The most noted of the cynics. He pursued the cunic ideal of self - suffiency, a life that was natural and not dependent upon the nonessential luxuries of civilization. Born in Sinope (modern Sinop, Turkey), he studied in Athens, he was a student of Antisthenes, he is credited with the development of the     chreian (moral epigram), with a scandalous attack of convention entitled Republic (with influenced Zeno of citium), and with tragedies illustrative of the human predicament. Because Diogenes believed that virtue was better revealed in action than theory, he made his life a protest against what he thought of as a corrupt society.He is said to have lived in a large tub, rather than house, and to have gone about Athens with a lantern (lighted Lamb) in the daytime,claiming to be looking for a honest man - but never finding one. In later art, Diogenes is often depicted in a torn cloak, with a dog, carrying a Lantern.
 

                                            and the Cynics

The cynics were adherents of a Greek philosophic school founded in the 4th century BC by Antisthenes. Its best-known member was Diogenes of Sinope.Antisthenes held that happiness is achieved by cyltivating virtue for its own sake. This is attained, he said, by conducting a life free of dependence on possessions and pleasures.
The cynics admired Socrates for his self-suffiency and his indifference to annecessary luxury and possessions. A good life, they taught, involves a return to nature, giving up the decadence of civilized urban life and living simply and strenuously.their name is generally supposed to come from the Greek kynikos, (doglike)  presumably a commentary on their severely critical philosophic style; or it may be derived from Cynosarges, the name of the gymnasium in witch the group met under Antisthenes.The cynics are important in the history of philoshophy because of their influence, both in Greece and Rome, on Stoicism.
 
 

Bibliography:Copleston,F.J.,A History of Philosophy:Greece and Rome (1962:repr,1993)