Parakharattein to nomisma / Falsifies the coins

Parakharattein to nomisma / Falsifies the coins

To a man who struck him a blow with a stake and then told him: “Be careful!” After hitting him with a stick, he said: “Be careful!”. (Anecdote reported by Diogenes Laertius on Diogenes as the dogged)

We don’t know what happened, some say that he was the father of Diogenes, the governor of the state bank at Sinope, that falsified the coins. Others say that it was precisely the dogged philosopher that falsified the legal money that his father gave him.

From a biographical report by Diogenes Laertius, still others argue that being the supervisor of the bank, he was led by financial operators to commit embezzlement, encouraged by the response of Apollo who, through the oracle of Delphi, declared the injunction to falsify coins: Parakharattein to nomisma.

It is also said that there was a misun- derstanding, due to the multiple meaning of the nomisma, which both means currency and custom, tradition, and rule. What Apollo meant, to subvert the laws of the state, was interpreted by Diogenes as to falsify the currency. He was sent into exile. Or perhaps

he escaped. Who knows how things went! We do not know… One thing we know for sure, however, is that the act that falsifies the coins is intended as a form of subversion of the dominant values and along with the ‘taking care of themselves’ to the parrhesiastic discourse and to the vita altra (other life), the form of life that is also a representation of another world, the cornerstone of the philosophy of cynicism.

These are arguments and ‘forms of life’ that come to us because of those philosophers, artists and writers, but also bakers, hairdressers and bus drivers who have turned their lives, and that have shaped their life as a work of art. They come to us because of all those who, in everywhere and at all times, as well as disrupting dissolute thoughts and academic customs, they were examples and teachers of life lived otherwise.