INTRODUCTION

I

THE BOOK AND ITS AUTHOR

The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is commonly ascribed to Diogenes Laertius; but who he was, and when and where he was born, is nowhere recorded. It is not quite certain that he is rightly named. Eustathius calls him Laertes; in some ancient authorities he is styled Laertius Diogenes, and among modern scholars there are those who have adopted this order of the two names as the more correct. Yet, while the author remains thus obscure, his work has by a lucky accident become famous.

It professes to give an account of the chief Greek thinkers and in this way to unfold the course of speculative thought in Greece. Many books had been written on the subject before; this, by the caprice of fortune, alone remains. It is idle to set bounds to the vanity of authors; but surely the writer of this book in his fondest dreams can scarcely have imagined that he would outlast his predecessors—that he, Diogenes Laertius, would survive, when Hermippus and Sotion had perished, and with them the long procession of respectable authorities whom he punctiliously parades at every turn. Yet so it is: habent sua fata libelli Original: "Books have their own destiny" (Terentianus Maurus)..