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2 results

  • Chapter 17 - Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Pythagoras

    • By André Laks, Universidad Panamericana and Université de Paris-Sorbonne
  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 360-380

  • Summary

    This chapter reviews the content of Book 8 of Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers and explains its place within Diogenes Laertius' work. It discusses some specific features of Diogenes' picture of Pythagoras. If one wants to detect an overall interest in Diogenes' Life of Pythagoras, they must certainly locate it in the Pythagorean mode of life as reflected in the long lists of religious and ethical precepts. The chapter gives an analysis of the extended report about Diogenes' doctrines which plays a central function in the overall construction of the book. The report excerpted by Alexander Polyhistor and copied by Diogenes is itself a sample of pseudo-Pythagorean literature. The chapter addresses the problem of Diogenes' attitude towards Pythagoras. The Pythagorean Notes would be a testimony of an eclectic Pythagoreanism and also of an eclectic Pythagoreanism.

  • Chapter 18 - Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras

  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 381-398

  • Summary

    For centuries, Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras (Vita Pythagorae (VP)) and Iamblichus' On the Pythagorean Way of Life have conveyed idealized pictures of Pythagoras that continued to be canonic down to the nineteenth century. Before examining the VP this chapter looks at the History of Philosophy (HP) as a whole in order to find out how Pythagoras' biography fitted into this ambitious work. One of the aspects of the HP that immediately catches the attention is its essentially antiquarian, scholarly, and at the same time compilatory and derivative character. Porphyry probably organized his material in roughly chronological order by individual philosophers, i.e., neither by schools of thought nor by philosophical themes or questions. The chapter concludes that reading Porphyry's VP gives access to the state of Pythagoreanism in the first centuries AD and to its views of Pythagoras and the Pythagorean tradition.