Casaubon—the hardest working of philologists, who flagellated himself with guilt when he rose at the late hour of five in the morning and railed at the “amici inimici” (“enemy friends”) who interrupted his hours of study—unveiled the new approach to Diogenes Laertius vividly in his commentary on the text, which first appeared in 1583, when he was only twenty-four. Casaubon would go on to become—by the testimony of Scaliger, himself a great Greek scholar and known for his arrogance—“the greatest Hellenist we have,” famous both for his great edition and translation of the Greek historian of Rome, Polybius, and for his unmasking of Hermes Trismegistus, the supposed Egyptian sage whose writings he showed to be late works composed in Greek. In 1583 Casaubon was unknown. But he set about Diogenes with energy and independence. Previous scholars had made relatively little systematic effort to establish exactly who Diogenes was and when he lived. Casaubon, by contrast, started out by underlining the vast zone of uncertainty that hedged about this ancient writer: “It is easier to tell when he didn’t live, than when he did.” Meticulous collecting of parallels from relevant texts helped to establish a general context. He noted, for example, that the Roman writer Lucius Apuleius (c. AD 125–170) offered a treatment of Plato’s philosophy so close to that of Diogenes that the reader “must confess, either that the one translated from the other, although they seem to have been contemporaries, or—as I would tend to believe instead—that both drew from the same source.” But uncertainty remained on every point. In his own copy of the first edition of the commentary, Casaubon later added the word “almost” before “contemporaries.”
For the most part, though, Diogenes stimulated Casaubon—as he would later stimulate the German philologists—to read critically. Diogenes’ arguments provoked his sarcasm. When Diogenes argued that philosophy must have been a Greek creation, since the word itself was Greek, Casaubon became snarky: “Here’s a dagger made of lead…. The Romans might just as well claim that they invented medicine, since medicine is a Roman term, not a barbarian one.” Sharply aware that Diogenes had drawn much of his material “word for word” from earlier sources, most of them otherwise unknown, he identified as many of them as he could. Yet even as Casaubon reduced the text to rubble, it provoked him to some amazing feats of scholarly imagination.
Diogenes tells a story. The poet and Homeric critic Aratus, he says, asked Timon of Phlius how he could get hold of a sound text of Homer. Timon told him to find an old one—one that no one (that is, no one like Aratus) had tampered with. This uninspired anecdote inspired Casaubon. He reconsidered everything he knew about the origin, transmission, and state of preservation of the Homeric epics. His conclusions were as revolutionary as they were concise:
If what Josephus says is true, that Homer did not leave his poems in written form, but they were preserved by memorization and written down much later, then I do not see how we can ever have them in a correct form, even if we have the oldest MSS. For it is likely that they were written down in a form quite different from that in which they were first composed.
Casaubon had reduced Diogenes to the low status of a compiler—but he still found in him the clue that enabled him to frame the hypothesis, later developed by Richard Bentley and Friedrich August Wolf, that Homer was an oral poet.
The erudite compilers of the seventeenth century—men like Joachim Jonsius, who wrote a pioneering book on ancient writers on the history of philosophy—followed Casaubon into the mines and worked at the same coal face, recovering the names of forgotten authorities and the titles of lost books. The philologist Gilles Ménage equipped his massive edition of the Lives with a commentary that analyzed every lost source and possible fragment as deeply and fully as sound philological method allowed. But it was the learned creators of the New Philosophy for whom Diogenes mattered most. Liberated by Francis Bacon and René Descartes, who insisted that modern thinkers knew more than their ancient counterparts, they felt free to criticize and depart from Diogenes on vital points; yet he remained indispensable to them.
The English scholar Thomas Stanley published the first distinctively modern History of Philosophy between 1655 and 1662. He set out—or so it seems—to write the history of philosophy in a new way. Francis Bacon had criticized traditional treatments of the history of philosophy for failing to reconstruct the full systems of past thinkers. Stanley quoted Bacon at length at the start of his third volume. And he frankly stated the failings of his ancient predecessor, drawing on Casaubon and the other philologists as he did so: “that which Diogenes Laertius gives us is so far short of what he might have done, that there is much more to be found of the same persons dispersed among other authors, which I have here collected and digested.”
Like Casaubon and others, Stanley argued that Diogenes had been wrong to seek the origins of the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom in ancient Greece, rather than in the older civilizations of Egypt and Persia. Yet when he came to trace the history of actual philosophical systems, he began, as Diogenes had, in Ionia, with Thales, and like Diogenes he saw Socrates as a figure in the same long tradition. On points of detail, Stanley innovated. Where Diogenes had characterized the views of each sect or tradition by describing the ideas of its founder, Stanley emphasized the independence of later philosophers. Anaximander, the second member of the Ionian sect, emerged from his treatment as an independent who had rationally disagreed with his teacher Thales. But though Stanley preferred detailed, philologically precise biographies of philosophers to Diogenes’ more unified presentations of sects, he still kept the sects as an organizing principle. His work—which was supplemented, rewritten, and translated into Latin—kept Diogenes alive as a model for the history of philosophy even as he departed from him on crucial points.
So did the work of Stanley’s older contemporary Pierre Gassendi. At once a philologist and a philosopher, he was an atomist, convinced that everything from the creation and form of the universe to the nature of perception and thought could best be explained by assuming that everything consisted of minute, indivisible particles. Gassendi kept up with the experimental philosophy of his time. But he also regarded the ancient texts of Epicurus, preserved by Diogenes, as vital sources on which the modern philosopher could still draw. Impressed by Diogenes’ defense of Epicurus and the rich materials on Epicurean logic that he preserved, he devoted much of his life to explicating these texts. Yet Gassendi rebelled against being the sort of scholar who spent all of his time worrying about whether ancient texts were correct and reliable. Gradually he emancipated himself from Diogenes and composed his own vast account of Epicurean philosophy. Gassendi felt free, as Stanley had, to disagree sharply with Diogenes and Epicurus himself on vital points—starting with the idea that the gods were not concerned with events in the universe. Still, Diogenes remained vital: again and again the marginal notes—recording the sources from which Gassendi took not only biographical details, but also philosophical points about the nature of individual atoms—read simply “Laert.”
Encyclopedists and historians of philosophy continued to trace the histories of the ancient sects and to draw on Diogenes for their material. But their attitude to him became increasingly distant and critical. Following Diogenes—who himself followed Antigonus of Carystus, an Athenian writer of the third century BC—scholars long believed that Pyrrho, who had maintained a position of absolute skepticism about all forms of human knowledge, rejected all preferences and decisions—including the resolve to move in order to avoid being run over by a chariot or falling off a cliff, fates from which his obliging friends saved him.
The seventeenth-century writer La Mothe de Vayer already pointed out that another Greek philosopher—Aenesidemus, a Skeptic in his own right—had offered a much more reasonable account of Pyrrho’s thought and conduct in a massive and scholarly work. By the end of the century, Pierre Bayle not only took care to ascribe the ridiculous stories about Pyrrho to their ultimate source, Antigonus, but also dismissed them as “bad jokes”—a position in which the eighte
enth century’s greatest historian of philosophy, Johann Brucker, followed him. More important still, Brucker now articulated, more explicitly than anyone before him, the central weakness of Diogenes’ work, as seen from the standpoint of an Enlightenment thinker: it was anecdotal, not analytical.
Well before the nineteenth century began, Diogenes had been revealed to be a compiler from older sources, and neither fully trustworthy nor reliably critical. But his downfall had only begun.
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the universities of Germany saw the rise of another avant-garde form of humanistic scholarship—one pursued by men bent on pushing historical and philological criticism as far as they could go. They did to the classics what Wordsworth held that philosophers did to nature: they murdered to dissect. In order to correct the texts of the ancients rigorously, German scholars scoured their manuscripts for errors, which they could use to reconstruct the transmission of each text. In order to judge the narratives of ancient historians, these scholars broke them down into the remains of their lost constituent sources. And in order to re-create the lives and teachings of ancient philosophers, they broke down the compendia of Diogenes Laertius and Stobaeus and others, paying far more attention to the lost texts that had provided their fragments and stories than to the compilations that actually survived.
Gradually the new philologists devised rules about the ways in which ancient writers like Diogenes used their sources, which they could wield in order to re-create them. By the end of the nineteenth century, those interested in the oldest Greek thinkers read about them not in Diogenes Laertius but in a standard collection of the fragments of the Pre-Socratics; those interested in the Stoics could use another collection, first published in 1903–1905. Study after study appeared, meanwhile, not on Diogenes Laertius but on the lost scholarly collections and compilations he quoted.
As for poor Diogenes, he was dismissed as ignorant, inaccurate, and unoriginal. Hermann Usener, the great historian of philosophy and religion who was one of the leading explorers of these new areas, only quoted, and did not make his own, the verdict of another scholar: that Diogenes was a “complete ass.” Going far beyond the evidence available to him, however, he did insist that Diogenes had basically written nothing. Rather, he had compiled materials from the works of earlier writers and given them to the scribes to copy.
Friedrich Nietzsche, as everyone knows, was no conventional classicist. But he took a special interest, in his student years, in the Lives, and his approach was typical in many ways of the philologists and philosophers who tore Diogenes Laertius limb from limb. Nietzsche did not take the time, in his articles on Diogenes, to lay out and justify his approach. Instead he took for granted—quite rightly—that those able to read his Latin essays would share his general views.
He treated Diogenes as a compiler, and assumed he could reconstruct his practices on the basis of a few rules, which he stated casually and in passing. When he argued that Diogenes derived his account of Stoic moral and natural philosophy from the earlier writer Diocles of Magnesia, for example, he had no firm textual evidence to go on, beyond Diogenes’ occasional mentions of Diocles’ name and works. He thought he had proved that Diogenes drew on Diocles for his treatment of the divisions of Stoic philosophy and of logic. It seemed implausible, he argued, that Diogenes would have failed to take over the other parts of Diocles’ material. Why would Diogenes “have deserted a source which he had just drawn on for no reason?”
Nietzsche was certain that Diogenes simply copied from his sources when he felt he could not improve on them. After all, he pointed out, Diogenes copied the works by Epicurus that he inserted in Book 10—though in that case Diogenes actually made clear that he was reproducing others’ work, a fact Nietzsche did not mention. At times he fetched his arguments from very far indeed—as when he argued that Diogenes must have ascribed some special meaning to the number of books and chapters in his work, since women often did the same to the number of dishes in their collections of china. In the hands of Nietzsche—as in the hands of many more conventional writers—Diogenes Laertius served as little more than an object of abuse and a quarry for materials, the latter supposedly all derived from others.
In the world outside classical scholarship, however, Diogenes experienced a paradoxical revival—thanks in part, ironically, to Nietzsche, who dramatically changed his judgment about the value of Diogenes in his later philosophical works. One of the few older Basel professors who felt real sympathy for Nietzsche was Jacob Burckhardt—whose cultural history of Greece, created as a series of lectures at the end of his career, would be dismissed by the professional classicists because he refused to use or discuss their methods of source criticism. Burckhardt’s heroic cultural history of the Italian Renaissance appeared far earlier, in 1860, when its author was in his early forties. Alberti’s autobiography—then known as the “Anonymous Life”—had appeared in print not long before Burckhardt wrote. Its account of Alberti’s personality and sayings became the core of the unforgettable early section of Burckhardt’s book in which he sketched the “universal human being” of the Renaissance. Burckhardt did not know—and, as one who despised the “viri eruditissimi” of the classical seminars and their source criticism, did not care—that this account of Alberti, and to that extent his own account of the Renaissance, rested on the frail foundation provided by Diogenes. Yet it was in Burckhardt’s work and that of his dozens of imitators that Diogenes’ vision of the active urban sage, athlete, and neurotic had its last lease on dramatic life—and helped to inspire Nietzsche’s theories about the heroic individual.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, classical scholars have lost some of their faith in the value of reducing Diogenes’ house to splinters. They have treated him as an author in his own right—one who set out to show that the philosophers of an older Greece had been men of high birth and good character, who had led exemplary lives as well as creating innovative systems of ideas. Taking a cue from Renaissance scholars like Sambucus, who compared Lives of the Eminent Philosophers with the near contemporary Lives of the Sophists by Eunapius, they have noted that Diogenes’ effort to connect the dots and show how students followed teachers and sects rivaled sects had more than one partial parallel in his own time—not only in the lives of orators and Christians drawn up by others contemporary with or only a little later than he, but also in the Jewish text Avot, part of the Mishnah, a Hebrew text compiled around AD 200, which collected the sayings of the rabbis of the two centuries before it was composed.
Diogenes has emerged neither as a totally isolated figure nor as a totally derivative writer. In the third-century crisis of the Roman world, when the existence of the Empire itself was repeatedly threatened, pagan and Christian intellectuals set out to gather and put in order their intellectual traditions, often in innovative and lastingly influential ways. Even if we no longer believe in Diogenes’ Thales, we can now appreciate the coherence and meaning of his project—and the multiple ways in which it has mattered, over the centuries, to other readers.
Raphael’s Eminent Philosophers: The School of Athens and the Classic Work Almost No One Read
Ingrid D. Rowland
The world’s most famous image of philosophers at work was painted on a wall of the private apartment of Pope Julius II in the Vatican between 1509 and 1511. Raphael’s School of Athens shows the great philosophers of antiquity and some of their medieval commentators gathered together beneath a single magnificent masonry vault, bent in earnest discussion over books, globes, scrolls, and drawings as Plato and Aristotle stand stately watch over their proceedings.1 This painted “Triumph of Philosophy” (which may have been the painting’s real title) announces Rome’s claim to status as an intellectual as well as a spiritual capital, the living heir to ancient wisdom joined with Christian revelation.2 Not surprisingly, the Vatican Library, originally housed two floors below this painted chamber, is still filled with manuscript translations and printed editions of Diogenes
Laertius, the best-known biographer of the ancient Greek philosophers. One might easily imagine that these books would rank among the most heavily used in Raphael’s time, at least in the charmed circle of the Vatican and the humanists who had created the same atmosphere of intellectual excitement that pervades The School of Athens.3
And yet Diogenes Laertius seems to be an author whose work everyone in Renaissance Rome felt the need to own, but not to read. Among seven manuscripts of Ambrogio Traversari’s popular Latin translation of the Greek, six are so perfectly preserved that they might have been written yesterday rather than half a millennium ago—virtually no one has touched them for five hundred years. It is downright depressing to think how few readers have ever seen the gorgeously illuminated capital P in MS Vaticanus Latinus 1891, with its pale pink dragonfly perched on a tendril of white filigree. The only sign of activity on MS Vaticanus Latinus 1895, produced in Belgium in 1476, is a terra-cotta-colored stain from a spill on page 165 recto some five centuries ago. Cardinals wanted to have copies of Diogenes Laertius, and illuminators inserted their coats of arms on the first page of the volumes they decorated with care, but once acquired, these beautiful books apparently ceased to be of interest. MS Vaticanus Latinus 1894 is riddled with blank spaces neither scribe nor readers ever bothered to supply with the missing blocks of text.
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers Page 67