The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
by Diogenes Laërtius · first published 2020
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<p>These brief biographies of more than eighty philosophers of ancient Greece were assembled by <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/diogenes-laertius">Diogenes Laërtius</a> in the early third century. He based these on a variety of sources that have since been lost. Because of this, his biographies have become an invaluable source of information on the development of ancient Greek philosophy, and on ancient Greek culture in general. Most of what we know about the lives and otherwise lost doctrines of Zeno the Stoic and Diogenes the Cynic, for example, come from what Diogenes Laërtius pr
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…unaware of Plato's possible slavery, and found this [0], but I do not have the background knowledge judge the veracity of the information: > One source of the story of Plato being sold into slavery is Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius. An English translation is available online [1] on Project Perseus. You can find the full story in Book 3 that discusses the life of Plato. [0] https://history.stackexchange.com/a/37499…
on “An intact slave's room found in Pompeii's ruins” ↗…translation and it has lots of good footnotes and interesting observations too, though I think his opinions may have been somewhat outside those of mainstream scholarship. Also the third century AD/CE Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (Diogenes Laertius) is interesting and quite readable (though I haven't read all of it) and could serve as a (dated) introduction to ancient Greek philosophy itself.
on “Ask HN: How do I get started in philosophy” ↗I just read in "the lives and opinions of eminent philosophers" written ca 300 AD that Pythagoras (yes that Pythagoras) was the inventor of the "meat for athletes" diet. He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing so he was not just an ivory tower speculator.…
on “Roman Gladiators ate a mostly vegetarian diet and drank a tonic of ashes” ↗