World's First Punk

The Hardcore life of Diogenes the Cynic

By: L. M. Patrick

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Length: 3 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

Peeing, pooping, and wanking in public, insulting the powerful and sleeping in the street: Such was the life of the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, a real man who was a contemporary of the immortal Plato. But unlike Plato who ran a famous school and behaved with austere grace, Diogenes lived like a wild animal among the marble colonnades of his adoptive city of Athens. He and the school of Cynic philosophers who followed him were renowned for their "dog-like" behavior, and they are history's first clear example of the urban primitive. In modernity we have seen the same ethos reemerge in the form of punk rockers who, like Diogenes, liked nothing better than to spit in the eye of the establishment and horrify those who cherished the existing order of things. Diogenes left no written records, such that all we have come to know of him has come down through second hand accounts - and this gives a sense of the depth of the impression he left upon his contemporaries. Those accounts of his words and deeds have been woven into this imagining of the great man's life, which is sure to amuse and edify.