Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers


Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is a biography of the Greek philosophers attributed to Diogenes Laërtius, written in Greek, the oldest extant manuscripts of which date from the late 11th to early 12th Centuries.

Overview

The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers was written in Greek and professes to give an account of the lives and sayings of the Greek philosophers. The work doesn't have an exact title in the manuscripts and appears in various lengthy forms.
Although it is at best an uncritical and unphilosophical compilation, its value, as giving us an insight into the private lives of the Greek sages, led Montaigne to write that he wished that instead of one Laërtius there had been a dozen. On the other hand, modern scholars have advised that we treat Diogenes' testimonia with care, especially when he fails to cite his sources: "Diogenes has acquired an importance out of all proportion to his merits because the loss of many primary sources and of the earlier secondary compilations has accidentally left him the chief continuous source for the history of Greek philosophy".

Organization of the work

Laërtius treats his subject in two divisions which he describes as the Ionian and the Italian schools. The biographies of the former begin with Anaximander, and end with Clitomachus, Theophrastus and Chrysippus; the latter begins with Pythagoras, and ends with Epicurus. The Socratic school, with its various branches, is classed with the Ionic; while the Eleatics and Pyrrhonists are treated under the Italic. He also includes his own poetic verse, albeit pedestrian, about the philosophers he discusses.


The work contains incidental remarks on many other philosophers, and there are useful accounts concerning Hegesias, Anniceris, and Theodorus ; Persaeus ; and Metrodorus and Hermarchus. Book VII is incomplete and breaks off during the life of Chrysippus. From a table of contents in one of the manuscripts, this book is known to have continued with Zeno of Tarsus, Diogenes, Apollodorus, Boethus, Mnesarchus, Mnasagoras, Nestor, Basilides, Dardanus, Antipater, Heraclides, Sosigenes, Panaetius, Hecato, Posidonius, Athenodorus, another Athenodorus, Antipater, Arius, and Cornutus. The whole of Book X is devoted to Epicurus, and contains three long letters written by Epicurus, which explain Epicurean doctrines.
His chief authorities were Favorinus and Diocles of Magnesia, but his work also draws on books by Antisthenes of Rhodes, Alexander Polyhistor, and Demetrius of Magnesia, as well as works by Hippobotus, Aristippus, Panaetius, Apollodorus of Athens, Sosicrates, Satyrus, Sotion, Neanthes, Hermippus, Antigonus, Heraclides, Hieronymus, and Pamphila

Oldest Extant Manuscripts

There are many extant manuscripts of the Lives, although none of them are especially old, and they all descend from a common ancestor, because they all lack the end of Book VII. The three most useful manuscripts are known as B, P, and F. Manuscript B dates from the 12th century, and is in the National Library of Naples. Manuscript P is dated to the 11th/12th century, and is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Manuscript F is dated to the 13th century, and is in the Laurentian Library. The titles for the individual biographies used in modern editions are absent from these earliest manuscripts, however they can be found inserted into the blank spaces and margins of manuscript P by a later hand.
There seem to have been some early Latin translations, but they no longer survive. A 10th-century work entitled Tractatus de dictis philosophorum shows some knowledge of Diogenes. Henry Aristippus, in the 12th century, is known to have translated at least some of the work into Latin, and in the 14th century an unknown author made use of a Latin translation for his De vita et moribus philosophorum.

Printed editions

The first printed editions were Latin translations. The first, Laertii Diogenis Vitae et sententiae eorum qui in philosophia probati fuerunt, printed the translation of Ambrogio Traversari and was edited by Elio Francesco Marchese. The Greek text of the lives of Aristotle and Theophrastus appeared in the third volume of the Aldine Aristotle in 1497. The first edition of the whole Greek text was that published by Hieronymus Froben in 1533. The Greek/Latin edition of 1692 by Marcus Meibomius divided each of the ten books into paragraphs of equal length, and progressively numbered them, providing the system still in use today.
The first critical edition of the entire text, by H.S. Long in the Oxford Classical Texts, was not produced until 1964; this edition was superseded by Miroslav Marcovich's Teubner edition, published between 1999 and 2002. A new edition, by Tiziano Dorandi, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013.

English translations

The first complete English translation was a late 17th-century translation by ten different persons. A better translation was made by Charles Duke Yonge, but although this was more literal, it still contained many inaccuracies. The next translation was by Robert Drew Hicks for the Loeb Classical Library, although it is slightly bowdlerized. A new translation by Pamela Mensch was published by Oxford University Press in 2018.