The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

Written in the late second century AD, this is our most voluminous surviving portrait gallery of ancient philosophy. Diogenes Laertius gathered everything he could find about the great thinkers of Greece and the Hellenistic world, preserving anecdotes, apocryphal tales, and fragments of lost works that would otherwise have vanished. Here you will find the serious philosophy, yes, but also the gossip: Plato's complicated love life, Diogenes the Cynic's legendary cheek, Epicurus's unusual dietary habits, and the various dramatic ways philosophers chose to die. The ten books move from Thales and the pre-Socratics through Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, then branch into the Stoics, Epicureans, Skeptics, and other schools of the Hellenistic period. It is uncritical, often fantastical, and occasionally contradictory. But it is also irreplaceable: much of what we know about ancient philosophy comes directly or indirectly from this work. For anyone curious about where Western thought began, this is the place to meet those thinkers as their own contemporaries knew them, eccentricities and all.