Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Vol. 1 (Loeb)

He accepts the legend of the Seven Wise Men who exchanged formal visits and letters; he accepts even their verses as enumerated by that exact historian, Lobon! Aristippus’s On Ancient Luxury, a dialogue of Heraclides of Pontus, and a forensic speech of Dinarchus are all good evidence for him. Yet it must be allowed that the admixture of error is seldom obtrusive. Rarely do the added details mar an otherwise consistent portrait. The insertion of extraneous matter which disturbs the context is a too-common fault, of which the trial of Socrates (ii. 38 ff.), the education of Plato (iii. 5 ff.), the death of Empedocles (viii. 67-72), and the garden of Epicurus (x. 10) are typical instances. Where the patch does not suit the cloth, the tear is made worse; this is particularly true of the marginal notes or scholia interspersed in the text of Epicurus in Book X. "The speech is disjointed, with the original words driven out by an intruded note," writes Usener in a critical note to x. 74. In a similar way, in the Lives, the main narrative followed may suffer or be in part effaced by the intrusion of untrustworthy or inconsistent detail.

There are also mistakes due to careless handling of the vast mass of excerpts, so that some seem to have got into the wrong "Life": for example, in ii. 1, Anaximander is credited with a discovery of Anaxagoras. This is only the first of many such slips; thus, he successively confuses Archelaus with Anaxagoras, Xenophanes with Xenophon, and Protagoras with Democritus. See notes to ii. 16, ix. 18, ix. 50.

Noticeable too are the historical allusions, which become especially frequent when we reach the events of the third century B.C. Some of these present