
and you find some usually fairly amusing person standing on
a corner. We now always have images of just someone
standing there and being like the sky is falling, or
a like, friends, don't you hate the Romans? We should
all be free? But like a good street orator was
infotainment mmmm, and it was a very popular form of

(21:57):
it and will probably end up back there at some point.
He met Alexander the Great, probably in corn and Alexander
wanted to meet this famous vagabond philosopher. But Diogenes is like, well,
I'm not going to like go meet you at your
place and do courtly shit. You gotta come see me
in my jar. Yeah. Well, in this case it's actually
Corinth where he doesn't have the jar. Oh okay, and

(22:19):
he's living in a cypress grove.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
Cool, actually beautiful, I know, it.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
Actually seems really nice. So he makes Alexander the Great
come see him in his cypress grove where he's living
in and Alexander asked him where he got his name,
like the dog, and he's like, I fawn on those
who give me something, I bark at those who don't,
and I sink my teeth into scoundrels.

Speaker 1 (22:39):
Wow, he's dope.

Speaker 2 (22:41):
Yeah no, And apparently Alexander the Great was like, I'm
just gonna quote my friend I was talking to about
this earlier today. We were like, oh, Alexander the Great
shows up and is like, oh, if I was an
Alexander the Great, I'd totally be you. You're so cool
as if. And again my friend's paraphrasing to this someone
who's just read Fight Clobe for the first time and
like thinks that they're like just like Tyler Durdan or

(23:03):
whatever the fuck you know, because Tyler Durden is the
other he is Oscar the Grouch and Tyler Durton. He's
like the stuff you own owns you.

Speaker 1 (23:12):
That's so funny, and Alexander was just this fanboy yeah
a little bit.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
That's like the famed meeting. But another interesting thing he
actually met Alexander's father to Phillip the Second. Because this
guy like get captured a lot. I actually don't know
why he's at this battle. But he's at the Battle
of Caronia, and I don't know why someone knows. I'm
not saying it's unknown. I just I don't know. And

(23:37):
he's captured. I think he's probably just traveling when this happens,
or he's like off to go see it. I get
the MN feeling he likes being a fly on the
wall different places. He gets captured, and he's so rude
to King Philip, because I think King Phillip's like, oh,
you're the famous Baguan philosopher, well I have you now,
And Guy's like, man, I don't give a shit, fuck you,

(23:58):
And King Philip is so amused that he lets him go.

Speaker 1 (24:01):
Amazing. Oh my gosh. I aspire to this level of charisma.

Speaker 2 (24:05):
I think that, like when people are really famous, treating
them like they're just people is kind of the way
to their heart.

Speaker 1 (24:12):
Listen, I'm sorry to make this reference, but this is
like kind of why Epstein was beloved by this like
elite class, because he could say whatever he wanted to
them and they like that was refreshing to them. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Fuck, that's almost that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (24:27):
I listened to this podcast by Jewish Currents on Epstein's
like whole rise, and I was just like, oh, rich
people are weird.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
Yeah, and it's so weird. Sometimes people like having their
asses kissed, and sometimes people are like everyone else kisses
your ass. But I'm gonna tell you what's up your breastanks, buddy,
you can like nag a king if you work it right,
you know.

Speaker 1 (24:46):
Yeah, he basically nagged his way into the infamy.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
Yeah, and he got captured another time, and for longer,
there was a ton of piracy in the Mediterranean because
the entire economy is built on slavery, and people wanted
to go ca capture people to enslave. So pirates would
attack ships and coastal villages and rich people would get
ransomed and poor people would get enslaved and sold. And
so Diogenes was captured by pirates by a captain who

(25:11):
is either Harpelias, Skirpelius, or Skirtalius. Those are the three
names that came down through history for him. All wish
are great names. The Roman names are amusing. I guess
they're not even Roman. This era names are so amusing
to me. I feel rude that I feel that way,
but I just do. I'm into the name Skirtalius the Pirate,
the dread Skirtalius.

Speaker 1 (25:33):
I mean, it's got to wait to it, you know. Yeah,
it's not like Robert.

Speaker 2 (25:37):
No, totally exactly. It's not that I think these names
are silly, although I think that the Roman ones get
silly because everything is like Maximilius and everything isn't Us.
And I guess that's what I'm thinking here. Anyway, whatever,
I'm wrong, I am wrong when I think names are silly.
That's a true fact. So they take him back to
Crete and they sell him. And he's in his fifties

(25:58):
or his seventies or who fucking knows, some age at
that point, but he's not young, and the story goes, well, okay.
There's two versions of the story. The rest of his
followers are like, we're gonna ransom you, and he's like, nah,
don't worry about it. No one should try and improve
their station in life. That's one version of the story.
Another version that doesn't contradict it. He's up on the

(26:20):
auction block and he says a rich guy who's kind
of effeminine walking through the crowd, Zenniades, And he doesn't
know Zenny Addies, but he figure that guy will do
so he says to the auctioneer, sell me to him.
He needs a master.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
Bold because for years at this point, Diogenes had been
teaching that, in order to roughly quote Tyler Durdan a
fight club, the stuff that you own ends up owning you.
And he meant it literally. He was like, a slave
owner is actually enslaved by his own ownership of other people,
and so in some ways the slave's the real master.
And that's the idea that a slave owner is enslaved

(27:02):
by his ownership of someone. I'm down with. Now. Actual
slavery is much worse, right.

Speaker 1 (27:07):
No, we're talking conceptually, yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:09):
But by the time you're like, the slave owns you,
I'm like, I don't know, man, I don't know. He's
been teaching that you basically should never own a slave
or be a slave because you have to let yourself
not get attached to possession. And anyone who lets themselves
be ruled by gluttony, sex, or sleep are quote slaves
three times over according to Diogenes.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
Okay, come on, these things are not all the same.
He doesn't like dependents, but I don't know what the
sleep situation is into it.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
I think he's just like I sleep six hours a
day and I get up and do eighteen thousand push ups.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
That's no. He's like, I do micro naps, Like.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
Yeah, yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 (27:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
He would have been a digital nomady.

Speaker 1 (27:53):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (27:55):
Oh you need is a laptop?

Speaker 1 (27:56):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
Because he also wrote books, so he clearly owned more
than and just these things. You know, at various points,
maybe he's like borrowing a pen to write a book.
I don't know whatever, And basically he's like, hey, sell
me to that guy, and people are like, oh, it's
because he believes so much in this philosophy. I think
Diogenes is being canny and knew it would go better
with that guy, probably because he knows he's educated, like

(28:20):
he himself is educated, and he's like, oh, I can
get myself into like a teaching job instead of a
fucking mining job, you know, right. He works for Zeniades
for a few years, running the man's household and tutoring
his kids, who apparently all loved him, and then he
was freed. Letting people buy their own freedom was a

(28:41):
way to recoup capital costs. You steal a few years
of someone's life and then you let them pay you back.
Your upfront cost. And also if you promise the slave
you're going to free them, they're much nicer to you.

Speaker 1 (28:53):
Yeah, and you are able to extract their labor.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
Yeah, totally. And so it's technically hypocritical of him to
want to become free again and to like buy himself
this freedom. And I do not blame him for this
hypocrisy at all. This is a completely natural thing. He
taught that if you desire to better your station in society,
like a slave who wants to be free, as the
example uses, it'll never be enough. You'll get free, and

(29:15):
then you'll want to be a slave owner, obviously, naturally,
that just happens to everyone, and then you'd want to
be a landowner, and then a citizen, and then an officer,
and then a king and then godhood. Where does it stop?

Speaker 1 (29:28):
I know, it's just too much slop, very slope.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
But like whatever is a philosopher, he's going to make
random as philosophical points, and he sharees oak the freedom
that was offered him, and he didn't go and buy someone,
so good on him. He gets back at it. He's
walking around dispensing wisdom and insults. Being an edge lord,
he would always walk around backwards and just to be
weird and be like he's like a thing where he's like, oh,

(29:53):
I'm walking backwards. You're saying me, I'm walking wrong, but
you're walking towards bad things because you're walking towards your desires.

Speaker 1 (30:01):
Oh my god. This guy is insufferable at some level,
I know.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
And he would wander around with a lit lantern during
the day and be like, I'm trying to find a
wise man, like you know, like peerings.

Speaker 1 (30:13):
Just this guy's annoying, I know, but I guess you know,
as far as like things you see on the street,
a shtick isn't so bad.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
No, totally exactly, Like when you think about it, this
man is busking. I was living in a squad in
South Bronx called Costadel Soul Rest in Peace Castad Soul,
and a bunch of us would go down to I
don't even remember somewhere in Manhattan and set up a
little booth made out of cardboard that looks like Lucy's
Advice stand peanuts and wrote like Advice one dollar, and

(30:50):
people would come up and ask us for life advice.
Amazing and like it wasn't the best way to like
make a ton of money busking, but like it, it
was fun. It kept people engaged, people.

Speaker 1 (31:02):
Like you interacted.

Speaker 2 (31:04):
Yeah, yeah, and like it it humanized us to people. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:08):
I've seen people at like Central Park, like selling a poem,
you know.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
Totally same, same kind of thing. Yeah, And if you
want people to come by your poem, maybe you got
to walk around with a lantern and say I'm trying
to find a wise man, you know, like it's all advertising. Yeah,
and yeah, he was against doing anything just because society
said so, and this led to interesting places like, for example,
masturbating in public.

Speaker 1 (31:33):
Okay, I feel like you're going to lose me.

Speaker 2 (31:35):
Yeah no, I yeah, we're all lost here. The cynics
were all about masturbation, especially Diogenes. He wrote quote if
only one could relieve hunger by rubbing one's belly, which
is funny. Oh my god, the public is the only
problem I have with that quote, Like.

Speaker 1 (31:55):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
And he did everything in public, including potentially and this
is contested, but that's because people fight about later Christians
hated him, and also some later Christians also really liked him,
and like everyone just fights about what he actually did.
All of his like rough Edges people like, nah, that
was just made up by his haters, or he was
he didn't really mean it about cannibalism. He was just oh, yeah,

(32:20):
I guess this's another thing. He was just saying some shit,
you know. Okay, but I suspect this man jerked off
in public, and I suspect, like everyone else who jerks
off in public under a cloak, he is doing it
because he's a creep. And his reasoning supposedly my read
as he comes up with philosophical excuses for things. His
reason is that we shouldn't let stuff happen only behind
closed doors. But he also might not have ever done

(32:42):
it at all. There's a bunch of stuff that the
cynics would talk about doing, but there's no evidence to
them doing or even promoting doing. They're just saying, like, hey,
while we're questioning everything.

Speaker 1 (32:51):
It's like a thought experiment.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
Yeah, including incest, cannibalism, and public sex and masturbation. Okay, later.
Cinics wanted to be into self denial. We'll talk about
those later. Later. Sinics wanted to be into self denial
to include no sexual pleasure, but Diogenes was like, no,
it's like better to seek pleasure to deal with pent
up needs. Like I think he saw sex kind of

(33:14):
like he saw eating, where he's like, you gotta gotta
do it.

Speaker 1 (33:18):
It's like a function.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
Yeah yeah, which isn't as technically true, but you know whatever.
But the Cynics, including Diogenies, were all about sexual consent.
So this is even like his worst sexual crimes, he
is infinitely more moral than the society he's rebellion against.
Like even if he like did all of the shit

(33:40):
that is not good that I just listed, they believed
in sexual consent, the Cynics, and specifically they also believed
in stopping the culture of fucking children.

Speaker 1 (33:49):
Yeah. Again, so many contradictions here, because like masturbating in
public to like an audience is not really because.

Speaker 2 (33:56):
It's not consent totally. And so that's like I would
like to imagine he or at least later Cynics are like,
I thought this part through a little further.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
You know, No, he'd probably be like, but they're out
in public, so they've.

Speaker 2 (34:09):
Consented, Yeah, totally, because it's this fucking thing. My personal
read is that that was his fucking kink and he
came up with excuses, but it's possible he didn't do it.
At all, And the Cynics believed in all three kinds
of sex masturbation, married sex, and unmarried sex between consenting partners,

(34:30):
and they talked about defended incest, but there's no evidence
that they promoted or practiced it, much like cannibalism, there's
no evidence of it. Ironically, the Christians were the ones
who had attacked them about it. On a certain level,
if you believe in transubstantiation, you are participating in a
cannibal cult. I don't make the rules. Yeah, and it's

(34:51):
ironic that these cynics, who obsessed with practice what you preach,
talked about incesting cannibalism but didn't seem to practice it.
But I am glad for this hypocrisy.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:00):
Yeah, some contradictions are necessary here because they're crazy.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
The only actual public sex we know that happened was
two disciples, Krates and Hipparchia, which of course was written
as his disciple Krates and his wife, even though like
it specifically mentions that she was also a disciple of
like God, fucking damn it. Anyway, whatever, she's also a
cynic and they're married, and they probably fucked in public.
A bunch the Synics, mostly refused marriage, and when they

(35:28):
did get married, they did away with all the various
customs around it, like, for example, they figured women should
only marry people that they wanted to marry. This was
part of the big wild difference revolutionary. Yeah. Krates, for
his part, when he proposed, he stood naked in front
of his future fiance Hipparchia, and he said, this is

(35:50):
the bridegroom and this is his property. Think it over,
for you will be no companion for me unless you
adopt my way of life.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
Okay, I gotta give him a little bit of credit.

Speaker 2 (35:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's just like all right, like this
is what I have. Yeah. Later, Krates Krote seems honestly,
I want to like, maybe him and hipparchy are they
actually like really cool ones. I'm not sure. Crots gave
away his daughter's hand in marriage for a trial period
of thirty days to see if his daughter liked it.

Speaker 1 (36:17):
Okay, again, not the worst Crot's No.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
I got no notes on Krates so far. He encouraged
his son to marry a sex worker he like, specifically
like took his son to brothel and it's like, this
is the kind of lady you got to marry.

Speaker 1 (36:29):
That's so funny. It's like this culture in West Africa.
I'm forgetting. I think it may have been Molly, I'll
double check that. But the more marriages you had as
a woman, the more valuable you are.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
That's experienced.

Speaker 1 (36:45):
Fuck. Yeah, So they have divorced parties.

Speaker 2 (36:48):
That's awesome. Yeah, that fucking rules. I love how Like, hey,
you look back in the past and people were like, ah, yes,
the European norm was this. Everyone was monogamous like whatever.
Fucking gar Like when Caesar showed up in Britain for
the first time and he was writing about it, he
was like, and they share everything in common, including wives.

(37:10):
Wives will have a bunch of husbands. They're all married too.

Speaker 1 (37:12):
This is righteous.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
Yeah, I'm like, ah, yes, monogamy is a normal way
for everyone. Like I mean, obviously that's also normal and fine,
but like every culture is fucking different, right, Yeah. And
Diogenes himself dated a famous courtisan, not hired her, but
they were like lovers or whatever. He told his followers
once that they should go to Brothels to visit to
learn that quote there is no difference between what costs

(37:36):
money and what costs nothing. And they were against social values.
So I want to talk about the social values they
were against. This will be the most content warning part
of the episode. Probably I'm bracing myself.

Speaker 1 (37:48):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (37:49):
Marriage is a fundamental part of Greek society, or was
you marry to make children? It is a productive act, right,
You need children to have a good reputation to be
seen as wealthy in some Greek Again, when we're like
the Greeks did the following the citizens the rich fuckers.
In some Greek cities, there's legal discrimination against unmarried men
past a certain age. Marriage wasn't really monogamous for men.

(38:11):
It wasn't considered adultery if they slept with unmarried young
men or boys, sex workers, or enslaved people of whatever gender.
Adultery is when you slept with a citizen's wife or
an engaged woman, because women were being treated as property.

Speaker 1 (38:26):
Yeah, I was about to say.

Speaker 2 (38:28):
If you were convicted of adultery, you would be covered
with ashes and then anally raped by a turnip. Jesus Christ,
and then everyone would make fun of you for being wide.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
Asked, oh my god, oh my, that's.

Speaker 2 (38:40):
A nightmare society.

Speaker 1 (38:41):
That is an They did not teach us this in school.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
They didn't talk about the turnips.

Speaker 1 (38:46):
No, they taught me a lot about Plato, but I
don't remember the turnips.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
Yeah, weird, I can't imagine the god. So by teaching
free love, the Cynics were promoting freedom for women, because
men were already largely free as long as you didn't
steal someone's property. But Diogenes himself was fine with corporal
punishment for adulterers because they had given in to temptation,

(39:12):
the same as eating or drinking too much.

Speaker 3 (39:15):
Okay, this guy settle down, yeah, he said, quote there
is nothing more vile than the adulterer who gives up
his soul in exchange for venal commodities.

Speaker 2 (39:26):
He also specifically campaigned against pederasti, telling young men that
they were being taken advantage of, and he would mock
young men who were fine with it by saying that
they had gaping assholes or whatever. So fucking mixed bag.

Speaker 1 (39:39):
Yeah, free love, but I don't really understand the contours
of this free love.

Speaker 2 (39:43):
Yeah. And on that note, there's ads. They're right now
and we're back. So the Cynics got their name from
hanging out the dog again. I should have written the
Greek word here down and I didn't much like the

(40:05):
Stoics who descended from them. They got their name from
hanging out on a porch in the agora a stoa
in Greek, because I remember to write that one down.
Old philosophy sounds more fun when you're like, pick your team,
the dogs or the kids on the porch they have mascots. Yeah,
and the cynical philosophy. The main two parts of it
are living according to nature and frugality. They taught that

(40:28):
humans had fallen from grace, that we should look to
animals because they show us what's natural instead of what's
imposed on us by society. Diogenies believed aggressively in free speech.
He opposed Plato. Plato taught the kind of modern right
wing idea that you should love your friends and be
hostile to strangers. You know, the like the like right
wing man dude who's like, I'm amazing to my friends,

(40:50):
but you cross me, I'll murder everyone you've ever met,
you know.

Speaker 1 (40:53):
I mean that's the basis of their entire thought process,
is like you have to be good only to your own,
to your family, to your friend, to your community. You
being in this country white.

Speaker 2 (41:03):
Yeah, yeah, it's like why Jade Vance was like trying
to be like, I'm Catholic, and the Catholic teaching is
that you should only be good to your people and
the yeah, all of the Catholic hierarchy is like, my dude,
the word Catholic means universal.

Speaker 1 (41:17):
Right the popes, Like what do we talk about?

Speaker 2 (41:19):
Yeah, the sole thing that this is built around is
a universal moral system.

Speaker 1 (41:25):
I'm sure you've seen this, and I don't want to
give them free like ad space here, But there are
all these books coming out now about how like Christians
have misunderstood empathy. Oh yeah, sick empathy. Like I don't,
we're not going to get into it, but it's a
thing now that they're trying to relitigate.

Speaker 2 (41:41):
Yeah, And so Diogenes was opposed to all of this idea.
He was opposed the idea that you should love your
friends and be hostile to strangers. Instead, you kind of
taught the opposite, you're kind to strangers and hostile to
your friends. Okay, I'm not really kidding why, Like I
feel like, okay, so I had a friend like this,

(42:02):
Who's the reason I know the word frenem me?

Speaker 1 (42:04):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
He since died Rest in peace Aragorn, who was named
that it was his legal name. It's not just me
making a token reference. Yeah. He was an indigenous anarchist
who died a couple of years ago. And his whole
thing was we should promote a culture where we're ruthless
to each other. And I absolutely and vehemently disagreed. But

(42:26):
it was a trap because if I disagreed with him directly,
I was doing his thing.

Speaker 1 (42:30):
Oh no, it got you. Yeah, so maybe it's like
a whole like I critique you.

Speaker 2 (42:35):
Because I love you exactly. Yeah, And he's like strangers,
why should they listen to you? But your friend like, hey,
that dress makes you look fat? Again? Shut the fuck up.
I know I know the size I am. Yeah, but
like I see it, I'll certainly take it over. Like
rampant zenophobia and racism and shit, you know, yeah, yeah,

(42:57):
and yeah. He stayed fit until his old age. He
was really into exercising and being fit as an old guy.
He didn't want to slow down. He said, quote, if
I were running a distance race, would I slowed down
when approaching the finishing line? Wouldn't I do better to
speed up?

Speaker 1 (43:13):
Wow?

Speaker 2 (43:14):
So he was like old dude fitness influencer deep. Yeah,
and one last aside about this man. He really liked
flipping people off. Did you know that that was a thing.

Speaker 1 (43:26):
I didn't know that they invented it back then.

Speaker 2 (43:28):
Yeah, So I fell down a rabbit hole. So I'm
gonna go down this rabbit hole. He wrote, quote, most
people go crazy over a finger. If you walk around
with your middle finger extended, a person thinks you're nuts.
But if you use your forefinger, it's no problem.

Speaker 1 (43:44):
Okay. So he's just doing that all day, like just
trolling people with his finger.

Speaker 2 (43:48):
Yeah. So he's just flipping people off and be like, well,
if you have a problem with it, it's your fault.
It's just this finger. It's like being like, oh, words
are just words, Like right, Well, shouldn't matter whether I say, hey,
I love you or hey I hope your child dies
in a fiery act.

Speaker 1 (44:04):
I mean that's you, that's you taking advantage of this situation.
Oh my gosh, I didn't know. I'm gonna have to
go on a deep dive and like when did the
middle finger?

Speaker 2 (44:11):
Oh, I'm going to talk about this going on. Unfortunately,
the main answers we don't know or the English language
sources that I read, don't know. Greece absolutely used it.
Rome absolutely used it, and so the insult goes back
at least that far. In ancient Greece, the middle finger
represents a dick, and the knuckles on either side represent testicles.

(44:31):
I did not know that.

Speaker 1 (44:32):
That's amazing.

Speaker 2 (44:33):
Flipping someone off meant saying you're the receptive anal partner.
Oh my gosh, so it's a homophobic insult. Uh huh.
I'm not trying to cancel the middle finger here, I'm
just explaining its history.

Speaker 1 (44:45):
We're reclaiming it.

Speaker 2 (44:46):
Yeah, that's right. And Diogenes like giving people shit about
being the receptive anal partner because he's piece of shit,
I mean, a complicated man. In Rome, it was called
digitous impudicus, impudicus whatever, fuck room and the indecent finger,
and the German tribes gave the finger to the approaching
Roman army, as related by the one historian who I
seemed to quote every damn week on the show lately, Tacitus,

(45:08):
who's an old historian from back then. So it goes
back at least that far. Interestingly, it didn't reach the
US until the wave of Italian immigrants in the late
nineteenth century. I'm not joking that this is like I
I was like, I should cut this out of the script,
and that I was like, no, I'm keeping this part now.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
No, it's super interesting.

Speaker 2 (45:24):
Yeah. So the wave of Italian immigrants in the late
nineteenth century brought over the middle finger. I think before
that they were probably using the English one, because the
English and French have their own insulting gestures. The French
is the broad d'ell noir, where you raise a fist
towards someone and grab your bicep, and the English have
the two finger salute where you kind of do a

(45:45):
backwards view for victory. And the origin of that one
seemed to be unknown. There's an apocryphal story. There's a
story that everyone says it's probably apocryphal, and I believe it,
and I'm going to give you my evidence is that
in the fifteenth century English archers during the Hundred Year
War against France, when they would win, they would often
win because they had really powerful archers.

Speaker 3 (46:06):
Right.

Speaker 2 (46:06):
Everyone else was I think moving acrossbows at this time,
but they're like, we're fucking good at fucking long bows.
So the English archers, basically the apocryphal story goes, if
they capture an English archer, they'll cut off his fingers
so he can't shoot anymore or whatever. Right, but like, no,
I'd probably just kill you, like I don't know whatever.
And so the English would be saying to the French, hey,

(46:26):
I still have these two fingers. I can still shoot
a long bow. I see my argument. One, there's no
evidence of this at all. Two, I'm going to make
a counter argument against it anyway to be a weird
medieval weaponry pedant. The English longbow or the war bow,
is the heaviest drawweight of any bow ever used in war.
The English the one thing you got fucking handed to them,

(46:50):
the heaviest drawweight bow. You hunt with a bow that's
like fifty or sixty pounds now, and historically the English
war bow had a drawweight of at least seventy pounds.
Most of them were probably ninety to one hundred pounds.
There's some sources estimating they had a draw away to
one hundred and sixty pounds. These are like massively complicated,
hard to shoot bows. English long women were trained from

(47:13):
childhood to shoot these fucking things. Okay, that said, you
could still learn how to shoot one now, but you
have to put your entire body into it, use your
back muscles instead of your it's not the thing. It's
not two fingers. That's where I'm going with this. It's
actually three fingers. It's not your whole fist, but it's
like you put three fingers on it, and you like,
do you use your back muscles to open it with

(47:34):
like your leg forward and all this shit. I spent
way too much time watching YouTube videos of archery versus
medieval plate armor like a normal person. So that's not
where the fucking thing comes from. People don't knowra it
comes from. Some people are like, it's two dicks, and
I'm like, you know what, I'd buy it. Everything is dicks.

Speaker 1 (47:52):
Everything is six. That's so funny. We do have a
version of it in my region.

Speaker 2 (47:57):
Oh yeah, I don't.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
It's also about anal receptivity like this.

Speaker 2 (48:02):
Oh it's the shocker.

Speaker 1 (48:03):
Great, it's really bad. I don't even and I don't
know where we got it. I'm just gonna blame the Romans, but.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
Yeah, who fucking knows. Every culture you go back far
enough and they're just like, ah, you like getting fucked.

Speaker 1 (48:19):
It's all homophobia.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Press yeah, yeah, even in cultures that are famously gay,
just like, eh, you enjoy the thing that we all
enjoy like it. Yeah, you have an organ up there
that's specifically designed for pleasure.

Speaker 1 (48:35):
Oh my gosh. Okay, well good to know.

Speaker 2 (48:39):
Yeah, so Diagenes eventually he dies is gonna shock you.
We don't know how he died. The legend goes he
dies the same night as Alexander the Great, the night
of June tenth to eleventh of three, twenty three BC.
But that wasn't an Olympics here, and some people think
he died on his way to the Olympics. So if so,
it wasn't he was like eighty one or ninety honestly,

(49:00):
like he was probably right about all that exercising as
you get older.

Speaker 1 (49:03):
Yeah, yeah, I didn't think they lived that long back then.

Speaker 2 (49:06):
So a lot of the ideas around like people dying
young back in the day is because life spans were
skewed by dying in childhood. Not just childbirth, but childhood.
If you make it to adulthood, you're going to live
about as long as a modern person.

Speaker 1 (49:18):
I see. Okay, makes sense.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
And so he might have died in Corinth or Athens
or on his way to the Olympics or fucking anywhere else.
He might have killed himself in one final act of
self sufficiency. He might have died of food poisoning. He
might have been teaching people you can eat octopus and died.
He fucking knows. And he always insisted that there'd be
no burial, that he'd just be thrown to the wilds.

(49:43):
But he was buried regardless, maybe by the kids that
he tutored when he was enslaved. That was like the
rich family that was always looking out for him, and
his later defenders worked really hard to smooth out his
rough edges. Even modern scholarship wants us really badly to
understand it. He might not have actually advocated incestor ca anibalism,
and there's no proof he jerked off in public, but

(50:04):
I don't know. Sinope. After being conquered by Rome in
seventy BCE, the city that he's from in modern day
Turkey started minting coins with his face on it, And
that's some fucking irony.

Speaker 1 (50:15):
Wow, he would have hated that counterfeitter on the coins.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
Yeah, counterfeitter who hated money and used to run the
coins of that fucking city. But he became kind of
a mascot figure. There was merch of him in the
ancient world. People would put pictures of him on everyday
items like oil lamps, in large numbers, and it's an
easy thing to do an iconic. You get a beardy
guy with a jar, and usually there's a dog. Sometimes

(50:42):
he has the lantern. People use that image a lot
of the Looking for the Wise Man. People are really
into this guy. I've had so many people ask me
to do him, and then.

Speaker 1 (50:50):
That's so interesting. He really resonated with folks back then.

Speaker 2 (50:53):
Yeah. And as a final note, when Alexander the Great died,
the classical era of Greece came crashing down and it
went back to the warring city states, and this reduced
the demand for slave labor and increased people's wages and
generally moved society away from obsessive productivity. This didn't last
second century BCE. Greece fell under Roman influence and the

(51:14):
Roman approach to slavery became the norm. That's the story.
A story of Diogenes by someone who feels complicated about him.

Speaker 1 (51:25):
I mean, yeah, he's complicated about himself, but what a
fascinating figure. And you've almost convinced me to go read
about Greek people in ancient history, which I avoided like
religiously throughout my life.

Speaker 2 (51:40):
Honestly, like me too, And yeah, you're like, oh, everyone's
fucking obsessed with this, but I mean, especially probably in
your position, like being like, yeah, why do I got
to read about these motherfuckers?

Speaker 1 (51:51):
But as an immigrant also, I was like in the
American system, both public and then higher ed and I'd
be like, why are we reading about Why do I
have to read Plato this many times? Why do I
have to? Like what do I need to know about it?
Because of course we understand like Western civilization like claims
these groups and claims this lineage.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
Yeah, nightmare Town, nightmare Town.

Speaker 1 (52:14):
Which is so amazing for them, But also even that
is like quite arbitrary, like totally.

Speaker 2 (52:20):
Yeah, well, thanks for listening to talking about diogenies. You
got anything you want to plug?

Speaker 1 (52:26):
Uh? Yeah, as always if you want to listen to
my episodes or it could happen here. I also do
episodes for from the Periphery Media Collective, and I have
a new book that I've edited coming out in a
couple of months called The Handbook on Authoritarianism in the
Arab world very different from what we well, not that different. Actually,
we've been talking about being anti authoritarian in various ways.

(52:47):
So if you want to look at modern manifestations, I'll
check out the book Awesome.

Speaker 2 (52:53):
I have a thing to Plug. I forgot that I
had a thing to plug last time. I have a
short story coming out in January and it's set in
the Daniel Kine world. I have three books out in
the Daniel Kine world, and when we kickstarted the last book,
I promised that we would do a short story that
felt like it could fit in with that book. Where
our heroes of the Daniel Kain series, the series that
starts with the Lamleslaughter or the Lion, our heroes are

(53:14):
sitting around a fire talking stories about people that they
used to know, the stories that their friends would have told,
with demons and stuff. It's a fantasy, horror, punk, rock
traveler series. And I promised I would write another short story,
and I have finished it and it is going to
be released as a zine. It's going to be free
to anyone who back to go on Kickstarter, and it's
going to be mailed out. The reason I'm pitching this

(53:35):
is that if you want a print copy. The way
to do it is if you subscribe to the publisher,
which I'm part of, its collectively run publisher called Strangers
in the Tangled Wilderness. If you subscribe at ten dollars
a month on our Patreon, you get a zine mailed
to you every month anywhere in the world, and January
we send out a bigger package with more stuff in it.
And if you sign up before December thirty first, you

(53:57):
will get January's edition and will include this story, which
is if You've liked the themes of the shit I've
been talking about for the past month or two where
I'm obsessed with weird old cultures and magic and sacrifice
and stuff. You might like it or you might hate it.
I don't know. But that's the thing. That's the thing
I've done.

Speaker 1 (54:17):
And the holidays are coming up.

Speaker 2 (54:19):
Yeah, although you won't get it in time for the holidays,
but you can sign someone up four second and then
they will get a zena month for however long you
keep them signed up for. Anyway, I will see you
all next week, and my dog is barking and I'm
going to go bye everyone.

Speaker 1 (54:33):
Bye.

Speaker 3 (54:38):
Cool people who did cool stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media.

Speaker 1 (54:42):
For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the I
Heard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.