The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

About this book

In ten books, Diogenes Laertius collects the lives, sayings and doctrines of the Greek philosophers, from the Seven Sages and Thales to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the Cynics, the Stoics and the Sceptics. Much of it is anecdote: Thales falling into a well while looking at the stars, Diogenes the Cynic living in a tub and asking Alexander the Great to stand out of his sunlight, Zeno founding the Stoic school in a painted colonnade. The whole of the last book is given to Epicurus, and it preserves three of his letters and his Principal Doctrines, our main source for his teaching.

Context and significance

Almost nothing is known about Diogenes Laertius, who probably wrote in the third century AD, and he can be credulous, but without him much of Greek philosophy would be lost. This translation is by C. D. Yonge. The Epicurean view of the world is set out in verse in Lucretius's On the Nature of Things.

About the author