MARIE Antoinette is said to have responded to complaints that the French poor of the late-eighteenth century had no bread with the words “let them eat cake”. Whilst the fact that she probably never said it is neither here nor there, at least for the purposes of what I am about to say, this ill-judged comment sounds more naive than callous and certainly not as calculated as the German aristocrat who, in the early part of the twentieth century, responded to a little boy’s wish to go to heaven on account of having no food with the sarcastic remark that “Perhaps his father ate it all?”

The powers-that-be don’t always have things their own way, of course, and Diogenes – that most cynical of all Ancient Greek renegades – famously had the nerve to inform Alexander the Great that he was standing in his sunlight. He also caused endless scandal by living in a tub and openly masturbating and defecating in the street. Although I wouldn’t go so far as to recommend that we should follow Diogenes’ example to the letter, the first instance illustrates how those in authority can trivialise or dismiss those beneath them and the latter demonstrates that there are still ways of turning the tables.

Those in authority often react very badly to this kind of thing, it must be said, and it was not for nothing that the great philosophical schools of Greece were removed from the marketplace (agora) and conducted in private. Retrospectively speaking, although it happened some time after his death, this may have had something to do with a particular episode involving Diogenes himself. After hearing that Plato had described man as “a featherless biped,” he tore the feathers from a rooster, strode into one of Plato’s lectures and announced “That is Plato’s human”. Ironically, the fact that Diogenes had stepped outside the realms of ordinary dialectics led Plato to place him on the same level as Socrates. Diogenes, in effect, had changed the dynamics of Ancient Greek philosophy.