Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

by Pamela Mensch

   Whom high-ruling Zeus slew with a smoking shaft.

  After a prologue, the rest of Diogenes’ first book is devoted to those semilegendary wise men of the archaic age known as the Seven Sages, about whom he quotes both other anonymous pseudo-inscriptions and some epigrams of his own.5

  By citing at the outset these early epitaphs, Diogenes places his Lives within a long tradition of prose texts with quoted epigrams, which functioned to authenticate the information provided. The metrical form used for almost all the short epitaphs is the single elegiac couplet, a combination of an epic-type hexameter followed by a shorter pentameter, which became the dominant form for inscribed verse (and later for literary epigrams) from the sixth century BC onward. One-couplet epitaphs for heroes were circulating as early as the fifth century, and epitaphs often close the short biographies attached to the manuscripts of various authors.

  The best literary parallel for Diogenes’ couplets is a work called the Peplos, attributed to Aristotle, which provided prose accounts of mythical heroes, mostly of the Trojan War, supplemented by simple epitaphs of the same type found in Diogenes. Though the work itself is lost, there survive at least forty-eight poems extracted from it by much later sources, including one on Orpheus that bears some similarity to the epitaph Diogenes gives for that heroic poet.6 “Peplos-writing,” as Cicero calls it,7 was later taken up by other compilers, most prominently the Roman polymath Varro, who preserved epigrams from statues and tombs for seven hundred prominent persons. In citing these Peplos-type couplets, Diogenes acknowledges at the outset of his work that epigrammatic commemoration of this type occupied an essential place in Greek biographical remembrance from its inception in the classical age.

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  Just before the first of his own epigrams, Diogenes quotes an anonymous epitaphic couplet for Thales, one of the Seven Sages (1.39):

  c The tomb is small, but the man’s renown soars to the skies;

   Behold the grave of Thales, the most thoughtful of mortals.

  Diogenes’ own epigram reflects his character as poet and biographer (1.39):

  One day as Thales watched the games,

   You snatched the sage from the stadium.

  I commend you, Zeus, Lord of the Sun, for

    drawing him toward you;

   For he could no longer see the stars from earth.

  His epigram is markedly different in style and content from the alleged inscription, and through its unusually complex relationship to other nearby material, it serves as a showpiece for the various ways in which Diogenes provides a personal take on his biographies through verse.

  While Diogenes is always careful to acknowledge his authorship of a poem, he introduces his first-occurring composition by saying more: “And here is my own epigram on [Thales] from the first book of my Epigrams, also entitled Pammetros” (1.39). From this the reader learns that Diogenes had previously published a collection of Epigrams in more than one papyrus book-roll and that the first book-roll bore the title “In Various Meters.”8

  He again cites the Pammetros in quoting his second epigram, on Solon, adding that there he had “discourse[d] about all the illustrious dead in all meters and rhythms, in the form of epigrams and lyrics” (1.63). This fits with the combination of metrical types found in Diogenes’ epigrams throughout the Lives, and it seems reasonable to assume that he intends the reader to understand that the earlier poetry book, mentioned three times elsewhere (7.31, 8.74, 9.43), was the source for all his quoted epigrams.9 We should note, however, that citation of the Pammetros is also a way for Diogenes to legitimate the inclusion of his own compositions, since he thereby turns his epigram collection into one of his sources. We begin to see the playful side of Diogenes.

  ***

  Diogenes’ first epigram differs from the anonymous epitaphs most basically because it is not an epitaph at all, but rather an elaborate conceit in which a first-person speaker compliments Zeus on the appropriateness of Thales’ manner of death (“I commend you”). It is typical of Diogenes’ approach that the voice heard is not that of an objective, anonymous composer (as usually in genuine inscriptions) and only occasionally the fictitious voice of the tomb or the dead or the passerby (as in many literary epigrams); predominantly it is the voice of “Diogenes” as the author’s persona—that is, someone who knows of a philosopher’s life from anecdotal accounts found in earlier biographies and epitomes of biographies.10

  In fact, as we have seen, the introductory citation of the Pammetros sets the reader up to identify the “I” speaker as Diogenes, a writer of epigrams on the famous dead. In contrast to the Peplos-type epigrams, the technique in his own poems descends from the more sophisticated tradition of Greek epigrams that were composed by the early third century BC for inclusion in single-authored poetry books, generally entitled simply Epigrams (like Diogenes’ complete collection). By the later Hellenistic period, these literary epigrams were anthologized in multiauthored anthologies with more metaphorical titles, the two most important being the Garland of Meleager (c. 100 BC) and the Garland of Philip (Julio-Claudian). These and other epigram anthologies were themselves later anthologized in a great Byzantine compilation (now called the Greek Anthology), which also included epigrams excerpted from Diogenes, forty-nine in a single sequence (Anthologia Palatina 7.83–133, by Diogenes and other poets) and several placed elsewhere.11

  Predecessors of Diogenes’ epigrams on philosophers can be found in the remnants of these collections. For instance, in the so-called Milan Papyrus, which preserves a large section of an epigram book by Posidippus of Pella (third century BC), there is an epigram lamenting the loss at sea of Lysicles, who is called the “first voice of the Academy.”12 Diogenes knows this Lysicles as a follower of the Academy who provided a home for Polemon and Crates, successive heads of that school in the late fourth and third centuries (4.22).

  Other examples by third-century BC poets, preserved in Meleager’s anthology, mock failed philosophical adherents. These include Callimachus’ epigram on the Socratic follower Cleombrotus, who leaped from a wall into Hades after reading, and apparently misunderstanding, Plato’s Phaedo (Anthologia Palatina 7.471), and one by Leonidas of Tarentum on an otherwise unknown Cynic who lost his self-control in succumbing to passion for a boy (Anthologia Palatina 6.293). As most of Diogenes’ prose sources are Hellenistic, so too does epigrammatic response to biographical accounts have its origins in that age.

  ***

  To return to Diogenes’ own epigram on Thales, we can observe how cleverly it is constructed through a variety of allusions—to the poetic and prose sources Diogenes has just cited, as well as to well-known cultural commonplaces. The elderly Thales had an ordinary death, succumbing to heat, thirst, and general weakness while watching an athletic contest, and Diogenes rearranges the exact wording in the prose report of this death (sophos … agōna theōmenos gumnikon, “a sage watching an athletic contest”) to fit the metrical pattern of his first couplet (gumnikon … agōna theōmenon … sophon). Despite the flatness of the initial paraphrase, Diogenes honors this father of Greek philosophical thought, an astronomer who predicted eclipses and sought to explain the physical nature of our world, by constructing from an adjective in the preceding anonymous epitaph—ouranomakes, “soars to the skies”—a fanciful conversion of Thales’ sunstroke to a kind of apotheosis performed by Zeus in order to grant the old astronomer continuing observance of the stars despite his failing eyesight. This combination of the mundane with the elevated is part of Diogenes’ epigrammatic style. We may also note Zeus’ action of “snatching” Thales to heaven, recalling the myth of his “snatching” Ganymede to be his cupbearer and boy-lover on Olympus. The incongruity of using the handsome youth Ganymede as the mythical model for the old, semiblind astronomer is surely designed to amuse the aware reader.

  The Thales epigram has been explored in some detail because it foreshadows in its unusual complexity many of the standard features of Diogenes’ other epigrams.
In the succeeding poems in Book 1, there repeat the themes of the immortality of the soul and the role of the gods in the wise man’s death, as well as puns and allusions to other poems and anecdotes. For instance, in his second epigram, on Solon, Diogenes poeticizes the rather dull story that the Athenian sage died on Cyprus, where his body was burned before the bones were returned to the island of Salamis for burial (1.63):

  Distant Cyprian fire consumed the body of Solon.

   Salamis harbors his bones, their dust has nourished grain.

  Revolving wooden tablets brought his soul to the heavens

   For the laws he framed sit lightly on his fellow citizens.

  By saying that in Salamis the dust of Solon’s bones became grain, Diogenes may be playing on the similarity between the sage’s role as a thesmothetes, “maker of laws,” and the epithet thesmophoros, “bearer of laws,” given to Demeter, the goddess of grain. The image of the beneficial conversion of Solon’s body into human nourishment then leads directly to the continuing survival of his soul in heaven. The “wooden tablets” revolving on axles on which Solon’s laws were displayed in Athens, which are said to have “brought his soul to the heavens,” are called axones in Greek, a word that can also mean the “axis of the celestial sphere.” This double reference, a kind of pun, accounts for the ability of the axones to lift Solon’s soul to heaven. It is thus the lightness of the burdens imposed by his laws, both for citizens and for the tablets, that allows his soul’s ascension. Despite its frequent lameness, Diogenes’ punning serves as a primary method of asserting his judgment of the philosophers’ lives, exemplified in their deaths.

  In the next of Diogenes’ epigrams (1.73), the first-person speaker thanks the god Pollux, the patron of boxing, for the death awarded the sage Chilon, who collapsed from excess joy at seeing his son crowned an Olympic victor in boxing. In closing, the speaker forbids carping about this happy death and prays for a similar end for himself.

  The conclusion introduces the theme of judging the quality of philosophers’ deaths, many of which will be found wanting. The story of Chilon’s demise is attributed by Diogenes to Hermippus (fl. late third century BC), a follower of Callimachus and a prolific biographer whose Lives included sages and many philosophers. Hermippus’ death stories, which seem contrived and are apparently apocryphal, are mentioned by Diogenes more often than other accounts as the basis for his epigrams,13 and it seems likely he was in the process of collecting notes for the Lives from biographical accounts that included Hermippus when he composed the epigrams for his Pammetros.

  Diogenes’ own epigrams, when extracted in order from the prose accounts in his Lives, do at times show thematic continuity or other linking devices that are typical of carefully arranged epigram collections, such as Meleager’s Garland.14 For instance, three of the first four of Diogenes’ epigrams in the Lives concern either the transportation of the soul to heaven or divine guidance to the underworld. In the fourth epigram, Hermes gently leads Bias of Priene to Hades, after the elderly sage has died, having just delivered a successful speech for a friend (1.85). Here Hermes is doubly appropriate as both the conductor of souls to the underworld and the patron god of rhetoric. The presence of the gods in these epigrams resembles a practice known from earlier poetry books, that of beginning with a sequence of hymns to the gods, such as in the collection of the sixth-century BC elegist Theognis (1–18), and the presence of Zeus in Diogenes’ first epigram on Thales follows the old topos of “beginning with Zeus,” found in Hesiod’s Works and Days and the Phaenomena by the Hellenistic poet Aratus. This thematizing of the gods in Diogenes’ initial epigrams gives a possible clue to the structure of the lost Pammetros.

  Later epigrams in Book 1, on the sages Periander and Pherecydes, illustrate Diogenes’ use of the death story to offer the reader moral instruction on how to die. The first couplet of the Periander epigram (1.97) is a warning to the reader not to be grieved by failure to obtain every desire but to enjoy whatever the gods provide. The second couplet presents the death of Periander as an example of what not to do: the wise man perished in despair (athumēsas) over not obtaining something he coveted. Although in the preceding account it is not clear what failed desire led to Periander’s suicide, which cruelly involved the deaths of several others, Diogenes’ epigram introduces a recurring theme of suicide from depression in old age, of which he clearly disapproves.15

  His epigram for the sage Pherecydes (1.120–21), his first in a lyric meter,16 offers a contrasting story of enduring suffering to its natural end and an arranged burial as a benefit for the living. The poem combines an account in which Pherecydes died slowly and dreadfully from an infestation of lice with a story from Hermippus to the effect that the philosopher left instructions for his dying body to be dragged to the land of the Magnesians; his reason was to aid the Ephesians in their war with the Magnesians, since he knew of a prophecy that the Ephesians would gain victory if they found and buried his body in Magnesia. Diogenes concludes with this moral: if anyone is truly wise, he confers benefits both when living and when no more.17 What is explicit in these contrasting accounts of Periander and Pherecydes is often only implicit in later books of the Lives, namely, that the philosophers who came after them demonstrate the validity of their teachings not only by their conduct but above all by the choices they make at the time of their deaths.

  According to Diogenes (and his sources), Greek philosophy consisted of two main lines of succession, the Ionian and the Italian. Book 2 introduces the Ionian succession, which begins with natural philosophers from Anaximander to Anaxagoras and continues, through Book 7, with Socrates and the various branches of his followers.

  If we focus on Diogenes’ epigrams, however, Book 2 opens with an important thematic contrast between the despondent suicide of Anaxagoras and Socrates’ calm acceptance of poisoning, both deaths resulting from accusations of impiety. According to various sources, Anaxagoras was brought up on charges in Athens because of his belief that the sun was a huge red-hot mass of metal. Diogenes follows Hermippus’ version (2.13), in which the philosopher, though successfully defended by his pupil Pericles, was unable to bear the indignity (hubris) of arrest and so took his own life because of the failure of his wisdom (2.15). Diogenes subtly suggests that Anaxagoras’s rationalization of natural phenomena correlates with a lack of moral fortitude, since he chose death in the face of popular rejection of his beliefs.18 The next epigram by Diogenes, on Socrates, forms a clear contrast (2.46):

  Drink, Socrates, now that you are in the house of Zeus.

   For truly did the god call you wise, and wisdom is a god.

  You merely accepted the hemlock from the Athenians,

   But it is they who, through your mouth, have drained the cup.

  The epigram is constructed around the motif of drinking, set out in the first word (pine, “drink”) and taken up in the final line (exepion, “drain the cup”). The point of the wordplay is to convey the judgment that by accepting the hemlock Socrates has earned a place in heaven since his wisdom is divine, whereas the Athenians by condemning him poisoned themselves through his mouth, his drinking of the poison.

  Despite the separation of the two poems in the prose text of the Lives, they clearly were composed to draw a contrast between the deaths of these two philosophers, who were not incidentally connected, since Socrates is said to have studied with Anaxagoras in his youth and, according to Plato’s Apology (26d), felt the need to defend himself by explaining away that early relationship. The contrast in choice of death and so in degree of wisdom forms a model for the majority of Diogenes’ epigrams to follow, and we might wonder if the two poems did not once reside side by side in the Pammetros.

  Many of Diogenes’ epigrams reflect the themes just discussed. A select few philosophers are praised for following the Socratic model of facing death with equanimity and trusting in the soul’s immortality. His student Xenophon, for example, “went up” (anebē) into Persia (as told in his Anabasis) not only b
ecause of Cyrus’ invitation but also to seek “a path that would lead up” (anodon) to the house of Zeus (2.58), and Plato is celebrated in double epigrams (3.45) as a healer of human souls, who now dwells in his own city in Zeus’ realm—a reference to his Republic. By contrast, Diogenes follows a version of Aristotle’s death (5.8) in which the philosopher, when about to be indicted for impiety, drank a poison called akoniton and so prevailed over his accusers “without effort” (akoniti). While the language of this epigram is mostly a rearrangement of the prose text, the slightly snarky pun is Diogenes’ contribution, intimating that Aristotle, in contrast to Socrates, chose poison as the easy way out.

  Throughout his Lives Diogenes is complimentary toward philosophers who faced death with fortitude, whether under torture (like Zeno of Elea [9.28] and Anaxarchus [9.59], who were pounded to death in a mortar) or from accident, decrepitude, or old age. For example, the elderly Academic Xenocrates, called a man of admirable character, tripped over a vessel that struck him in the face but merely cried “oh,” and so died (4.15; cf. the similar fate of Zeno the Stoic, 7.31).

  On the other hand, Diogenes is critical, directly or indirectly, toward those who abandoned their principles at death (like the atheist Bion of Borysthenes, who earns Diogenes’ scorn—“I have taken him to task”—for turning to magic and sacrifice, 4.55–57) or who died from overindulgence in a failure of philosophical self-control or who committed suicide, either as a form of display (like Empedocles’ leap into the volcano, 8.75) or more often from depression (like Periander) or as an escape from disease or hardship (like Aristotle). A foundational source for his critical view of suicide was seemingly Plato’s Phaedo, where Socrates on the day of his death argues for the immortality of the soul and labels suicide wrong because only the gods have the right to release us from the prison of bodily life. Suicide, or the proper reasons for it, continued to be a subject of debate in the Hellenistic philosophical schools, and the subject was both culturally important and controversial in Diogenes’ own day, in the aftermath of the many politically motivated suicides during the terrors of the early Roman Empire.19