Diogenes is my new role model.
List of cool shit Diogenes did:
• He masturbated in public to show that he who rejected cultural norms was happy.
• He pissed on people who insulted him.
• He brought food and ate to Plato’s lecture to be distracting as a way of saying “fuck you” to Plato.
• When Plato defined men as “featherless bipeds”, Diogenes plucked every fucking feather from a chicken, brought it to Plato’s Academy, said that he got them a fucking man, causing the Academy to add “with broad flat nails” to their definition.
• He shat in the theatre.
• He ate in the marketplace, which was considered extremely rude back then.
• He willfully lived as a hobo, sleeping in a goddamn jar.
• He got banished from his hometown of Sinope when he managed to lower the value of the currency, which he could do because his father minted coins for a living.
• In broad fucking daylight, he carried out a lamp, saying that he was looking for an honest man.
• He fucking destroyed his one and only wooden bowl after seeing a boy drinking water with just the cup of his hand. He then called himself a moron for carrying useless shit with him.
• Shit relating to Alexander the Great:
• When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes, who was at that moment sunbathing, Alexander asked him if there was anything he wanted so that he could give it to him, to which Diogenes responded by telling him to get out of the way of the fucking light.
• Alexander was surprised by Diogenes’ response and starting leaving, but as he was doing so, he said to his followers that if he wasn’t himself, he would like to be Diogenes, to which Diogenes responded by saying that if he wasn’t himself, he’d also wish to be Diogenes.
• Another account says that Diogenes was looking at some bones when Alexander approached him, and when Alexander asked him what the fuck he was doing, Diogenes responded by saying that he was trying to find the bones of Alexander’s dad, Philip II of Macedon, but he couldn’t tell the difference between them and a slave’s.
• While on a ship to Aegina, he got captured by pirates and sold into slavery in Crete, and then got bought by a guy from Corinth named Xeniades, who asked Diogenes what the fuck he did. Diogenes said that the only fucking thing he knew about was governing men and that he wanted to be sold to someone who needed a master. This was actually him making a pun since in Ancient Greek, it would’ve sounded like both “Governing men” and “Teaching people values”. In response to this, Xeniades gave Diogenes a job as a tutor to his kids.
• While he was in Corinth, someone reported that Philip II of Macedon (Alexander the Great’s dad, if you’ll recall) was in town, which sent everyone into the same sort of mood as when everyone in a class is goofing around like a bunch of shitheads and then the Principal walks in, and then everyone starts looking like they’re working really fucking hard. Diogenes, wanting to look as productive as everyone else so as to not feel left out, starting rolling his jar up and down the gym, and when someone asked him why, he said that he didn’t want to be the only guy doing nothing when everyone else is working hard as hell, and that he was rolling his jar to be like everyone else.
• His cause of death is disputed, but different sources say it was caused by him holding his breath until he died, getting sick from a infected dog bite or from eating raw fucking octopus, and probably some other shit, but those are the only 3 things I got from Wikipedia. However, that’s not even the best part. The best part is that he asked that when he died, his body was to get fucking yeeted outside the city so that wild animals could eat it. When someone asked him if he gave a shit about that, he said that he didn’t as long as they gave him a stick to scare the animals away. They reminded him that once he died, he wouldn’t be able to scare them away seeing as how he wouldn’t be conscious. He responded by saying that if he wasn’t conscious, then why the fuck should he give a shit about what happens to his body?
