Plato reportedly called Diogenes "Socrates gone mad," and Diogenes spent his life earning the title. He lived in a large clay storage jar in the Athenian marketplace, ate and slept in public, and treated every social convention as an open question. When Plato defined a human being as a featherless biped, Diogenes plucked a chicken, carried it into the Academy and announced, "Here is Plato's man." When Alexander the Great, the most powerful man alive, stood over him and offered him anything he wished, Diogenes asked him to step aside, because he was blocking the sun. According to Plutarch, Alexander walked away saying that if he weren't Alexander, he would want to be Diogenes.
His followers were called Cynics, from the Greek word for "dog," because they lived without shame, like animals in the street. The modern meaning of cynic, someone who assumes the worst of everyone, has nearly reversed the original. Diogenes wasn't bitter. He believed people were capable of real virtue and that most of what society prizes gets in the way of it. His famous stunt of walking through Athens in broad daylight with a lit lamp, "looking for a human being," was a joke with a moral: the city was full of people and short on real ones.
Waterhouse painted him in 1882, years before the enchantresses that made him famous, when he was still working in the polished classical style of Lawrence Alma-Tadema. The painting, now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, has a joke of its own. Fashionable young women on the steps above peer down at the philosopher like tourists at a curiosity, surrounded by roses, fans and parasols, while he keeps reading. Those parasols are Japanese in style, a nod to the craze for Japanese art that swept London in the 1870s and '80s. Waterhouse had quietly put his own society on the steps of ancient Athens.
That's the painting's real subject: who is watching whom. The onlookers think they've found an oddity. The picture suggests the oddity is them, idling among luxuries they don't need, while the man in the jar has the one thing they lack, the freedom of not caring what anyone thinks of him.
Diogenes' influence runs a long way. The Stoics admired his indifference to fortune. Asked where he came from, he answered that he was a kosmopolitēs, a "citizen of the world," the earliest recorded use of the idea. Modern minimalism, the voluntary-simplicity movement and every serious attempt to opt out of the status race owe him something. Medicine even named a condition after him, "Diogenes syndrome," describing elderly people who neglect themselves and hoard, an irony he'd have enjoyed, since he owned almost nothing.
What makes him worth returning to is the question underneath all the pranks: how much of what you want do you actually need, and whose approval are you working for? More than two thousand years later, in a culture built on display, it's still an uncomfortable thing to be asked.
Waterhouse's Diogenes appears on our: