Chapter 10

ἡ φρήν σοι ἀλγήσει, ἡ δὲ γλῶσσα ἔσται ἀνάλγητος: "your mind will suffer but your tongue will be free from pain." This is an adaptation of a famous line from Euripides' Hippolytus (612): ἡ γλῶσσ’ ὀμώμοχ’ ἡ δὲ φρὴν ἀνώμοτος ("my tongue has sworn but my mind is unsworn"). The line has been interpreted as a comment on the power and perhaps the danger of the rhetorical training offered by the Sophists in Athens.

σε καὶ ἀνδρεῖον ὑπολήψονται: "and they will consider (you) to be courageous." ἀνδρεῖον is a predicate adjective directly describing the direct object (σε). Verbs of saying and thinking usually have the predicate adjective connected to its noun with εἶναι but sometimes εἶναι is omitted, as here (see S. 1041).

φωνὴ...φθέγμα: while φωνή can refer to the voice or a sound, the contrast here with φθέγμα suggests that φωνή is being used in its extended sense of "language" or "discourse." Diogenes is recommending that one use brash language and to affect a harsh delivery like that of a barking dog. It is this sort of iconoclastic sentiment that caused Diogenes and his followers to be known as "cynics" (from κύων, κυνός, dog).

ἔστω: 3rd sing. imperative from εἰμί. Greek commonly uses its third-person imperative while Latin mostly prefers a jussive subjunctive.

καὶ πρόσωπον δὲ ἐντεταμένον: "and (let) your expression be stretched tight," meaning that one should adopt a fixed and serious expression (see ἐντείνω LSJ II.1). ἐντεταμένον is the perf. mid-pass. participle from ἐντείνω.

καὶ ὅλως...τὰ πάντα: "and in general...let everything be..." (continuing the construction with ἔστω and note that the following sentence has a parallel construction with the imperative ἀπέστω).

καὶ τὸ ἐρυθριᾶν ἀπόξεσον τοῦ προσώπου: "and scratch away blushes from your face." The imperative here takes a direct object (here an articular infinitive: S. 1153f) and a genitive of separation (S. 1392). Diogenes urges people to ignore societal constraints and, interestingly, Diogenes extends it to include even blushing, an action most would not consider voluntary or under an individual's conscious control. In using this metaphor, Diogenes suggests that these constraints are superficial and can be scraped away like paint from a mask (note that πρόσωπον can refer to a face, an expression, or a mask such as was used in dramatic productions). The ancients viewed the face and its expressions as often revealing a person's inner thoughts. Tacitus (Annales1.7.7) records that Tiberius "was storing away the words and expressions (vultus) of the elite, distorting [these expressions] to make them incriminating (verba vultus in crimen detorquens recondebat). Cicero describes the face as "the doorway to the soul"(Pet. 44vultu ac fronte, quae est animi ianua). Telling people to control their blushing is essentially asking them to blur the lines of nature and culture, akin to the way that Quintilian recommended the use of carefully rehearsed gestures in the course of making a speech (e.g., Institutio Oratoria, 11.3.159-162). These gestures need to be learned and practiced but presumably should appear natural and spontaneous. Maud Gleason (Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome; Princeton: 2008) and Anthony Corbeill (Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome; Princeton: 2003) have written extensively on the Romans' close attention to the significance of one's gestures, gait, style of speech and dress, but the Greeks were also attuned to the connections of external appearance and inner character. This pairing can be seen as early as Homer's unusually full physical description of Thersites in Iliad 2 but continues on through the hellenistic period (Theophrastus' Charactersand the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise physiognomonika) and on into the Second Sophistic in the second century CE when Lucian was writing.

τῶν χωρίων: partitive gen. as is common after superlatives (S. 1434; for partitive gen. see S. 1306 and 1312).

καὶ ἐν αὐτοῖς τούτοις: "and in these very places," with αὐτοῖς functioning to intensify the demonstrative τούτοις (see S. 1206b), presumably to highlight the surprising exhortation to be solitary in very crowded places.

μὴ φίλον μὴ ξένον προσιέμενος: "allowing neither friend nor stranger to approach." The coordinated use of μή makes this a more generalizing clause and is presumably due to the influence of and connection to the participle προσιέμενος. For the generalizing force of μή with a participle, see S. 2045.

ἀρχή, -ῆς, ἡ: here meaning authority, prestige, or empire.

ἰδίᾳ: "privately." This is a dative fem. adjective being used adverbially. Smyth characterizes this as a type of the dative of accompanying circumstance or manner (S. 1527cand for the origins of such adverbial uses, see S. 341).

θαρρῶν ποίει: "do courageously." θαρρῶν is a circumstantial participle expressing manner and is best rendered as an adverb (S. 2062).

καὶ τῶν ἀφροδισίων αἱροῦ τὰ γελοιότερα: "and of the sexual acts, choose the more ridiculous." τῶν ἀφροδισίων is partitive genitive (S.1306), which commonly occurs in conjunction with comparatives and superlatives (S.1315).

καὶ τέλος: "and finally" (adverbial acc.: S. 1607).

ἤν σοι δοκεῖ...φαγὼν ἀπόθανε: "if it seems right to you...then eat...and die." This is a future more vivid conditional (S. 2323) where the primary verb in the apodosis has been replaced by an imperative (S. 2326e and S. 2357). Further, φαγών is a participle expressing an action happening before that of the imperative ἀπόθανε. Greek often expresses multiple actions in this way with a combination of participles and verbs while English generally prefers to keep them all as verbs.