Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

by Pamela Mensch

  When B, P, and F agree, we may hope to reconstruct the text of Ω. Because Φ and the other Byzantine excerpts preserve smaller parts of the text, there are fewer cases in which we are able to go all the way back to Χ, the common ancestor of Ω, Φ, and the excerpts in the Suda, Pal, and Vi.

  The editor of the Greek text of Lives faces a further complication. By now it has been ascertained that Diogenes Laertius did not have the last word in preparing the text of Lives, which was put into circulation only after his death. Although he left some books in an almost definitive state, others were to some degree unfinished and in need of revision. There are many passages in which it is possible to show the presence of misplaced “file cards,” repetitions, and marginal notes, as well as stylistic and syntactic uncertainties that Diogenes would undoubtedly have corrected had he been able to put the finishing touches on his complete work. It is possible, moreover, that the order of the books and of the biographies within them was not yet definitive.4

  Still, not all of the omissions and inconsistencies can be explained by the theory of the opus imperfectum.

  In the centuries from the first appearance of a Greek manuscript of Lives to the creation of Χ, various errors had doubtless been introduced into the text and serious damage had occurred (the most obvious being the loss of the end of Book 7).

  To some extent, it is possible to more closely approximate Ω, thanks to the excerpts in Φ and the other Byzantine sources.

  But in any attempt to recapture Χ, the editor can rely only on his or her own judgment.

  —Translated from the Italian by Julia Hein

  1 Translator’s note: A saut du mēme au mēme happens when the same phrase occurs more than once on a page, and the scribe, after copying the first, brings his eyes back to the page at the second instance, and thus fails to copy what is in between.

  2 Hieronymus Frobenius and Nicolaus Episcopius, Diogenis Laertij: De vitis, decretis, et responsis celebrium philosophorum Libri decem, nunc prium exscusi (Basel, 1533).

  3 A. Biedl, Zur Textgeschichte des Laertios Diogenes: Das grosse Exzerpt Φ (Vatican: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1955); A. Delatte, La Vie de Pythagore de Diogène Laërce (Brussels, 1922); G. Basta Donzelli, “I codici P Q W Co H I E Y Jb nella tradizione di Diogene Laerzio,” Studi italiani di filologia classica n.s. 32 (1960): 156–99; G. Basta Donzelli, “Per un’edizione di Diogene Laerzio: I codici V U D G S,” Bollettino del Comitato per la preparazione dell’Edizione Nazionale dei Classici Greci e Latini 8 (1960) 93–132; I. Düring, Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition (Göteborg, 1957); A. Gercke, “Die Überlieferung des Diogenes Laertios,” Hermes 37 (1902): 401–34; A. Gercke, Deutsche Literaturzeitung 11 (1900): 170–73; D. Knoepfler, La Vie de Ménédème d’Éretrie de Diogène Laërce: Contribution à l’histoire et à la critique du texte des Vies des philosophes (Basel, 1991); H. S. Long, “The Short Forms of the Text of Diogenes Laertius,” Classical Philology 44 (1949): 230–35; E. Martini, “Analecta Laertiana,” Leipziger Studien z. class. Philologie 19 (1899): 73–177 (pt. 1) and 20 (1900): 145–66 (pt. 2); L. Tartaglia, “L’estratto vaticano delle Vite di Diogene Laerzio,” Rendiconti Accademia Archeologia, Lettere e Belle Arti di Napoli 49 (1974): 253–71; L. Tartaglia, “Probabile cognatio dei codici Neapolitanus (Burbonicus) III B 29 (= B) e Parisinus gr. 1759 (= P) di Diogene Laerzio,” Vichiana n.s. 3 (1974): 51–58; H. Usener, Epicurea (Leipzig, 1887), vi–xv; K. Wachsmuth, Corpusculum poesis epicae Graecae ludibundae. II. Sillographorum Graecorum reliquiae (Leipzig, 1885): 51–55.

  4 See Peter Von der Mühll, Ausgewählte kleine Schriften (Basel: Friedrich Reinhardt, 1976), 388–90; and Marcello Gigante, “Biografia e dossografia in Diogene Laerzio,” Elenchos 7 (1986): 7–102 (passim).

  Diogenes Laertius in Byzantium

  Tiziano Dorandi

  Knowledge of Diogenes Laertius was extremely limited in late antiquity, but the first place we find evidence of interest in Lives of the Eminent Philosophers is in the Byzantine world.

  In his Bibliotheca, a text that describes 279 books he had read, Photius (c. 810–893 AD), the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, canonized in the Eastern Orthodox churches as St. Photios the Great, reported that Sopater of Apamea (fourth century AD), in his book Various Extracts, had reproduced a number of passages from the Lives. (By the sixth century, Stephanus of Byzantium, the author of Ethnica, a geographical dictionary, also seemed to know of at least the work’s first three books.)

  Despite the evidence that Photius knew of Diogenes through Sopater, Lives is otherwise absent from the Bibliotheca, and also from the patriarch’s letters—he was not attracted to the genre (the almost complete absence of philosophy books in the Bibliotheca is well-known).

  Shortly after the death of Photius, we find the first evidence that a manuscript of Diogenes’ Lives was being studied in Constantinople, probably in cultural milieus more oriented toward philosophic study. In a manuscript dated July 28, 925, a certain Ioannes Grammatikos (John the Grammarian) copied passages from the doxographic section of Book 3 (the life of Plato), which are preserved in a Viennese codex.1

  Two aspects of this codex merit comment.

  The beginning section preserves a larger corpus of philosophical writings among which we find Didaskalikos by Alcinous, some passages from the Commentary of Plato’s Gorgias by Olympiodorus, the anonymous Prolegomena in Platonis philosophiam, and Carmen aureum, attributed to Pythagoras, with Commentary by Hierocles. John the Grammarian was thus working within an intellectual environment focused on the study of Platonic philosophy.

  Second, John’s codex preserves scholia whose origin dates back to Arethas of Caesarea (c. 850–935), who later became archbishop of Caesarea and was one of the outstanding scholars of his time—he played a key role in resurrecting interest in the so-called Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The presence of Arethas’ scholia in the Viennese codex has led to speculation that John in all likelihood was copying a (now lost) older codex that had passed through the hands of Arethas, who had annotated it.

  Did Arethas play a role in the rediscovery of Diogenes Laertius in Byzantium? If the Viennese codex is in fact copied from a manuscript put together by Arethas from different sources, and containing extracts of Diogenes, it is plausible to suppose that the bishop of Caesarea had had access to a manuscript of Lives from which he had taken the passages from the Platonic doxography. Arethas’s interest in Diogenes seems, however, limited and occasional (the passages in question are reproduced together with other putatively Platonic texts); I have not yet found further traces of Lives in his writing.

  The hypothesis that it was Arethas who resurrected Lives from oblivion at the start of the tenth century, as he had done with the Meditations, is alluring, but aside from the presence of the Laertian extracts in the Viennese codex there remains no other concrete evidence.

  In any case, there is no need to bother with the great figures of the time to explain Diogenes’ rediscovery. As Cavallo has noted, often the “literary types, philologists, copyist-philologists or minor philosophy enthusiasts, many of whom have remained anonymous … alone or united in groups” contributed noteworthy transliterations, transcriptions, and editions of classical texts in the Byzantine world.2

  For a while now I have asked myself if the reappearance of Lives in Constantinople was related to the scholars who collected manuscripts of the so-called collection philosophique. This important collection of codices, eighteen of which still survive, included Platonic and Neoplatonic works (including some comments by Aristotle and authors of scientific texts) linked together by a codicological and paleographical affinity. All the manuscripts, produced by the same writerly and intellectual milieu, were copied by at least nine contemporaries in similar style dating to around the early second half of the ninth century. We can presume the collection was created in Constantinople because of the interest of a circle of scholars attracted to Platonic philosophy.3

  It was within this cultural milieu interested in philosophic-scie
ntific study, some have speculated, that Lives reappeared from the depths of a library and had its contents disseminated. In any case, the real renaissance of Diogenes Laertius in Byzantium began late in the tenth century, when the ten books of Lives were systematically excerpted in Constantinople as part of two large classical compilations: the Suda, a kind of encyclopedia that was created between 975 and 980; and Constantinos Cephalas’s Anthology of classical Greek poetry.

  Scholars agree that only doxographic and not biographical excerpts were taken from Lives and used in the Suda. The latter excerpts were copied from another source, an updated edition (created between 829 and 857, now lost) of Hesychius of Miletus’ sixth-century work, Name-Finder or Register of Famous Men in Scholarship. The indisputable similarities between the biographical sections of Diogenes’ Lives and some passages in the Suda can be explained by presuming that Diogenes and Hesychius both had access to many of the same earlier sources. In some cases, however, the Suda augmented Hesychius’ text with supplementary information that had been compiled by Diogenes Laertius.4

  Did the editors of the Suda have direct access to his Lives? Picking up Ada Adler’s suggestion,5 I have shown that the editors of the Suda did not read Lives firsthand. They recovered the Laertian extracts from an intermediary source that Adler calls a “philosophische Hauptquelle,” or a key philosophical source. This source was composed of passages taken from Diogenes Laertius’ doxographies, from Commentary on Aristotle’s “Topics” by Alexander of Aphrodisias, and from Commentary on Aristotle’s “On Soul” by John Philoponos. Traces of Christian texts can sometimes also be found in the Suda, which derive from a work that shows points of contact with John of Damascus’ Fountain of Knowledge, one of the earliest scholastic works in the Eastern tradition and one of the first Christian attempts to refute Islam.

  On the margins of some philosophic articles, graphics were added that schematically summarized the content; they are an integral part of the article in question, from which it may be deduced that they derive from a common source that probably circulated in the philosophy schools of Alexandria of Egypt in the sixth century. The extracts were originally ordered alphabetically.

  An important confirmation of Adler’s hypothesis can come from an element that has, until now, been neglected. If one takes the structure of the philosophic articles into consideration, it seems evident that often several definitions of the same concept coming from two or more sources were mixed together: Alexander and Diogenes; Alexander and Philoponos; Alexander, Diogenes, and Philoponos. At times the definitions are intermeshed. As for the literary genre of this philosophic source, I hypothesize that it was structured as a collection of “definitions” of the principle philosophic concepts, using material found in the commentaries of Alexander and Philoponos for the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, supplemented with material found in Diogenes Laertius for the Stoic, Platonic, Cyrenaic, and Pyrrhonian traditions.

  Constantinos Cephalas had created his poetic Anthology around the year 900, putting together several thousand epigrams by Greek poets throughout the ages; this collection included numerous poems written or cited by Diogenes Laertius in his Lives. Cephalas had direct access to the same codex that is presumably at the origin of the entire Laertian manuscript tradition. His Anthology was used several decades later by the anonymous editor of the Greek Anthology. Some of its epigrams were later passed on to the Planudean Anthology, organized by the eponymous monk Maximum Planudes (c. 1260–1305).

  In Byzantium, between the tenth and eleventh centuries, interest in Lives is evident in two collections of extracts that survive in a miscellaneous codex, handwritten in the first half of the twelfth century, and conserved in the Vatican Library (the codex Vaticanus gr. 96). The first collection of extracts in this codex, under the title On Distinguished Men in Scholarship, is falsely attributed to Hesychius of Miletus, known, as we have seen, for his Name-Finder, among other things. The second collection is known as Magnum excerptum.

  Let me start with a few words about the content and structure of the two collections. On Distinguished Men in Scholarship consists of a series of biographies of illustrious characters in alphabetical order, put together as a pamphlet by an anonymous author who compiled extracts from Diogenes Laertius and from the Suda.

  The Magnum excerptum is an ample collection of extracts organized by an anonymous editor who followed a precise schema. The extracts are put together in ten sections: the first incorporates a selection of doxai and the biographies of the philosophers of Book 1 of Lives; the remaining nine sections are dedicated to Books 2 through 10. The anonymous editor distinguishes between the doxographic and biographic excerpts, which are laid out in the following way: the doxographic passages are extrapolated following the order of the Laertian books, including sections from the introduction, doctrinal summaries from Cyrenaics of the Schools of Hegesias and Anniceris, passages from Plato, from the Stoics, from the Pyrrhonians, and, finally, from the Epicureans. More space was reserved for the second, biographical section, perhaps because the excerptor wanted the anecdotes and jokes to render the whole collection more amusing.

  The biographies follow the same succession that can be found in the continuous manuscripts; there are frequent textual transpositions or reorganizations of anecdotes. What seems to be disorganization comes from the editor’s apparent desire to order what he may have believed was disorder in the Laertian text. He possesses an excellent knowledge of Diogenes’ work and leaves nothing to chance. And in no case were the texts he transcribed the same as those included in the small work wrongly attributed to Hesychius.

  These observations raise two questions: Was the author of the Magnum excerptum the same as the author of the opuscule attributed to the pseudo-Hesychius? When were the two collections compiled?

  A parallel reading reinforces a one-editor hypothesis. Still, each of these two distinct collections is dictated by different aims. The excerpts attributed to the pseudo-Hesychius seem to be modeled on the Register of Famous Men in Scholarship compiled by Hesychius of Miletus. The “great extract,” on the other hand, gives the impression of a history of philosophy organized in two blocks: one that is truly philosophic and one that takes the form of anecdotes and jokes that illuminate and make more accessible the thought and opinions of the single philosophers. Interpreted in this way, the two collections would correspond to a very defined and structured work plan.

  As for the chronology of the two collections, we can arrange them based on two concrete elements: (1) the date of the codex Vaticanus gr. 96, copied in the first half of the twelfth century; (2) the presence of large extracts of the Suda. Since the writing of the Suda dates to the years 975–980, this date constitutes the terminus post quem for the composition of the pseudo-Hesychius, if one assumes it was compiled by the same editor who created the “great extract.” We can thus establish that the model of the codex Vaticanus gr. 96 should be situated somewhere between the end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth.

  In the centuries that preceded and followed the composition of the two collections of extracts of the Vatican codex, the Byzantine scholars do not seem to have paid much attention to Lives. I will just note a few cases of authors, known or anonymous, who had direct or indirect access to the work. We are dealing, at least in the most ancient phase, with secondhand knowledge from anthologies, collections of adages, or the codex excerpts.

  Only later, from the fourteenth century, do we have more certain evidence of the more ample and direct use of Lives, read most likely in its entirety, even if sometimes the intention was to extract select passages, wisdom expressions (gnomai), and sayings (apophthegmata), or to use it for making bio-doxographic compilations.

  To begin, let me address two collections of aphorisms, the first in codex 263 of the Monastery of St. John at Patmos, and the second in codex Vaticanus gr. 151.

  The Patmos manuscript is particularly interesting because it contains two anthologies, the second entitled Sayings and Sentenc
es of Ancient Philosophers. This collection is composed of a first section of gnomai and apophthegmata by Thales, Solon, Chilon, Pittacus, Bias, Cleobulus, Periander, Anacharsis, Anaxagoras, Aristippus, Plato, Bion, Demetrius of Phalerum, Antisthenes, Diogenes of Sinope, and Democritus; a second section follows with ninety-nine apophthegmata that are mostly anonymous. The editor of the two collections copied the extracts from a manuscript of Lives. They are often reproduced to the letter, occasionally with structural or linguistic changes, keeping the order of Diogenes Laertius’ narration largely unchanged. The Vatican codex obviously draws on a reading of Diogenes’ life of Xenocrates, in Book 4.

  Even the anonymous compilers of several Byzantine collections of the aphorisms of the Seven Sages—notably, the Recensio Parisina and Recensio Monacensis, edited by Tziatzi-Papagianni—read and used Diogenes. The original sources for both compilations are two prior anthologies, one attributed to Demetrius of Phalerum and the other to a certain Sosiades, both included in the Anthology by John of Stobi (Stobaeus). Diogenes had access to the anthology attributed to Demetrius through an intermediary source, better than the one used by Stobaeus, which had been reworked in various areas and probably corrupted.

  As for the so-called Gnomologium Vaticanum that, in Sternbach’s edition, includes 577 aphorisms and sayings in alphabetical order, it has by now been established that Lives cannot be counted among its sources. Diogenes and the Gnomologium Vaticanum derive from a more ancient common source that has not yet been recovered. We must think of a text created in late antiquity or in the period of Byzantine encyclopedism, by fusing various Hellenistic aphorisms which were then reworked and reorganized in various ways through the centuries. The same collections were also used by Plutarch and Stobaeus.