Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

by Pamela Mensch

  A man spare in body […],

   I assure you, was this Strato,

  To whom Lampsacus gave birth; forever

    wrestling with diseases,

  He died without anyone knowing it, even

    himself. (5.60)

  The joke here is that Strato not only slipped away while unconscious, but had grown so emaciated that he seemed, to observers, already dead. Similarly parodic are Diogenes’ verses on the death of Xenocrates—

  Stumbling over a bronze basin and

    breaking his head,

  He cried “Oh” and breathed his last;

  Xenocrates, that matchless ideal, a man in

    full. (4.15)

  —where the satiric point lies in the contrast between the heroic last line and the banal household object, probably a chamber pot, that caused the fatal injury.

  That we are right to hear a parodic or mocking tone in some of the Pammetros poems is signaled by the language with which Diogenes introduces them. He several times refers to his verses as “playful,” paignion (7.184), or a “satirical” thing (skōptikon, literally “done in jest”; 8.75), or else uses forms of the verb paizō, “play,” to characterize his composition of them (6.100; 7.164 and 176; 8.44). Paizō is derived from pais, the Greek word for “child,” but, in a literary or intellectual context, the kind of activity it describes is hardly childlike or innocent; it carries a note of mischief or even malice that cannot be brought out in translation. Those in the Lives of whom the word is used, other than Diogenes himself, include mockers like Bion of Borysthenes, who “made fun” of music and geometry (4.53), and the suspected forgers Dionysius and Zopyrus of Colophon, thought to have created satires “in jest” and then foisted them off on Menippus (6.100). Diogenes seems to assimilate himself to such jesters with his paiz-language; indeed, it is significant that he first uses the verb to describe his own verse composition in the very same chapter in which it also denotes the supposed impostures of Dionysius and Zopyrus.

  The longest and most ambitious of Diogenes’ poems in the Lives concerns Bion of Borysthenes, a man who himself composed parodic verses (4.52). Diogenes characterizes his poem about Bion not as a form of play but rather as a reproach, introducing it by saying “I have taken him to task” (ēitiasametha). The tone is indeed severe, but the theme is of a piece with Diogenes’ larger interest in the tension between the exigencies of the body and the aspirations of the mind: Bion had given up his rationalism and atheism in the face of illness and approaching death. The same theme is echoed by the case of Dionysius of Heraclea, nicknamed “the Turncoat,” to whom Diogenes devoted a brief but intriguing biography. Uniquely in this life, Diogenes holds off his usual opening formula, identifying his subject by place of origin and parentage, so as to give emphasis to a different first line: “Dionysius the Turncoat declared, as a result of an eye disease, that pleasure was the goal; for his suffering was so severe that he was reluctant to say that pain was an indifferent” (7.166). Having first attached himself to Zeno and the Stoics, Dionysius abandoned his school under the pressure of eye pain and went over to the pleasure-loving Cyrenaics, thereafter becoming a lifelong denizen of Athenian brothels.

  Whether or not he uses verses borrowed from Pammetros to discuss the deaths of his philosophers, Diogenes catalogues the corporeal details of those deaths with a kind of wry amusement. Indeed, his book is Homeric in the inventiveness with which it portrays how people die. Several commit suicide by fasting, cutting off their own breathing passages, holding their breath, or (in the uniquely mundane case of Empedocles) self-hanging; others perish from lice, accidents, sunstroke, alcohol poisoning, and the wasting disease the Greeks called phthisis. Pythagoras was caught and killed by opponents because he refused to cross a beanfield and tread on sacred beans; Zeno of Elea clamped his teeth onto the ear of a hated tyrant and kept biting until he was stabbed to death. Chrysippus literally died laughing, after joking that a donkey who had eaten some figs ought to be given wine to wash them down. Most bizarre of all is the account of Heraclitus’ battle with dropsy, a disease that causes painful swelling of the limbs. Heraclitus tried to draw out the water that caused the swelling by coating himself with cow manure; then, according to one account at least, he was torn apart by dogs, who could no longer recognize his human form (9.4). The famous Cynic Diogenes of Sinope was also killed by a dog’s bite—to his foot—in the version of his death endorsed by Diogenes (6.77 and 79).

  Grotesque or bizarre deaths are hardly meant to raise a laugh (with the possible exception of death from laughter). However, in the context of a compendium of the lives of great thinkers, there is something comic about them. Diogenes’ emphasis on the fragility of the body poses a counterweight to the admiration for greatness of spirit and mind that undergirds his entire project. In the end, not even the sage can escape corporeality; the physical world stakes its claim on us all. With his graphic depictions of symptoms and sufferings, Diogenes evokes a very different response to the deaths of his sages than, say, Plato does with his portrayal of the death of Socrates in the Phaedo. There, Plato carefully suppressed the effects of hemlock poisoning, which include retching and vomiting, to make Socrates’ death a spiritual liberation, a curing of the “disease” of mortal existence (as signaled by Socrates’ final request for a thanks-offering to Asclepius, god of healing). By contrast, in the deaths of Diogenes’ many subjects, the body—the great leveler, the site of disintegration, indignity, and embarrassment—is kept vividly before our eyes.

  ***

  It is not only the body’s experience of pain and disintegration that interests Diogenes, but also its impulse toward pleasures, in particular those of sexual love. Dionysius the Turncoat is only an extreme case of a more widespread aspect of his work: sages are here given sex lives and sexual thoughts and desires, sometimes in contrast to their own professed beliefs or to how they are depicted elsewhere by more reverent writers. To garner such “information,” Diogenes has often relied on an extremely irreverent source, Pseudo-Aristippus’ On the Luxuriousness of the Ancients, a now lost treatise that seems to have been devoted, in a way that Diogenes evidently found congenial, to showing how the demands of the body, even for those devoted to the life of the mind, can exert irresistible power.

  Diogenes took a strong interest in Pseudo-Aristippus’ treatise (a work barely heard of elsewhere). He cites it by name eight times, and undoubtedly used it more widely without explicit citation. In it he found a collection of tabloid gossip and racy anecdotes that portrayed great thinkers of the past as thralls of their passions; its content was nicely legitimized by the name of Aristippus, the revered founder of the Cyrenaic school, though it is in fact the work of an unknown Hellenistic writer who hoped to gain credibility by using this pseudonym. “The author’s habit was to defame persons famed for their moral integrity and attribute truphé [luxuriousness or sensuality] and all kinds of love affairs to them,” writes Walther Ludwig, who dates the work to the period between the late third and late first centuries BC.1 To which might be added this qualification: The love affairs in question, to judge by Diogenes’ citations, were mostly between philosophers and meirakia or paidika, the younger males, often beardless youths, who, for many postclassical Greeks (and for non-Greek observers), embodied the moral problem of sensuality.

  One of Pseudo-Aristippus’ principal targets, significantly, was Plato. In the Symposium and again in Phaedo, Plato distinguished the sexual passion experienced by the erastēs, the older member of such a couple, from the spiritual desire for Beauty in its pure and divine form, itself an erotic phenomenon but not, in Plato’s formulation, concerned to achieve consummation with the erōmenos, the younger “beloved.” Socrates was cast in the Symposium as the model of what came to be called “Platonic love,” in a speech by Alcibiades, a much younger man who was both his pupil and his would-be erōmenos. That speech describes how Alcibiades’ efforts to seduce Socrates came to naught, since the philosopher remained focused on
objects of mental contemplation and felt indifferent to his pupil’s famously alluring physical charms.

  “Platonic love” might easily be thought of as the path followed by Plato himself, who never married and was not identified, in accounts other than Diogenes and his source, as the erastēs of any particular erōmenos. But Diogenes, citing Pseudo-Aristippus, made him out a positive Don Juan (3.29–32), quoting amatory epigrams directed at four men—Aster, Alexis, Phaedrus, and Agathon—and three women—Archeanassa, Xanthippe, and an unnamed young girl who was enjoined to give up her virginity. A funerary elegy to Dion of Syracuse, quoted among these amatory poems, appears to imply an eighth sexual relationship, especially given the poem’s last line, “You drove my spirit mad with love, O Dion,” though the erōs here referred to might have been taken, in another context, to refer only to the passion for absolute Beauty that drives the inquiries of philosophers, as described in the Symposium.

  Although these poems were long accepted as genuine, Ludwig has convincingly shown that, apart from Dion’s elegy, they were cribbed from Hellenistic verse collections and assigned to Plato by Pseudo-Aristippus; clearly the purpose was to give a rampaging libido to a philosopher whose works dramatized the virtues of sexual restraint. Cleverly, this scandalmonger lifted poems addressed to a Phaedrus, an Agathon, and a Xanthippe, since Plato knew people by these names and the imposture would thus be more convincing. He counted on his readers not thinking through the issue of chronology and realizing that Plato, considerably younger than the Phaedrus and Agathon portrayed in his dialogues, could never have been wooing them with love poems, or that Xanthippe, the wife of Socrates, would have lost her maidenhead long before Plato was born. What mattered to Pseudo-Aristippus was that a familiar name might help the poems adhere to Plato and portray him as an ardent, even importunate, seeker of sexual love. He then added the presumably genuine elegy for Dion into the mix, in Ludwig’s view, in a sequence designed to give maximal weight to the ambiguous use of the word erōs in its final line.

  Diogenes has chosen to quote Pseudo-Aristippus on these matters, at length and without any hint of skepticism, just as he has chosen to cite him elsewhere on the randiness of the ancient philosophers. Even Socrates’ famous rejection of the advances of Alcibiades, instanced by Plato in the Symposium as proof of the power of philosophic erōs, is turned on its head: again citing “Aristippus,” Diogenes declares that Socrates was the pursuer, not the pursued (2.23). On the same authority, Diogenes asserts that Polemon was the beloved of Xenocrates (4.19), that Theophrastus wooed Aristotle’s son even while tutoring him (5.39), and that Aristotle himself was so infatuated with a courtesan as to offer her sacrifice, as though to the goddess Demeter (5.4). And these (along with 8.60) are only the passages in which Diogenes cites “Aristippus” by name; possibly other snatches of gossip he retails, revealing that X was really sleeping with Y (or trying to), are also derived from On the Luxuriousness of the Ancients. Occasionally a model of “Platonic” chastity emerges from his pages, such as Xenocrates, who resisted the seductions of one or perhaps two famous courtesans. Tellingly, however, Xenocrates needed the aid of genital surgery, not mere philosophic conviction, to achieve such restraint (4.7–8); and in any case, as mentioned above, he is later described as the erastēs of Polemon, his successor as head of the Academy.

  Diogenes not only retails rumors of the sexual attractions or activities of his subjects, he also credits them with quips and bons mots of a decidedly earthy nature. Twice in his work, he quotes sages making loaded references to opening or closing “doors” or “barring the way” where the context suggests a sodomitic pun (2.138 and 4.41). Zeno of Citium, founder of the Stoic school, jokingly refers to his growing erection as a “tumid inflammation” that needs “rest” for treatment, when moving away from a youth to whom he was passionately attracted (7.17). Arcesilaus asks of a man who was accustomed to being anally penetrated, and who argued that the relative size of two objects was inconsequential, whether he regarded a six-incher as the equal of a ten-incher (4.34). Crates of Thebes, after causing irritation to the head of a gymnasium by taking hold of his hips—presumably an aggressive sexual advance—asks, “What, aren’t these as much yours as your knees?” (6.89), referring to the more acceptable custom of grasping a person by the knees in supplication. Diogenes finds this last remark an especially “charming” one.

  Oddly, such obscene jokes, puns, and gestures intrude abruptly into passages not otherwise concerned with sexual matters. The effect is something like that of the comedies of Aristophanes, where the concerns of the body—sex, food, wine, and (unlike in Diogenes’ text) excretion—are always percolating just below the surface of the play and can erupt into the open, without warning, at any moment. A particularly Aristophanic moment occurs in the life of Hipparchia, a highborn noblewoman who gave up her wealth to pursue Cynic philosophy. At a banquet, Hipparchia bests another philosopher, Theodorus, in debate, whereupon Theodorus tries to remove the woman’s cloak and leave her exposed in only an undergarment. The sudden reversion to pure, sexualized aggression fails to discomfort Hipparchia, but the episode is nonetheless paradigmatic of the mind-body tensions configured in Diogenes’ text.

  Diogenes’ purpose in writing Lives of the Eminent Philosophers is far from clear; no one who had read only the irreverent poems of the Pammetros would have predicted he would write such a work. That earlier verse collection often assumed an ironic and even parodic stance toward the great thinkers of antiquity, “playing” with their august reputations in irreverent ways. Its tone, to judge by selections preserved in the Lives, harmonizes well with the sources Diogenes later turned to when composing his magnum opus: Timon’s Lampoons, the plays of Old and Middle Comedy, and scandal collections like Pseudo-Aristippus’ On the Luxuriousness of the Ancients. In all these texts, and therefore in the thematic pattern Diogenes creates by including them in the Lives, the needs and desires of the body are foregrounded in ways that comically undermine the aspirations of the mind.

  1 Walther Ludwig, “Plato’s Love Epigrams,” Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies 4 (1963): 62.

  Philosophers and Politics in Diogenes Laertius

  Malcolm Schofield

  Diogenes Laertius portrays many of the thinkers he presents to the reader without reference to any engagement in politics on their part. For all that he tells us, they may or may not have had political involvements—although our default assumption might be that if he does not mention any significant participation in politics, then there was none to report. If that assumption were broadly correct, we would have to conclude that many Pre-Socratics, most philosophers who belonged to the Academy in whatever phase, and most Peripatetics were as apolitical in practice as Epicurus was on philosophical principle. Such an assumption would, however, be too hasty. One example will suffice to establish the point.

  One of the best documented of all interventions in politics by ancient Greek philosophers is the visit to Rome in 155 BC made by the heads of the three major philosophical schools in Athens, as the city’s designated ambassadors, sent to appeal a fine imposed by the Romans upon the Athenians for attempting to seize the small town of Oropus, a long-disputed Boeotian border settlement. The philosophers in question were Critolaus the Peripatetic, the Stoic Diogenes of Babylon, and the Skeptic Carneades for the Academy, who made the occasion famous by his delivery of public lectures for and against justice as a true value.

  What does Diogenes Laertius tell us about this incident? Nothing. Lyco (third century BC) is the last head of the Lyceum he deals with in the book dedicated to Aristotle and thinkers associated with his school. The final part of his book on the Stoics—where a treatment of Diogenes of Babylon was provided—is lost. His account of Carneades does survive (4.62–66). Not a word is said there about the famous embassy to Rome.

  Apart from reminding us of the sad loss of the final sections of Book 7, this glum report on the nonappearance of the embassy of 155 BC in the pages of Diogenes illustrates how selective
he may have been in using the sources available to him (did accessible information on Peripatetic scholars really run out with Lyco?). So when we tackle the involvement of philosophers in politics as he presents it, our overview is inevitably uncertain. What is not there may be as important as what is; what is there may be invention or exaggeration as well as plain truth. Still, this does not make the study of Diogenes Laertius all that different from a great deal else in research on the classical world, particularly research on Greek philosophy. We just have to make the best of a not wholly satisfactory job.

  The work is entitled—according to the manuscript tradition—Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. But Diogenes in fact launches it with an account occupying the whole of Book 1 (after the general prologue) of thinkers he calls not philosophers (philosophoi, lovers of wisdom) but sages (sophoi, wise men). He nominates seven as those commonly recognized as such and adds a few more (whom he will discuss in the later sections of the book) (1.13). Thales heads the list, with the consequence that when Diogenes goes on to introduce the two original traditions of philosophy itself that he identifies—the Ionian and the Italian—it is Thales’ pupil Anaximander who is made the first of the Ionians (1.14), even though the subsequent life of Thales will represent him too as committed to the same study of nature as was typical of the early Ionian thinkers (1.23–25 and 27).

  The difficulty is somewhat obscured by Diogenes’ presentation of philosophical activity as a phase of Thales’ life subsequent to “politics” (1.23), and by his remarking after a sketch of Thales’ theoretical discoveries that he had the reputation of having given excellent advice in the political sphere (1.25). The one example cited is the way he frustrated the hopes of Croesus of Lydia for an alliance with his native city of Miletus—which proved to be its salvation when Cyrus’ Persia subsequently defeated Croesus. But Diogenes then gives evidence from Heraclides Lembus that Thales himself claimed to be someone who lived an entirely apolitical and indeed solitary existence. There follows a reference to his reported shrewdness in business (his renting all the olive presses in the vicinity ahead of an olive glut, a story retailed at length by Aristotle in the Politics), to prove how easy it is to get rich (1.26).