Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

by Pamela Mensch

  The judgments that Diogenes makes of philosophers reflect to some degree the earlier biographical accounts he privileges as the basis for his epigrams, such as Hermippus, but as we have seen, he adds poetic flourishes to his epigrams to produce a certain tone and to project a certain attitude, at least ostensibly his own. He also conveys the recurring principles behind his opinions of philosophers by thematically repeating motifs and key words.

  One important theme, rooted in Socrates’ death by hemlock, involves consumption of food or drink as a means of death. For instance, Stilpo, the last head of the Megarian school, killed himself by drinking wine to excess; Diogenes creatively says that he “found in wine a charioteer more powerful than that evil team” of old age and disease, since by abundant drinking he drove the chariot of death (2.120). Contrariwise, Stilpo’s student Menedemus, the eristic philosopher, starved himself to death, an act that Diogenes calls “unworthy of a man” because driven by despondency (2.144). Wine drinking reappears in the epigrams of Book 4 on Plato’s followers, the Academics, where it becomes linked with paralysis and bodily “loosening.” The earliest of these is Speusippus, Plato’s nephew and successor, who Diogenes claims could not be “related by blood to Plato” (4.3) because he committed suicide in a state of depression over his paralysis. After discussing Xenocrates, Polemon, and Crantor, who all died well and receive complimentary epigrams (4.15, 20, and 27), Diogenes offers his pity to Arcesilaus, Crantor’s lover and a poet, who died from drinking too much unmixed wine and so destroying his rational capacity: “I pity you not so much for your death but because you insulted the Muses with an overflowing goblet” (4.45). In his epigram on Lacydes (4.61), who died from “paralysis brought on by heavy drinking,” Diogenes puns on the verbal root lu-, “loosen” (found in the Greek paralusis), by speaking of the wine god Dionysus as the one who “loosens (luse) [Lacydes’] limbs” and is rightly called by the epithet “Loosener” (Luaios). Finally, Carneades avoids Diogenes’ censure, since though afflicted by a wasting disease he refused a “loosening” (lusis) of his body by means of poison and chose instead to drink only honeyed wine, explaining “nature which holds me together will dissolve (dialusetai) me” (4.65–66).

  The first epigram by Diogenes in Book 5 on the Peripatetics is that on Aristotle’s suicide by poison, discussed above. His first three successors, however, all die of old age from bodily ills. Theophrastus, who was “sound”—that is, “not disabled” (apēros)—“of body” (demas) before his retirement at eighty-five, died shortly thereafter “disabled in his limbs” (pēromelēs) (5.40). Strato was so thin “of body” that in “wrestling with diseases” he failed to notice or have any sensation of his own death (5.60).20 About the third successor, Lyco, who died of gout (podalgēs, literally “of foot pain”), Diogenes makes the weak joke that he miraculously ran during one night the long road to Hades though before he walked only by means of “the feet of others” (5.68). Our biographer does not criticize these deaths of old philosophers from natural causes, but he does aim for a lighthearted tone, supported by his fondness for wordplay. We should note too that the epigrams display verbal linkage such as found in the sequences in Meleager’s Garland. The phrase ēn demas or demas ēn (“he was in body”) appears in the last line of the Theophrastus poem and the first line of the Strato poem, a linking repetition easily overlooked in the prose context of the Lives but likely more noticeable in the Pammetros if the epigrams stood side by side. It is interesting too that Diogenes calls attention to the possibility of the reader’s boredom in the Strato epigram (“if you are not paying attention to me”)21 and comments in the next epigram on the inclusion of Lyco, saying, “Nay, I will not even neglect Lyco, who died of gout” (5.68). In its current context, Diogenes’ unwillingness to omit “even” Lyco seems a meaningless statement since it occurs at the end of the prose account of the philosopher. It would, however, be relevant in a sequence of epigrams on philosophers in a poetry book, to explain the inclusion of this Peripatetic who set the school on its decline.22

  ***

  The last two Diogenes epigrams in Book 5 on the Peripatetics concern snakes, and a thematic use of animals continues in Book 6 on the Cynics. Demetrius of Phaleron, a student of Theophrastus, died in Egypt when imprisoned by Ptolemy Philadelphus through a suspicious bite of an asp (5.79). In regard to Heraclides of Pontus, who was associated both with the Academics and the Peripatetics, Diogenes follows a story in which the philosopher arranged for a snake to pop out of his shroud as he lay on his bier so that he might seem to have departed to the gods. Addressing Heraclides as a sophistic trickster, Diogenes turns the tables on him, claiming that he was the one deceived, since “the snake was indeed a beast, but you were detected as a beast, not a sage” (5.90).

  The animal theme is a natural one for the book on the Cynics, since their name means “doglike” and earlier epigrams on the unconventional Cynics play on their shameful resemblance to dogs. In his poem on Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates who was often considered the forerunner of the Cynic sect, Diogenes compares the living Antisthenes, who bit with his words, with the dead Antisthenes, who would make a good “guide to Hades,” being like Cerberus, the three-headed hound of hell (6.19). The founder of the Cynics, Diogenes by name, speaks from the grave (in dialogue with a passerby) to explain that he died, ironically, from a dog bite (6.79), and Menippus, called “a Cretan dog,” is chastised for committing suicide after losing his property to thieves, an act that proves he did not understand “the character of a dog” (6.100)—that is, what it meant to be a Cynic, since Cynics rejected material possessions.

  The epigrams on the Stoics in Book 7, the Italian succession from Pythagoras in Book 8, and miscellaneous philosophers in Book 9 often return to the theme of food and drink. Diogenes prefaces several of these poems with an acknowledgment of his playfulness (7.164 and 176; 8.45), as he does earlier for his epigrams on Lacydes (4.61) and Menippus (6.100). Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, and his first successor, Cleanthes, died of self-starvation (7.31 and 176); Chrysippus, the third in succession, died after drinking sweet wine at a banquet given by his students (7.184). Diogenes wrote a series of joking poems on Pythagoras’s refusal to eat beans because they were associated with the souls of the dead (8.44–45); in the last he follows Hermippus (8.40) in claiming that this reverence brought about the philosopher’s death when, running from pursuing Syracusans during a war with the Agrigentines, he refused to trample a beanfield and so was caught.

  Diogenes labels “scoptic,” or jesting, his epigram on Empedocles, who when he leaped into Mt. Etna “drank fire from everlasting craters,” a crater being both a wine bowl and the center of a volcano (8.75). More admirable, it seems, was Democritus, who delayed his death for three days by inhaling the vapors from hot bread so his sister could celebrate the festival of the Thesmophoria for Demeter (9.43).23 The wine theme reappears in the final epigram of the Lives, concerning Epicurus, whose philosophy Diogenes apparently admires (10.16):

  “Farewell and remember my doctrines.”

   Such were Epicurus’ dying words to his friends.

  He sat in a warm bath, downed unmixed wine,

   And forthwith quaffed chill Hades.

  Following Hermippus’ account one last time, Diogenes makes his now familiar wordplays, on “warm/chill” and the drawing in of death with the wine (espasen … epespasato).

  No criticism here for the suicide of Epicurus, who appears to have followed his own dogma to leave life without fear of death when the possibility of continuing to live with pleasure has passed (he suffered from a kidney stone). Cicero cites the Epicurean principle that we should depart from life only “when it no longer brings pleasure, just as we exit the theater.”24 We should note as well that this last epigram, though buried in the prose of Book 10 on the Epicureans, would serve well as the concluding poem of an epigram book, where Epicurus’ farewell to his philosophical friends (xairete) would double as the poet’s farewell to his readers.

 
1 The Lives contains fifty-two epigrams by Diogenes on forty-six philosophers and twenty-nine epigrams by other poets, both named and anonymous, on twenty-three philosophers.

  2 For the importance of death scenes in Diogenes’ biographies, see Sergi Grau, “How to Kill a Philosopher: The Narrating of Ancient Greek Philosophers’ Deaths in Relation to Their Way of Living,” Ancient Philosophy 30 (2010): 347–81.

  3 Note, for example, the harsh remarks of Herbert S. Long in his preface to Robert D. Hicks, trans., Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers (1925; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 1:xvi: “The extant poems are so wretched as fully to justify van Gutschmid’s thanks to Apollo and the Muses for allowing the collection as a whole to vanish”; and of W. R. Paton, trans., The Greek Anthology (London: William Heinemann, 1917), 2:50n1: “perhaps the worse verses ever published.” Marcello Gigante, “Biografia e dossografia in Diogene Laerzio,” Elenchos 7 (1986): 41–44, however, defends Diogenes against the charge of being a “silly poetaster.” On the epigrams generally, see Richard Hope, The Book of Diogenes Laertius: Its Spirit and Its Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), 164–67.

  4 Jørgen Mejer, Diogenes Laertius and His Hellenistic Background (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1978), 46.

  5 The alleged inscriptions, supposedly on tombstones or statues, are as follows: Thales (1.34 and 39), Solon (1.62), Chilon (1.73), Pittacus (1.79), Bias (1.85), Cleobulus (1.93), Periander (1.97), and Pherecydes (1.120). The lists of the Seven Sages varied, and Diogenes discusses eleven possible sages.

  6 On the Peplos and the antiquity of its epigrams, see Kathryn Gutzwiller, “Heroic Epitaphs of the Classical Age: The Aristotelian Peplos and Beyond,” in Archaic and Classical Greek Epigram, ed. Manuel Baumbach, Andrej Petrovic, and Ivana Petrovic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 219–49.

  7 In his Letters to Atticus 16.11.3.

  8 Nietzsche “Analecta Laertiana,” 2, reprinted in Nietzsche Werke: Philologische Schriften, ed. Fritz Bornmann and Mario Carpitella (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1982), 17:172, pointed out that the Greek indicates that only the first book of the Epigrams was called Pammetros. I understand Pammetrōi in 1.39 to be an adjective agreeing with “first [book-roll = Greek tomōi] of the Epigrammata,” while in 1.63 it agrees with an understood feminine noun, bublōi, which can mean a complete book or, as apparently here, a division of a complete work such as would fit on one papyrus roll.

  9 Gigante, “Biografia e dossografia,” 35, argues that Diogenes’ epigram collection included the epigrams by earlier poets he cites in the Lives. This may be right, though the evidence is inconclusive.

  10 The study of Diogenes’ sources has long been a preoccupation of scholars. For a good summary of how Diogenes may have gathered notes from early biographies and later compilations made from them, see Mejer, Diogenes Laertius and His Hellenistic Background, 16–29. Diogenes sometimes slyly acknowledges his use of sources in gathering the material for his epigrams, as in his epigram for Menedemus, which begins, “I heard of your fate, Menedemus” (2.144, imitating a famous epigram by Callimachus on a fellow poet’s death, Anthologia Palatina 7.80, quoted by Diogenes in 9.17), and the one on Protagoras that begins, “I heard a rumor, Protagoras, that you died” (9.56).

  11 Two anonymous poems near the end of the sequence, Anthologia Palatina 131–32, do not appear in the Lives. Other epigrams likely excerpted from Diogenes are Anthologia Palatina 7.57, 60–62, 615–20, 706, 744; 9.496 and 540; and 16.334.

  12 No. 89 in Colin Austin and Giovanni Bastianini, eds., Posidippi Pellaei quae supersunt omnia (Milan: LED, 2002).

  13 On Hermippus, see Mejer, Diogenes Laertius and His Hellenistic Background, 32–34; and Jan Bollansée, Hermippos of Smyrna and His Biographical Writings: A Reappraisal (Leuven: Peeters, 1999), esp. 114, 230–32 on the death stories.

  14 See Kathryn Gutzwiller, Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), esp. 276–322.

  15 On the shaping of the biographical traditions by means of formulaic themes, see Maarit Kivilo, Early Greek Poets’ Lives: The Shaping of the Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2010), esp. 208–24. Bollansée, Hermippos of Smyrna, 143–44, identifies recurring themes in fragments of Hermippus that closely map those in Diogenes.

  16 Lyric meters were in origin highly adaptable metrical patterns used in song, but by the imperial period they were often used in unsung verse, as in the Odes of Horace. The meter that Diogenes uses in this epigram he identifies as Pherecratean, a simple seven-syllable pattern of the Aeolic type.

  17 Two of the Seven Sages, Solon and Pherecydes, bestow benefits not only through their teachings but also from the mere presence of their bodies, like the heroes who were worshipped in local cults.

  18 For other examples of suicide from loss of honor among the Greeks and Romans, see Anton van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide: Self-Killing in Classical Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1990), 107–20.

  19 On suicide in Greek and Roman culture, see ibid.; Timothy Hill and Ambitiosa Mors, Suicide and Self in Roman Thought and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004); and Hartwin Brandt, Am Ende des Lebens: Alter, Tod und Suizid in der Antike (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2010), esp. ch. 4.

  20 Diogenes’ joking epigram on Strato’s thinness resembles a series of scoptic, or satirical, epigrams on ridiculously thin or small people written by poets of the imperial age (Anthologia Palatina 11.88–95, 99–107, 110–11, by Lucilius and Nicarchus). On the genre of scoptic epigrams, see Lucia Floridi, “Greek Skoptic Epigram and ‘Popular’ Literature: Anth.Gr. XI and the Philogelos,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 52 (2012): 632–60.

  21 This phrase is omitted in the translation as if it were corrupt, but it also appears in Anthologia Palatina 7.111, where it makes sense as part of the sequence of Diogenes’ epigrams on Theophrastus, Strato, and Lyco.

  22 Likewise, if the Lacydes epigram (4.61) appeared just after the Arcesilaus epigram (4.45) in the Pammetros, as it does in the extract in the Anthologia Palatina (7.104–5), its opening—“and your story too, Lacydes, I have heard”—would make clear reference back to Arcesilaus’ death, since both died from excess of wine.

  23 To explain the anecdote’s origin, Bollansée, Hermippos of Smyrna, 148–49 suggests that it combines the atomists’ claim that life depends on breathing in and out with a folk belief that the smell of fresh bread could prolong life.

  24 Cicero, De finibus bonorum 1.49.

  Corporeal Humor in Diogenes Laertius

  James Romm

  Sense of humor is a topic not often addressed in discussions of Diogenes Laertius; in long stretches of his work, especially the doxographies or summaries of philosophic doctrines, he may seem not to have had one. His prose is generally uniform and even in tone, revealing little of his own response. Yet in the quoted verses with which Diogenes leavens this prose, many of which derive from the comic poets or from the Lampoons of Timon of Phlius, a different persona is revealed, and an undercurrent of mischievous irony is established. These verses often make light of their subjects, or openly deride them, and Diogenes seems not to be quoting them only for the stray bits of biographical data they offer, but to be enjoying or sharing their satirical stance. This impression is confirmed by Diogenes’ importations, usually at the end of a biography, of verses from his own poetry collection, Pammetros, a book that, to judge by these excerpts, used satire to undercut the sobriety of the philosophers it targeted. Then too, the anecdotes and bons mots Diogenes collects in many of his lives, some of which he professes to find particularly pleasing, share in the spirit of mockery and bitter laughter that was so pervasive in his era (as seen in the satirical dialogues of Lucian, the jibes at great thinkers preserved in the collection of late Greek epigrams known as the Greek Anthology, and the joke book Philogelos, or “Laughter-Lover,” all of which belong to the second and third centuries AD; Diogenes himself probably lived in the third).

  In what follows, I will focus on one strai
n of humor found in many of these verses and anecdotes, in order to show how Diogenes ironizes his philosophic subjects by focusing attention on the physical frailties that limit, or distract from, their mental and spiritual pursuits. Time and again, he shows us how the body, the vessel that experiences pain and pleasure, sexual desire, illness, and death, challenges the higher aspirations of the mind. The thinkers profiled in Lives of the Eminent Philosophers were flesh and blood, like the philosophers who, in Shakespeare’s mocking lines, could not withstand the pain of a toothache; and Diogenes calls attention, sometimes seemingly gleefully, to their physical vulnerability and ultimate mortality.

  Before he set out to write the Lives, Diogenes had already written Pammetros, and we can learn much about his tastes and methods by considering that earlier composition. As nearly as can be judged by the quotations he uses in the Lives, Pammetros employed a wide variety of meters to address a single topic, the deaths of great thinkers. Its tone was sometimes solemn; several of the quoted poems are traditionally elegies, mourning the departure of a great soul or asserting its translation to the sky or the company of the gods. Two of the poems quoted in the Lives make a traditional, idealized distinction between the philosopher’s body, sōma, and his true self: “It was your body that he beat, and not you,” Diogenes says of Zeno of Elea (9.28; see also 4.20). Other poems, however, identify the sage with his body and make sport of his vulnerability to injury or deterioration. Take Diogenes’ smirking lines on the death of sickly, rail-thin Strato of Lampsacus: