Diogenes Laërtius

Diogenes Laërtius compiled Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers sometime in the 3rd century CE, pulling together anecdotes and teachings about the great thinkers of Greece. Almost nothing is known about his own life. Scholars have argued over his method for centuries: he repeats sources without vetting them, lingers on trivial biographical details while skipping core doctrine, sometimes blurs which ideas belonged to which era of a school. But he also tends to report what the philosophers said without twisting it to fit his own agenda, a rarer virtue than it sounds. The primary texts he c…