In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.

Foucault expands this reading in his last course at the Collège de France The Courage of Truth. He begged for a living and slept in a large ceramic jar in the marketplace. An exile and an outcast a man with no social identity Diogenes made a mark on his contemporaries.

None of Diogenes’ many writings has survived but details of his life come in the form of anecdotes (chreia) especially from Diogenes Laërtius in his book Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Diogenes of Sinope was a controversial figure.