Vitae philosophorum

Diogenes Laertius

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

Demetrius, in his book on Men of the Same Name, says that he despised even the Athenians, although held by them in the highest estimation; and,

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notwithstanding that the Ephesians thought little of him, he preferred his own home the more. Demetrius of Phalerum, too, mentions him in his Defence of Socrates[*](This work is again quoted in ix. 37 and ix. 57, and is perhaps the source of the first sentence of § 52 also.); and the commentators on his work are very numerous, including as they do Antishenes and Heraclides of Pontus, Cleanthes and Sphaerus the Stoic, and again Pausanias who was called the imitator of Heraclitus, Nicomedes, Dionysius, and, among the grammarians, Diodotus. The latter affirms that it is not a treatise upon nature, but upon government, the physical part serving merely for illustration.[*](Apparently D. L. is using, through another of his sources, the very same citation from Diodotus which he has given verbatim in § 12.)

Hieronymus tells us that Scythinus, the satirical poet, undertook to put the discourse of Heraclitus into verse. He is the subject of many epigrams, and amongst them of this one[*](Anth. Pal. vii. 128.):

Heraclitus am I. Why do ye drag me up and down, ye illiterate? It was not for you I toiled, but for such as understand me. One man in my sight is a match for thirty thousand, but the countless hosts do not make a single one. This I proclaim, yea in the halls of Persephone.

Another runs as follows[*](Anth. Pal. ix. 540.):

Do not be in too great a hurry to get to the end of Heraclitus the Ephesian’s book: the path is hard to travel. Gloom is there and darkness devoid of light. But if an initiate be your guide, the path shines brighter than sunlight.

Five men have borne the name of Heraclitus: (1) our philosopher; (2) a lyric poet, who wrote a hymn of praise to the twelve gods; (3) an elegiac

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poet of Halicarnassus, on whom Callimachus wrote the following epitaph[*](Anth. Pal. vii. 80.):
  1. They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
  2. They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
  3. I wept as I remembered how often you and I
  4. Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
  5. And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
  7. A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
  8. Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
  9. For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take;[*](From Cory’s Ionica, p. 7. In bare prose: One told me of thy death, Heraclitus, and moved me to tears, when I remembered how often we two watched the sun go down upon our talk. But though thou, I ween, my Halicarnassian friend, art dust long, long ago, yet do thy Nightingales live on, and Death, that insatiate ravisher, shall lay no hand on them. Perhaps Nightingales was the title of a work. Laertius deserves our gratitude for inserting this little poem, especially on so slight a pretext.)
(4) a Lesbian who wrote a history of Macedonia; (5) a jester who adopted this profession after having been a musician.

Xenophanes, a native of Colophon, the son of Dexius, or, according to Apollodorus, of Orthomenes, is praised by Timon, whose words at all events are:

Xenophanes, not over-proud, perverter of Homer, castigator.
He was banished from his native city and lived at Zancle in Sicily [and having joined the colony planted at Elea taught there]. He also lived in Catana. According to some he was no man’s pupil,
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according to others he was a pupil of Boton of Athens,[*](Possibly the same Boton who taught Theramenes rhetoric. If so, D. L. (or his authority) may have transferred to Xenophanes an excerpt intended for Xenophon. See the note of Diels, Fr. d. Vors., on 11 A 1 (Xenophanes)) or, as some say, of Archelaus. Sotion makes him a contemporary of Anaximander. His writings are in epic metre, as well as elegiacs and iambics attacking Hesiod and Homer and denouncing what they said about the gods. Furthermore he used to recite his own poems. It is stated that he opposed the views of Thales and Pythagoras, and attacked Epimenides also. He lived to a very great age, as his own words somewhere testify[*](Fr. 8 D.):

Seven and sixty are now the years that have been tossing my cares up and down the land of Greece; and there were then twenty and five years more from my birth up, if I know how to speak truly about these things.

He holds that there are four elements of existent things, and worlds unlimited in number but not overlapping [in time]. Clouds are formed when the vapour from the sun is carried upwards and lifts them into the surrounding air. The substance of God is spherical, in no way resembling man. He is all eye and all ear, but does not breathe; he is the totality of mind and thought, and is eternal. Xenophanes was the first to declare that everything which comes into being is doomed to perish, and that the soul is breath.[*](Presumably followed by Epicharmus when he wrote εὐσεβὴς νόῳ πεφυκὼς οὐ πάθοις κʼ οὐδὲν κακὸν κατθαν ών· ἄνω τὸ πνεῦμα διαμεν εῖ κατʼ οὐρανόν.(Fr. 22, ap. Clem. Strom. iv. 170, p. 640 P.) )