Stand Out of My Light

The story

The Greeks had met at the Isthmus and named Alexander their general against Persia. Plutarch says ministers and philosophers came to congratulate him. Diogenes of Sinope, who was living at Corinth, did not. Alexander found him lying in the sun in the suburb called the Cranium.

Clough’s revision of the Dryden Life of Alexander has Diogenes raise himself a little when the crowd arrives. Alexander asks whether he wants anything. “Yes,” said he, “I would have you stand from between me and the sun.” The followers laugh at the rudeness. Alexander tells them that if he were not Alexander, he would choose to be Diogenes.

Diogenes Laertius, in Hicks’s 1925 translation, tells the request more briefly. Alexander stands over him in the Craneum and says, “Ask of me any boon you like.” The answer is, “Stand out of my light.” The wish to have been Diogenes is in Laertius too, but in an earlier section, reported on its own: “Had I not been Alexander, I should have liked to be Diogenes.” Plutarch makes it the next sentence, spoken to the men who laughed. Laertius does not tie the two remarks into one afternoon.

“Stand out of my sunlight” is the wording that travels now. It is a paraphrase. The citable public-domain sentences are Hicks’s “Stand out of my light” and Clough’s “stand from between me and the sun.” De Crayer’s canvas, from about 1625 to 1630, puts the seated man in front of the king and the army. The useful difference between the two ancient books is whether Alexander’s admiration was part of that meeting or a saying remembered separately. The night he refused to steal a victory is a different story, years later, before Gaugamela.