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

II

PLAN AND CONTENTS OF THE WORK

The title in brief is Lives and Opinions of the Philosophers—more exactly (in codex P) A Brief Summary of the Lives and Opinions of Those Who Distinguished Themselves in Philosophy and of the Doctrines of Each School. It is called by Photius Lives of Philosophers and by Eustathius Lives of Sophists. There is no dedication. But Book I begins with a kind of prelude, mentioning systems of thought, if such they can be called, outside Greece—those of the Magians in Persia, the Chaldeans, the Gymnosophists or Fakirs of India, and the Druids, some of whom had been supposed (not without cause) to be more ancient than any philosophers of Greece.

Here it may be convenient to explain a difference of terminology, trifling in itself but not without serious consequences. Where we talk of a "school" or "schools" of philosophy, the Greeks preferred to speak of a "succession" or "successions" (diadochai) of philosophers. The work before us professes to trace two such successions: the Ionian in the East and the Italian in the West, certain "stragglers" bringing up the rear for whom no place could be found in either. The same word "succession" is used of rulers: as "Amurath to Amurath succeeds," so in the schools each master hands down doctrine and authority to his disciple, the line of scholarchs heads of schools being thus assimilated to a pedigree or genealogical table. It is a result of this method that we are apt to separate thinkers and influences upon thought, which, to be properly understood, must be studied