Public acts
Sir: Peregrine Worsthorne complains (6 August) of the two half-naked youths in the underground who dribbled malodorous hamburgers down their hairy chests, thereby abolishing the distinction between what can 'properly be done in public and in private'. He may be consoled to know that such behaviour is no new thing, for the same objections were made in Athens to Diogenes the Cynic, the first 'cosmo- politan', when he ate his breakfast in the Agora. Diogenes believed in the Victorian virtue of self-sufficiency (autarkeia), and thought that if an act was natural it could and should be performed in public — 'the work of Demeter and Aphrodite alike'. One day as he abused himself before the crowd he was heard to remark: `If only it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly!'
Colin WTI*?
Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, The Old Piano Factory, 43 Gloucester Crescent, London NW I
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