![]() Montaigne’s essays are full of morsels from the Lives, many of which he misremembers or simply rewrites to fit his purposes. Montaigne is in some ways Diogenes’ target audience: hungry for gossip, a little credulous, and thoroughly committed to the premise that a philosopher’s personal life reveals things about the worth of his ideas. The outsized disdain this has engendered in some commentators has just a whiff of the professional academic’s contempt for amateurism.īeams inscribed with Greek and Latin maxims in Montaigne’s tower, to where he retreated in 1571 to set about living the life philosophical (Château de Montaigne, Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, Dordogne, France). In these moments of spontaneous versification, Diogenes has the air of an excitable enthusiast – more passionate perhaps than self-aware, but likable all the same for his eagerness to share his latest turn of phrase. But by including them, he gives us a rare hint about his character – and we’ll take as many of those as we can get. 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. But others say that he dedicated it to Heracles in Thebes, since he was a descendant of the Thebans who had founded a colony at Priene and this is the version of Phanodieus.Ī story is told that, while Alyattes was besieging Priene, Bias fattened two mules and drove them into the camp, and that the king, when he saw them, was amazed at the good condition of the citizens actually extending to their beasts of burden.It’s ironic that Diogenes Laertius, biographer extraordinaire, had no biographer of his own. And thereupon the tripod was dispatched to him but Bias, on seeing it, declared that Apollo was wise, and refused to take the tripod. In course of time, as has been already related, the bronze tripod with the inscription “To him that is wise” having been found at Athens by the fishermen, the maidens according to Satyrus, or their father according to other accounts, including that of Phanodicus, came forward into the assembly and, after the recital of their own adventures, pronounced Bias to be wise. Phanodicus relates that he ransomed certain Messenian maidens captured in war and brought them up as his daughters, gave them dowries, and restored them to their fathers in Messenia. Some make him of a wealthy family, but Duris says he was a labourer living in the house. Bias, the son of Teutames, was born at Priene, and by Satyrus is placed at the head of the Seven Sages. ![]()
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