Diogenes Laertius

Everyone wants to live a meaningful life. Long before our own day of self-help books offering twelve-step programs and other guides to attain happiness, the philosophers of ancient Greece explored the riddle of what makes a life worth living, producing a wide variety of ideas and examples to follow. This rich tradition was recast by Diogenes Laertius into an anthology, a miscellany of maxims and anecdotes, that generations of Western readers have consulted for edification as well as entertainment ever since the Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, first compiled in the third century AD, came to prominence in Renaissance Italy. To this day, it remains a crucial source for much of what we know about the origins and practice of philosophy in ancient Greece, covering a longer period of time and a larger number of figures-from Pythagoras and Socrates to Aristotle and Epicurus-than any other ancient source.

This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius and translated by Robert Drew Hicks. Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is a biography of the Greek philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, written in Greek, perhaps in the first half of the third century AD. There are some who say that the study of philosophy had its beginning among the barbarians. They urge that the Persians have had their Magi, the Babylonians or Assyrians their Chaldaeans, and the Indians their Gymnosophists; and among the Celts and Gauls there are the people called Druids or Holy Ones, for which they cite as authorities the Magicus of Aristotle and Sotion in the twenty-third1 book of his Succession of Philosophers. Also they say that Mochus was a Phoenician, Zamolxis a Thracian, and Atlas a Libyan. If we may believe the Egyptians, Hephaestus was the son of the Nile, and with him philosophy began, priests and prophets being its chief exponents. Hephaestus lived 48,863 years before Alexander of Macedon, and in the interval there occurred 373 solar and 832 lunar eclipses. The date of the Magians, beginning with Zoroaster the Persian, was 5000 years before the fall of Troy, as given by Hermodorus the Platonist in his work on mathematics; but Xanthus the Lydian reckons 6000 years from Zoroaster to the expedition of Xerxes, and after that event he places a long line of Magians in succession, bearing the names of Ostanas, Astrampsychos, Gobryas, and Pazatas, down to the conquest of Persia by Alexander.

'Stoic Six Pack 8 - The Peripatetics' includes Lyco of Troas by Diogenes Laertius, The Aristotelian Sense of Proportion by William De Witt Hyde, Strato of Lampsacus by Diogenes Laertius, Life of Aristotle by George Grote, Theophrastus by George Malcolm Stratton and Post-Aristotelian Philosophy: The Stoics by Alexander Grant.

STOIC SIX PACK 6 - THE CYRENAICS: Aristippus Biographies by William Smith and Diogenes Laertius, On the Contempt of Death by Marcus Tullius Cicero, Dionysius the Renegade by Diogenes Laertius, Phaedo by Plato, Philebus by Plato and Aristippus vs Socrates by Xenophon.

Stoic Six Pack 5 - The Cynics presents the key primary sources of this ancient philosophy, as well as secondary material to provide insight and understanding: An Introduction to Cynic Philosophy by John MacCunn, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave by Publius Syrus, Life of Antisthenes by Diogenes Laertius, Book IV of The Symposium by Xenophon, Life of Diogenes by Diogenes Laertius and Life of Crates by Diogenes Laertius.

A sextet of sceptic texts has been collected in Stoic Six Pack 4 - The Sceptics: Pyrrhonic Sketches by Sextus Empiricus, Life of Pyrrho by Diogenes Laertius, Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism by Mary Mills Patrick, The Greek Sceptics: from Pyrrho to Sextus by Norman MacColl Stoics and Sceptics by Edwyn Bevan and Life of Carneades by Diogenes Laertius.