Almost nothing about Diogenes can be verified and the anecdotes contradict each other, which is itself the point: the school transmitted a way of behaving rather than a set of propositions, so the stories are the doctrine. The lamp in daylight, the jar in the Metroon, the plucked chicken produced in Plato's classroom to answer the definition of man as a featherless biped — these are teaching devices preserved because there was nothing else to preserve. Institutionally he matters for one link: Crates was his pupil and Zeno of Citium was Crates's. That is how a school which owned nothing became the ancestor of the most establishment philosophy in Rome.