Les sources anciennes sont nombreuses à évoquer les mendiants et la mendicité. L’analyse de ces références, dispersées dans des textes de natures et d’époques différentes – épopée, élégie, théâtre tragique ou comique, plaidoyers, traités philosophiques ou rhétoriques, romans, épigrammes ou encore proverbes –, permet d’appréhender le fait social de la mendicité. Afin de mettre en évidence le processus d’exclusion et de déchéance sociale dont sont victimes les ptôchoi dans la cité, on examinera les contours de la catégorie sociale des mendiants, leur image sociale, mais aussi les signes extérieurs de mendicité ou encore la forme prise par les demandes d’aumône.
Of all the ancient Greek philosophers, none lived in accordance with his beliefs in such an all-consuming fashion as Diogenes the Cynic. His every word, gesture, and action seem to have been calculated to call into question even the most mundane aspects of our daily lives. Diogenes’s own life, as the rich son of a banker who became a slave and then regained his freedom, raises a whole range of philosophical questions that have remained a source of inspiration down through the centuries for a great many remarkably inventive defamers and defenders.
Diogenes chided philosophers for the discrepancy between their teachings and their lives, and surely no one lived his beliefs in a more uncompromising manner than he did. Diogenes’s exhibitionism and his propensity for taking and giving offense are regarded by some as childish and motivated by a desire for fame, but by others as an ideal form of pure commitment. As a teacher, he eschewed the usual methods of instruction, though he is credited with many works of poetry and philosophy, perhaps none of greater consequence than his Republic. Its doctrines were deeply influential among early Stoics and still resonate in contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism, feminist politics, free speech, et cetera. In antiquity, philosophers’ deaths were taken to be emblematic of their lives, and the various versions of Diogenes’s end reflect the continuing disputes about his conception of a good life.
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