This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Diogenes is recorded meeting Alexander the Great, then the most powerful ruler in the Greek world, who offered him any favor he wished to name, a documented royal offer distinct from an ordinary exchange between a philosopher and a passing stranger. Diogenes is said to have asked only that the king step out of his sunlight, a documented request distinct from money, office or any of the other rewards a king of Alexander's standing was positioned to grant.
How Diogenes actually died is recorded as disputed, a documented uncertainty distinct from a death whose circumstances are agreed across the surviving ancient sources. That same uncertainty extends to the dating of his life, fixed only to the approximate span of about 413 to 324 BCE rather than to exact birth and death years independently confirmed outside the tradition that also preserves his sayings.
That the single exchange for which Diogenes is best remembered, refusing a world conqueror's offer of anything at all in favor of being left alone in the sun, survives in far sharper detail than the circumstances of his own death, marks his remembered life as a documented case where a philosopher's most quoted moment outlasted, in the record, even a settled account of how it ended.