The lantern guy — you know the one, went around with a lantern saying he was looking for a single honest man? Or was it righteous man. Either way, that story always annoyed me and if anybody talked approvingly about it, I suspected I wouldn’t like them either. Because how hypocritical to make a performance over everyone else’s flaws.

Old Kid researched Diogenes and told me the following, which I have not bothered to look up and am now typing in based on my memory of our conversation.

Diogenes was nude all the time and lived in a barrel.

Diogenes pooped in public and urinated on people he didn’t like. He often gave the middle finger to people. Did you know they had the middle finger in ancient Greece?

Diogenes had a slave who ran away.

Diogenes was captured and enslaved by pirates.

Diogenes hated Plato and would disrupt his lectures by sneaking in and loudly eating. Once Plato defined “man” as “a featherless biped” and Diogenes plucked a chicken and ran into one of Plato’s lectures with the chicken yelling about how it was a man.

Another philosopher who Diogenes bothered too much hit him on the head with a stick.

Diogenes had no possessions except a wooden bowl (and I guess his barrel) but once he saw a poor child drinking out of his hand because the child didn’t even have a bowl. So did he give the bowl to the child, I asked, and Old Kid said no, he destroyed it because he wanted to be virtuous.

In sum, I was correct about Diogenes.