The Cynical philosopher Diogenes of Sinope was not impressed by the newfangled timekeeping devices of his day. In the Apophthegmes, Englished by Nicholas Udall in 1542, Erasmus includes the following anecdote about the philosopher’s disdain for the sundial.
Diogenes is presented a dial that his contemporaries regard as innovative and ingenious, likely a hemispherum or hemicycle.92 Upon seeing it, he dismisses it: “A gaye instrumente,” he quips,
“to save us from beeyng deceived of oure supper.” Lest this be construed as a compliment, Erasmus explains: “Menyng the arte of geometrie, with all other the sciencies Mathematicall, to bee to veraye litle use or purpose.”93 Erasmus is diligent to make his reader understand that Diogenes saw the sundial, which relies upon geometrical and mathematical calculations, as but another innovation of little use. In the philosopher’s opinion, there is no cause for mechanical timekeeping when the growl of a hungry belly does the same job naturally. The human body
92 A portable form of the sundial called the hemispherium or hemicycle was purportedly developed by Berosus during Diogenes’s lifetime. See R. Newton Mayall and Margaret L. Mayall, Sundials: How to Know, Use, and Make Them (Boston: Charles T. Branford, 1938), 7–8, and Winthrop W. Dolan, A Choice of Sundials (Battleboro, VT:
Stephen Greene Press, 1975), 34–35.
93 Erasmus, Apophthegmes, trans. Nicholas Udall (London, 1542), 158v. Hereafter cited in text as A.
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In Elizabethan texts, Diogenes is often presented as a champion of various forms of unconstraint. In the Apophthegmes, where he plays a prominent role, he preaches that “libertee”
is the “principall best thing” in life, and he tries to achieve it, according to Erasmus’s approving moralization, through living without need of “many soondrie thynges” (A, 152r). This
“frugalitee” became a hallmark of the philosopher, who was notorious for eschewing a house and household goods by living in a tub in the marketplace (A, 90r). A different, though related, kind of liberty is associated with the philosopher in Thomas Wilson’s The Art of Rhetoric (1553), where Diogenes is the second-most frequently quoted philosopher. There he exemplifies what Wilson calls “liberavox” or “freenesse of speache” and defines as “when wee speake boldely, &
without feare, euen to the proudest of them, whatsoeuer we please, or haue list to speake.”94 Both of these differing forms of freedom are also part of John Lyly’s dramatic representation of
Diogenes in A moste excellent comedie of Alexander, Campaspe, and Diogenes (1584). Lyly’s character counsels Alexander the Great, his most famous foil, to “unlearne to covet.”95 This lesson frees both the ruler and his subjects from the fetters of Alexander’s own lust for his captive, Campaspe, enabling her to marry the painter, Apelles, with whom she is in love.
Combined, Erasumus, Wilson, and Lyly—three influential sources for subsequent Diogeneana—
present the philosopher as representative of liberty from things, from authoritative restrictions on speech, and from lust.
Recent scholarship on Cynicism has brought increasing attention to the philosophy’s
94 Quotation from Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1553), 107v. On Wilson’s use of Diogenes, see Hugh Roberts, Dogs’ Tales: Representations of Ancient Cynicism in French Renaissance Texts (New York: Rodopi, 2006), 15.
95 John Lyly, A moste excellent comedie of Alexander, Campaspe, and Diogenes (London, 1584), C2v. Lyly’s play was printed in four editions in the space of one year and performed both at court before Queen Elizabeth and in the Blackfriars. It was also reprinted again in his Sixe Court Comedies (London, 1632).
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associations with these liberties. In Michel Foucault’s late lectures, the Cynics serve as both exemplary parrhésiastes (“free speakers”) and as paragons for the philosopher who wishes to teach through a style of life rather than through written doctrine.96 One aspect of the Cynical lifestyle that interests Foucault is its sexual practice: Diogenes is said to have masturbated in public, which he purportedly compared to banishing hunger by rubbing his belly, and to have solicited prostitutes at his tub, on one occasion masturbating rather than waiting for one to arrive.97 This immediate satisfaction of sexual impulses helped the philosopher minimize desire, which he saw as tyrannous. As Diogenes Laertius, whose Lives of Eminent Philosophers remains the primary source for students of Cynicism, explains, Diogenes attempted to train himself to
“derive more pleasure from despising pleasure than from the pleasures themselves” (73), and
“claimed that to fortune he could oppose courage, to convention nature, to passion reason” (39, 41). Rather than provoking passion, he aimed to purge it. Foucault describes and praises this aspect of Cynicism in The Use of Pleasure, where he interprets Diogenes’s masturbation as a means of preventing domination by lust:
The strategy made possible an equilibrium in the dynamics of pleasure and desire: it kept this dynamics from ‘running away,’ from becoming excessive, by setting the satisfaction of a need as its internal limit; and it prevented this natural force from revolting, from usurping a place that was not its own, because it provided only for what was necessary to
96 Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotexte; distributed by MIT Press, 2001), and The Courage of Truth (the Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983- 1984, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Frédéric Gros (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Apropos this “style of life”
means of teaching and my prior chapter, Cynical educational practice seems to have included a fair measure of violence, with Antisthenes, whom Diogenes followed, having initially beaten his would-be pupil away with a staff rather than educating him (see LEP, 25). The work of Ansgar Allen dilates upon this. See Benign Violence: Education in and Beyond the Age of Reason (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and The Cynical Educator (Leicester:
Mayfly, 2017).
97 See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 47, 71; hereafter cited in text as LEP with reference to English translation page number.
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the body and was intended by nature, and nothing more.98
Though Foucault cites Galen and other sources that were known to early modern readers,99 this sexual liberty of Cynicism—meaning both its free engagement in sex acts and its freedom from unbridled lust—has been less taken up by scholars of the philosophy’s reception in early modernity. Instead, engaging with the philosopher’s late lectures, scholars including David Mazella and David Hershinow have shown how Shakespeare in particular used the philosophy to explore problems with both free speech and freedom from things.100 However, as Foucault’s commentary makes clear, underpinning these liberties is the same notion that is at the heart of Diogenes’s confrontation with the dial: to become self-sufficient, one need only follow one’s natural, bodily needs.101