Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

by Pamela Mensch

  [Epicurus] is also said to have written to many other courtesans, but particularly to Leontion, with whom Metrodorus was also smitten. And in his work On the Goal he writes thus: “For I, at any rate, do not know what I would consider good apart from the pleasures derived from taste, sex, sound, and beautiful form.” And in his letter to Pythocles, he writes, “Hoist every sail, my dear boy, and flee from all culture.” Epictetus calls Epicurus a writer of obscenities and utterly reviles him.

  It is quite possible that Inghirami advised Raphael on the choice of philosophers for The School of Athens; he served as the Pope’s private librarian before his appointment as Vatican librarian. In that case his portrait is particularly appropriate.

  On the right side of The School of Athens, beneath Aristotle’s benevolently gesturing hand and the statue of gray-eyed Minerva, a group of geometers and cosmologists gathers around a balding man who appears to be measuring a geometric figure with a pair of dividers. He is usually identified as another double portrait: the papal architect (and Raphael’s relative) Bramante, posing as Euclid of Alexandria. Diogenes does not write about the so-called father of geometry, but only about the Socratic philosopher Euclides of Megara. However, scholars often confused the two in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and Diogenes’ description of the Megarian Euclid’s beliefs about divine goodness and unity (2.106) perfectly expressed Egidio da Viterbo’s conviction that the Greek philosophers already understood the essential truths of Christian revelation: “He declared that the good is one, though it is called by many names: sometimes wisdom, sometimes god, sometimes mind, and so forth. He rejected what is opposed to the good, claiming that it does not exist.”

  Two dignified men stand close by Euclid-Bramante, one wearing a crown and holding a sphere with the fixed stars. This man is normally identified as the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, presented (wrongly, as we now know) as if he were one of the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt. Egidio’s Commentary notes that two senses of the five first led humankind to think about divinity: hearing, through music, and sight, by inducing us to look up to the heavens. Thus the astronomers, like the Pythagoreans with their musical harmonies, guided the ancients toward theological speculation: “In the [Phaedrus] it is written that there are two divine senses: vision and hearing, because each has its own kind of knowledge, one speculative knowledge, the other music, as we may read in the second book of the Laws.”38

  The identity of Ptolemy’s elegant companion is debated, and most of the candidates in recent scholarship (Zoroaster, Strabo) are barely mentioned in Diogenes.39 The figure’s features may well be those of Raphael’s close friend Baldassare Castiglione, who was certainly the most elegant of men; in fact, he wrote the book for his time on courtly elegance, Il Cortegiano.40

  Raphael himself appears, appropriately enough, on this “visual” or “speculative” side of the fresco, together with another artist, perhaps one of his predecessors in this suite of rooms, either Timoteo Viti from his native Urbino or Giovanni Bazzi, the eccentric Sienese who answered to the nickname Sodoma.41

  Egidio da Viterbo’s Commentary on Peter Lombard also helps us interpret the three relief plaques that appear beneath the statues of Apollo and Minerva. Three human impulses, he writes, when properly channeled, become divine: anger becomes Fortitude in the service of God, lust becomes Love of God, and reason becomes transcendent Justice. The plaques, their designs inspired by the scenes on ancient Roman sarcophagi, show one figure striking another (wrath), a Triton fondling a Nereid (lust), and Minerva enthroned above the Zodiac (reason). As Egidio puts it: “All things that exist under Heaven are, as it were, sunk beneath the waves of matter, and only the human soul emerges like a crag or an island, and lifts its head out of the sea: and as the fourth book of the Republic tells us, it has three parts: lust, anger, and reason.”42

  Two figures attract particular attention in the center of Raphael’s composition: a flamboyantly reclining Diogenes the Cynic, his haphazardly arranged blue wrap suggesting something of his outrageous defiance of convention, and a brooding, bearded man who leans his elbow on a block of marble and sports a conspicuous pair of golden suede boots. The melancholic mood is appropriate to Heraclitus, at least according to Diogenes (9.1):43

  He was exceptionally haughty and disdainful, as is clear from his book, in which he says, “Much learning does not teach understanding; otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, or, in turn, Xenophanes and Hecataeus.” For “the wise is one thing: to understand thought, which steers all things through all.”

  The odd insertion of this block of marble, the rapt expression, and the distinctive way Raphael paints this figure all confirm Vasari’s statement that it is a portrait of Michelangelo.44 In 1510, two years before the Sistine Chapel officially reopened to the public, Bramante and Raphael had sneaked in to see the ceiling frescoes, and Raphael has produced a perfect imitation of his Florentine rival’s muscular style, strikingly novel pastel colors, and the dogskin boots to which Michelangelo was so devoted that he almost never took them off (when he did, his skin came off too).45

  Repeatedly, then, Raphael has used the personal information about the ancient Greek philosophers in Diogenes Laertius to draw strongly individualized portraits, often comparing these ancient figures directly to his own contemporaries in affectionate but uncompromising double images. As for the text of Diogenes itself, it provided deep inspiration for only a handful of readers in the Renaissance Rome of Pope Julius II, but that handful included Egidio da Viterbo, the head of the Augustinian order; Angelo Colocci, one of the most influential intellectuals (and generous hosts) in Rome; Tommaso Inghirami, Vatican librarian; and perhaps the Pope himself and his close friend the architect Bramante. Although ancient Greece was still the fascination of only a few, the world enshrined in The School of Athens helped to create a widespread passion for the careful study of Greek in Italy; within a generation, Greek had become an indispensable part of any classical education, and Diogenes Laertius, at last, an author known to many readers rather than a choice few.

  1 The bibliography on The School of Athens is vast. See, for instance, Heinrich Pfeiffer, “Die Predigt des Egidio da Viterbo über das goldene Zeitalter und die Stanza della Segnatura,” in J. A. Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, Marcell Restle, and Herbert Weiermann, eds., Festschrift Luitpold Dussler (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1972), 237–54, and Heinrich Pfeiffer, Zur Ikonographie von Raffaels Disputa (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1975), which first proposed Egidio da Viterbo as an influence; Matthias Winner, “Disputa und Schule von Athen,” in Raffaello a Roma: Il Convegno del 1983 (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1986), 29–46; Matthias Winner, “Stufen zur Erkenntnis in Raffaels Schule von Athen,” Jahrbuch der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen (1993): 50–60; Marcia L. Hall, ed., Raphael’s “School of Athens,” Masterpieces of Western Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Marcia L. Hall, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Raphael (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). In the present context, the most important discussion of The School of Athens is that of Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura: Meaning and Invention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  2 The identification of the painting as the “Liceo d’Atene” goes back to Gaspare Celio in 1638; Konrad Oberhuber, Polarität und Synthese in Raffaels “Schule von Athen” (Stuttgart: Urachhaus, 1983), 54.

  3 Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, Measuring Heaven: Pythagoras and His Influence on Thought and Art in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 273n6–74n7.

  4 Alfonso D’Agostino, Fiori e vita di filosafi e d’altri savi e d’imperadori, Edizione critica, Pubblicazioni dell Facoltà di Lettere dell’Università degli Studi di Milano 87 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979), 28–54.

  5 M. C. Sommers, “Burley, Walter,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4037, accessed March 27, 2014; M. Grignaschi, “Lo pseudo Walter Burley e il Li
ber de vita et moribus philosophorum,” Medioevo 16 (1990): 131–90; J. Prelog, “‘De Pictagora phylosopho’: Die Biographie des Pythagoras in dem Walter Burley zugeschriebenen Liber de vita et moribus philosophorum,” Medioevo 16 (1990): 191–252; O. E. Stigall, “The Manuscript Tradition of the De vita et moribus philosophorum of Walter Burley,” Mediaevalia et Humanistica 11 (1957): 44–57.

  6 Tiziano Dorandi, Laertiana: Capitoli sulla tradizione manoscritta e sulla storia del testo delle “Vite dei filosofi” di Diogene Laerzio (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 203–14.

  7 D’Agostino, Fiori e vita, 64, citing the original’s “così sozzo omo … che aveva sceme le narici e cavate, la fronte calva, pilosi le omere delle spalle e le gambe stravolte”; but the description in Vite dei filosofi is nearly identical.

  8 Ingrid D. Rowland, “Raphael, Angelo Colocci, and the Genesis of the Architectural Orders,” Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 81–108.

  9 Giovanni Santinello and Francesco Iottin, Models of the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, From its Origins in the Renaissance to the “Historia Philosophica,” Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées 135 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 155.

  10 For tabulation, see Ingrid D. Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 109–40.

  11 Rowland, “Raphael, Angelo Colocci.”

  12 Julián Martín Abab, “L’(in)olvidable historia bibliotecaria de los manuscritos vincianos de la Biblioteca Nacional de España,” in connection with the show “El imaginario de Leonardo,” Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, 2010; www.bne.es/es/Micrositios/Exposiciones/Leonardo/Estudios/seccion2/, accessed April 1, 2014. My thanks to Noah Charney for this reference.

  13 The painting, a detached fresco now in Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera, has been attributed both to Bramante himself and to Bramantino; see Richard Schofield, “Bramante dopo Malaguzzi Vieri,” Arte Lombarda 167 (2013), www.vitaepensiero.it/scheda-articolo_digital/Richard-schofield/bramante-dopo-malaguzzi-valeri-666112_2013_0001_0005-155511.html, accessed April 1, 2014.

  14 Dorandi, Laerziana, 28.

  15 Pfeiffer, “Die Predigt des Egidio da Viterbo”; Pfeiffer, Zur Ikonographie von Raffaels Disputa; Ingrid D. Rowland, “The Intellectual Background of The School of Athens: Tracking Divine Wisdom in the Rome of Julius II,” in Hall, Raphael’s “School of Athens,” 131–70; Daniela Gionta, “‘Augustinus Dux meus’: La teologia poetica ‘ad mentem Platonis’ di Egidio da Viterbo OSA,” Atti del Congresso internazionale su S. Agostino nel XVI centenario della conversione, Roma, 15–20 settembre 1986 3 (Rome: Istituto Storico Agostiniano, 1987): 187–201; Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance, 141–92.

  16 John O’Malley, Giles of Viterbo on Church and Reform (Leiden: Brill, 1967); John O’Malley, Rome and the Renaissance (London: Variorum, 1981).

  17 See Brian Copenhaver and Daniel Stein Kokin, “Egidio da Viterbo’s Book on Hebrew Letters: Christian Kabbalah in Papal Rome,” Renaissance Quarterly 67 (2014): 1–42, with bibliography.

  18 Rome, Biblioteca Angelica, MS gr. 97, 203r.

  19 The Commentary has now been transcribed in a critical edition by Daniel J. Nodes, Giles of Viterbo: The Commentary on the Sentences of Petrus Lombardus (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

  20 Commentary, MS Vaticanus Latinus 6325, 37v.

  21 Biblioteca Angelica, MS gr. 97, 58r.

  22 Ingrid D. Rowland, “A Summer Outing in 1510: Religion and Economics in the Papal War with Ferrara,” Viator 18 (1987): 347–59.

  23 John O’Malley, “Man’s Dignity, God’s Love, and the Destiny of Rome: A Text of Giles of Viterbo,” Viator 3 (1972): 389–416; and John O’Malley, “Fulfillment of the Christian Golden Age under Pope Julius II: Test of a Discourse of Giles of Viterbo, 1507,” Traditio 25 (1969): 265–338.

  24 For the Disputa, see especially Pfeiffer, Zur Ikonographie von Raffaels Disputa.

  25 The participation of Cristoforo Marcello has been suggested by Winner, “Disputa und Schule von Athen,” 29–46; Winner, “Stufen zur Erkenntnis in Raffaels Schule von Athen,” 50–60. The participation of Pontano has not been discussed.

  26 John O’Malley, “The Vatican Library and The School of Athens: A Text of Battista Casali, 1508,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7 (1977): 271–87.

  27 Sylvia Ferino Pagden and Maria Antonietta Zancan, Raffaello: Catalogo completo dei dipinti (Florence: Cantini, 1989), 83; Matthias Winner, “Projects and Execution in the Stanza della Segnatura,” in Guido Cornini and Christine Denker Nesselrath, eds., Raphael in the Apartments of Julius II and Leo X: Papal Monuments, Museums, Galleries (Milan: Electa, 1993), 256.

  28 Giorgio Vasari, Vita di Raffaello d’Urbino (1550; revised 1568); Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Descrizione delle immagini dipinte da Raffaelle d’Urbino nel Palazzo Vaticano, e nella Farnesina alla Lungara: Con alcuni ragionamenti in onore delle sue opere, e della pittura, e scultura (Rome: Boëmo, 1695).

  29 Ingrid D. Rowland, “Giordano Bruno and Neapolitan Neoplatonism,” in Hilary Gatti, ed., Giordano Bruno, Philosopher of the Renaissance (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2002), 97–120.

  30 Rowland, “The Intellectual Background of The School of Athens,” 131–70.

  31 Ibid.

  32 The Plato is often identified as Leonardo da Vinci, whom Raphael might have met in Florence, but the identification depends on taking Leonardo’s Torino drawing of an old man as a self-portrait. Joost-Gaugier takes the drawing itself as a bust of Plato: Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura, 92–93.

  33 Commentary, MS Vaticanus Latinus 6325, 55r–v, cited, with slight revisions, from Rowland, “The Intellectual Background of The School of Athens,” 148–49.

  34 Commentary, MS Vaticanus Latinus 6325, 22v, cited from Rowland, “The Intellectual Background of The School of Athens,” 151.

  35 Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura, 136–46.

  36 Ibid., 82–83.

  37 Biblioteca Angelica, MS gr. 97, 120v ff.

  38 Commentary, MS Vaticanus Latinus 6325, 76v, cited from Rowland, “The Intellectual Background of The School of Athens,” 153.

  39 Joost-Gaugier rejects the identification as Zoroaster and proposes Strabo because of the figure’s close association with Ptolemy; Vasari thought that the figure now recognized as Ptolemy was Zoroaster, and the transferral of identity to his neighbor has no more substantial justification than this physical proximity; Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, “Ptolemy and Strabo and Their Conversation with Apelles and Protogenes: Cosmography and Painting in Raphael’s School of Athens,” Renaissance Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1998): 761–87; cf. Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura, 104–12.

  40 See Joost-Gaugier, “Ptolemy and Strabo and Their Conversation,” 763, 778–79.

  41 Ibid., 764, 780–83.

  42 Commentary, MS Vaticanus Latinus 6325, 75v, cited from Rowland, “The Intellectual Background of The School of Athens,” 152.

  43 Joost-Gaugier identifies this figure as Anaximander in Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura, 96–99.

  44 For the story of this modern identification, first made in 1941 by Deoclecio Redig de Campos, superintendent of the Vatican Museums, see Maria H. Loh, “Renaissance Faciality,” Oxford Art Journal 32 (2009): 350–53.

  45 Giorgio Vasari, Vita di Michelangelo (1550; revised 1568).

  Diogenes’ Epigrams

  Kathryn Gutzwiller

  Diogenes Laertius peppered his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers with short poems known as epigrams, the majority of them self-composed but a good number written by earlier poets.1 These epigrams typically comment on some aspect of the death of a philosopher whose biography has just been related from an earlier source.2

  The poetic quality of Diogenes’ epigrams has been judged harshly, although his playful wit has appealed to some.3 His poetry has been valued, almost universally, only as a window into his “own interests and views.”4 Although Diogenes often adapted the very words of his prose source, his epigrams provided t
he opportunity to express, in poetic form, his own opinion on the philosopher’s character. By turning poet, Diogenes acquired a personalized voice that would otherwise not suit his role as an objective collector of information about the lives and beliefs of those who perished centuries before. When we read Lives through the lens of Diogenes’ epigrams, we uncover the nature of judgments he typically renders, how he connects philosophers of similar character types through linguistic play, and how he draws upon and situates himself within the tradition of Greek epigram.

  ***

  Diogenes begins his Lives by arguing that philosophy had its origin with the Greeks. As evidence he cites the achievements of two legendary poets of the misty past—Musaeus, an Athenian who died at Attic Phalerum, and the Theban Linus, a son of Hermes and Urania. To legitimate the brief information he gives about these two, primarily their lineage and place of birth, he quotes the inscriptions he claims were placed upon their graves. Here is the first, on Musaeus (1.3):

  Here the Phalerean soil holds Musaeus,

   The beloved son of Eumolpus.

  Here is the second, on Linus (1.4):

  Here the earth has received the Theban Linus

   The son of the fair-crowned Muse Urania.

  Having established these two, both Greeks, as the first philosophers, Diogenes then turns to refuting the claim of some that Orpheus, a barbarian from Thrace, was the inventor of philosophy. Orpheus’ criticism of the gods for inflicting suffering on humans disqualifies him as a philosopher, in Diogenes’ view, and he offers as proof of Orpheus’ impiety an epitaph in which the Thracian poet is said to have been killed by Zeus in Macedonian Dium (1.5):

  Here the Muses laid the Thracian, Orpheus of the Golden Lyre,