The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~190,000 words · 926 passages
Cite this work
- APADiogenes Laertius. (n.d.). The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/diogenes-laertius/the-lives-and-opinions-of-eminent-philosophers
- MLADiogenes Laertius. "The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/diogenes-laertius/the-lives-and-opinions-of-eminent-philosophers.
- ChicagoDiogenes Laertius. The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/diogenes-laertius/the-lives-and-opinions-of-eminent-philosophers.
What it is about
The lives, doctrines and sayings of the Greek philosophers, from Thales to Epicurus, with wills, letters and lists of works.
Context and history
Diogenes Laertius was writing around the third century and was no philosopher: he was a compiler, and not a very critical one. He mixes verifiable fact with joke and rumour without signalling it. He is nevertheless irreplaceable, for an uncomfortable reason: for many ancient philosophers he is the ONLY source that has reached us. Epicurus's three letters and the Principal Doctrines survive only because he copied them here. He must therefore be read knowing that he often cannot be checked against anything.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
In that among the Persians there existed the Magi,[1] and among the Babylonians or Assyrians the Chaldæi,[2] among the Indians the Gymnosophistæ,[3] and among the Celts and Gauls men who were called Druids[4] and Semnothei, as Aristotle relates in his book on Magic, and Sotion in the twenty-third book of his Succession of Philosophers. Besides those men there were the Phœnician Ochus, the Thracian Zamolxis,[5] and the Libyan Atlas. For the Egyptians say that Vulcan was the son of Nilus, and that he was the author of philosophy, in which those who were especially eminent were called his priests and prophets. II. From his age to that of Alexander, king of the Macedonians were forty-eight thousand eight hundred and sixty-three years, and during this time there were three hundred and seventy-three eclipses of the sun, and eight hundred and thirty-two eclipses of the moon. Again, from the time of the Magi, the first of whom was Zoroaster the Persian, to that of the fall of Troy, Hermodorus the Platonic philosopher, in his treatise on Mathematics, calculates that fifteen thousand years elapsed. But Xanthus the Lydian says that the passage of the Hellespont by Xerxes took place six thousand years after the time of Zoroaster,[6] and that after him there was a regular succession of Magi under the names of Ostanes and Astrampsychos and Gobryas and Pazatas, until the destruction of the Persian empire by Alexander. III. But those who say this, ignorantly impute to the barbarians the merits of the Greeks, from whom not only all philosophy, but even the whole human race in reality originated. For Musæus was born among the Athenians, and Linus among the Thebans; and they say that the former, who was the son of Eumolpus, was the first person who taught the system of the genealogy of the gods, and who invented the sp