Lovers of Wisdom

Poor Diogenes Laertius. He gets no respect. A perfect ass—asinus germanus—one nineteenth-century scholar called him. Dim-witted, said Nietzsche. An ignoramus, declared the twentieth-century classicist Werner Jaeger. In his lyric moods he wrote perhaps the worst verses ever published, an anthologist pronounced. And he had no talent for philosophical exposition, declares The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Then why waste time on him? For this excellent reason: Diogenes Laertius compiled the sole extant work from antiquity that gives anything like a comprehensive picture of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy.