Opening Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (Books 1–2) — Diogenes Laertius in Plato Scroll…
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Diogenes Laertius · C. D. Yonge
The single most important source for the lives of the ancient philosophers — a sprawling, anecdote-laden compendium in ten books by Diogenes Laertius (early third century AD), covering some eighty thinkers from Thales and the Seven Sages through Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to the Cynics, Stoics, Sceptics, Pythagoreans, and Epicurus, whose three great letters it preserves entire. Nearly everyone else in this library is known to us partly through these pages. The translation is Charles Duke Yonge's of 1853; his notes are omitted. Public domain. I. Some say that the study of philosophy originated with the barbarians. In that among the Persians there existed the Magi, and among the Babylonians or Assyrians the Chaldæi, among the Indians the Gymnosophistæ, and among the Celts and Gauls men who were called Druids and Semnothei, as Aristotle relates in his book on Magic, and Sotion in the …
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