 Nowadays, the word cynic is kind of a bad word, right? It's used to refer to a person who's sort of motivated by craven self-interest rather than honorable reasons, or somebody who doubts and despises human sincerity is called a cynic. And thus, it's often said that our politics today are cynical and so forth, and that we're all we're living in a cynical age and so forth. So this is another important example of how terminology that originated in philosophical schools of the Hellenistic period pervades our contemporary conceptual seeds. So I've already given examples of that with respect to skeptics, Stoics, and Epicureans, and the cynics are another case of this. But as in those other cases where the term seems to have become perverted and transformed in its transmission over thousands of years, so the term cynicism has been transformed nearly into its opposite. So the cynics practiced a way of life that was influenced by a philosopher named Antispanese, A-N-T-I-S-T-H-E-N-E-S to spell it with Roman characters. This Antispanese had been one of the pupils of Socrates, and he taught in a gymnasium which was called the cuneaux sargais, which literally means something like the white dog. And thus, his followers actually became known as cunees, cynics, or dog. So the Greek word for dog is cunees. This is where we ultimately get the word canine and so forth. Now what was Antispanese philosophy? We're not going to spend much time on it because he's a classical age philosopher, but he embraced poverty in pursuit of self-control, moderation, and in general putting virtue above all else, and adopting a kind of slogan about living in accordance with nature, having a natural-based lifestyle. And in Athens, Diogenes met and doggedly insisted on becoming a pupil of Antispanese. So in the reading, you may have noticed that Antispanese initially tried to reject him as a student and actually started sort of beating Diogenes up every time he would follow him around and insist on becoming his pupil, something I won't do. Antispanese did, but Diogenes said something like, go ahead and hit me. You won't find any wood hard enough to keep me away from you so long as I think you have something important to teach me. Diogenes really enthusiastically embraced this title of being like a dog and doing, as it were, doggy-style philosophy. And he's developed a kind of reputation for being dog-like or rude or churlish. But he argued that, look, dogs live more in accordance with nature than human beings do. And so after he became a homeless beggar in the streets of Athens, he says that he would fawn over those who gave him handouts just like a dog and bork at those who don't give him handouts just like a dog. And he would also attack scoundrels just like a dog. But he also pointed out that whereas dogs bite only their enemies, Diogenes is quite willing to bite his own friends if it will help them and correct them and make them become a better person. Now, none of his writings actually survive. And at the very end of the reading, we have a list of various titles that were attributed to him. Although when our source gives the list of those readings, he points out that some people believe that some of those writings weren't authentic and aren't really attributable to Diogenes. So there was already some doubt about his writings in antiquity. But the work that he was most famous for was called The Republic. And the loss of that work is particularly unfortunate because it seems to have made a great splash. And it seems to have had an influence on Plato who wrote a work called The Republic, which still survives maybe the most popular work of philosophy of all time. And the Stoics, who later adopted Diogenes as their kind of mascot, as it were, certain Stoics, including the founder of that school, also wrote political works called The Republic that seemed to have embodied some of the ideas of the cynics and of Diogenes in particular. Since all of those works are also lost and exist only in fragments, it's very difficult to say anything with certainty, but it seems clear that Diogenes have a big influence. Now, since all of his writings are lost, we're dependent on a source book that was compiled in something like the third century AD. Confusingly enough by another person named Diogenes, but this time his name is Diogenes Laertius. He's the source. And so I don't want you to get confused about the source of all of these anecdotes written by Diogenes Laertius in his biographical compendium called Lives of the Famous Philosophers, among other philosophers that he writes about, he writes about Diogenes of Sinnoh. Now, he also writes anecdotes about other cynic philosophers because they formed something like a school, or at least had followers. They didn't really have a school in terms of having institutions and buildings and that sort of thing. After all, they embraced a lifestyle of poverty and lived homeless in the streets. But there were pupils and people that followed Diogenes around and his successors. And we have anecdotes and stories about some of these people, including cradies of thebes and Hipparchia of Marlea, who was a practicing female cynic philosopher. Now, for Diogenes, we can distinguish three periods of his life. First, his early life in Sinnoh, which is a city on the north shore of the Black Sea in modern-day Turkey, where there is still a statue to Diogenes if you go there. That's where he was born, and he became exiled from that place. Upon being exiled, he went to Athens, where, as I already said, he took up philosophy, became a pupil of Antisthenes, and became famous as the cynical philosopher, but also became a beggar living in the streets and going around berating people about living in accordance with nature. And the third phase of his life is after he was doing some traveling and he was captured and sold into slavery and ended up in Corinth. Now, of this first phase of his life, we know next to nothing, except that he was born the son of a coin maker or a moneyer in Sinnoh. But he had to leave there after his father and or he was accused of counterfeiting money or adulterating currency somehow. And later, biographers make the episode with the counterfeiting and adulterating the currency to prefigure Diogenes later complete and utter rejection of all conventions. And so making this into a potent metaphor, the idea of defacing the currency, meaning rejecting everything that people currently believe or altering the perceived value of things. But the actual effect of the episode was to throw Diogenes into financial ruin, abject poverty and force him into exile and to leave that city. And so eventually, he arrived in Athens, where again he becomes a beggar and seemingly enthusiastically embraces poverty and chooses to live in the streets, claiming that quote, the love of money or greed is the metropolis from which all evil things originate. So this is the second phase of his life, and most of the anecdotes in the readings pertain to this Athenian phase. Now, he was accused of greed himself because of the counterfeiting. So when he goes around denouncing greed all the time, people say, aren't you the guy that was busted for counterfeiting money in Sinnoh and so forth? And he would respond to this by saying, well, yes, I was. That crime drove me into exile, which forced me to do philosophy, which made me a better person, while you, who are standing there accusing me of being a bad person, have never bothered to improve yourself whatsoever. And his follower, Crady, so fanatically embraced this idea of living in accordance with nature and that the love of money is evil, that he sold all of his property, all of his land and animals and all of his possessions, took the money, went down to the seashore, and threw it into the ocean, and got rid of all of his wealth. It was like, thank God I got rid of all of that stuff that was burdening me and bothering me and causing me not to live in accordance with nature. Now, Diogenes argued that by observing other animals, such as mice, who live contentedly without homes, are unafraid of the dark, don't seek luxuries and so forth, one can discover that there are ample means for living in accordance with nature that are available in almost any circumstances. So he ends up enacting the ideas of Antisthenes in a way taking them even further by adapting a radical lifestyle focused completely on nature's demands and valuing nothing above freedom, self-sufficiency, and outspokenness. So he says that, quote, the most beautiful thing in the world is freedom of speech. And we have this picture of him of somebody who sort of speaks truth to power. He's constantly running into powerful people and he's saying exactly how he feels because there's basically nothing they can do to undermine him. They can't take his property, they can't harm him in any way because he's already voluntarily given up all status, all of his possessions, and so forth. And so he has absolute freedom to speak freely to whomever he wants, however he wants. And he insists that the means of living happily are easily available if people train themselves to live in accordance with nature. As it stands, people develop habits and desires and make themselves miserable because of their unwillingness to do so. So he made various public displays of rejecting conventions that he thought drew us away from living in accordance to nature. So he would eat, sleep, or converse wherever he happened to be in public, in the marketplace, in a temple, among a crowd of people, whatever. And so, for example, somebody asked him, why are you eating in public? And he said, well, because I became hungry in public. And there's another kind of joke where somebody says, what are you doing drinking in a tavern? And he said, well, I also get my haircut at the barber shop. And he says, he even masturbated in public and said, yeah, if it were just so easy to gratify my hunger by rubbing my stomach. And he insisted that he outdid the great king of Persia in good luck and in his quality of life. Because while the king of Persia can never get enough of anything, Diogenes never wants anything, never desires anything. He got rid of all of his desires. And here's a really profound point. When you're confronted by desires, desires are intrinsically painful things. It means you want something that you don't have. And there's exactly two ways of dealing with desires. One of them is to work really hard to satisfy that desire, to seduce that person, to earn the money to buy that car or that house, to work really hard in order to get that job. Another way to deal with it is just to get rid of the desire. Just don't care about driving that car anymore. Just don't worry about making that other person fall in love with you. Just eliminate the desire, and then the pain goes away. And it's a much easier path than working so hard and twisting your whole life around in order to satisfy the desire. Yeah, you have a question? Is wanting to leave according to nature a kind of desire? Well, no. No, it's a method of living. Desires are for things like luxuries. Well, first of all, we have desires for basic things like food, drink, shelter, clothing, that sort of thing. But then we also have desires for other things, like luxuries, power, status, wealth, and so on. Now, the former objects, we can't really get rid of. So when you're hungry, you can't just say, OK, I'll just not desire food anymore. You need to satisfy those desires. But Dialgie's point is, those are really easy to satisfy, actually. So he can just go beg somebody to buy him food. Or you can easily find water to drink. You can live in the same ragged cloak. And you don't need to have really cool shoes and really nice clothes. And you don't need fancy kinds of food. And you don't need bottled water and so forth. You can eliminate the desire for those things and just be satisfied with the more simple things. As for the later of the other objects of desires, desires for things like fame, glory, status, power, riches, that sort of thing, you could just get rid of those desires entirely. There's no pain of getting rid of those. They don't need to be satisfied, and it's not worth it to work to satisfy them. So no, that's a confusion to think that living in accordance with nature is itself a desire. Living in accordance with nature is a way of dealing with desires that we actually have. And what we do is we say, which of these desires are natural and which aren't? And the natural ones are the ones that cause me pain if they're not satisfied. And so I need some means of dealing with them, but it turns out they're pretty easy to obtain. The other ones, the other things that we happen to desire, we can just eliminate by realizing they're not in accordance with nature. They're just ideas that people have invented that you should want to be famous. You should need to be powerful. You need to be a successful person. You need to be a professional, whatever it is. It seems like a lot of people were inspired by his way of life. But I was curious if there is anyone prior to the Algenies, philosophers or just any prominent people who chose a similar kind of life or like religious orders or anything like that, this kind of stuff? Well, I mean, there are certainly Antisthenes. And what happens is these are the earliest, this is a period of time in which we're making a transition to writing. And people are becoming literate and starting to write things down. So these are really the earliest, some of the earliest people in the Greek tradition that are written about pursuing this kind of lifestyle. But presumably, it's a very ancient or even perennial way of life to realize, I don't need to actually try to live up to these things. Now, it does require a certain amount of freedom in order to do this. Not everybody, slaves, for example, can't just walk away and say, I'm not going to deal with any of this stuff anymore. Although there's this crazy anecdote about what happened when Diogenes became enslaved, and we'll get to that later. But presumably, there were other people that lived this way. And there are still people that lived this way, even though they haven't read any Greek philosophy or read any Diogenes. So I think most homelessness is involuntary. And those people would like to have jobs and have places to live. But not all of them. It's possible to embrace this lifestyle to say, well, in order to have a house, I have to have a job. I have to deal with bankers. I have to deal with creditors earning money, making payments, signing agreements, and all that. And all of that was a huge restriction on my freedom. And I value freedom more than I value living in a house. And so some of these people that live on the streets do so voluntarily, because they actually reject the conventions that say, you ought to live in a house. And this is somebody who sort of did that and then made a philosophical movement based on it. Question? Any of the rest of you who have met wheels and raptor or resident press punks who live on campus who do exactly this? Who lived out of your religious robe and spoke a lot of weed? And I'm glad how nice this did be. No, I can't believe I haven't hung out with these people. What are you talking about? These are the cynics that live on campus and are homeless. And do they challenge other people's views? What am I talking about? Do they think of themselves as living in accordance with nature? No, they're not explicitly silly. OK. But this kind of thing persists. This is, I think, a perennial lifestyle. We didn't really need diogenes to invent this. But he promoted as an idea and realized that there's a philosophical basis for this kind of view. And that in a way, if we think it's a ridiculous, despicable thing, and these people are living like dogs and so forth, then we've really got to come up with a reason why it's actually worth it to do all of those things and to undergo all the evils that are necessary to make our luxurious lifestyles possible or even our relatively modest lifestyles possible. So diogenes only possessions, according to the reading, was a large cloak. That's what's meant by saying it's a double-folded cloak. A pack, sort of like a backpack that he used to carry food around, a bowl, a cup, and later in life, a staff, which he claims he used only for long blocks or for self-defense, which you need if you're living on the streets because people randomly attack homeless people and so you need some means of self-defense. Now, there's these stories about how he threw his bowl away because he saw a child eating lentils with a concave morsel of bread or like naan or something and said, what am I doing carrying this bowl around when I could just eat this stuff with my hands? And then he abandoned his cup one day when he saw a lab drinking water with cupped hands. And he remarked that a child has outdone me in simplicity of living. And he addressed his cup, why on earth have I been carrying you around for so long? My justification is you can't drink coffee with cupped hands. It burns your hands. But again, biology wouldn't buy the answer because you'd say, well, if you can't drink coffee with cupped hands, then get rid of the desire for coffee. It's costing you money. It's taking up resources that are destroying the planet to have all this plastic and paper and then we have to go exploit people in South America in order to get coffee and so forth. Why don't you just stop drinking coffee and drink water, which you can drink with cupped hands and is easily available, except that it's not easily available around here. It's one of the scarcest things you can find in Southern California and probably in Athens as well. But again, it's a point that it's something we don't need and it's almost ridiculous to think of all the trouble that's being gone to make it possible. And including all of the injustices that seem to be necessary to make it possible, like dealing with international trade and that sort of thing. So he got rid of his cup. He got rid of his bowl. His double folded cloak. He had to have a large one because it had to be warm enough in the winter and also so he could sleep on it. Since, again, he has often had to sort of rough it. There is an anecdote about how he tried to procure a small house, but he ran into difficulties with that and so he took to sleeping in a large storage container near a temple dedicated to the mother goddess. And so he'd walk around pointing to these temples like the Portico of Zeus and the Hall of Precessions and these big public buildings in Athens. And he would say, look at these great places that the Athenians have built me to live in. These giant temples and so forth. This is wonderful. Now, a really profound thing he said, and subsequently extremely influential, is people would ask him, hey, where are you from? What is your citizenship exactly? What city are you a citizen of? And to give an answer, he said, that one. And he points upwards. And then he would remark, I'm a citizen of the cosmos, which is where we get the term and then eventually an entire philosophy that develops out of it, cosmopolitan, which means citizen of the cosmos. A cosmopolitan person is someone who completely rejects nationalism of any form, who doesn't think there is any value whatsoever and, in fact, thinks that patriotism and nationalism are negative, bad, horrible things and that we shouldn't identify with the state that we happen to be born in. Instead, we should realize that those states are just temporary, artificial, conventional, political configurations, and that we're all from the same place. We all come from nature. We all come from the cosmos. And our true allegiances should not be to these conventional states, but should be to the entire cosmos and nature and human nature and so forth. So that's where we get the concept of being cosmopolitan. Again, the term has also been belittled and distorted into meaning something like being a rich playboy or something. And so again, we get this inversion of what the term actually means. I'm always laughing when I'm standing in line at the grocery store and there's a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine there with Ivanka Trump or something on the cover of it. It's a complete travesty of the concept of cosmopolitanism. All right, are there some questions back here? Any indication about how you feel about the gods? Yes, plenty. So he rejected the somebody suggested to him, look, you should be initiated into the mystery religions because you would do really well and get a really good place in it because you're obviously this very spiritual kind of guy. And he said, it's really absurd to think that people who get initiated into religions that they should eventually dwell in the aisles of the blessed or in heaven or whatever, even bad people that sign up for these religions supposedly get that, whereas good people who never get initiated into religions should wallow in the mire or be sent to hell. It's absolutely ridiculous to think that your destiny after death has to do not with the kind of person you are and the kind of ethics you had, but whether you signed up to a particular religion or not. So that's one of his views on religion. And he basically mocked religion and made fun of it. So there's the anecdote about how somebody was sprinkling water in that sort of purification ritual over people. And he said, look, just as you can't correct grammatical errors in your term papers by sprinkling water over them, so you can't correct moral errors by sprinkling water over the heads of people, there's the anecdote about how he sees these temple administrators leading away a man who had stolen money from the donation box. And he says to them, look at how great thieves lead away petty thieves and characterize the collection of funds for this institutional religion as being a kind of thievery, stealing from people. Yeah? His criticisms of religious institutions, would he say that identifying with certain religions kind of does the same thing as identifying with certain states or nations? Well, that's an interesting way to think about it. We would have to know a bit more about the sociology of Greek religious practices. They don't seem to be as exclusive as our organized religions, where you're either Catholic or Protestant or Muslim or whatever. Although that point just seems to drive home the points he's making even more along the lines you're saying. You have allegiance to some conventional human-invented thing or a system of beliefs that's not universal. It's ridiculous to think that those people, just because they're members of that religion, are better than other people that didn't sign up to that religion, or that they will be saved, or they will be favored by the gods, and so forth. There was like a few surveys done about, I guess, asking overall ethical questions about many different cultures. And it seems to be on the overall averages, they seem to be quite similar over most different cultures. But at the same time, I guess people act like they're complete opposites because they identify with a different religion. Well, yes, and there's the sociological stuff about how the closer two religions are to each other than the more vehemently they hate each other, and so forth. We think it's fine, whatever religion these people in India practice, but these Protestants right next door to me are really devil-worshiping, and so forth. So yes, I mean, he did say quite a bit about religion. And like the other conventional institutions, he exposed the things that were stupid about it and tried to have this idea of having allegiance only to nature, to the cosmos, and so forth. So does that answer the question, Luca? Yeah, I'm trying to figure out if there is actually anything about, any answer about him, like, just like the institutional gods, the pancels of the gods. Well, it's OK. I think I get your point, because everything, all the answers I've given are about the institutions and the priests and temples and things like that. And what does he have to say about God, about Zeus, and those sorts of things? I mean, do we know that they have a wisdom tradition from the ancients? And I mean, he's fourth century after. Yeah. But he still has, wasn't you VC? But he still has, you know, normally, like, he's still participating in the, like, he's like one of the, one of the, yeah, he's like, he's still, like, fully involved in the ritual practices. He's saying, like, put like this, he's doing the work of demeanor and effort, and he hasn't used him as someone. It's a society that still depends on these figures. Well, yes, that remark about him doing the demeanor and the after-diety thing in public is a reference to eating and having sex in public. And so that's the kind of thing he would say, is that, look, you're having sex in public, which Crady's and Hipparchia actually did. I mean, biology's masturbated in public. They actually had sex in public. And if somebody was to say to them, what are you doing? The answer is, I'm worshiping after-diety, who's the goddess of sexual intercourse. And also, because it's natural, the point is that it's totally in accordance with nature, and that it's mere conventions that tell us that these kind of things shouldn't happen. And there are other cultures in which they do happen in public and so forth, which is an indication that it's by convention and not by nature that we reject it. Another example, I mean, this isn't exactly on religion, but along the same lines, is his attitude about marriage, which was a kind of religious institution in a way. But he said, look, first of all, there is no problem whatsoever with men and women having sex outside of marriage so long as it's consensual. And in fact, his concept of marriage was to reduce marriage to consensual sex. You have consensual sex with someone, you're married to them. So be careful who you have sex with in this concept. Now, if you have that idea about marriage and consensual sex, then you may end up having a problem raising all of the children that will be produced out of that. The solution advocated in his republic, apparently, as it was also advocated in Plato's republic and probably in Zeno, the Stoics Republic, was to say that we should get rid of these conventional family structures and raise all of the children in common. We should have wives and husbands in common, and then the state should be taking care of all of the children. This is advocated by Plato as a way of getting rid of a source and motive for corruption of caring about your own family and giving, for example, political power to people within your own circle and within your own family because you have a allegiance to them. That would never happen nowadays. But back then, it was apparently a problem where people would favor their own family members and their own organizations and so forth instead of the common good. And the response to that was that's out of accordance with nature, and that's wrong. And so what we should do is get rid of that structure and have one where we have wives, husbands, children, and so forth all in common. Just one more thing on this point about religion because it's not, again, directly addressing a point about his attitudes about the gods, but a religious issue. The treatment of his body after death. So he opined on what should happen to his body after death. Right? There are very serious religious rituals connected with what you do with the body after death. All of which he considered to be conventions inconsistent with nature. And so he said, hopefully my friends will just thrust my corpse into a ditch and sprinkle a little dust over it or maybe just throw it out off of the city walls unburied or better yet, drop it into a river so that the fish can eat it. And that way I might be useful after my death. So again, that's flying in the face of organized religion. It would be considered a kind of blasphemous thing. But to him, it's living in accordance with nature. These elaborate rituals around funeral rites and so forth. One thing is, they're all specific to specific communities. And there's great variation of them. That's how you can tell they're not in accordance with nature. And especially if you go to distant places, you'll find that they have totally different ways of dealing with the dead, letting them be eaten by animals or burying them at sea or burning them or whatever. And so none of that is in accordance with nature. So how do you feel about all the theorizing and such that philosophers like Plato and other people did to figure out what nature is? Because so far it seems like his way of going about things is to just strip away social conventions and then whatever's left is natural, right? Right. OK. Well, there are some really great anecdotes about how he dealt with Plato, my favorite ones, in fact. So one anecdote has it that the Academy was into producing definitions. They're trying to get at the forms of things, and as you say, in a way, trying to figure out the nature of things. Although Plato doesn't really like the concept of nature very much, but he wants to get at reality in the forms of things. And they had come up with this definition of a human being as being something like a bipedal or two-footed animal. But then the problem with that is that birds are also two-footed, so you have to add that they're featherless two-footed animals. So they were discussing this definition, and Diology is responded by taking a chicken and plucking it of its wings, bringing it into the classroom, and saying, I give you Plato's human being. At which point, the Platonists were forced to revise their definition to say, having broad nails, since chickens have narrow fingernails. There is also an anecdote of Plato coming back in him. So Diology said, oh, Plato, you're a theory of forms. You're a elaborate theory of forms. I see a cup here, but I don't see the form of a cup here. I don't see a platonic form of a cup. And then Plato is supposed to have said in response to that something like, well, that's because that by means of which you can see a cup, eyes you have, but that by which you would apprehend the form of a cup, i.e. a mind you don't have. And so sometimes Plato gets the better of him in these exchanges, and sometimes he doesn't. But he did seem to reject academic, sophisticated, intellectual stuff, and thought, no, it's all a lot more simple than that, to live in accordance with nature. So he doesn't, and cynics in general, don't seem to go in for elaborate philosophical theorizing and writing up big books about nature and so forth. Although what happens is that in a way, although hardline cynicism continues throughout the Hellenistic age and throughout late antiquity, and arguably gets taken up into Christian monastic cultures and things like that, in fact, there's even people that think that Jesus Christ was essentially a cynic, a guy who walked around, talked about how love is the only thing you should care about, embraced poverty, had no possessions, et cetera. And so there's an interpretation of what's going on there that essentially that is cynicism continued into a later age, and that, as I said earlier, probably continues to the current day. But the Stoics took this cynical movement, and in a way they did intellectualize it, and came up with, they said, okay, well, we do wanna live in accordance with nature, so we really need to figure out what nature is, and if we're gonna figure out what nature is, we're gonna have to do some physics, because physics is the study of nature, and if we're gonna do some physics, then we need to do some logic, because you can't have scientific knowledge about anything without doing logic, and so then they get very deeply into elaborate philosophical views. So there is a kind of hyper-intellectual side of the cynical ethical philosophy in the form of the developments within Stoicism. But the hard-line cynics, the people living homeless in the streets and so forth, those people are not writing elaborate books about nature and so forth, they're just parading people about living unnaturally. Now another great anecdote, set of anecdotes are the ones about Alexander the Great. So he actually confronted diogenes. In fact, one thing is, it turned out Alexander the Great was a great admirer of diogenes and thought, he's really cool, this guy is so, you know, he'll speak the truth to anyone and so forth, and so apparently Alexander actually said, if I wasn't Alexander, I would choose to be diogenes. And one time when they met, apparently Alexander came up to him and said, I'm Alexander the Great. And of course, diogenes responded, I'm diogenes the dog. And then diogenes' son bathing and Alexander comes up to him and says, just tell me, you know, standing above him, just tell me, what do you want me to do for you? I'll do whatever you want. And diogenes said, step out of my sunlight. You're blocking my son, so step aside. Which of course was richly interpreted later about, you know, you're getting all this fame and all this power and all this attention, which you shouldn't be, people should instead be paying attention to me, who's teaching people how to live in accordance with nature and so forth. Now the last stage of his life is this murky period when he goes, he ends up in Corinth and it's related to us through a famous story called The Sale of Diogenes, which was probably a story made up by later authors and it was continually embellished with more and more anecdotes about what had happened. But the outline of the story is that he's kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery. And there he does things like convincing the captors to give the captives more food on the ground that herders of sheep and pigs fatten up the livestock to get them into shape before selling them and so forth. And then when he's on the auction block ready to be sold, he refuses to stand up and he says, hey look, fish are sold in whatever position they lay in on the table. And jokes like this, where he just refuses to acknowledge the authority and so forth of his captors. And he's about to be auctioned off and the auctioneer's going through these people and they're saying, okay, here's a man who's good at ship building, who wants to buy a ship builder. And here's a man who's good at shoe making, who wants to buy a shoemaker. And here's a person who's good at farming, who wants to buy a farmer. And then he gets to Diogenes and it's like, what can this guy actually do? And he asks Diogenes, so what are you capable of doing? And Diogenes' reply is, I know how to rule people, right? I know how to be a master of other men, you know? Or, you know, what's my skill? Government, I can run other people. And so surprisingly, he's about to be auctioned off. There's this lavishly dressed, pretentiously dressed buyer named Zaniades. And he says, look, there is a guy who needs a master over there. That guy dressed up in those ridiculous clothes, he clearly needs somebody to govern his life. So why don't you get him to buy me? And Zaniades was actually impressed with this and bought him, took him to Corinth, put him in charge of the education of his children and eventually the management of his entire estate and then used to remark that it was as if a good guardian spirit had come into his household. All of that story seems to be that one can, by pursuing philosophy and following nature as opposed to convention, one can alter the currency and completely turn around one situation from exile and beggar to a rival of the great king of Persia or from a slave into a master. And thus, when Dioges was asked to summarize what he got from doing philosophy and why should anybody study philosophy, his answer was in order to be prepared for anything that might happen.