Study of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers[1] gives us tantalizing snippets of information about women of whom we might never have heard. He tells us of nameless women, wives, daughters and courtesans. He wrote, for example, that Timon had a wife and son, but we are told nothing about them. Eudoxus had three daughters, but we are told only their names, Actis, Philtis and Delphis. In the first… Read more
Diogenes Laertius Diogenes Laertius wrote in Greek in Anatolia in the third century CE. The piece of writing that has survived to this day is his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, which is a compilation of biographies. He described philosophical thought, and gave biographical details, genealogies, and quotes from letters and wills. He gives us anecdotes, and he wrote his own poetry about his subjects. Wikipedia reports that he has… Read more
The first to use the term, and to call himself a philosopher or lover of wisdom, was Pythagoras; for, said he, no man is wise, but a god alone. … All too quickly the study was called wisdom and its professor a sage, to denote his attainment of mental perfection; while the student who took it up was a philosopher or lover of wisdom. Sophists was another name for the… Read more
For centuries of European art, it was one of the most frequently portrayed moments from classical antiquity. Wikimedia Commons includes more than fifty artistic renderings of an apocryphal meeting of the young Alexander of Macedonia (later to be known as “the Great”) and the much older Diogenes of Sinope (later to be known as “the Cynic”). It is hard to imagine a more unlikely pair. Alexander was the brash young… Read more