Vitae philosophorum

Diogenes Laertius

Diogenes Laertius. Hicks, R. D., editor. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1925.

Theophrastus was a native of Eresus, the son of Melantes, a fuller, as stated by Athenodorus in the eighth book of his Walks. He first heard his countryman Alcippus lecture in his native town and afterwards he heard Plato, whom he left for Aristotle. And when the latter withdrew to Chalcis he took over the school himself in the 114th Olympiad.[*](323 b.c.) A slave of his named Pompylus is also said to have been a philosopher, according to Myronianus of Amastris in the first book of his Historical Parallels. Theophrastus was a man of remarkable intelligence and industry and, as Pamphila says in the thirtysecond book of her Memorabilia, he taught Menander the comic poet.

Furthermore, he was ever ready to do a kindness and fond of discussion. Casander certainly granted him audience and Ptolemy made overtures to him. And so highly was he valued at Athens that, when Agnonides ventured to prosecute him for impiety, the prosecutor himself narrowly escaped punishment. About 2000 pupils used to attend his lectures. In a letter to Phanias the

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Peripatetic, among other topics, he speaks of a tribunal as follows[*](In the extract from the letter Theophrastus seems to be considering the best means of preparing for publication what he has to say, possibly in lecture, before the large class which, as we have just been informed, sometimes numbered 2000. It is difficult to see how this topic can have been worked into a letter on the law courts as such, and there is much to be said for Mr. Wyse’s emendation διδασκαλίου. If this be accepted, the whole letter would be about means or subjects of instruction in lecture.): To get a public or even a select circle such as one desires is not easy. If an author reads his work, he must re-write it. Always to shirk revision and ignore criticism is a course which the present generation of pupils will no longer tolerate. And in this letter he has called some one pedant.

Although his reputation stood so high, nevertheless for a short time he had to leave the country with all the other philosophers, when Sophocles the son of Amphiclides proposed a law that no philosopher should preside over a school except by permission of the Senate and the people, under penalty of death. The next year, however, the philosophers returned, as Philo had prosecuted Sophocles for making an illegal proposal. Whereupon the Athenians repealed the law, fined Sophocles five talents, and voted the recall of the philosophers, in order that Theophrastus also might return and live there as before. He bore the name of Tyrtamus, and it was Aristotle who re-named him Theophrastus on account of his graceful style.

And Aristippus, in his fourth book On the Luxury of the Ancients, asserts that he was enamoured of Aristotle’s son Nicomachus, although he was his teacher. It is said that Aristotle applied to him and Callisthenes what Plato had said of Xenocrates and himself (as already related), namely, that the one needed a bridle and the other a goad; for Theophrastus interpreted all his meaning with

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an excess of cleverness, whereas the other was naturally backward. He is said to have become the owner of a garden of his own after Aristotle’s death, through the intervention of his friend Demetrius of Phalerum. There are pithy sayings of his in circulation as follows: An unbridled horse, he said, ought to be trusted sooner than a badly-arranged discourse.

To some one who never opened his lips at a banquet he remarked: Yours is a wise course for an ignoramus, but in an educated man it is sheer folly. He used constantly to say that in our expenditure the item that costs most is time.

He died at the age of eighty-five, not long after he had relinquished his labours. My verses upon him are these[*](Anth. Pal vii. 110.):

Not in vain was the word spoken to one of human kind, Slacken the bow of wisdom and it breaks. Of a truth, so long as Theophrastus laboured he was sound of limb, but when released from toil his limbs failed him and he died.

It is said that his disciples asked him if he had any last message for them, to which he replied: Nothing else but this, that many of the pleasures which life boasts are but in the seeming.