![]() ![]() So too do his flickers of irony: his philosophers are often “eminent” in the same sense that Lytton Strachey’s Victorians were. The tension between logos and bios-between doctrine and life-keeps his heap of often dubious biographical reportage from sinking into tedium. He treats his subjects as public exemplars, for good or ill, of the precepts they advanced. Philosophy to him was not a mere body of propositions it was a way of life, one that pretended to be superior to conventional modes of human existence. But he is keenly attuned to the philosopher as a social type, and an eccentric one at that. It is true that he shows little interest in, and scant understanding of, actual philosophical reasoning. Despite the ridicule to which he has been subjected, Diogenes Laertius has some undeniable virtues. If so, it was not an altogether unhappy quirk. That his work should endure, when the vast majority of the philosophical writings he drew on perished, may simply have been a “quirk of fate”-so guesses James Miller, the editor of this welcome new translation. There is a hint in his text that he might have been a native of the eastern city of Nicea. Even his slightly absurd Greco-Roman name is a puzzle-was “Laertius” some kind of nickname? Judging from the historical references in Lives (which stop just short of the Neoplatonists), he probably lived early in the third century CE. In fact, almost nothing is known about the man. (Still, the nineteen or so dialogues Aristotle composed-esteemed for their literary quality by Cicero as “a river of flowing gold”-were somehow mislaid by Western civilization.) But Diogenes Laertius didn’t have a school, as far as anyone knows. Aristotle too founded a school, and his treatises were widely copied and studied. ![]() We still have Plato’s dialogues because they were diligently preserved by the Academy. What made this fellow so lucky? It’s not hard to explain why certain works survive. And by dint of that, its author has become what Nietzsche called “the night watchman of the history of Greek philosophy: no one can enter into it unless he has given him the key.” Well, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers showed up. But those other sources are lost, which makes what Diogenes Laertius left behind, to quote the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “truly priceless.” Eighty percent of success is showing up, Woody Allen supposedly said. He may have produced a scissors-and-paste job cribbed from other ancient sources. He may have been credulous and intellectually shallow. Then why waste time on him? For this excellent reason: Diogenes Laertius compiled the sole extant work from antiquity that gives anything like a comprehensive picture of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. And he had “no talent for philosophical exposition,” declares The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. In his lyric moods he wrote “perhaps the worst verses ever published,” an anthologist pronounced. An “ignoramus,” declared the twentieth-century classicist Werner Jaeger. A “perfect ass”-“ asinus germanus”-one nineteenth-century scholar called him. George’s Church, Suceava, Romania, sixteenth century Plato, Pythagoras, and Solon fresco in St. ![]()
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