Diogenes was banished from Sinope as a result of this. At some point the father and son got involved in a plot to debase the currency and mint coins mixed with base metal, and when it was discovered they were blamed for it. Diogenes’ father Hicesias was a banker involved in the Sinopian mint, and Diogenes was originally brought up in the family tradition. This made the city wealthy, wealthy enough to mint its own coins. It was a wealthy port on the southern coast of the Black Sea, acting as a place for trading caravans from the south to meet with ships and exchange their cargoes. The fact that we don’t know what he looked like makes Diogenes a popular pose for portraits – just add lamp.ĭiogenes was born around 412 BC in the Greek colony of Sinope. So if the following seems somewhat far-fetched and occasionally overly dramatic, know that there’s a reason. And worse is that in many cases (especially with a figure as iconic as Diogenes became), they swiftly get co-opted as symbols for whatever the later author wishes to write about. One pitfall there though is that we lose the context of their original source – whether it was a hostile biography or fawning praise, we just don’t know. Mostly we wind up relying on ancient (to us) but more recent writings, which we have to hope were based on reliable lost sources. Of what was, little has survived to this day.
People didn’t keep great records back then, of course, and not much was written down. Diogenes was born over twenty-four hundred years ago, which is more of a problem than historians like to admit.
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