His surprising behaviours earned Diogenes the Cynic much criticism and reproach. But the surprise sometimes comes from these reproaches themselves: why should he be reproached for eating on the agora and, even more surprisingly, for drinking in a tavern? If table manners in the broadest sense, which also include the places and times of consumption, constitute strong markers of cultural identity, it is understandable that their contestation is inherent to any counterculture, such as that which the Cynic movement represents. But what does make this consumption in such places so contrary to customs? My claim is that what is really at stake in these stigmatized conducts is not that they transgress social decency, but that they shake the traditional notion of the "common" in its relation to space as it is presented under the institutional form of the common meal and banquet.
In this contribution I propose to analyse the figure of the Cynical as dinner guest in Greek and Latin comedy. Allusions to cynical table manners are found in three passages: the fragment 137 by Eubulus, the fragment 132 by Antiphanes and lines 703-4 from Plautus' Stichus. Methodological challenges in interpreting the three excerpts are related to the literary genre itself, that presupposes a distorted description of reality, and to the philological issues derived from the transmission of the Greek fragments preserved in Athenaeus. However, the present work is of great interest, especially if one considers that the analysed sources dated back to a very ancient age, an exception in the panorama of the sources about cynic philosophy. Thus, Greek comedy corroborates the antiquity of many features of the figure of the Cynic as dinner guest that we find in more recent texts of a different nature: frugality and rusticity in the choice of food, drink, dishes, and even in the posture assumed during the banquet; the association with marginal figures such as parasites, slaves and animals; the refusal of the traditional paideia, which, on the contrary, represents a traditional feature of the philosopher as dinner guest.
