Person
Diogenes
Cynic from Sinope who lived at Corinth. Asked by Alexander what he wanted, he said, in Hicks's translation, "Stand out of my light."
Life
Diogenes of Sinope is the Cynic who turned poverty and public shamelessness into a method. Ancient lives place him in Athens and then in Corinth. They do not agree on the year of his birth or of his death. Diogenes Laertius collects several accounts of how he died, and one tradition puts that death in the same year as Alexander’s, 323 BCE.
The meeting with Alexander is told twice in public-domain English, with different wording. Plutarch, in Clough’s revision of Dryden, sets it in the Cranium at Corinth, just after the Greeks named Alexander their general, and gives the answer “I would have you stand from between me and the sun.” Diogenes Laertius, in Hicks’s translation, gives “Stand out of my light.” “Stand out of my sunlight” is a paraphrase of those sentences. The picture on this page is Gaspar de Crayer’s canvas of about 1625–1630, in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum. It is a history painting of the meeting, not a face from the fourth century BCE.
Gaspar de Crayer, Alexander and Diogenes, about 1625–1630. Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne. Not a portrait from life. Public-domain reproduction via Wikimedia Commons. Image file. Public domain. See the Commons file for the reproduction status outside the United States.
