Diogenes the Cynic in the Dialogues of the Dead of Thomas Brown, Lord Lyttelton, and William Blake.(Critical essay)

 
  Diogenes once passing neare to Hell 
  Beheld Mydas, that sometime liv'd a King, 
  Now in Infernall Beggery to dwell, 
  Base, ragged, dispossesst of ev'ry thing; 
  And laughing said, ah ah my golden Asse, 
  Ist possible the world comes thus to Passe? 
  --Arthur Warren, "Poverties Patience" (1605) 

Dialogues of the Dead and Cynic Philosophy

When Lucian of Samosata composed his Dialogues of the Dead in the second century A.D., he gave Diogenes the Cynic an important though intermittent role in its underworld debates and intellectual satire. (1) Lucian's Dialogues featured not only Diogenes, but other Cynics such as Menippus, Crates, and Antisthenes, inclusions which only underscored the emblematic function of the Cynic philosopher in this newly invented genre. The intimate and long-standing connection between the Dialogues of the Dead and Cynic philosophy reflects some of the genre's most important features: the philosopher as an unlikely ethical hero; the noisy competition of various philosophical sects; and the sad or absurd fates of the rich and powerful in the pagan underworld's "democracy of death." (2) The close generic link between Diogenes and the Dialogues of the Dead continued for a remarkably long time in European literary history, running from Lucian through both the humanist and Enlightenment-era reception, translation, and imitation of Lucian's satire. (3)

This essay will focus on the emblematic role of Diogenes the Cynic in three eighteenth-century English contributions to the genre: Thomas Brown's Letters from the Dead to the Living (1702), George, Lord Lyttelton's Dialogues of The Dead (1760/65), and William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793). Rather than argue for a continuous, evolving tradition that has uniformly affected the philosopher's depiction in all three works, I will stress instead how Diogenes appears as a discontinuous, freestanding trope within each work's treatment of the underworld. In each example, Diogenes is shown to be visibly affiliated with the Lucianic-satiric tradition, but he also reflects the pressures of topical and historical events taken from the author's present. Because of this combination of topical, historical, and Lucianic characteristics, Diogenes in these dialogues becomes a symbol of the ancient moralist incongruously brought into a modernity which he despises, and which threatens to turn his moral poses into burlesque. Each of these eighteenth-century dialogues uses Diogenes to show how a simple and self-sufficient morality can be ironized, threatened, or overturned by the increasing refinement of manners of those around him. Thus, the eighteenth-century Dialogue of the Dead often worries over the possibility that not only manners, but morality itself--as represented by the ancient and perhaps irrelevant moralist Diogenes--could be vulnerable to the passage of time. With Blake, however, the scale of both the moral critique and the passage of time has become so vast that Diogenes has been elevated into a form of prophet; consequently, the distinctions upheld in the earlier dialogues between past and present, or ancient and modern, have simply vanished into the prophet's "perception of the infinite."

While these dialogues wrestle with the issue of how morality and the moralist are affected by history, their depictions of Diogenes turn on three crucial issues: topicality, so that each dialogue-writer uses Diogenes as a convenient device to reference and comment upon some contemporary issue, figure, or event for his readers; truth-telling, so that when Diogenes assumes his traditional role as moralist in the underworld, his blunt comments upon past and present events make him into a surrogate for the moralizing author; and the protest against modernity, so that the dialogue-writer uses Diogenes's attacks upon corruption, artificial manners, and rampant pleasure-seeking as a precedent for his own rejection of modernity. (4) Though these issues are relevant for all three dialogues, Brown seems most interested in exploiting the topicality of the genre, Lyttelton the possibilities of truthful historical discussion of politics, and Blake the potential for the broadest possible critique of his own historical moment.