See also: Diogène

Diogène Laërce (in Greek Διογένης Λαέρτιος/ Diogenês Laertios ), poet and Greek Doxographe (Laërce, Cilicie, deb. of the 3rd century).

One knows only few things about Diogène Laërce. The fact is all the more paradoxical as it often represents the single source which we have on the life and the doctrines of many philosophers. It is for example only by him that we know the letters of Épicure and its capital maxims, as well as the wills of certain philosophers. Some of its writings remain still subjects to deposit, because it quotes a letter of Pisistrate to Solon and an answer of Solon with Pisistrate considered today as apocryphal books.

Biography

The origins of Diogène Laërce are badly known: does its name mean that it was born in Laërtès, a Greek colony of Cilicie about which Strabon (XIV speak, 5,3) (Diogène of Laërtès ), or although his/her father named Laërce (Diogène wire of Laërce )? British epigraphists in any case located a city on the mountain of Celebireç Dagi where one discovered currencies carrying the inscription: Laerteiôn.

In the same way, we cannot know the time to which he lived only by steppings. He knows the “traditional” philosophers, such as Aristote or Plato, like their successors, as Théophraste until the beginning of the IIIe century (he speaks about Sextus Empiricus and Saturninus into IX, 116); he does not mention the Néoplatonisme of Plotin and Porphyre of Tyr, nor the neopythagorism. He would thus have lived in first half of the third century.

Doctrines

Just as for its life, its doctrines are known little about to us, if as well is as it had one of it. It seems to appreciate Épicure (Wilamowitz saw in him a epicurean), and is shown rather hard towards Plato, but no precise indication enables us to classify it in such or such school. In book IX of its work, Diogène, speaking about Apollonidès de Nicée, a commentator of Tiller of Phlionte, known as: O gar emôn , which one can translate by our compatriot or our school-fellow . This last translation is an argument (discussed however, because not very convincing) in favor of the assumption that Diogène was Sceptique. This expression can simply mean that Diogène was of Nicée in Bithynie, or that it belonged to the family of Apollonidès.

As of its foreword, however, he announces: “Us other Greeks gave to the world philosophy, not only the thing, but even the word”, and is ironical about the “ xenophilism ” of its compatriots, if outside open whom they do not seem to think that anything of good can come from on their premises.

Diogène Laërce was in fact a doxographe: it retranscribed the doctrines and the lives of the most important philosophers of its time. One could also see it like a Poète being interested in philosophy and liking themselves the scholarship.

Work

He wrote two books: a collection of epigram S ( Pammétros ) where it shows a great technical skill (we know about fifty its epigrams which it quotes in its second work), and the Vies, doctrines and sentences of the famous philosophers , in which it classifies the philosophers by schools, while starting with the founder. The plan of each life is overall identical. Diogene starts by recalling the life of the philosopher, with an abundance of various anecdotes, which locate in particular the relations that this one would have had with the other philosophers. The doctrines are evoked rapidly, sometimes with some inconsistencies. A list of works follows, the circumstances of dead and a epigram composed by Diogène Laërce.

Old publications

The editions most estimated of Diogène Laërce at the 19th century, quoted by the dictionary Bouillet are those:
  • of Marcus Meibom, Greek-Latin, with notes of Gilles Spares, Isaac Casaubon, etc, Amsterdam, 1692, 2 volumes in-4;
  • of Hübner, Leipzig, 1828, all Greek;
  • that which belongs to the Bibliotheca graeca Misters Didot, collated on new manuscripts by Carel Gabriel Cobet, Paris, 1852.

Gassendi gave separately Xe delivers (Épicure), with a comment.

All the work was translated into French:

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