According to legend, Alexander the Great came to visit the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope. Alexander wanted to fulfill a wish for Diogenes and asked him what he desired. As told by Diogenes Laërtius, Diogenes replied, "Stand out of my light."
One day while he was eating a frugal dish of lentils, he was challenged by the philosopher Aristippus, who, for his part, led a golden life as he was one of the king’s courtiers.
Aristippus scornfully told him:
“See, if you learned to crawl before the king, you wouldn’t have to settle for rubbish like this vulgar dish of lentils!”
Diogenes replied:
“If you’d learned to make do with lentils, you wouldn’t have to crawl before the king!”
He was a raving homeless man who frequently masturbated in public and antagonized anyone who would approach him. However, beyond all that he was one of the smartest people in the ancient world and lived life never comporimising his principles.
Well I think Karl Marx agrees on some way. But when you are BFFs with Engels and enjoy Fox Hunts as a pass time, are you eating the rich or just saying everyone should eat like the rich?
One that I really enjoyed during my pretentious phase was the father of modern philosophy himself, Immanuel Kant. He wrote a lot about ethics and aesthetics but the crux of his work boils down to the idea that space and time are just "forms of intuition" that structure our experience and are just appearances we can comprehend. The true nature of things as they are in themselves is unknowable to us.
As someone who has always considered themselves very rational and more of an agnostic than an atheist, his ideas really clicked with me.
Yeah... something about the anecdotes told about Diogenes sounds off to me - you don't see homeless people today live the charmed life they say Diogenes got to live.
Also slavery was typically nowhere near as a different sort of brutal in that era. Still brutal and terrible, but not "working people to death and then shipping in more people to work to death" brutal.
Edit: changed my wording because slavery has always been fucking horrible, e.g. eunuchs
There's also that another apocrypha of him and Plato. Plato once sarcastically claimed that men were "featherless bipeds". Diogenes later showed up with a chicken, whose feathers had been plucked, "Here is Plato's man!"