For all Pseudo-Burley’s popularity, his unsystematic book soon proved unsatisfying—especially to the humanists, the new breed of scholars that sprang up in late-fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy. These humanists disliked nothing more than the anachronistic way in which a learned medieval like Burley depicted the ancient past, presenting Greek philosophers as if they had been medieval savants and magicians rather than the independent-minded teachers of equally independent-minded pupils, who freely contradicted them. The humanists devoted themselves to finding and mastering as many ancient texts as they could—especially literary texts, which they valued for their beauty as well as their content. The humanists began with Latin. But the Latin writers they knew best, above all Cicero, reported that they themselves had gone to the Greeks to seek wisdom. They also suggested that the Greek philosophers had combined wisdom with eloquence—powerful language that could actually persuade readers and hearers to accept a writer’s theses. The works of Aristotle—systematic treatises, carefully rendered into Latin from literal translations into Arabic—were hard to read and harder to love. (His dialogues were lost, something that Renaissance scholars did not at first realize.) By contrast, the humanists now read Plato, who had offered an alternate form of philosophy, couched in language of the greatest beauty and power. Other Greek philosophers—Stoics and Epicureans, Cynics and Skeptics—also cropped up in Cicero and Seneca. In the decades just before and after 1400, Italian scholars searched for Plato and his many fellow Greek philosophers. They studied the Greek language, both in Florence—where a distinguished Byzantine scholar, Manuel Chrysoloras, taught for three years—and in Constantinople. And they began to translate the Greek classics, slowly at first, into more or less readable Latin.
One Florentine scholar in particular, Niccolò Niccoli, played a special role in the fortunes of Diogenes Laertius. An antiquary and collector whose library included some eight hundred manuscripts at his death, Niccoli did his best to live in the antique world that he loved better than his own. He ate off crystal plates, filled his house with fragments of ancient sculpture, and chastised his contemporaries, who asked him to correct their Latin writings, telling them that their work belonged in the outhouse rather than the library. What obsessed him most, however, were libraries: his own, and the older Christian ones that contained forgotten treasures. He read every ancient text to which he gained access with an eye to references to other texts he had not yet seen. He gathered every indication he could about the books still lurking in monastic libraries. And he dispatched eager young friends to find, copy, borrow, or steal every new text they could. Niccoli—who did much to shape the fifteenth-century revival of antiquity—clearly saw the potential value of the Lives. Diogenes Laertius was both a rich source of the information Niccoli craved and a guide for further searches.
Early in the 1420s, Niccoli and Cosimo de’ Medici, the latter already a patron of letters, urged a Camaldolensian monk of their acquaintance, Ambrogio Traversari, to translate the full text of Diogenes Laertius into Latin. Traversari, a profoundly pious man, resisted their request. He wanted to translate the Greek Church fathers rather than pagans. Even when he began work, the task proved harder than his sponsors had suggested. The text was difficult and corrupt, so Traversari looked for better manuscripts. He found the technical terms that filled Diogenes’ work bewildering, since he himself had never studied formal philosophy. Diogenes’ verse epigrams bewildered him, and though a scholar of more literary tastes, Francesco Filelfo, promised to translate them, he failed to do so. Parts of Book 10, on Epicurus, the philosopher who had put the pursuit of pleasure at the core of his system, baffled Traversari completely. They presented ideas that had become completely unfamiliar to Western scholars. Only in 1433 did Traversari manage to present a manuscript of his complete translation to Cosimo.
Traversari did his best to convince himself, and others, that he was not doing something impious in loosing all this new material on Latin readers. He insisted, in his preface to the text, that the pagans whose lives and teachers Diogenes collected had had inklings of the truth:
In the writings of all the more notable philosophers, God, the heavens, the celestial bodies, and nature are truly and subtly discussed, and largely in agreement with Christian truth. Such singular effort of investigating truth, the work of such keen genius and constant study, did not deserve to be everywhere deprived of the fruit of its sweat. God permitted this so that the true faith might receive support and strength from their testimony as well.
Though they had not benefited from the true teachings of Christianity, moreover, the philosophers described by Diogenes had lived truly virtuous lives, which could still serve as models:
The pagans, though alien from the worship of God and religion, were more zealous for probity, moderation, frugality and the other ornaments of the human soul. There are many examples of this very close, I would say, to evangelical perfection, so that it should make a Christian blush and feel greatly ashamed if the philosopher of Christ exhibits this less than the philosopher of the world.
Niccoli read and approved this preface for Traversari, to the translator’s gratification—even though Traversari insisted, in the end, on the difference between the “real virtue” of the Christians and the “shadowy image of virtue” presented by the pagan sages, a sentiment not exactly to the taste of the classicist Niccoli.
Traversari could put up all the warning signs he wanted. Diogenes remained, as he had seen, a dangerous writer, who could threaten to open up scary new perspectives on life, the universe, and everything else. Alberti, one of the first to read his new translation, found inspiration in it for an exercise in self-analysis that would have confirmed all the fears of the earlier man, had he lived to read it (Traversari died in 1439).
The Lives of Diogenes was not the only dangerous classical text the Medicis helped to resurrect. The most skillful and fortunate book hunter who worked with Niccoli was a young scribe and Latinist named Poggio Bracciolini. In 1417, taking a break from his work as a papal secretary to turn over the spiderwebbed volumes in a German monastery library, he discovered a manuscript of the ancient poem by Lucretius, On the Nature of Things. Lucretius was an Epicurean, and his work presented the basic principles of Epicurus’ atomism: a totally unfamiliar vision of the cosmos, in which tiny particles came together by random collision to create the universe, while the gods looked on, uninvolved. Early readers of Diogenes valued his rich presentation of the life and teachings of Epicurus—which for centuries to come would offer by far the fullest resources for explicating Lucretius’ complex and demanding text.
Diogenes’ tenth book presented a detailed account of the thought of Epicurus, with documents to support it. He also defended the philosopher from the ancient canard that he had devoted his life to the pursuit of pleasure, spending vast amounts on food and drink and vomiting daily as a result of these excesses. Epicurus, Diogenes insisted, had defined pleasure in a cerebral and virtuous way that did honor to him.
For Alberti, Diogenes offered a new model of what it meant to be a philosopher—a model that snugly fit his own urban life and secular concerns. For Thomas More, Diogenes offered even richer resources. More’s greatest book, first published in 1516, was Utopia: a description of a society radically different from that of Christian Europe. He portrayed this, through the mouth of one of his characters, as a real society on a previously undiscovered island. More’s imagination was set to work, in part, by the discovery of the New World. Travel accounts by Amerigo Vespucci portrayed it as a world of wonders, and some emphasized the virtue of its inhabitants. But Diogenes also helped to open More’s mind. The Utopians have their own religion and philosophy. They hold that humans should pursue pleasure: in particular, the permanent pleasures of the mind and soul (though they do not look down on the pleasures of the body). By doing so, they argue, one can achieve salvation: “God will recompense us for surrendering a brief and transitory pleasure here with immense and never-ending joy in heaven. A
nd so they conclude, after carefully considering and weighing the matter, that all our actions and the virtues exercised within them look toward pleasure and happiness as their final virtues.” Here, as More’s editors have pointed out, he echoed Diogenes’ account of Epicurean morality: “We choose the virtues not for their own sake but for the sake of pleasure, just as we have recourse to medicine for the sake of health.” Similarly, as fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists discovered the ancient Skeptics in the works of Cicero and Sextus Empiricus, they read and drew on Diogenes’ life of a very different skeptic, Pyrrho—which Pseudo-Burley had simply omitted.
In modern times, Diogenes has been much criticized for his mistakes. In the Renaissance, even his errors proved fertile. More’s Utopians have no private property or money, and their laws forbid the accumulation of gold and the other false treasures valued most by Europeans. Raphael Hythloday—the European traveler who speaks through most of the work—not only praises their regime, but also denounces the effects of money on Europe, where sheep are eating people, as peasants are thrown off their land to make way for animals that can produce wool, and crippled soldiers who cannot fend for themselves are executed for petty theft. “When I consider all these things,” he reflects, “I become more sympathetic to Plato, and wonder the less that he refused to make laws for any people who would not share their goods equally. Wisest of men, he saw easily that the one and only path to the welfare of all lies through equality of possessions.”
In fact, Socrates did not argue in Plato’s Republic that in an ideal society, all would have equal shares—though he did insist that the Guardians, the men and women responsible for guiding and protecting society, should possess only common property. But Diogenes, in one of his flights of bibliographical pedantry, quoted a story from the work—now lost—of a female scholar, and that inspired More: “Pamphila, in the twenty-fifth book of her Reminscences, says that the Arcadians and Thebans, when they were founding Megalópolis, invited [Plato] to be their lawgiver; but when he learned that they were opposed to equality of possessions, he would not go.”
Plato’s works, only a handful of which had been known in the Middle Ages, were translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino and printed, first in Latin and then in Greek. His newly accessible Republic was More’s single most important literary model. But when it came to interpreting Plato’s views on property, More followed not the original text but the lore preserved by Diogenes Laertius. So did his close friend Desiderius Erasmus. When he argued in his influential collection of classical adages that “friends should have all things in common,” he claimed to be following Plato in approving community of property.
Even for a potentially dangerous text, utility ensured popularity. And the Lives, which offered vast resources of ready information for anyone faced—for example—with the task of teaching the very popular works of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, were more useful than most. The full Latin text of Diogenes’ work reached print by 1472 and was reprinted at least twenty-two times. The original Greek texts of Diogenes’ lives of Aristotle and Theophrastus were printed by Aldus Manutius, in his pioneering edition of the works of Aristotle in Greek, in 1497. The life of Xenophon in an edition of his works appeared in 1527. Six years later the Greek text was printed in full. Other editions followed—notably a very scholarly one by Johannes Sambucus, published in 1566, which the editor had improved by drawing on new manuscript evidence, and a Greek-Latin one, published in 1570, edited by the great Hellenist Henri Estienne. Gradually the text—which swarmed with difficult and unusual words—swam into clarity, like a field of amoebas seen through a microscope as it is focused.
Machiavelli, in his life of Castruccio Castracani, appropriated some of the sayings of the Socratic philosopher Aristippus, recorded by Diogenes. He noted that a flatterer let Castracani spit on him “to catch a whale” (to win his favor). Aristippus, in the Latin text Machiavelli read, said fishermen let the sea drench them to catch a gudgeon, while he himself let Dionysius of Syracuse spit on him to gain a blenny (a small, colorful fish). Traversari, not knowing the word blennos, simply transliterated it as blenus. The printers’ correctors, equally puzzled, corrupted the text further, inserting the meaningless balenus. Machiavelli finally transformed this into the real Italian word for whale, balena. As Estienne—the compiler of the greatest Greek dictionary of the Renaissance—and other scholars worked on the text, errors like this slowly disappeared.
Not all learned readers, moreover, worried about the dangers posed by the content of the Lives. In the early sixteenth century, more and more scholars turned their attention, and their philological skills, to purifying the texts and traditions of the Christian Church. The Spanish philologist Juan Luis Vives lamented that “a license for lying” had established itself “where holy things are concerned.” He listed apocryphal stories and texts, starting with the legendary case of leprosy from which a pope had supposedly cured the emperor Constantine, and denounced them: “we shriek and bark at lesser errors and wink at these—which, if they fall into the hands of the impious, will make our most holy and profound religion look absurd to them.” The lives of saints, he argued, were full of obvious fantasies, more likely to arouse derision than devotion. Melchior Cano, an influential Dominican theologian who worried about the humanists’ criticisms of Church traditions, agreed with Vives in this case. Christian writers would do better to emulate Diogenes, who had cited his sources and quoted long extracts from the writings of his subjects: “I say in sorrow, rather than in slander, that Diogenes Laertius did a much more serious job of writing the lives of the philosophers than the Christians did of writing the lives of saints.”
By the later sixteenth century, Diogenes was well established as a standard author. Like Plutarch, another Greek writer of the Imperial period whose vast Moralia offered a rich source of information about the lives and works of ancient philosophers, his work was on the bookshelves not only of scholars, but of all highly educated men. Montaigne expressed his fascination with the ancient thinkers—and his desire to know more about them—eloquently in his Apology for Raymond Sebond:
How much do I wish that, whilst I live, either some other or Justus Lipsius, the most learned man now living, of a most polite and judicious understanding … had both the will and health, and leisure sufficient, carefully and conscientiously to collect into a register, according to their divisions and classes, as many as are to be found, of the opinions of the ancient philosophers, about the subject of our being and manners, their controversies, the succession and reputation of sects; with the application of the lives of the authors and their disciples to their own precepts, in memorable accidents, and upon exemplary occasions. What a beautiful and useful work that would be!
Since no such modern reference work existed, he happily stuffed his innovative, informal French Essays on philosophy and many other topics with anecdotes and quotations from Diogenes. The Lives, he made clear, dissatisfied him only because they were not comprehensive enough: “I am very sorry we have not a dozen Laertii—or that he was not further extended; for I am equally curious to know the lives and fortunes of these great instructors of the world, as to know the diversities of their doctrines and opinions.”
Opening pages (“Prologue”) of Ambrogio Traversari’s early-fifteenth-century Latin translation of Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum.
Even while Montaigne and others still found riches in Diogenes Laertius, his fortunes began to take their long, slow turn for the worse. In the middle and later years of the sixteenth century, French humanists began to approach many classical texts from a new standpoint. Reading the Lives and comparing them with compendia made by Greek scholars after Diogenes, such as the anthologies made by Stobaeus in the fifth century, they realized that the Lives were not just model accounts of noble men’s careers. The teachings and sayings that Diogenes ascribed to the ancient sages were, in many cases, the fullest information available about them. They could be systematically collected, and juxtaposed wi
th other versions of the same thinkers’ views. At the same time, Diogenes’ habit of citing the authors and titles of the works he had drawn on suggested that modern humanists might be able to reconstruct the earlier scholarship he had used—or at least to find out much about it.
The problem was that the more systematically one read Diogenes, the more holes appeared in the fabric of his work. Henri Estienne—son of Robert Estienne, a great scholar-printer who had published the first collection of the fragments of archaic Latin poetry in 1554—set to work in the 1560s, collecting from Diogenes and other sources the fragments of what are now called the Pre-Socratic philosophers. A younger colleague, Joseph Scaliger, who lived in Geneva, where the Estiennes had their printing house, from 1572 to 1574, and Estienne’s son-in-law, Isaac Casaubon, collaborated with him at times. The results were in part traditional: Estienne printed his own edition of Diogenes Laertius, but he also published collections, first of Apophthegms of Kings, Leaders and Philosophers (1566), in which he stripped out the sayings of the ancient sages from Plutarch and Diogenes, and then of Philosophical Poetry (1573), in which he published all the texts by Empedocles and other early philosophers in verse, and raised—for the first time—the question of whether their writings could be considered to be philosophical. Often, as these men collected their fragments, they realized that Diogenes had less to offer than other sources. Except in special cases, like that of Lucretius, he quoted secondhand accounts rather than original sources—an error for which his undeniable entertainment value could not compensate.
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers Page 66