Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

Diogenes Laertius

The ideas

30 ideas. Scroll sideways for the next one.

• Who deserves to be called wise? An old story says Pythagoras turned the title down, since “no man ought to be called wise, but only God,” and called himself a lover of wisdom instead. Historians think the story was made up generations later, in Plato’s circle.

• A golden tripod came up in a fishing net, and an oracle said it belonged to the wisest. Each sage who got it passed it on to another. In one telling, it ended up with the god at Delphi.

• Thales held that water is the source of everything. Once, out watching the stars, he fell into a ditch, and the old woman with him said, “Do you, O Thales, who cannot see what is under your feet, think that you shall understand what is in heaven?”

• The rule “know yourself” is credited to Thales. Others said it belonged to Phemonoe, an early priestess at Delphi, and that Chilo of Sparta took it for his own. It was carved at Delphi, and nobody knows who said it first.

• Many of these sayings have more than one owner. Ancient writers gave the same line to different sages and the same comeback to different men. Treat them as stories people passed down about these men.

• Pittacus ruled his city for 10 years, set it in order, and then gave the power back. Offered a large estate as thanks, he kept only a small piece of it, saying “that half was more than the whole.”

• Socrates liked to look over everything for sale in the market and say to himself, “How many things are there which I do not want.” He turned down money and land from rich friends and kings.

• Socrates held that the one good is knowledge and the one evil is ignorance. For himself he claimed very little: “he knew nothing, except the fact of his ignorance.”

• Asked whether a man should marry, Socrates answered, “Whichever you do, you will repent it.” By one account he had two wives himself.

• Charged with rejecting the city’s gods and corrupting the young, Socrates turned down a defense speech a skilled speaker wrote for him. It suited him, he said, about as well as fancy clothes and shoes would. He was found guilty and drank the hemlock.

• Aristippus, another of his students, went the other way. He enjoyed whatever pleasure was in front of him without chasing what wasn’t, and claimed that pleasure never owned him. Of the courtesan Lais he said, “I possess her, but I am not possessed by her.”

• Plato angered the ruler of Syracuse, and one account says the ruler had him sold as a slave. A man from Cyrene who happened to be there paid for his freedom and sent him home to Athens.

• Someone asked Aristotle what a friend is. He answered, “One soul abiding in two bodies.”

• Diogenes of Sinope owned a cloak, a staff and a food bag, and for a while made a big storage jar his house. He said “the Athenians had built him places to live in,” meaning their public colonnades. Seeing a child drink from cupped hands, he threw his cup away.

• In broad daylight he lit a candle and said, “I am looking for a man.” He meant a person worth the name. Asked whether the Olympic games had drawn a big crowd, he said, “A great multitude, but very few men.”

• Plato defined a human being as a two-footed animal without feathers. Diogenes plucked a chicken, carried it into the school, and said, “This is Plato’s man.”

• The story people tell is that Alexander the Great stood over him and offered him any favor he liked. The answer was, “Cease to shade me from the sun.” Another legend has the two men dying on the same day.

• His home city had exiled him over a scandal with its coins. When someone threw that at him, he said, “You wretched man, that is what made me a philosopher.” Asked where he came from, he answered, “A Citizen of the world.”

• Hipparchia turned down rich suitors to marry Crates, a philosopher who had given away his fortune. When a man mocked her for leaving the loom, she asked if she was wrong to give philosophy the time she would have spent weaving.

• The story goes that Zeno, a shipwrecked merchant, asked a bookseller where men like Socrates could be found. The bookseller pointed at Crates, who was walking past: “Follow that man.” Zeno later taught in the Painted Porch, the Stoa, so his students were called Stoics.

• This is the reason why we have two ears and only one mouth, that we may hear more and speak less.

• Pythagoras taught that souls move from body to body, and he claimed to remember his own past lives. New students kept silent for 5 years before they were allowed to see him.

• His death comes in several versions. In one, he was fleeing a mob and stopped at a field of beans rather than trample it, and they killed him there. In another, he starved himself. Death stories like these were often built later out of a thinker’s own teachings.

• One story has Empedocles jumping into the volcano Etna so that people would think he had become a god, until one of his bronze slippers turned up. Other ancient writers denied it and said he died from a fall.

• Heraclitus taught that “everything flows on like a river” and that the world is made from fire. His writing was so dark that Socrates said his book needed an expert diver to get to the bottom of it.

• “Man is the measure of all things” was how Protagoras opened one book, and another began by saying he couldn’t know whether the gods exist. The story is that Athens exiled him and burned his books in the market. Scholars now doubt that it happened.

• Pyrrho held that nobody can know how things really are, so he kept his judgment on hold. One early writer says his friends had to pull him away from carts and cliffs. Another says he never once acted carelessly.

• Enemies called Epicurus a glutton and passed around obscene letters forged in his name. Those who knew him described a plain life in a garden, with water, bread, and a little cheese when he wanted a feast.

• Epicurus did call pleasure the good, but he didn’t mean parties or rich food. In his words, “we mean the freedom of the body from pain, and of the soul from confusion.”

• Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is devoid of sensation, and that which is devoid of sensation is nothing to us.

The book in short

In plain words

The most powerful man in the world walked up to a beggar and offered him anything he wanted.

The story is more than 2,000 years old, from ancient Greece, and it may never have happened. The powerful man was Alexander the Great, a king who had conquered almost every land he had ever seen. The beggar was an old man named Diogenes, sitting in the dirt of the marketplace with no house, no money, and almost nothing to his name. Alexander stood over him and said: ask me for anything, and it’s yours.

Diogenes looked up. The king’s body was throwing a shadow over him, blocking the warm sun he had been sitting in. So that was what he asked for. Move a little, he said. You’re standing in my light.

He wanted nothing the king could give — not gold, not power, just his patch of sun back. That one strange answer is the way into one of the oldest and weirdest books we have: a book full of people who thought for a living, and lived in ways that still surprise people today.

We only know this story because, a long time after it happened, a man sat down and collected every tale he could find about these famous thinkers and wrote them into one giant book. He wasn’t a great thinker himself. He was more like a fan with a notebook. When two people told him a story differently, he wrote down both. He even stuck in his own bad poems. Some of what he saved is surely made up — but without his notebook, almost all of it would be gone. What’s left is a museum of the strangest, bravest, funniest people who ever asked a big question.

The first people to use their own heads

Go back to the very first of these thinkers, and you find people doing something that had almost never been done before.

When something happened that nobody understood — why the sun crossed the sky, where the whole world came from — there had always been one answer: a god did it. A god pulled the sun across the sky and stirred up the sea. For thousands of years, that was simply what people said.

Then a man named Thales looked at all of it and tried something new. Maybe, he said, everything is made of water in the end. Water turns to ice, water turns to steam and air, water feeds every living thing — so maybe water is what the whole world is built from. We’re fairly sure now that he was wrong. But it almost doesn’t matter. For the first time, someone had tried to explain the world with an idea you could think about and argue over, instead of a god you just had to believe. That one move is where both science and philosophy begin.

Thales also proved that being very smart and being a bit silly can live in the same person. One night he was walking along staring up at the stars, lost in his huge thoughts, and he was so busy looking up that he walked straight into a hole in the ground and fell in. An old woman had to help him out. How do you expect to understand the sky, she asked him, when you can’t even see what’s in front of your feet?

The most famous thinker of all came later, and his trick was almost too simple. His name was Socrates, and he mostly just asked questions. He would stop people in the street and ask them what they really meant — what is fair? what is brave? — and keep asking until they realized they didn’t actually know. It drove people a little crazy. He never wrote a single book, yet the students who trailed after him went on to start nearly every school of thought that came next. Someone once asked Socrates whether a young man should get married. Either way, he said, you’ll wish you’d done the other.

The man in the barrel

Remember the old man in the dirt, the one who told a king to move out of his light? His name was Diogenes, and he is the reason that book is so strange and so loved.

Diogenes had decided that almost everything people spend their lives chasing — money, fine clothes, a big house, looking important — is junk you don’t actually need. So he got rid of it. All of it. He slept in a big empty clay jar in the marketplace, the kind people stored wine in, curled up inside it like a dog in a barrel. He owned one cup, until the day he saw a child drink straight from cupped hands — and he threw the cup away too, annoyed that a kid had beaten him at owning less.

He loved to make people think, and he did it with little stunts. Once he lit a lamp in the middle of the day, as if hunting for something in broad daylight, and said, “I am looking for a man.” People were all around him, and his point was that he couldn’t find one real, honest human being among them.

Someone asked him once where he was from — what city, what country. People back then were proud of their home city the way people now are proud of a team. Diogenes brushed the whole question off. He belonged, he said, to the whole world — maybe the first person ever to call himself a citizen of everywhere instead of one town.

Under the jokes was a hard idea. The less you own, the less anyone can take from you, and the less you can be frightened into doing. A man who needs nothing can’t be bought and can’t be threatened. In his weird way, Diogenes had made himself completely free.

Glad he lost everything

Not every one of these thinkers started out poor. One of them lost everything by accident — and later called it the best thing that ever happened to him.

His name was Zeno, and he was a merchant. He was shipping a load of goods across the sea to sell when a storm caught his ship and sank it. That cargo was his whole fortune, and it went straight to the bottom. Zeno washed up in a strange city, Athens, with nothing left.

With nothing else to do, he wandered over to a bookseller’s stall and picked up a book about Socrates, the question-asking man, and started to read. He was hooked, and he didn’t leave. He stayed in Athens and became a philosopher, and years later he looked back on the shipwreck that had ruined him and called it the luckiest voyage he ever made. Losing everything was how he finally found the thing that mattered. That, at least, is the story; another old account says he simply sold his goods in Athens and turned to philosophy.

Zeno started his own school. Because he taught his students under a covered porch, people came to call them the Stoics — the porch people. Their big idea is one you can carry your whole life: you almost never get to choose what happens to you. The storm comes, or it doesn’t. But you always get to choose what you do with it — how you stand, how you take it, what you make of it. That part is yours.

The thing everyone’s afraid of

The last great thinker in the collection went after the scariest subject there is and tried to take its power away.

His name was Epicurus, and the thing he stared straight at was death. Almost everybody is a little afraid of dying; it sits in the back of the mind. Epicurus thought that fear was a trick being played on us, and he tried to think his way out of it.

Here was his argument. Being dead can’t actually hurt you, he said. To feel pain, or fear, or anything at all, you have to be there — alive, with a mind that feels. But once you’re dead, there is no more “you” left to feel anything. The lights are simply off. So the one thing everyone dreads, the state of being dead, is a thing you will never actually meet. While you’re here, it isn’t. When it comes, you aren’t. The two of you never share a room.

He said it in one short line: “Death is nothing to us.” You don’t have to be sure he’s completely right to feel how brave it is. Most people spend their whole lives not looking at this at all. Here was a man who walked right up to the worst thing he could imagine, stared at it, and argued it down to nothing.

How they died

The man who collected all these lives had one favorite thing to write about, and it was a little dark: he loved to tell you exactly how each thinker died.

The deaths in his book are wild. One philosopher, the story goes, was so sure he had become a kind of god that he jumped into the burning crater of a volcano to prove it. Another got sick and decided the cure was to bury himself in a pile of warm dung — it did not work. Diogenes, very old by then, is said by his friends to have simply held his breath until he was gone. Almost none of these are likely true. They’re the kind of tall tale people invent later to give a famous life a fitting ending.

And that is the real secret hiding in all these lives. These were not gods, and they were not perfect, floating saints. They were odd, stubborn, funny, sometimes completely ridiculous people — the kind who slept in clay jars, walked into ditches staring at the stars, lost their tempers, and made fools of themselves.

And they were the ones who first dared to ask the questions we’re still stuck on. What do you actually need in order to be happy? What happens to us when we die? They never answered them for good. They argued, and guessed, and passed them down — all the way, in the end, to you.

The long read

A man walks at night with his eyes on the stars and falls into a ditch. An old woman, helping him up, asks how he expects to understand what is in heaven when he cannot see what is under his feet. The man is Thales of Miletus, the first name in Greek philosophy, and the scene is one of the first stories Diogenes Laertius tells. It sets the tone for everything after it. This is a book about the highest thinkers who ever lived, and it never once forgets that they tripped, went hungry, lost their tempers, and died badly. The wisdom and the comedy arrive in the same sentence.

A cabinet, not a system. Diogenes Laertius wrote in the 3rd century after Christ, when the great schools were already centuries old, and he wrote not as a philosopher but as a collector. He gathered everything he could find on each thinker — where they were born, who taught them, what they argued, the sharp things they said, how they died — and laid it all out side by side. He rarely chooses between his sources. When two accounts disagree, he prints both and lets them argue. A good retort, caught fresh, he hands you whole. At each death, Laertius almost always pauses to add a few lines of his own bad verse, an epigram he composed for the occasion: “And we ourselves have also written an epigram on him.” The habit is vain and a little absurd, and it is also why the book feels alive. You are not reading a treatise. You are being walked through a crowded gallery by a guide who cannot stop talking.

That guide is the reason we have the gallery at all. For dozens of these figures, Laertius is the only full source that survived. Strip his book out of the record and whole philosophers go dark — their doctrines, their jokes, their deaths, gone. Most of what an ordinary reader “knows” about the ancient philosophers, the lantern and the tub and the shipwreck, comes down through this one credulous, gossiping, indispensable man.

Philosophy as a family tree. Laertius organizes the crowd as two long chains of teacher and pupil, two bloodlines of the mind. One he calls the Ionian line, running from Thales down through Socrates and Plato to Aristotle and beyond. The other is the Italian line, beginning with Pythagoras. Each thinker is a link: the pupil of one master, the teacher of the next. Philosophy here is not a set of ideas floating free. It is inherited, handed down a chain of named human beings, each passing the work to someone who will change it. The frame is tidy and the reality was not — the chains are partly a later scholar’s invention, smoothing a tangle into a line — but the instinct holds. Ideas come from people, and people learn them from other people. Walk the chain and you walk the whole history.

The wise men come first. These are the practical wise men of Greece, the sages who came before philosophy had hardened into a discipline. Thales stands at the head. He taught that water is the source of everything — “He asserted water to be the principle of all things, and that the world had life, and was full of dæmons” — the first recorded attempt to explain the whole world by a single natural cause rather than by the gods, and the seed of all science. The saying “know yourself” is credited to him, though Laertius honestly adds that others claimed it too. And Thales answered the oldest sneer against thinkers, that they are clever and poor, with a hard practical joke: reading the season, he foresaw a heavy olive crop, took over large olive plantations, and made a fortune — to show, the story says, how easy it was to get rich.

The other sages arrive in quick strokes, each fixed by a single saying. Bias of Priene, asked nothing and offering everything, leaves one cold sentence that the whole gallery seems to test against experience: “Most men are wicked.” Their maxims — seek nothing in excess, give no rash pledges — were carved at Delphi and handed down as the floor of Greek good sense. Laertius can’t always agree on who said which, and says so. The disagreement is part of the record.

Socrates, and the great branching. With Socrates the gallery reaches its hinge. He wrote nothing, founded no school, and yet nearly every school that follows claims him as a father. Laertius gives him in his own register — quick, ironic, impossible to pin. Asked what virtue suited a young man, he said: “To avoid excess in everything.” Asked the question every young man asks, whether to marry, he gave the answer that has outlived the question: “Whichever you do, you will repent it.” From this one barefoot, ugly, relentless talker the lines split and run in opposite directions. One pupil, Aristippus, taught that pleasure is the good and founded the Cyrenaics. Another, Antisthenes, taught that wanting almost nothing is the good — and through him the chain runs to the most vivid man in the book.

The dog in the marketplace. Diogenes of Sinope is the philosopher everyone half-remembers, and Laertius is where the half-memory comes from. He was a Cynic — the word is from the Greek for dog, the name his enemies threw at him for living shamelessly in public, and which his school wore as a badge. He owned nothing, slept in a large ceramic tub in the marketplace, and turned his whole life into an argument that almost everything other people chase is unnecessary. The stories are small and they detonate. He “lighted a candle in the day time” and walked the crowded square saying “I am looking for a man” — surrounded by people, finding no one who lived like one. In the story everyone knows, when Alexander the Great, master of the known world, stood over him and offered him anything he wished, Diogenes asked only for the one thing the conqueror was blocking: “Cease to shade me from the sun.” Plato won applause for defining man as a two-footed animal without feathers; Diogenes plucked a chicken, carried it into Plato’s school, and set it down: “This is Plato’s man.” Asked where he was from, he refused the whole machinery of city and tribe that organized ancient life and answered, in a single phrase, “A Citizen of the world.” Asked what was the most excellent thing among people, he said “Freedom of speech.” Laertius gives three versions of his death, and the one his friends preferred has him simply holding his breath until he was gone. The Cynics after him, Crates and his wife Hipparchia among them, kept the practice alive — a woman who turned down rich suitors to live the dog’s life beside him, one of the few women the book lets speak.

Shipwreck into the painted porch. Out of Cynic poverty grew the most influential school of the ancient world. Zeno of Citium, the story goes, was a merchant who lost his cargo in a shipwreck off Athens, sat down at a bookstall with Xenophon’s memoirs of Socrates, asked where such men could be found, and was pointed to the Cynic Crates walking past. He stayed to become a philosopher. He looked back on the disaster without a flinch: “I now find that I made a prosperous voyage when I was wrecked.” He taught in a public colonnade in Athens, the Stoa or porch, and from that porch his followers took their name — the Stoics, who held that the only true good is virtue and that a wise person stays unshaken by everything fortune does. Laertius gives the Stoics his fullest treatment of any living system, walking their logic, their physics, and their ethics in order, and tracing the chain down from Zeno to Cleanthes to Chrysippus, the relentless systematizer whose logic became the backbone of the school. Here the collector becomes, for a stretch, a real reporter of doctrine — and that summary is one of the best records we have of how the Stoics actually argued.

Number, soul, and the southern line. The Italian chain begins with Pythagoras, and here the history shades into legend. Laertius credits him with the very word for the work: “Pythagoras was the first person who invented the term Philosophy, and who called himself a philosopher” — philo-sophia, the love of wisdom, a man who would not claim to be wise, only to love it. He taught that the soul never dies but passes from body to body, into beasts and back again, so that all living things are kin. He bound his followers with strange rules, including the famous order to abstain from beans. And his disciples held him in such awe that his word ended every argument; from the Pythagoreans comes the phrase still used for lazy appeals to authority, “Ipse dixit” — the master himself has said it, so there is nothing more to discuss. Down the same line stands Empedocles, who taught that all things are made and unmade by Love and Strife, and who, the legend says, leaped into the fire of Mount Etna — some say to prove himself a god, some say for no reason anyone could prove, since, as Laertius notes, other writers flatly deny the whole tale.

Outside the chains. Here stand the thinkers who fit no neat chain. Heraclitus, who taught that nothing stands still and “everything flows on like a river,” ended, the story runs, as a complete misanthrope, riddling the doctors who could not cure his dropsy and finally burying himself in cow-dung in the hope its heat would draw the water out of him. Democritus built the universe out of atoms and empty space, and held that we never reach the bottom of things: “But we know nothing really; for truth lies in the bottom.” And Pyrrho founded the Skeptics — from the Greek for inquiry — who answered the noise of competing systems by suspending judgment altogether, refusing to declare anything certainly true or false, and finding a strange calm in the refusal.

The compiler out of his depth. Plato and Aristotle, the two systematic giants, get the longest treatments and the least life. With the sharp-tongued wanderers Laertius is in his element, but faced with the architecture of the Republic or Aristotle’s logic he mostly lists — titles of dialogues, summaries of doctrines, the philosopher’s last will copied out in full. He is a magpie, not an analyst, and the great systems slip through his fingers. It is the honest limit of the whole book: it preserves the surface of philosophy, the sayings and the lives, far better than its depths.

Epicurus, and the one whole voice. The compendium climbs, in its tenth and final book, to the one place where the compiler steps aside and lets a philosopher speak at length in his own words. For Epicurus, Laertius copies out three entire letters and a list of the master’s key doctrines — and because he did, those texts survived when almost everything else Epicurus wrote was lost. So it ends on actual philosophy rather than anecdote. Epicurus taught that pleasure, rightly understood as the absence of pain and fear, is the natural aim of life, and that the two great terrors poisoning it, the gods and death, both dissolve under thought. The gods, he argued, are untroubled and take no interest in us. And death is not an evil to be feared but simply the end of all sensation, and what cannot be felt cannot harm: “Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is devoid of sensation, and that which is devoid of sensation is nothing to us.” The argument turns on a single clean move — that we and death never actually meet: “the most formidable of all evils, death, is nothing to us, since, when we exist, death is not present to us; and when death is present, then we have no existence.” After ten books of men dying absurdly — in dung, in a field of beans, in the fire of a volcano — the gallery closes on the one philosopher who looked steadily at death and argued it away.

One real line. “Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is devoid of sensation, and that which is devoid of sensation is nothing to us.” — Epicurus, preserved in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book 10.

What didn’t hold. This is a 3rd-century compilation, and its weaknesses are the weaknesses of its method, not failed experiments. Read it as a quarry of sayings, not as a chronicle of fact:

• Laertius as historian. He is credulous and often impossible. He has thinkers meet people who lived generations apart, copies contradictory dates without resolving them, and repeats anecdotes that were already legends when he found them. Modern scholarship treats him as a treasure-house of fragments — frequently the only surviving witness to a lost work — and distrusts his biographical “facts” by default. The sayings are far more trustworthy than the stories around them.
• The deaths are mostly legend. Heraclitus in the dung, Empedocles into Etna, Diogenes holding his breath — these are the kind of death a later age invented to fit the life, and Laertius himself often records that “others contradict” them. They tell you what the ancients thought each man’s life meant, not how he actually died.
• The two chains are a construction. The neat Ionian and Italian successions, master handing to pupil in a clean line, were a tidy frame imposed by Hellenistic scholars on a far messier reality. The lineage is a useful map, not the territory.
• Pythagoras and the word “philosophy.” Laertius takes the story from Heraclides Ponticus, a pupil of Plato’s. Walter Burkert showed in 1960 that the idea of the philosopher it assumes, a lover of wisdom who never possesses it, is Plato’s, so the tale is treated as a later invention, not something Pythagoras said.
• Diogenes and Alexander. The meeting in the sun and the report that the two men died on the same day are legends. Laertius passes on the second from Demetrius without comment.
• Zeno’s shipwreck. Laertius himself records that some said Zeno was never wrecked at all, and simply sold his cargo in Athens.
• The letters are forgeries. The letters Laertius copies from Thales, Solon, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and the rest are later inventions. He flags one himself, an Epimenides letter written in an Attic dialect too new for its supposed author.
• Epicurus’s texts are mostly sound. The Letters to Herodotus and Menoeceus and the Principal Doctrines are accepted as Epicurus’s own. The Letter to Pythocles is sometimes taken as a student’s compilation from his teaching.
• A missing ending. Book 7 breaks off partway through the list of Chrysippus’s books in every surviving manuscript. An old table of contents shows it once went on through about 20 more Stoics.
• The same wisdom, many owners. The famous maxims drift between sages even inside this book — “know yourself” is given to Thales and disputed in the same breath, “nothing in excess” floats among several names. Laertius prints the disputes rather than settling them, which is, in the end, the most honest thing about him.

For the little ones

This book as stories to read aloud, each with a note for the grown-up.