Diogenes Laertius’s biography of Anaximander begins Book II and it is one of the shortest biographies in the Lives. Anaximander was a native of Miletus. Unlike Thales (who was his teacher) he affirmed that the “infinite” or “unbounded” (to apeiron) was the first principle and element. He held that the…
Month: July 2021
On Diogenes Laertius’s Biography of Solon
Solon was a native of Salamis located off the coast of Athens (midway between Megara and Athens) in the Aegean. He was the first to introduce the “shaking off of burdens” (seisachtheia) debt reduction program when he came to Athens, a political policy which aided the many landless serfs to…
On Diogenes Laertius’s Biography of Thales
Rather than identifying the past by numerical years (i.e. “455 BC”) ancient historians tended to associate ancient Greek epochs with the ruling archon of Athens at the time. The Athenian maintained meticulous lists of archons that went back many centuries. In this way, Diogenes Laertius claims Thales, the first of…
On the Prologue to Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Eminent Philosophers
Diogenes begins his Lives with a brief prologue which argues against the commonly held opinion that philosophy initially began with the “barbarians” (i.e. non-Greeks like the Zoroastrian magi of the Persians, or the sages of the Babylonians, Chaldeans, Indians, Egyptians, Celtic Druids and so on). Instead Diogenes argues that this…