The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

This ancient compendium gathers the lives, teachings, sayings, and gossip of the great philosophers of Greece, from Thales and Socrates to the Stoics and Epicureans. Anecdotal, quotable, and often entertainingly unreliable, it is the single most important source for the biographies of the ancient thinkers and preserves ideas and quips that would otherwise be lost. Diogenes Laertius writes less as a rigorous historian than as an enthusiastic collector, and the result is a rich, colorful window onto the ancient world of ideas. It remains indispensable to anyone curious about the roots of Western philosophy.