![]() 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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