In all three essays, he argued that almost all the information to be found in Diogenes Laertius was derived not from the earliest sources Diogenes names but from a single intermediate source, the lost Compendium of the Philosophers written by the shadowy figure Diocles of Magnesia (whom Nietzsche assigns to the first century BC, although most more recent scholars date him a century earlier). In Nietzsche’s view, Diocles himself had cited many of the earlier sources he had used, such as the lost work on homonyms by the first-century BC author Demetrius of Magnesia; Diogenes had done little more than mechanically transcribe Diocles’ source references together with his data, remarks on dating, etc., into his own work. According to Nietzsche’s hypothesis, Diogenes had also inserted some individual reports he derived from the works of Favorinus (c. AD 85–155); Nietzsche at one point even suspected Favorinus had been Diogenes’ sole source for most of his information. He also later suggested that for the Pyrrhonian Skeptics Diogenes had used another, unidentifiable source. The significant overlaps between the reports in Diogenes and in the Suda were due not to the latter having derived its information from the former but to the dependence of both texts upon lost common sources. The real reason Diogenes had written his book, Nietzsche suggested, was to provide an artificial framework that would justify republishing the wretched epigrams he had written about the deaths of the philosophers. Nietzsche further speculated that these had been a total failure with the public when they had first appeared as part of a collection of his miscellaneous poems and that he was anxious to find a pretext for republishing them.
Nietzsche’s analysis was intended to unmask Diogenes not only as a thief who had stolen all the jewels he passed off to posterity as his own, but also as a writer so stupid he did not notice that many of the sources he was transcribing made statements about chronology and philosophical orientation that became nonsense when Diogenes took them over unchanged. No doubt partly in order to emphasize the value and brilliance of his own research, Nietzsche exaggerated both Diogenes’ importance and his stupidity. He came to do so by closely analyzing some of the same passages that had bothered earlier scholars (and that have continued to bother later ones), partly by uncritically accepting as fundamental methodological principles four suspicions about Diogenes as a writer and as a person:
1. Somnolence: Over and over again, Nietzsche asserted that Diogenes must have been half asleep when he excerpted his sources. Evidently, Diogenes had transcribed so much that he became tired and simply kept on copying out things that were irrelevant or false without even noticing what he was doing.
2. Indolence: Nietzsche preferred to assume fewer sources rather than more sources. He suspected Diogenes to have been so lazy that he stayed with one source as long as possible and only moved on to another one when this became absolutely necessary.
3. Secondhand erudition: The more learning Diogenes flaunted, the more Nietzsche presumed he derived it from intermediate sources rather than from his own reading of the sources named.
4. Deliberately misleading references: According to Nietzsche, Diogenes always took care to mention somewhere the authors he copied so he could not be accused of having suppressed their names altogether. But to mislead the reader he took just as much care to mention them only in passing, for the sake of minor details, and usually so as to disagree with them.
The result was a Diogenes almost incredibly doltish, and dishonest to the point of moral turpitude. At one point, adopting the tone of the vice squad, Nietzsche wrote, “If we are severe, then we must call this a hypocrisy and unreliability on the part of the author and we must keep a sharp watch on this kind of character trait.”7
At first Nietzsche’s prodigious exercise in Quellenforschung enjoyed some success. His essay won the prize (perhaps not least because the competition had been designed with him in mind, and apparently no other candidates presented themselves). His research on Diogenes was an important factor in his being offered a professorship at Basel.
But within a few years, Nietzsche’s theories had started to crumble, and soon they fell apart altogether. In 1880, Ernst Maass (who went on to have a distinguished career as a classical scholar) could still discuss Nietzsche’s hypothesis as one that scholars had to take seriously, even if they had to reject it in the end.8 But already one year earlier Hermann Diels, in his epoch-making work on the Greek doxographers, had contemptuously dismissed the theory as less than a cobweb, and had derided Nietzsche for misunderstanding the grammar of the single sentence that served as a lynchpin for his whole argumentation.9
Since then, Nietzsche’s work on Diogenes would have been largely forgotten had it not been his work. Philosophically interested readers have usually tended to ignore the more technical writing in classical philology he did as a student and professor. Their tendency may have been reinforced not only by the general disciplinary boundaries separating classics from philosophy since the nineteenth century but also in particular by the exclusion of Nietzsche, at least until recently, from the canon of scholars deemed acceptable by the world of professional classicists. More recently, when interest in Nietzsche finally became acceptable in that world, it was above all his speculations on Greek religion and tragedy that commanded their attention.
Even within the much smaller world of scholars interested in Diogenes Laertius, Nietzsche has not received much attention, let alone found acceptance. This is not hard to understand. For even though his hypothesis cannot really be disproven (and even though it has found at least one authoritative, albeit halfhearted, defender10), it is liable to various objections. For example, the putative centrality of Diocles encounters grave difficulties if we date him not, as Nietzsche did, to the first century BC, but instead, as most scholars do now, to a century earlier.
Worse is a fatal methodological flaw: for to claim that Diogenes merely took over most of his information thoughtlessly from Diocles means that the text that we actually possess, Diogenes’, is denied any intellectual, philosophical merit of its own, while its qualities are attributed instead to a different text that we do not possess and about which we know almost nothing. This means not solving the problems posed by Diogenes, but instead just kicking the can down the road.
So we can understand why Nietzsche’s hypothesis has largely been forgotten except by specialists. This is regrettable, not because it has a high probability of being correct but for two other reasons.
The first is that Nietzsche’s analysis of Diogenes’ procedures as a writer shows them to be uncannily, if only partially, similar to certain aspects of his own: studying Nietzsche on Diogenes helps us understand something about Nietzsche himself. For, as his private notebooks reveal, Nietzsche was not only a brilliant writer but also a voracious reader, a habit that bore all kinds of fruit in his own work. Many of the texts he wrote, published and unpublished, arose out of his reaction to those he read, and they often so clearly bear the traces of his reading that they can come to look like palimpsests through which we can glimpse, more or less faintly, the lineaments of his library.11
Nietzsche’s use of excerpts from and partial revisions of other writers’ texts does not in the least mean he is a plagiarizer, for his intention was not to fool his readers. Rather, he found certain ideas and formulations so fascinating that he could not help but incorporate some version of them into his own thinking and texts. And yet the analogy between Nietzsche and Diogenes is in the end misleading: for the results of Diogenes’ reading remain undigested, crudely laid out without having been elaborated and transformed by a searing, hermeneutical intelligence. In Nietzsche, everything is rethought and reformulated by an unrelenting process of scriptural metabolism into the style we immediately identify as his own. Perhaps it was Diogenes’ lack of assimilation that made Nietzsche so impatient and intolerant of him.
The other reason to recall Nietzsche’s hypothesis is the more important one for the present volume: what sources Diogenes used and how he used them necessarily remain crucial questions in writing the history of Gree
k philosophy itself. Nietzsche’s source-oriented answers fell out of favor at first because they were problematic, but in the end because the source-oriented questions for which he devised them fell out of favor themselves. The result has been that for a long time both Nietzsche’s answers and his questions seem to have dropped out of the consciousness of classical philologists. The article on Diogenes Laertius in the standard large-scale encyclopedia of classical philology, dating from the beginning of the twentieth century, still takes seriously the business of unraveling Diogenes’ sources (though it mentions Nietzsche only once in passing, as a dangerous example of manifest error).12 A German handbook from 1975 declares that it is impossible to know what Diogenes’ sources were and how he used them, while the corresponding English reference work asserts no less dogmatically that we can trust Diogenes when he tells us what his sources were and can in general know what these were and how he used them.13
Only more recently has the subject of Diogenes’ use of sources returned to the forefront of research in all its fascination and difficulty.14 Nowadays we are less inclined to reduce late ancient compilations to the mere sum of their sources and more to see them as relatively autonomous works with their own dignity, engaged in the creative interpretation and application of the traditions that stand behind them. The result is that the very questions Nietzsche was asking in such a mechanistic and censorious way have lost much of the interest they once had. If reformulated so as to be more flexible and less condemnatory, however, they deserve to be of interest once again.
The likeliest explanation for the incoherencies and other defects in Diogenes’ treatise is not that he was a plagiarizer: there is no evidence he intended such a deception of his readers any more than Nietzsche did. Instead we may assume that he did not live to put the finishing touches to his treatise and that all we possess now are the notes he made from his reading and more or less finished sketches for some chapters. So his book was probably published posthumously.15 Who were his literary executors, and how competent were they philosophically? Did they compile all of his work or only a selection of it, and according to what criteria? To what extent, if at all, did they revise it, and why did they publish it?16 Those tempted to call Diogenes an asinus germanus (“perfect ass”)17 should pray instead that the preparatory notes for their own unpublished works never see the light of day. Had he lived to complete his work we would doubtless still wonder about the reliability of his sources and his use and interpretation of them. As it is, the unfinished state of his treatise puts those puzzles in relief. We will surely not want simply to adopt Nietzsche’s precise answer to them; but nor should we conceal from ourselves how urgent and perplexing they really are.
1 See especially Jonathan Barnes, “Nietzsche and Diogenes Laertius,” Nietzsche-Studien 15, ed. Wolfgang Müller-Lauter and Karl Pestalozzi (1986): 16–40.
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999), 1:417. The passage goes on to launch a spirited attack upon the pedantic, merely verbal study of the history of philosophy in the universities, and to claim that the only valid criticism of a philosophy is to see whether one can live according to it. For a similar passage in Nietzsche’s notebooks, cf. ibid., 7.782.
3 ibid., 1:799–872; Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, in ibid., 2:214–18, sect. 261.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe. Werke (Munich: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1933–1940) 5:126.
5 The materials are available most completely in ibid., vols. 4–5.
6 See Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli, Mazzino Montinari, et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967ff), 2.1.75–245.
7 Werke und Briefe, 4.229–30.
8 E. Maass, De biographis graecis quaestiones selectae (= U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Philologische Untersuchungen, 1880).
9 Hermann Diels, Doxographi graeci (1879), 78. But cf. Barnes’s careful discussion of this extremely difficult and textually uncertain sentence (7.48), in “Nietzsche and Diogenes Laertius.”
10 Barnes, “Nietzsche and Diogenes Laertius.”
11 See, e.g., T. Fries and G. W. Most, “Die Quellen von Nietzsches Rhetorik-Vorlesungen,” in Nietzsche oder “Die Sprache ist Rhetorik,” ed. J. Kopperschmidt and H. Schanze (Munich: Fink, 1994), 17–38, 251–58; and “Von der Krise der Historie zum Prozess des Schreibens: Nietzsches zweite Unzeitgemässe Betrachtung,” in Schreibprozesse. Zur Genealogie des Schreibens, ed. Peter Hughes, Thomas Fries, and Tan Wälchli (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2008), 133–56.
12 E. Schwartz, “Diogenes” [40], Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft 9; Halbband (Stuttgart, 1903), 745.
13 H. Dörrie, “Diogenes” [11], Der kleine Pauly (Munich, 1975), 2.46; H. S. Long, “Diogenes Laertius,” Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 349.
14 The article by David T. Runia, “Diogenes” [17], in the updated Neuer Pauly, vol. 3 (Stuttgart-Weimar, 1997), 603, is admirably cautious and indicates clearly both the importance and enormous difficulty of these questions. On the other hand, the revision of Long’s article by R. W. Sharples in the 3rd edition of The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) maintains the earlier formulations entirely unchanged in this section.
15 To be sure, at 10.138 Diogenes says that he is putting “the finishing touch … to my entire work”; but this does not mean that he actually lived long enough to complete the rest of it before he set what he thought might be the seal on its conclusion.
16 On the other hand, it is surely exaggerated to claim, as Schwartz does in Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, that Diogenes’ treatise consists of nothing more than note cards that had fallen into total disorder and were thrown together, largely at random.
17 See H. Usener, Epicurea (Leipzig: Teubner, 1887), xxii.
Guide to Further Reading
Jay R. Elliott
Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers is a unique invitation to the world of ancient philosophy in all its fullness, from its complex arguments and doctrinal disputes to its scholarly successions and political intrigues. As Diogenes’ writing reveals, his relation to ancient philosophy was already that of a scholarly investigator seeking to collect and synthesize a vast amount of material from philosophical texts, letters, biographies, and other sources. Two thousand years later, we lack access to many of the sources that Diogenes worked with, yet we have access to much more by way of modern scholarship and commentary. Because the Lives draw together so many aspects of the world of ancient Greek philosophical culture, the literature that is of potential interest to its readers is nearly infinite. In the pages that follow we provide a compact overview of this literature, focusing on texts that are most likely to be of interest to the student or general reader rather than the specialized scholar. The aim is to place the work of the present translation in context and to help readers to take the next steps in their further exploration of the world of ancient philosophy. The overview is divided into three main sections: first, materials pertaining to Diogenes’ Lives itself, including editions and other translations of the text, as well as secondary literature on it; second, introductions to the study of ancient Greek philosophy; and third, materials relevant to specific philosophers and schools discussed in the Lives. With a few exceptions, we include translations and secondary materials in English only. Since much of the most important scholarly work related to the Lives has been done in French, German, or Italian, this is a significant limitation. Readers of those languages are encouraged to consult the editions and translations mentioned immediately below.
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers
Editions
The most authoritative edition of the Greek text of Diogenes’ Lives is Tiziano Dorandi, ed., Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); it includes a critical apparatus with variant readings of the text, cross-references to parallel p
assages in other ancient sources, an introduction that surveys the manuscript tradition through which Lives have come down to us, a bibliography, and a useful Subsidium Interpretationis connecting specific passages in the text with relevant pieces of scholarship. Dorandi’s version of the text forms the basis for the present translation. Other modern editions, each of which includes variant readings of the text’s disputed passages, are: Robert D. Hicks, ed. and trans., Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers (2 vols., with English translation; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925); H. S. Long, ed., Diogenis Laertii: Vitae Philosophorum (2 vols.; 2nd ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); and Miroslav Marcovich and Hans Gärtner, Diogenis Laertii: Vitae Philosophorum (3 vols.; Stuttgart: Teubner, 2002).
Translations
Apart from this edition, the only widely available complete translation into English is included in Hicks’s edition mentioned above. Readers of French will wish to consult Diogène Laërce: Vies et doctrines des philosophes illustres (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1999), a translation prepared under the direction of Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé. It includes a general introduction, separate introductions and bibliographies for each book, and extensive notes with references to other ancient sources and to modern scholarly literature. Finally, readers of Italian will find Marcello Gigante’s translation useful: Diogene Laerzio: Vite dei filosofi (2 vols; 3rd ed.; Bari: Laterza, 1987).
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers Page 88
