Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

by Pamela Mensch

  4 Xenocrates served as head of the Academy from 339 to 313 BC. Diogenes discusses his life and views at 4.6–15.

  5 Aristotle moved from Athens to Chalcis in 323 BC, and died there the following year. Diogenes discusses his life and views at 5.1–35.

  6 Perdiccas became regent of the Macedonian empire after Alexander the Great’s death in 323 BC. He resolved the following year that the Athenian settlers on Samos had to be removed.

  7 A Greek city on the Ionian coast near Samos.

  8 307–306 BC.

  9 Elsewhere referred to as Apollodorus of Athens.

  10 Hesiod (c. 700 BC) composed a genealogy of the gods entitled Theogony, in which Chaos represents the primal void from which the universe arises.

  11 Democritus of Abdera (b. 460/57 BC), a philosopher who advanced atomism, a position later adopted and modified by Epicurus. Diogenes discusses his life and views at 9.34–49.

  12 The Greek word is kuntatos, “most doglike,” perhaps with a double reference to Cynic (“doggish”) mores.

  13 After Zeno, Chrysippus was the most prominent of the Stoic philosophers (c. 280–207 BC). His life and views are discussed at 7.179–202. Diogenes mentions scandals associated with him at 7.187–88.

  14 The Greek could also mean “that he prostituted one of his brothers.”

  15 This claim at least appears to be true (see 10.5–6).

  16 Aristippus of Cyrene is discussed at 2.65–104.

  17 Timocrates of Lampsacus was for a time a pupil of Epicurus. He eventually renounced Epicurus’ teachings and criticized his way of life (see 10.6–8).

  18 A different Herodotus than the famous historian; possibly the addressee of Epicurus’ letter on natural science, quoted below starting at 10.35.

  19 In ancient Athens, young men (in Greek, ephēboi) of citizen status were required to undergo military training.

  20 Lysimachus (c. 355–281 BC) was one of Alexander’s officers who later became king of Thrace and, eventually, Macedonia. The “administrator” (dioikētēs) in question must have been one of his emissaries or deputies. The terms of address quoted here and in the following chapter, normally addressed to Apollo (see next section), suggest servile flattery and impiety.

  21 Idomeneus of Lampsacus (c. 325–c. 270 BC), a biographer and politician, was a friend of Epicurus.

  22 Despite Diogenes’ introduction, the letter appears to have been addressed to Leonteus, the husband of Themista. Both spouses were students of Epicurus.

  23 The addressee of Epicurus’ letter on celestial phenomena (see 10.84–116).

  24 The text is corrupt here and no convincing restoration has been proposed.

  25 The great Stoic teacher Epictetus (c. AD 55–135) is known today through the Encheiridion and Discourses, records of his teaching set down by his student Arrian.

  26 The Mystery cult of Demeter at Eleusis involved ecstatic and secret rites. According to Timocrates, Epicurus parodied these rites as a kind of riotous party.

  27 A significant sum of money, since one mina was equal to one hundred drachmas, and one drachma was the pay for a single day’s skilled labor. But Epicurus lived with his followers communally and the “table” in question was meant to feed the entire group.

  28 Little is known of these figures.

  29 Nausiphanes of Teos (fl. c. 340–320 BC), a follower of Democritus, became Epicurus’ teacher c. 324. He passed on to Epicurus Democritus’ physics and theory of knowledge.

  30 Some words have fallen out of the manuscript here.

  31 The charge that Plato or his school had benefited from the wealth of Dionysius II, tyrant of Syracuse, was deployed by several rivals (see 6.25, e.g.). “Golden” here implies self-enrichment.

  32 Protagoras was thought (incorrectly) to have been the student of Democritus (see 9.50 and corresponding note).

  33 The epithet given to Heraclitus, kukētēs, parodies one of his cosmologic writings, which compared the universe to a kukeōn, a kind of porridge made up of disparate elements.

  34 The first element of this mocking name, lēros, means “trash” or “nonsense.”

  35 Both the meaning of the nickname and the identity of its target are obscure.

  36 A Greek city in Asia Minor.

  37 Diogenes discusses the life and views of Pyrrho, a prominent Skeptic, at 9.61–108.

  38 That is, the critics of Epicurus cited at 10.3 and following.

  39 A different person than the Metrodorus mentioned at 10.6 above.

  40 Carneades of Cyrene (214/13–129/28 BC) served as head of the Academy. Diogenes discusses his life and views at 4.62–66.

  41 See 10.3.

  42 Epicurus moved to Athens near the end of the fourth century BC, at a time when the wars between the successors of Alexander the Great were roiling the political life of Greece.

  43 See 8.10.

  44 The seat of the priestess at the oracle of Delphi.

  45 Anaxagoras and Archelaus are discussed at 2.6–15 and 2.16–17, respectively.

  46 There is a philosopher named Praxiphanes whose life span overlapped with that of Epicurus, but some editors delete the name here on the assumption that it arose through scribal error.

  47 Hermarchus of Mytilene, a prominent disciple of Epicurus and his successor as the head of the Epicurean school. He was named heir to Epicurus’ library in the philosopher’s will.

  48 A fifth-century BC philosopher jointly credited, along with his pupil Democritus, with originating the atomic theory. Diogenes discusses his life and views at 9.30–33.

  49 No one else attributes such a work to Epicurus, and the title is not found in Diogenes’ list of Epicurus’ works below.

  50 The date corresponds to late January of 341 BC.

  51 In 271 or 270 BC.

  52 Greek wine would normally be mixed with water. Unmixed wine was thought to be bad for one’s health or sanity.

  53 A different person than the Timocrates mentioned above.

  54 The Metröon (literally, “mother’s building”) was a temple dedicated to the mother goddess; it was also used as an archive and council hall.

  55 Because Hermarchus was not a citizen of Athens, he could not legally inherit the estate of Epicurus directly.

  56 Melite was a village near ancient Athens.

  57 Another Athenian month, which fell during December and January.

  58 Polyaenus of Lampsacus was one of Epicurus’ chief disciples, as mentioned at 10.24. Metageitnion fell during August and September.

  59 If the name is correct, then Metrodorus perhaps named his son after his teacher, as two other students, Leonteus and his wife, Themista, apparently also did (see 10.26).

  60 Otherwise unknown.

  61 A letter from Epicurus to this couple was briefly quoted at 10.4.

  62 Colotes of Lampsacus (c. 325–260 BC) was a prominent Epicurean, later used as a straw man by Plutarch in the work entitled Against Colotes.

  63 A disciple of Epicurus, Polystratus followed Hermarchus as head of the school. His published works included a treatise entitled On Philosophy and a critique of Skepticism.

  64 The Garden referred to here is the Epicurean school, which Apollodorus headed in the second century BC. Apollodorus is cited frequently by Diogenes as a source.

  65 Otherwise unknown, and almost certainly not among the dynastic rulers of Egypt who took the name Ptolemy.

  66 See 10.19 and corresponding note. It is curious that Diogenes does not here mention the son of Metrodorus in the list of men named Epicurus.

  67 The same complaint is raised at 7.181. For Chrysippus, see 7.179–202.

  68 One of Epicurus’ brothers (see 10.3).

  69 Another of Epicurus’ brothers (see 10.3).

  70 Possibly the Mithras mentioned at 10.4.

  71 A rare form of direct address, used only one other time by Diogenes in this volume (see 3.47). Presumably Lives of the Eminent Philosophers was dedicated or presented to a particular person.

  72 Otherwise unknown.


  73 This is a response to the Skeptical argument that adduces the case of a square tower which appears round from a distance, in order to undermine attempts to draw conclusions from the senses (see 9.107). The Epicureans argue that priority should be given to the appearance of the tower on closer inspection.

  74 The first of many passages that have been identified as commentary, rather than part of the original text. They are inside square brackets throughout and typeset in italics.

  75 This passage is obscure and probably corrupt.

  76 This passage, presumed to be part of the commentary, is regarded as corrupt.

  77 That the world is itself a living organism was a prominent doctrine of the Stoics (see 7.139 and 7.142–43).

  78 Perhaps Leucippus is meant (see 9.30).

  79 Possibly a reply to another argument of the Skeptics against making inferences from the senses (see 9.85).

  80 The passage of one celestial body in front of a second, thus hiding the second from view.

  81 Scholars generally assume that the passages that begin here are out of order in the manuscripts.

  82 That is, he will not be disturbed by improper dreams (see 10.135).

  83 An obscure and possibly corrupt passage.

  84 A quotation from the elegiac poet Theognis, verse 427.

  85 Diogenes discusses the doctrines of the Cyrenaic school at 2.86–93.

  86 Sophocles, Trachiniae 787f. Heracles’ wife, Deianira, smeared the tunic with poison, believing it was a love potion. Heracles, donning the tunic, is overwhelmed with burning pain. The fact that even the notoriously tough Heracles is averse to pain shows that this is a natural reaction.

  87 That is, the basic concept of justice, according to which it consists of an agreement for mutual advantage.

  Essays

  Diogenes Laertius: From Inspiration to Annoyance (and Back)

  Anthony Grafton

  In sixteenth-century Italy, flamboyant men wrote spectacular autobiographies. Benvenuto Cellini described his success at everything from dueling in the streets of Rome and shooting enemy leaders from the battlements of the Castel Sant’Angelo in 1527 to creating a bronze statue of Perseus and Medusa that electrified even the critical inhabitants of Florence. Girolamo Cardano told the story not only of his brilliant career as mathematician and medical man, but also of the rich dream life that had sometimes predicted his accomplishments—and sometimes simply mystified him. Both were frank: Cellini narrated a sadomasochistic love affair with a model in graphic detail, and Cardano described his sexual impotence, his carelessness in important matters, and his silly walk as vividly as his algebraic discoveries.

  But the wildest of all Renaissance autobiographies was written long before either of these men was born. In 1441 Leon Battista Alberti was a youngish writer whose accomplishments had not yet made him famous. Born in 1404, the illegitimate offspring of a rich Florentine family that had been exiled for political reasons, he joined the papal Curia as a secretary and accompanied Pope Eugene IV back to Florence. There he wrote a long series of highly original books: a treatise on the new Florentine painting of the 1420s and 1430s, dialogues on the new world of the merchant family, and the first grammar of Italian. But while Alberti made a modest splash in the piranha pool of Florentine intellectual life, he also found himself attacked from many sides. A poetry contest that he organized fizzled out, and he often found himself musing, angry and sad, at the injuries his enemies had inflicted on him. In this context, Alberti set out to avenge himself by describing his character, his accomplishments, and his way of life with unforgettable brio.

  The Autobiography—written anonymously, in the third person—is a wild text, swarming with contradictions. Alberti describes himself as intensely active, buzzing with physical and mental energy: he could jump over the head of a man standing next to him, he threw a coin so high that it rang as it struck the ceiling of the Florentine cathedral, and he explored the arts and crafts with passion and energy. He mastered music without a teacher and made social life itself into an art—especially walking in public, riding a horse, and speaking. But he was also a neurasthenic invalid who suffered from vertigo and tinnitus, starved himself into ill health, and experienced dreadful visions of scorpions while reading. Easy and articulate, he seemed gay and lovable even when the most serious discussions were under way—but would fall into reveries even in company, and become taciturn and aloof. For all his originality and productivity as a writer, he tore himself apart when he saw fields of flowers in the spring, denouncing his own failure to be fertile. The sovereign urban intellectual was at once a hero and a victim, a master of the crowd’s applause who was always in search of a cork-lined room.

  Alberti followed a model as he crafted this astounding anatomy of his own character. Diogenes Laertius, whose Lives of the Eminent Philosophers he was one of the first modern Westerners to read, showed him how to present his own life dramatically and effectively. Like Diogenes’ life of Thales, the first Ionian philosopher, Alberti’s autobiographical work was divided into two sections: an account of his character, as revealed through both his accomplishments and stories about him, and a collection of witty sayings. Both anecdotes and witticisms suggest how much Alberti learned from his ancient model.

  Thales—according to Diogenes—was a polymath who studied politics, nature, and pretty much everything else. So was Alberti. Thales had no teacher. Neither did Alberti. Thales proved the value of the study of nature by predicting that an especially good olive harvest would take place. He rented all the olive presses and then profited from his prescience. Alberti also described himself as a lover and student of nature. Above all, Thales, like Alberti, was a creature of paradox. He used his knowledge of nature to become rich. But he also fell into a ditch while out at night to observe the stars—whereupon the old woman who was his guide mocked him for trying to understand the heavens when he could not see what was in front of him.

  The sayings of Thales that filled the second part of the Life were as provocative as they were short: “[Thales] said that there was no difference between life and death. ‘Why, then,’ someone asked, ‘do you not die?’ ‘Because,’ he replied, ‘it makes no difference.’” Alberti’s sayings—which echoed those of Thales in a craftily allusive way—were also charged with tough-minded wit: “Asked what would be the biggest of all things among mortals, he answered, ‘Hope.’ As to the smallest, he said, ‘The difference between a man and a corpse.’” For Alberti, in short, Diogenes’ book was irresistibly exciting: a lifeline in his hour of intellectual need. It gave him a model for imagining and narrating the life of a new kind of thinker, a secular intellectual, to use an anachronistic but not inappropriate term, who lived out his life not in the seclusion of a monastery but as a walker in the city.

  Nowadays, Diogenes Laertius seems an unlikely character to attract a reader as exacting as Alberti. His work—compiled in the third century AD—comprises ten books, which offer both biographies of ancient philosophers and doxographies, or collections of their opinions. Diogenes was not interested in the thinkers of his own day—such as the public professors of Platonic and other schools of philosophy, whom Marcus Aurelius had appointed. Rather, he covered the period from the sixth to the third century BC—basically, from Thales to Epicurus—with a few excursions into the second century. Diogenes drew his material from a vast range of sources, many of which no longer survive, whose authors and titles he cited in exuberant and sometimes untrustworthy profusion. He used them to compose surveys of what he described as the major schools and practitioners of Greek philosophy—the Ionian and Italic sects, Plato and Aristotle and their followers, the Stoics, Skeptics, and Epicureans. Though he offered accounts of both his subjects’ thought and their lives, he made no effort to connect them, much less to use the larger contexts within which different schools of philosophy had taken shape to explain the differences in their views. Often dismissed with contempt in modern times as a derivative and untrustworthy source of curious but
pointless anecdotes—such as the story that Zeno liked green figs—his book struck chords in many serious scholars and thinkers in the past. He and it have come to be appreciated in new ways in recent scholarship.

  Opening pages (“Prologue”) from a thirteenth-century Greek manuscript edition (“P”) of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives.

  The path from Diogenes to Alberti was anything but direct. Later Greek scholars occasionally read—and mined—the Lives. Some forty Greek manuscripts of the work survive. But Diogenes’ book first found really curious readers in the twelfth century. The learned clerics of Latin Europe were at work rediscovering the riches of Greek philosophy—especially, but by no means only, the works of Aristotle, which had been preserved in Arabic translations and widely studied in the Islamic world. These swarmed with references to ancient philosophers whose works did not survive—figures like Pythagoras and his followers, whose obsession with numbers Aristotle criticized, and Plato, whose pupil Aristotle had been. In parts of the West—especially Sicily and southern Italy—Greek remained a living language. Scholarly circles in the Byzantine Empire continued to copy and study the Greek classics. Erudite Latins used their mastery of Greek to hunt for more texts and information. In the first half of the twelfth century, a Calabrian cleric named Henricus Aristippus, who traveled to Constantinople, translated Plato’s Phaedo and Meno from the Greek. He knew the work of Diogenes and in the 1150s he translated it.

  Aristippus’ version found readers. Sometime before the 1320s, another Italian drew on it to create a compendium titled On the Lives and Conduct of the Philosophers. Wrongly ascribed to an influential philosopher, Walter of Burley, this paraphrase attained massive popularity: more than 270 manuscripts survive. It gave Western readers their first introduction to the lives and thought of philosophers outside the university canon. Pseudo-Burley did not simply translate what he found. Diogenes’ life of Pythagoras, for example, emphasized both his achievements in mathematics and his wisdom as a sage who taught his followers how to pursue virtue. Diogenes also identified Pythagoras as the head of a coherent school—the Italian school that had developed alongside the Ionian tradition founded by Thales. Pseudo-Burley abbreviated what he found in Diogenes to a bare report that Pythagoras had been a sage in both mathematics and ethics. Then he added material from other sources. He reported that Plato had based his account of the cosmos and Boethius his works on mathematics on Pythagoras, and that Augustine ascribed the invention of the word “philosophy” itself to him—though he also associated him with necromancy. In Pseudo-Burley’s account, Pythagoras—and the other Greek sages who made an appearance—looked rather like the great scholastic philosophers of the thirteenth century and after, such as Albertus Magnus and Pseudo-Burley himself: wise, learned, sometimes more given to speculation about occult arts than was quite healthy. But that made his work all the more useful. Mendicant friars composing sermons and vernacular writers telling stories drew on his rich stores of material. Thanks to Pseudo-Burley, ancient thinkers long forgotten peopled the pages of late medieval texts of every kind.