Lives of Eminent Philosophers
Bioi kai Gnomai ton en Philosophia Eudokimesanton
Understanding a philosopher's teaching is inseparable from knowing the life, sayings, and even gossip surrounding him, and compiling the biographies, doctrines, and quips of every major Greek philosophical school into one work preserves a record that would otherwise have been lost entirely.
- biography as inseparable from philosophical understanding
- compilation across all major Greek schools
- preservation of otherwise-lost primary texts (Epicurus's letters)
- uneven reliability mixed with anecdote
- an irreplaceable source for Hellenistic philosophy
Diogenes Laertius, whose own life and even hometown remain almost entirely unknown, compiled Lives of Eminent Philosophers around the early third century AD, a ten-book survey moving from the legendary Seven Sages through the Ionian and Italian philosophical successions to the major Hellenistic schools, mixing biography, anecdote, doctrinal summary, and often unreliable gossip. Diogenes's uneven scholarship has long frustrated historians of philosophy, yet the work is irreplaceable precisely because it quotes at length from primary sources now otherwise lost entirely, including the complete text of three letters by Epicurus, material that would not exist without Diogenes's compilation.
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