If everyone practised such autonomy, Diogenes argued, the world would be a better place. Pan, the story goes, frustrated by his fruitless pursuit of the nymph Echo, learned the technique from his father, Hermes, and later taught the trick to shepherds to help them cope with having to spend so much time alone in the mountains.
It is, I would like to suggest, a meaningful ecological gesture. They just go out and rub themselves off on something rough.’ But Diogenes’ interest in the aetiology of masturbation presents us with more than a justification for an off-colour antic. ‘When fish need to ejaculate,’ he observed another time, again in self-defence, ‘even they are more sensible than humans. ‘If only it were so easy to relieve hunger by rubbing one’s stomach,’ he is reported to have said when confronted about it. By Dio’s time, Diogenes himself was already famous for the practice, owing to his public displays. Diogenes, Dio tells us, was particularly fond of the myth about the god Pan’s discovery of masturbation. In his sixth Discourse, the orator Dio Chrysostom ( c40-120 CE) relates a curious detail about the Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (404-323 BCE).
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