Lives of the Eminent Philosophers
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers
Diogenes Laertius
Translated by Pamela Mensch
Edited by James Miller
Consulting Editors
James Allen, Tiziano Dorandi,
Jay R. Elliott, Anthony Grafton,
A. A. Long, Glenn Most, James Romm
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Contents
INTRODUCTION
James Miller
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
Pamela Mensch
MAP
LIVES OF THE EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BOOK 1
Prologue; Thales, Solon, Chilon, Pittacus, Bias, Cleobulus, Periander, Anacharsis, Myson, Epimenides, Pherecydes
BOOK 2
Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Archelaus, Socrates, Xenophon, Aeschines, Aristippus, Phaedo, Euclides, Stilpo, Crito, Simon, Glaucon, Simmias, Cebes, Menedemus
BOOK 3
Plato
BOOK 4
Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemon, Crates, Crantor, Arcesilaus, Bion, Lacydes, Carneades, Clitomachus
BOOK 5
Aristotle, Theophrastus, Strato, Lyco, Demetrius, Heraclides
BOOK 6
Antisthenes, Diogenes, Monimus, Onesicritus, Crates, Metrocles, Hipparchia, Menippus, Menedemus
BOOK 7
Zeno, Ariston, Herillus, Dionysius, Cleanthes, Sphaerus, Chrysippus
BOOK 8
Pythagoras, Empedocles, Epicharmus, Archytas, Alcmeon, Hippasus, Philolaus, Eudoxus
BOOK 9
Heraclitus, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Melissus, Zeno, Leucippus, Democritus, Protagoras, Diogenes, Anaxarchus, Pyrrho, Timon
BOOK 10
Epicurus
ESSAYS
Diogenes Laertius: From Inspiration to Annoyance (and Back)
Anthony Grafton
Raphael’s Eminent Philosophers: The School of Athens and the Classic Work Almost No One Read
Ingrid D. Rowland
Diogenes’ Epigrams
Kathryn Gutzwiller
Corporeal Humor in Diogenes Laertius
James Romm
Philosophers and Politics in Diogenes Laertius
Malcolm Schofield
Diogenes Laertius and Philosophical Lives in Antiquity
Giuseppe Cambiano
“A la Recherche du Texte Perdu”: The Manuscript Tradition of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers
Tiziano Dorandi
Diogenes Laertius in Byzantium
Tiziano Dorandi
Diogenes Laertius in Latin
Tiziano Dorandi
Diogenes Laertius and the Pre‐Socratics
André Laks
Plato’s Doctrines in Diogenes Laertius
John Dillon
Cynicism: Ancient and Modern
R. Bracht Branham
Zeno of Citium: Cynic Founder of the Stoic Tradition
A. A. Long
Skeptics in Diogenes Laertius
James Allen
Epicurus in Diogenes Laertius
James Allen
Diogenes Laertius and Nietzsche
Glenn W. Most
Guide to Further Reading
Jay R. Elliott
Glossary of Ancient Sources
Joseph M. Lemelin
Illustration Credits
Index
Introduction
James Miller
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers of Diogenes Laertius is a crucial source for much of what we know about the origins of philosophy in Greece. The work covers a larger number of figures and a longer period of time than any other extant ancient source. Yet few classical texts of such significance have provoked such sharp disagreement, even contempt.
Modern scholars have generally dismissed Diogenes Laertius as a mediocre anthologist, if not an “ignoramus” (thus the great German classicist Werner Jaeger). Even when dealing with invaluable evidence of otherwise unknown philosophical doctrines, concluded one expert, “we may be said to have a museum of philosophical ideas which are pinned like beetles on pegs in glass cases to be looked at and admired, a compilation which is no more capable of furnishing an understanding of the history of these ideas than the mere examination of beetles under a glass will yield an understanding of the life of the beetle.”1
Renaissance readers, though not uncritical, by contrast tended to revel in the book’s abundance of biographical lore. In one of his Essays, Montaigne says he wished that instead of just one Diogenes Laertius there had been a dozen: “for I am equally curious to know the lives and fortunes of these great instructors of the world as to know the diversity of their doctrines and opinions.”2
Friedrich Nietzsche, who came to admire Lives after itemizing its manifold defects from the standpoint of modern scholarship, quipped that Diogenes Laertius is the porter who guards the gate leading to the Castle of Ancient Philosophy. Like Montaigne, Nietzsche savored the paradox that this gatekeeper was also a fabulist. But the biographies recounted by Diogenes became for him one touchstone of how properly to search for wisdom—through studying lives as well as doctrines. “I for one prefer reading Diogenes Laertius,” Nietzsche wrote in 1874, in the context of dismissing academic philosophy as arid and uninteresting: “The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves anything, namely trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it, has never been taught at universities; all that has ever been taught is a critique of words by means of other words.”3
Plate with relief decoration of two philosophers debating, eastern Mediterranean, AD 500–600.
From the J. Paul Getty Museum: “Two seated philosophers, labeled Ptolemy and Hermes, engage in a spirited discussion. The scene has been interpreted as an allegory of the debate between Myth and Science: Ptolemy, the founder of the Alexandrian school of scientific thought, debating Hermes Trismegistos, a deity supporting the side of myth. The woman on the left, gesturing and partaking in the exchange, is identified as Skepsis. Above the two seated men, an unidentified enthroned man is partially preserved.”
***
As we understand the disciplines of philosophy and intellectual history today, Diogenes Laertius practiced neither, nor was he much of a literary stylist. But Diogenes was a man on a mission, and he had the ingenuity and diligence to carry it out.
The author compiled a variety of
information about all the philosophers for whom he had material—eighty-two, as it happened. All the chosen were Greek or wrote their works in Greek, since Diogenes took it as axiomatic that not only all philosophy but “the human race itself” began with the Greeks and not the barbarians (be they Persian or Egyptian). In addition to summarizing key doctrines, Diogenes offers a sequence of short biographies—the most extensive set we possess.
The author’s voice is direct, generally plain, even impassive—though a dry sense of humor is also at play. He appears as a stockpiling magpie, leaving little out if it fits with his own apparent fascination with whether, and how, the lives of philosophers squared with the doctrines they espoused.4 Evidently interested in odd and amusing anecdotes, the more controversial the better, Diogenes sometimes notes the bias of his sources, but only rarely does he make an effort to evaluate their plausibility or the authenticity of the letters and other documents he reproduces. Although he obliquely comments on his Lives through a series of epigrams by others and poems of his own, filled frequently with puns and wordplay meant to amuse, he almost never praises or criticizes directly the characters he describes, nor does he venture any unambiguous opinion of his own about how one might best undertake philosophy as a way of life. His philosophical views (if he had any) are obscure.
The treatment of individual philosophers is uneven, ranging from an interminable list of categorical distinctions in the chapter on Plato to the verbatim citation of several works by Epicurus in his chapter on that philosopher. Some chapters are barely one paragraph long; others go on for pages. Sometimes a reader feels as if the author had simply dumped his notes on a table.5 Recent research suggests Diogenes may have died before he was able to organize a definitive version of his text, which would explain some of the lacunae and inconsistencies careful readers will notice.6 Yet even if the overall order of the books and some of the biographies was still unsettled at the time of his death, the text as we have it is never haphazard, since the material on individual philosophers is sorted more or less carefully into sections on genealogy, anecdotes, apothegms, doctrines, key works, and (almost always) a necrology, just as each of the work’s ten books is more or less plausibly organized by schools and lines of putative succession.
As a result of this encyclopedic format, it has long been the habit of most scholars and ordinary readers to dip into Lives of the Eminent Philosophers as needed, treating it like a reference work (however strange and unreliable).
But if instead one reads the entire text straight through (as there is some evidence the author intended), a not unwelcome bewilderment descends.
Despite some rough parts and missing passages, we behold a meticulously codified panorama of the ancient philosophers. Through the eyes of Diogenes, we watch them as a group living lives of sometimes extraordinary oddity while ardently advancing sometimes incredible, occasionally cogent, often contradictory views that (to borrow a phrase from Borges) “constantly threaten to transmogrify into others, so that they affirm all things, deny all things, and confound and confuse all things”—as if this parade of pagan philosophers could only testify to the existence of “some mad and hallucinating deity.”7
***
It has proven impossible to determine the exact dates of Diogenes Laertius. Since the author makes no mention of Neoplatonism, which began to flourish in the latter half of the third century AD, and since he discusses nobody born after the second century AD, experts have tentatively concluded that he lived in the first half of the third century AD.
Equally uncertain is the reason for the text’s survival: if Diogenes Laertius had readers in his own lifetime, we don’t know who they were. The manuscript may well have been published only posthumously, prepared by a scribe forced to work with unfinished material. No one knows how many copies were initially made. Unlike the corpus of Plato, which was carefully preserved by his school, or the treatises of Aristotle, which came to be widely read, studied, and copied in antiquity, it’s as if the manuscript had been preserved by a quirk of fate, just like the wall paintings in Pompeii (or the papyrus rolls of the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus in nearby Herculaneum).
Modern philologists have spent careers examining the scant evidence for mocre clues about Diogenes and the provenance of his text. Some of this research has focused on an effort to reconstruct a Greek text as close as possible to the (lost) original manuscript. Other research has examined the sources Diogenes consulted. As one scholar dryly remarked, “The relation of all this work to the Laertius problem as a whole has been strikingly expressed in a statement of Richards: ‘I have confined myself mainly to minutiae, with which it seems comparatively safe to deal.’”8 (In his doctoral work on the text as a young philologist, Nietzsche focused on just such minutiae.)
The earliest surviving references to Diogenes appear in works by Sopater of Apamea (fourth century) and Stephanus of Byzantium (sixth century). But it was only centuries later that the text became better known in the West, at first through a Latin translation by the Christian monk Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439), and then through the first print editions of the Greek text.
***
Despite their obvious import, the biographies in Diogenes have long chagrined modern scholars, not because they are unsourced but because of their sheer number—and their sometimes amazing contents.
For example, his life of Pythagoras gives four different versions of how that philosopher died, citing three sources: he died fleeing a fire; he died in combat; he starved to death; and then this:
When he arrived in Italy, he built an underground chamber and instructed his mother to commit to writing everything that occurred, and at what time, and then to send her notes down to him until he came back up. This his mother did. And after a time Pythagoras emerged, withered and skeletal; entering the assembly, he said that he had come from Hades; he even read aloud what he had experienced there. Shaken by what he said, the people wept and wailed and were so convinced Pythagoras was a god that they sent their wives to him in the hope they might learn some of his doctrines. These were called the Pythagorizusae (Women Who Followed Pythagoras). So says Hermippus.
Lives glories in the deadpan reproduction of this kind of lore, some of it slyly deflationary, all of it offered in disorienting abundance.
A group of men pushing philosophers toward a fire fueled by burning books. Engraving attributed to Marco Dente, c. 1515–1527.
A general picture of the philosopher as a social type nevertheless starts to emerge. He (with one or two exceptions, the philosopher is a man) is an imposing figure, often adept at argument, and generally interested in questions about the order of the world, the best way to live, or both. Absentmindedness is frequently noted, starting with Thales, along with an indifference to hygiene—body lice are a common malady; he is often a stranger to conventional behavior and customary beliefs, and his utterances are sometimes inscrutable.
A representative sample of anecdotes and odd apothegms: When asked what knowledge is the most necessary, Antisthenes said, “How to rid oneself of the need to unlearn anything”; when masturbating in the marketplace, a shameless act that made him a cynosure, Diogenes the Cynic said, “If only one could relieve hunger by rubbing one’s belly”; Carneades let his hair and fingernails grow, so single-minded was his devotion to philosophy; Pyrrho took as an example of perfect tranquillity a pig in a ship eating calmly in the midst of a raging storm; Xenocrates was so infallibly honest that he was allowed to give unsworn evidence in courts; Chrysippus, a Stoic of unrivaled industriousness and quickness of wit, was renowned for his copious use of citation, “with the result that in one of his books he copied out nearly the whole of Euripides’ Medea; and when someone holding the book was asked what he was reading, he replied, ‘Chrysippus’ Medea.’”
The cumulative effect of such details is to underline the eccentricity of the philosopher as a social type and of philosophy as a way of life. But whereas Plato’s enchanting dramatizations of the transcendental moral
perfection of Socrates still lead otherwise skeptical readers to suspend disbelief, the accounts in Diogenes, often allegorical in nature, occupy a playful twilight zone between fact and fiction: they seem designed both to fascinate and to provoke incredulity.
Then again, perhaps the real reason for the promiscuous citation of strange stories and conflicting authorities is to confirm the fame of the figure in question. After all, the work’s objects of interest are not just any old philosophers, but only those who are eminent. And what makes someone famous is, in part, the number of legends that surround him. Those prove eminence.
Diogenes thus starts his biography of Plato with a genealogy linking him to an Olympian deity and the legendary lawgiver Solon, followed immediately by an account of his virgin birth:
Plato, son of Ariston and Perictione—or Potone—was an Athenian, his mother tracing her descent back to Solon. For Solon’s brother was Dropides, and Dropides was the father of Callaeschrus, who was the father of Critias (one of the Thirty) and of Glaucon, who was the father of Charmides and Perictione, by whom Ariston fathered Plato. Thus Plato was in the sixth generation from Solon. Solon himself traced his descent to Neleus and Poseidon, and his father is said to have traced his descent to Codrus, son of Melanthus; both, according to Thrasylus, trace their descent to Poseidon.
Speusippus in Plato’s Funeral Feast, and Clearchus in his Encomium on Plato, and Anaxilaides in his second book On Philosophy say that there was a story in Athens that Ariston tried to force himself on Perictione, who was then in the bloom of youth, and was rebuffed; and that when he ceased resorting to force, he saw a vision of the god Apollo, after which he abstained from conjugal relations until Perictione gave birth.
The biographies of Plato in modern textbooks simply omit such information, yet these details offer vivid evidence of how Plato came to be called “divine”—and hence help to explain how his writings became as consecrated as anything in Jewish or Christian scripture.
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