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![]() ![]() Paton, editor of the Loeb Greek Anthology: see Further Reading.įair enough: Diogenes’ poems suck. Others have been harsher still: one critic called Diogenes’ original poetry, which is sprinkled throughout the Lives, “perhaps the worst verses ever published.” The words of W.R. Hegel to dismiss the Lives in the 19 th century as containing “bad anecdotes extraneous to the matter in hand”. Perhaps that is what led the uncompromising German philosopher G.W.F. How does it help us to know that Zeno of Citium, founder of the Stoic school of philosophy, liked figs? And it’s not even clear that his anecdotes always reveal much about the philosophy at issue. If you want rigorous historical accuracy and meticulously cited sources, look elsewhere. 334 –272) takes a contemplative walk far from the madding crowd (from Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy, 1655–61).ĭiogenes’ approach to philosophy has been alternately the object of passionate scorn and of devoted affection, according mostly to the fashions of the times and places in which the Lives have been read. Did they practice what they preached? How did that work out for them? ![]() ![]() The Stoics and the Epicureans and the Cynics talked a big game. The Lives presents its subjects as complete individuals, whose philosophical outlook was bound up with their personalities and whose truest teaching was revealed by their lives. The details of Miller’s translation are given under Further Reading. “Diogenes seems… to assume that a vignette or a telling anecdote may reveal more about the essential character of a philosopher than the canonic writings that generations have intensively studied,” writes James Miller. That’s almost the whole point of the Lives: it’s a collection of biographical sketches and philosophical doctrines, a survey not just of philosophical schools but of the kinds of people who founded and attended them. He himself would probably have thought it did. He may have been from Nicaea, in what is now Turkey. It is generally thought that he lived and wrote in the early 3 rd century AD. We know next to nothing about the life of the man who wrote Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. The editors provide substantive introductions as well as essential critical and explanatory notes and selective bibliographies.It’s ironic that Diogenes Laertius, biographer extraordinaire, had no biographer of his own. Epic and lyric poetry tragedy and comedy history, travel, philosophy, and oratory the great medical writers and mathematicians those Church fathers who made particular use of pagan culture-in short, our entire classical heritage is represented here in convenient and well-printed pocket volumes in which an up-to-date text and accurate and literate English translation face each other page by page. The Loeb Classical Library® is the only existing series of books which, through original text and English translation, gives access to all that is important in Greek and Latin literature. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Diogenes Laertius is in two volumes. It is a very valuable collection of quotations and facts. His history, in ten books, is divided unscientifically into two “Successions” or sections: “Ionian” (from Anaximander to Theophrastus and Chrysippus, including the Socratic schools) and “Italian” (from Pythagoras to Epicurus, including the Eleatics and sceptics). Diogenes Laertius carefully compiled his information from hundreds of sources and enriches his accounts with numerous quotations.ĭiogenes Laertius lived probably in the earlier half of the third century CE, his ancestry and birthplace being unknown. This rich compendium on the lives and doctrines of philosophers ranges over three centuries, from Thales to Epicurus (to whom the whole tenth book is devoted) 45 important figures are portrayed. ![]()
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