Diogenes Lærtius

Diogenes Lærtius seems to have been born at Laerte, in Cilicia, and to have taken his surname from that town. Little is known of his history; but it is most probable that he flourished in the 2d century A.D. His name has been kept alive by his Lives of the Philosophers, a work in ten books, in which he divides the philosophy of the Greeks into the Ionic—beginning with Anaximander, and ending with Chrysippus and Epicurus—and the Italian, founded by Pythagoras, and ending with Epicurus. The Socratic school was a part of the Ionic philosophy; to the Italian belong the Eleatics, with Heraclitus and the Sceptics. This work contains a great mass of interesting information regarding the private lives and habits of the most eminent philosophers of antiquity. Though it is utterly worthless in respect of plan, coherence, or criticism, it yet contains so many piquant anecdotes, and so many valuable quotations from lost works, that Montaigne's wish was perhaps a justifiable one—that instead of one Lærtius, we had had a dozen. The best editions of Lærtius are those of Hübner (Leip. 1828–31) and Cobet (Paris, 1850).