![]() ![]() He offers many varied and sometimes conflicting accounts of the ancient philosophers. Diogenes’s book reinforces the idea of eminence. The concept of ’eminence’ which appears in the title is worth exploring it implies a person with a reputation that has superseded his own life and who has therefore become the subject of gossip. By my count there are eighty-two biographies in the text and only two philosophers are given a place of prominence with an entire book devoted to their lives (Plato in Book III and Epicurus in Book X -the final book in the text). In the text he offers short, simple biographies of the “eminent” philosophers of classical Greece and Rome. The only work for which Diogenes Laertius is remembered today is the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers however in Latin the title was simply shortened to Vitae Philosophorum. Perhaps there is a link between philosophy and biography. In contrast Renaissance thinkers like Montaigne praised Diogenes’s voluminous biographies and, going back even further, Byzantine scholars were fascinated by Diogenes’s form of hagiography, while modern existentialists like Nietzsche initially found Diogenes to be dimwitted, but later praised Diogenes for being the gatekeeper to classical philosophy (he enjoyed reading the Lives as a testing ground for which philosophies were superior to others based on how they lived their lives). He has often been dubbed a petty “gossip columnist.” For example, German classicist Werner Jaeger called him an “ignoramus” and German philologist Hermann Usener labeled him asinus germanus (“a complete ass”). Until relatively recently modern scholarship has mostly scorned Diogenes Laertius as a mere anthologist rather than a serious thinker.
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