Diogenes of Sinope c. 412 BC – 323 BC

Diogenes of Sinope was an ancient Greek philosopher and one of the founders of the Cynic school. After his exile from Sinope on the Black Sea coast he settled in Athens, where he lived in deliberate poverty and used public spectacle to expose what he took to be the folly of conventional values. He is said to have lived in a large ceramic jar and to have walked through Athens in daylight with a lighted lamp claiming to look for an honest man. He left no writings of his own; his teachings and many famous anecdotes survive in the Lives of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius. His radical asceticism and his concept of a cosmopolitan citizenship of the world were taken up and softened by the Stoics.