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LAERTI (Ancient city) TURKEY
Diogenes Laertius, so called from his native city, Laerte in Cilicia.
He wrote the lives of the philosophers (Philosophoi Bioi), in ten books, which
are still extant. The period when he lived is not exactly known, but it is supposed
to have been during the reigns of Septimius Severus and Caracalla. Diogenes is
thought to have belonged to the Epicurean School. He divides all the Greek philosophers
into two classes: those of the Ionic and those of the Italic school. He derives
the first from Anaximander, the second from Pythagoras. After Socrates, he divides
the Ionian philosophers into three branches: (a) Plato and the Academics, down
to Clitomachus; (b) the Cynics, down to Chrysippus; (c) Aristotle and Theophrastus.
The series of Italic philosophers consists, after Pythagoras, of the following:
Telanges, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, Leucippus, Democritus, and others
down to Epicurus. The first seven books are devoted to the Ionic philosophers;
the last three treat of the Italic school.
The work of Diogenes is a crude contribution towards the history
of philosophy. It contains a brief account of the lives, doctrines, and sayings
of most persons who have been called philosophers; and though the author is evidently
a most unfit person for the task which he imposed upon himself, and has shown
very little judgment and discrimination in the execution of it, yet the book is
extremely useful as a collection of facts, which we could not have learned from
any other quarter, and is entertaining as a sort of pot-pourri on the subject.
The article on Epicurus is valuable, as containing some original letters of that
philosopher, which comprise a fairly satisfactory epitome of the Epicurean doctrines
and are very useful to the readers of Lucretius.
This text is from: Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. Cited Nov 2002 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
Diogenes Laertius, (Diogenes ho Laertios or Laertieus, sometimes also Laertios
Diogenes), the author of a sort of history of philosophy, which alone has brought
his name down to posterity. The surname, Laertius, was derived according to some
from the Roman family which bore the cognomen Laertius, and one of the members
of which is supposed to have been the patron of an ancestor of Diogenes. But it
is more probable that he received it from the town of Laerte in Cilicia, which
seems to have been his native place. A modern critic (Ranke) supposes that his
real name was Diogenianus, and that he was the same as the Diogenianus of Cyzicus,
who is mentioned by Suidas. This supposition is founded on a passage of Tzetzes
(Chil. iii. 61), in which Diogenes Laertius is mentioned under the name of Diogenianus.
We have no information whatever respecting his life, his studies, or his age.
Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus and Saturninus are the latest writers he quotes, and
he accordingly seems to have lived towards the close of the second century after
Christ. Others, however, assign to him a still later date, and place him in the
time of Alexander Severns and his successors, or even as late as the time of Constantine.
His work consists of ten books (philosophoi bioi, in Phot. Bibl. Cod. cxxi; philosophos
historia in Steph. Byz., sophiston bioi in Eustath) and is called in MSS. by the
long title of peri bion, dogmaton kai apophthegmaton ton en philosophia eudokimesanton.
According to some allusions which occur in it, he wrote it for a lady of rank
(iii. 47, x, 29), who occupied herself with philosophy, especially with the study
of Plato. According to some this lady was Arria, the philosophical friend of Galen
(Theriac. ad Pison. 3), and according to others Julia Domna, the wife of the Emperor
Severus. The dedication, however and the prooemium are lost, so that nothing can
be said with certainty.
The plan of the work is as follows: He begins with an introduction
concerning the origin and the earliest history of philosophy, in which he refutes
the opinion of those who did not seek for the first beginnings of philosophy in
Greece itself, but among the barbarians. He then divides the philosophy of the
Greeks into the Ionic -which commences with Anaximander and ends with Cleitomachus,
Chrysippus, and Theophrastus- and the Italian, which was founded by Pythagoras,
and ends with Epicurus. He reckons the Socratic school, with its various ramifications,
as a part of the Ionic philosophy, of which he treats in the first seven books.
The Eleatics, with Heracleitus and the Sceptics, are included in the Italian philosophy,
which occupies the eighth and ninth books. Epicurus and his philosophy, lastly,
are treated of in the tenth book with particular minuteness, which has led some
writers to the belief that Diogenes himself was an Epicurean.
Considering the loss of all the numerous and comprehensive works of
the ancients, in which the history of philosophers and of philosophy was treated
of either as a whole or in separate portions, and a great number of which Diogenes
himself had before him, the compilation of Diogenes is of incalculable value to
us as a source of information concerning the history of Greek philosophy. About
forty writers on the lives and doctrines of the Greek philosophers are mentioned
in his work, and in all two hundred and eleven authors are cited whose works he
made use of. His work has for a long time been the foundation of most
modern histories of ancient philosophy; and the works of Brucker and
Stanley, as far as the early history of philosophy is concerned, are little more
than translations, and sometimes amplifications, of Diogenes Laertius. The work
of Diogenes contains a rich store of living features, which serve to illustrate
the private life of the Greeks, and a considerable number of fragments of works
which are lost. Montaigne (Essais, ii. 10) therefore justly wished, that we had
a dozen Laertiuses, or that his work were more complete and better arranged. One
must indeed confess, that he made bad use of the enormous quantity of materials
which he had at his command in writing his work, and that he was unequal to the
task of writing a history of Greek philosophy. His work is in reality nothing
but a compilation of the most heterogeneous, and often directly contradictory,
accounts, put together without plan, criticism, or connexion. Even some early
scholars, such as H. Stephens, considered these biographies of the philosophers
to be anything but worthy of the philosophers. His object evidently was to furnish
a book which was to amuse its readers by piquant anecdotes, for he had no conception
of the value and dignity of philosophy, or of the greatness of the men whose lives
he described. The traces of carelessness and mistakes are very numerous; much
in the work is confused, and there is much also that is quite absurd; and as far
as philosophy itself is concerned, Diogenes very frequently did not know what
he was talking about, when he abridged the theories of the philosophers.
The love of scandal and anecdotes, which had arisen from petty views
of men and things, at a time when all political freedom was gone, and among a
people which had become demoralized, had crept into literature also, and such
compilations as those of Phlegon, Ptolemaeus Chennus, Athenaeus, Aelian, and Diogenes
Laertius display this taste of a decaying literature. All the defects of such
a period, however, are so glaring in the work of Diogenes, that in order to rescue
the common sense of the writer, critics have had recourse to the hypothesis, that
the present work is a mutilated abridgment of the original production of Diogenes.
(J. G. Schneider in F. A. Wolf's Lit. Anal. iii.) Gualterus Burlaeus, who lived
at the close of the 13th century, wrote a work "De Vita et Moribus Philosophorum",
in which he principally used Diogenes. Now Burlaeus makes many statements, and
quotes sayings of the philosophers, which seem to be derived from no other source
than Diogenes, and yet are not to be found in our present text. Burlaeus, moreover,
gives us several valuable various readings, a better order and plan, and several
accounts which in his work are minute and complete, but which are abridged in
Diogenes in a manner which renders them unintelligible. From these circumstances
Schneider infers, that Burlaeus had a more complete copy of Diogenes. But the
hope of discovering a more complete MS. has not been realized as yet.
The work of Diogenes became first known in western Europe through
a Latin translation made by Ambrosius, a pupil of Chrysoloras, which, however,
is rather a free paraphrase than a translation. It was printed after Ambrosius's
death (Rome, before A. D. 1475; reprinted Venice, 1475 ; Brixen, 1485; Venice,
1493; and Antwerp, 1566). Of the Gieek text only some portions were then printed
in the editions of Aristotle, Theophrastus, Plato, and Xenophon. The first complete
edition is that of Basel, 1533, ap. Frobenium. It was followed by that of H. Stephens,
with notes, which, however, extend only to the ninth book, Paris, 1570, and of
Isaac Casaubon, with notes, 1594. Stephens's edition, with the addition of Hesychius
Milesius, de Vita Illustr. Philos. appeared again at Colon. Allobrog. 1515. Then
followed the editions of Th. Aldobrandinus (Rome, 1594), corrected by a collation
of new MSS., and of J. Pearson with a new Latin translation (London, 1664), which
contains the valuable commentary of Menage, and the notes of the earlier commentators.
All these editions were surpassed in some respects by that of Meibom (Amsterd.
1692), but the text is here treated carelessly, and altered by conjectures. This
edition was badly reprinted in the editions of Longolius (1739 and 1759), in which
only the preface of Longolius is of value. The best modern edition is that of
H. G. Hubner, Leipzig,1828-1831. The text is here greatly improved, and accompanied
by short critical notes. In 1831, the commentaries of Menage, Casaubon, and others,
were printed in 2 vols. 8vo. uniformly with Hubner's edition.
Diogenes seems to have taken the lists of the writings of his philosophers
from Hermippus and Alexandrian authors (Stahr, Aristot. ii.; Brandis, in the Rhein.
Mus. i. 3; Trendelenburg, ad Aristot. de Anim). Besides the work on Greek philosophers,
Diogenes Laertius also composed other works, to which he himself (ii. 65) refers
with the words hos en aallois eirekamen. The epigrams, many of which are interspersed
in his biographies, and with reference to which Tzetzes (Chil. iii. 61) calls
him an epigrammatic poet, were collected in a separate work, and divided into
several books (Diog. Laert. i. 39, 63, where the first book is quoted). It bore
the title he pammetros, but, unfortunately, these poetical attempts, so far as
they are extant, shew the same deficiencies as the history of philosophy, and
the vanity with which he quotes them, does not give us a favourable notion of
his taste. (G. H. Klippel, de Diogenis Laertii Vita, Scriptis atque Auctoritate,
Gottingen, 1831)
This text is from: A dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology, 1873 (ed. William Smith). Cited Oct 2005 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
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