Today’s counter-culture and alternative movements question mainstream norms, such as putting too much value on material possessions. The Cynics, practical philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, also rejected conventional desires to seek wealth, power and fame. They were not your usual kind of philosophers: rather than lecturing or writing about their ideas, they acted out their beliefs by denying themselves worldly possessions and tried to live as simply as possible. Their leader, Diogenes of Sinope, allegedly slept in a ceramic jar on the streets of Athens and ate raw meat like a dog, flouting convention to draw attention to his ideas.

So who were the Cynics? How influential was their movement? What made it last some 900 years? And why does the term 'cynicism' have a different meaning today?

Bridget Kendall is joined by three eminent scholars of Greek philosophy:

(Image: The meeting of Alexander and Diogenes, detail from a tapestry, Scotland. Credit: DEA/S. Vannini/Getty Images)