• General Overview
  • The Project and Its Shape
    • Biography as philosophy: each life joins birth, character, sayings, writings, and death to the doctrines held.
    • Two roots: the Ionian line descends from Thales, the Italian from Pherecydes and Pythagoras.
    • Greek priority: barbarian claims to philosophy are refuted; Musaeus, Linus, and Orpheus are rejected or qualified.
    • Three divisions: natural philosophy studies the world, ethics life, dialectic argument.
    • Ten sects: Academic, Cyrenaic, Elian, Megaric, Cynic, Eretrian, Dialectic, Peripatetic, Stoic, Epicurean.
    • Dogmatic vs sceptical: dogmatists affirm comprehension; sceptics suspend judgment and may write nothing.
  • The Seven Sages
    • Thales: first to study the heavens, foretell eclipses, and call water the principle of all things.
    • Solon: cancels debts, recovers Salamis by feigned madness, and refuses to rule Athens.
    • Maxims: know yourself, nothing in excess, suretyship and then destruction.
    • Civic wisdom: Chilo, Pittacus, Bias, Periander, and Cleobulus legislate, judge, and ransom captives.
    • Disputed roll: Plato inserts Myson; others add Anacharsis; Hermippus lists seventeen candidates.
    • Deaths as signature: Chilo dies of joy, Bias in court, Pittacus after resigning his rule.
  • The Ionian Succession
    • Anaximander: the Infinite is the principle; parts change while the whole remains; first gnomon, map, and globe.
    • Anaximenes: air is the principle; the stars circle the earth rather than passing beneath it.
    • Anaxagoras: first to make Mind the ordering cause; sun as burning iron larger than the Peloponnese.
    • Archelaus: carries natural philosophy to Athens and treats law and justice as convention.
    • Heraclitus: all things from fire and into fire; his obscure book deposited in Artemis' temple.
    • End of physics: natural inquiry culminates in Archelaus, then yields to Socrates' ethics.
  • The Italian Succession and Atomism
    • Pythagoras: metempsychosis, number as principle, a common life, five years' silence, and dietary taboos.
    • The school: friends hold all goods in common; the school survives nine or ten generations.
    • Empedocles: four elements moved by love and strife; wonder-worker, poet, and democratic patron.
    • Eleatics: Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus argue the one unchanging being.
    • Atomists: Leucippus first makes atoms principles; Democritus adds void, infinite worlds, and cheerfulness.
    • Soul and knowledge: reason tests the untrustworthy senses; mind and soul are held identical.
  • Socrates and the Socratics
    • Ethical turn: Socrates first converses about human life — the good and harm in a man's own house.
    • Ignorance: he knows only that he knows nothing; his daemon foretells the future.
    • Civic courage: alone votes to acquit the ten generals; refuses to deliver Leon to the Thirty.
    • Trial and death: condemned for impiety and corrupting the young; hemlock in the 95th Olympiad.
    • Aftermath: Athens repents, banishes the accusers, and honors him with a bronze statue by Lysippus.
    • Companions: Xenophon, Æschines, Aristippus, Phædo, Euclides, Antisthenes, and Plato each take a path.
  • Plato, the Academy, and Its Turns
    • Synthesis: Plato joins Heraclitean sensation, Pythagorean intellect, and Socratic politics.
    • Ideas: eternal intelligible models; particulars are named by partaking of them as copies.
    • Early successors: Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemo, Crates, and Crantor keep the school.
    • Arcesilaus: founds the Middle Academy, suspending judgment because reasons contradict on both sides.
    • Carneades and Clitomachus: the New Academy answers the Stoics while writing no settled doctrine.
    • Self-questioning: the school's history becomes a record of its own successive doubts.
  • Aristotle and the Peripatetics
    • Aristotle: Plato's pupil for twenty years, then founder of the Lyceum; Peripatetics walk while discussing.
    • Corpus: nearly four hundred works, 445,270 lines, including constitutions of 158 cities.
    • Doctrine: virtue exercised in a perfect life; a fifth element for the heavens; God unmoved yet provident.
    • Theophrastus: two thousand pupils and royal patronage; "time is the dearest thing a man can spend."
    • Strato and Lycon: the "Natural Philosopher" and the sweet orator who excels at training the young.
    • Demetrius: governs Athens ten years, raises its revenues, then falls to exile and an asp.
  • The Hellenistic Schools
    • Cynics: Antisthenes, Diogenes, Crates, and Hipparchia reduce philosophy to virtue and self-sufficiency.
    • Stoicism: Zeno's system spans logic, physics, and ethics; live according to nature, virtue alone good.
    • Scepticism: Pyrrho and Timon suspend judgment; the ten modes make reality unknowable; tranquillity follows.
    • Epicurean physics: atoms and void, nothing from nothing, countless worlds dissolving in infinite space.
    • Epicurean ethics: pleasure is the chief good, understood as freedom from bodily pain and mental disturbance.
    • Common aim: every school seeks undisturbedness, differing only on what secures the soul's peace.
• Deep Dive
  • Book I
    • Introduction
      • Origins Claimed for Barbarians
        • Barbarian thesis: philosophy began with the Persian Magi, Babylonian Chaldaei, Indian Gymnosophists, and Celtic Druids.
        • Magi doctrines: dualism of good and evil demons, resurrection, and rejection of images.
        • Chaldaeans: study astronomy and soothsaying.
        • Gymnosophists: despise death, live on vegetables, cheese, and coarse bread.
        • Druid precepts: worship gods, do no evil, and practise manly virtue.
      • Philosophy Is Greek
        • Refutation: barbarian claims ignorantly impute Greek achievements to others.
        • Musaeus: first taught genealogy of the gods and spheres; all things from one return to one.
        • Linus: invented cosmogony and celestial motions; Anaxagoras built on his ordered creation.
        • Orpheus rejected: his attributing shameful human acts to gods disqualifies him.
        • Pythagoras coined philosophy: only God is wise; the seeker is a philosopher.
      • Successions and Wise Men
        • Two roots: Ionian school from Thales via Anaximander; Italian from Pherecydes via Pythagoras.
        • Ionian line: Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Archelaus, then Socrates.
        • Socratic branches: Plato's Academy runs Old, Middle, New; Cynic line ends in Stoic Chrysippus.
        • Italian line: Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno, Leucippus, Democritus, then Epicurus.
        • Seven wise men: Thales, Solon, Periander, Cleobulus, Chilo, Bias, Pittacus; others sometimes added.
      • Divisions and Schools
        • Three divisions: natural philosophy studies the world; ethical, life; dialectic, arguments.
        • Ten ethical sects: Academic, Cyrenaic, Elian, Megaric, Cynic, Eretrian, Dialectic, Peripatetic, Stoic, Epicurean.
        • Dogmatic vs sceptical: dogmatists affirm comprehension; sceptics suspend judgment and may write nothing.
        • School surnames: derive from cities, places, habits, masters, or characteristic doctrines.
        • Eclectic school: Potamo of Alexandria selects criteria of truth and a virtuous life as the end.
    • Life of Thales
      • Origins and First Fame
        • Lineage: son of Euxamius and Cleobule, of the Phoenician Thelidae; usually counted a native Milesian of noble birth.
        • First Wise Man: received the title when Damasias was archon, with the Seven Sages.
        • Writings: reportedly left none; the ascribed Naval Astronomy is said to be by Phocus the Samian.
        • Astronomy: first to study the heavens, foretell eclipses, and find the Lesser Bear; Xenophanes and Herodotus praise him.
      • Natural Philosophy and Mathematics
        • First principle: water is the principle of all things; the world has life and is full of daemons.
        • Soul: first to affirm human immortality; gave souls to lifeless things, judging from magnet and amber.
        • Cosmic order: found the sun's path through the ecliptic, made the sun 720 times the moon, and set the year at 365 days.
        • Geometry: learned from Egyptian priests, described a right-angled triangle in a circle, then sacrificed an ox; some credit Pythagoras.
        • Nile flood: caused by Etesian winds beating back the river's streams.
      • Practical Wisdom and Feats
        • Political foresight: kept Miletus from allying with Croesus, saving the city when Cyrus prevailed.
        • Wealth: foresaw a great olive harvest, bought olive grounds, and proved riches are easy to acquire.
        • Way of life: lived in solitude and was intimate with Thrasybulus, tyrant of Miletus.
        • Hydraulics: promised Croesus passage over the Halys without a bridge by turning the river's course.
        • Pyramids: measured them by comparing shadow lengths at the right hour.
      • The Tripod of the Wise
        • Oracle: fishermen found a tripod; Delphi said it belonged to the wisest, so it went to Thales and round the sages.
        • Dedication: Thales offered it to Apollo Didymaeus, saying he had twice received it as a reward for virtue.
        • Rival versions: Callimachus tells of Bathycles's goblet; Eudoxus and Evanthes trace it to Croesus; Andron makes it an Argive prize.
      • Sayings and Maxims
        • Cosmic sayings: God is most ancient, the world most beautiful, place greatest, intellect swiftest, necessity strongest, time wisest.
        • Ethics: never do what you blame in others; remember absent friends; be beautified by studies; help parents so children will help you.
        • Happiness: belongs to one healthy in body, easy in circumstances, and well-instructed in mind.
        • Life and death: life and death are no different; asked why he did not die, he said, “Because it makes no difference.”
        • Know yourself: the saying is his; Antisthenes assigns it to Phemonoe, saying Chilo claimed it.
      • Death and Legacy
        • Death: died as a spectator at the games, overcome by heat, thirst, and age; his tomb says his fame reaches the skies.
        • Seven Sages: their number and names were disputed—Plato inserts Myson, Ephorus Anacharsis, Hermippus lists seventeen candidates.
        • Letters: surviving letters invite Pherecydes and Solon to Miletus, revealing his philosophical circle.
    • Life of Solon
      • Debt Relief and Early Laws
        • Seisachtheia: Solon canceled debts and freed debt-slaves, beginning with his own inheritance; called "shaking off burdens."
        • Scope of relief: The ordinance released debtors' bodies and possessions, ending enslavement for nonpayment.
        • Law tablets: His numerous laws were inscribed on revolving wooden tablets.
      • Recovery of Salamis and Civic Cunning
        • Feigned madness: After a death-penalty decree against proposing war for Salamis, Solon rushed crowned into the agora.
        • Elegiac rally: "Let's go and fight for lovely Salamis" stirred Athens to renew war and conquer the island.
        • Burial proofs: Opened tombs to show Salamis burials followed Athenian customs.
        • Homeric support: Added lines to Homer linking Salaminian bands to Athens, strengthening the claim.
        • Refused rule: Athenians willingly obeyed him, but he declined to become their ruler.
      • Warning against Pisistratus and Exile
        • Armed warning: He entered the assembly with spear and shield, exposing Pisistratus's plot; "I am wiser... braver..."
        • Dismissed as mad: Council sided with Pisistratus; Solon predicted stern reality would prove his madness.
        • Poetic foretelling: "By its own great men a city falls" warned of tyranny.
        • Laying down arms: He declared "my country, I have stood by you in word and deed" and sailed into exile.
        • Letters from exile: Advised Periander to leave tyranny or hire foreign guards; refused to return while Pisistratus ruled.
      • Moral and Political Sayings
        • Speech and silence: Speech is the image of actions; discourse sealed by silence, silence by opportunity.
        • Laws as cobwebs: They hold trifling offenders but are broken by powerful ones.
        • Tyrants' favorites: Like counting-pebbles, their influence rises and falls with the tyrant's whim.
        • Wealth and insolence: Satiety is generated by wealth, insolence by satiety.
        • Parricide and injustice: He made no law against parricides, not expecting any; injustice dies when the uninjured share outrage.
        • Advice to rulers: "Rule, after you have first learnt to submit to rule"; advise what is best, not most agreeable.
      • Legal and Cultural Reforms
        • Civic standards: Neglect of parents, squandering patrimony, idleness, and debauchery were punishable.
        • Athletes vs. soldiers: Reduced athletic prizes; honors belong to war dead, whose sons were educated publicly.
        • Guardians and seals: Guardian of orphans may not live with mother; seal-engraver may not keep a ring impression.
        • Homer and calendar: Arranged Homer for bards taking cues; called the thirtieth day "old and new."
        • Punishment symmetry: Striking out a one-eyed man's eye cost both eyes; false deposit claims were capital.
      • Later Life and Death
        • Answer to Croesus: True happiness is Tellus and Cleobis/Biton, not royal splendor; peacocks outshine the adorned king.
        • Founding Soli: In Cilicia he founded Soli; colonists' corrupted Greek produced "solecism."
        • Death in Cyprus: Died at eighty; bones burned in Salamis and ashes scattered, "turned to corn."
        • Mimnermus dispute: He extended ideal lifespan to eighty and urged watchfulness against feigned citizens.
    • Life of Chilo – Life of Cleobulus
      • Life of Chilo
        • Spartan sage: Chilo became ephor and joined ephors to kings as counsellors; his concise speech was called “Chilonean.”
        • Foresight: he wished Cythera sunk; Xerxes and Nicias later proved the island’s strategic danger.
        • Ethics: avoid injustice, restrain anger and tongue, honour old age, prefer punishment to disgraceful gain.
        • Sayings: “Suretyship, and then destruction”; foresight is man’s virtue; silence about secrets is difficult.
        • Death: died of joy at Pisa hugging his victorious son; spectators honoured his funeral.
      • Life of Pittacus
        • Mytilenean leader: general who killed Phrynon with a net trap, then ruled ten years and resigned.
        • Lawgiver: doubled penalties for drunken crimes, since wine was plentiful on Lesbos.
        • Mercy: pardoned his son’s murderer and Alcaeus, saying “Pardon is better than repentance.”
        • Sayings: “Hard to be good”; “power shows the man”; “watch your opportunity.”
        • Marriage counsel: told a suitor to follow boys’ “mind your own” and choose an equal; his own high-born wife tyrannized him.
        • Self-sufficiency: refused Croesus’s gold, saying he had twice as much as he wanted.
      • Life of Bias
        • Prienian sage: ransomed Messenian maidens, educated and dowered them; Satyrus put him first among sages.
        • Tripod: declared Apollo alone is wise and refused the tripod sent to him.
        • Siege wisdom: fattened mules and corn-topped sand convinced Alyattes to make peace.
        • Justice: eloquent advocate who reserved talents for right causes; judges were told to “give a Prienian decision.”
        • Sayings: most men are wicked; hope is pleasant; bear change of fortune with magnanimity.
        • Death: died in court after winning his last case, reclining on his grandson’s bosom.
      • Life of Cleobulus
        • Lindian sage: strong and handsome, studied philosophy in Egypt; his daughter Cleobulina composed riddles.
        • Works: wrote three thousand lines of songs and sayings; the Midas epigram is attributed to him.
        • Enigma: a father with twelve daughters, each with thirty children, is the year.
        • Apophthegms: moderation is best; opportunity is powerful; train daughters as girls in age but women in sense.
        • Social counsel: serve friends and enemies to turn both into friends; avoid giving friends blame and enemies openings.
        • Letter to Solon: praised democratic, maritime Lindus as a safe haven from Pisistratus.
    • Life of Periander – Life of Epimenides
      • Life of Periander
        • Tyrant of Corinth: Heraclid son of Cypselus; ruled forty years after turning legitimate power into tyranny with bodyguards.
        • Domestic tragedy: Killed pregnant wife Melissa on concubines’ false charges, then burned the concubines alive.
        • Fall of his house: Sent grieving son Lycophron to Corcyra; Corcyreans killed him, and Periander’s revenge was thwarted at Samos.
        • Crafty death: Ensured his tomb stayed unknown by staging a chain of killings, then placed himself before the first killers.
        • Sayings: Monarchs should be guarded by citizens’ goodwill, not arms; gain is disgraceful; honour outlasts pleasure.
        • Letters: Invited the wise men to Corinth; warned Procles after Melissa’s death; received Thrasybulus’ advice to cut down the tallest ears of corn.
      • Life of Anacharsis, the Scythian
        • Scythian sage: Son of a Scythian king and a Greek mother; wrote eight hundred verses on laws, war, and temperance.
        • Solon’s friend: Gained entry to Solon’s house by declaring himself already in Solon’s country.
        • Fatal Hellenism: Killed by his brother for trying to replace Scythian customs with Greek ways.
        • Aphorisms: A vine bears pleasure, drunkenness, and disgust; sailors are four fingers from death; the tongue is both good and bad.
        • Inventions: Credited with the anchor and the potter’s wheel.
      • Life of Myson
        • Chosen wise man: The Delphic oracle named Myson wiser than Anacharsis; Plato ranked him among the Seven instead of Periander.
        • Obscure origin: From the small village of Chen; his lowly birth led others to attribute his sayings to Pisistratus.
        • Practical wisdom: Found fitting a plough handle in summer, saying it was the right season for preparing one.
        • Misanthrope: Laughed alone in Lacedæmon because solitude itself was reason enough.
        • Saying: Seek words in things, not things in words.
      • Life of Epimenides
        • Cretan wonder-worker: Slept fifty-seven years in a cave, then awoke thinking only a short nap had passed.
        • Purifier of Athens: Ended the plague by releasing black and white sheep from the Areopagus; nameless altars remained as memorials.
        • Longevity: Reported to have lived 157 years, or 299 by Cretan account.
        • Writings: Composed poems on the Curetes, the Argo, and Cretan sacrifices and constitution.
        • Legendary gifts: Received food from nymphs, never seen eating; claimed several past lives and foresaw Athens’ suffering from Munychia.
        • Letter to Solon: Predicted Pisistratus’ tyranny would not last, urging Solon to visit him in Crete.
    • Life of Pherecydes
      • Legend and Prophecy
        • Syrian sage: son of Babys, pupil of Pittacus; first Greek to write on nature and gods.
        • Ship omen: prophesied a passing ship would sink, and it sank before witnesses.
        • Earthquake forecast: predicted an earthquake within three days from well-water.
        • Messene warning: urged host Perilaus to flee; the city fell when he stayed.
        • Spartan dream: told Lacedaemonians to honour neither gold nor silver on Hercules’ dream command.
        • Ephesian victory: asked to be dragged into Magnesian land after death; burial brought Ephesus victory.
      • Death and Proverb
        • Lousy disease: died eaten by lice; Pythagoras saw his finger through the door: “You may see by my skin.”
        • Philosophers’ proverb: words became proverb for worsening affairs; misapplied to good affairs.
        • Rival account: Aristoxenus says he fell sick, was buried by Pythagoras in Delos.
        • Delphi version: some say he threw himself down from the Corycian hill.
      • Identity and Teaching
        • Name confusion: Andron says two Syrians—astronomer and theologian; Eratosthenes says one Syrian, one Athenian.
        • Pythagoras’ master: Pherecydes taught Pythagoras; some marvels are credited to Pythagoras too.
        • Cosmogony: his book opens “Jupiter, Time, and Chthon existed externally”; Chthonia became Tellus as a reward.
        • Sun-dial: a sundial preserved in Syra was of his making.
      • Epigrammatic Legacy
        • Duris epigram: “The limit of all wisdom is in me”; sends report to Pythagoras as first of Greeks.
        • Ion of Chios: praises his valour, modesty, and study of many nations’ manners.
        • Diogenes’ verses: in Pherecratean metre, lice consume him; his corpse gives victory to Ephesus.
      • Letter to Thales
        • Flourished: active around the fifty-ninth Olympiad; sometimes numbered among the wise men.
        • Letter to Thales: charges servants to bring his book after burial; Thales may publish or keep it.
        • Intellectual honesty: claims no certain knowledge, only arguments on divine nature; speaks obscurely.
        • Death invitation: shows his eaten skin through the door and bids friends come to tomorrow’s funeral.
  • Book II
    • Life of Anaximander – Life of Archelaus
      • Life of Anaximander
        • Primary element: the Infinite or boundless, undefined as air, water, or anything else; parts change while the whole remains unchangeable.
        • Cosmology: Earth lies at the center, spherical; moon borrows light from the sun; sun is pure fire no smaller than Earth.
        • Inventions: first to use the gnomon on Spartan sundials for solstices and equinoxes; also made clocks, a map, and a globe.
        • Written work: published a concise statement of his doctrines, which Apollodorus the Athenian encountered.
        • Life: died near sixty-four in Polycrates' era; he answered laughing children, “We must then sing better.”
      • Life of Anaximenes
        • Pupil and style: pupil of Anaximander (or Parmenides); wrote in pure Ionian; flourished in the sixty-third Olympiad, died near the fall of Sardis.
        • Cosmology: principles of everything were air and the Infinite; stars move around the earth, not beneath it.
        • Letter on Thales: reported his stargazing fall; pupils preserved his teachings, attributing the beginning of all wisdom to Thales.
        • Letter on politics: praised Pythagoras’ move to Crotona; Milesians faced tyrants and Medes, so contemplation was impossible amid fear of death or slavery.
      • Life of Anaxagoras
        • Mind as ordering principle: first to attribute mind to matter; all things were mixed, then Mind came and arranged them in distinct order.
        • Natural philosophy: sun is burning iron larger than Peloponnesus; moon has houses, hills, ravines; primary elements are small bodies of similar parts.
        • Physical explanations: winds from rarefied air; thunder and lightning from clouds; earthquakes from air returning into earth; animals from moisture, heat, earth.
        • Generous detachment: gave his patrimony to relatives and devoted himself to nature; pointed to heaven when accused of lacking patriotism.
        • Trial: prosecuted for impiety by Cleon or Thucydides, defended by Pericles; he said nature had long condemned his judges.
        • Legacy: first prose writer; read Homer as praising virtue and justice; asked that children play yearly in his death month.
      • Life of Archelaus
        • Bridge to Athens: pupil of Anaxagoras and master of Socrates; first to import natural philosophy from Ionia to Athens.
        • Moral turn: natural philosophy ended with him as Socrates introduced ethics; he treated laws and justice as matters of law, not nature.
        • Physics: two primary causes, heat and cold; water becomes earth under fire, air when liquefied; earth surrounded by air, air by fire.
        • Generation: animals and humans generated from hot mud; sea is filtered through hollows of the earth.
        • Physical theories: first to say sound arises from percussion of air; sun is greatest of stars; universe is boundless.
    • The Examined Life of Socrates (Life of Socrates · I)
      • Origins and the Ethical Turn
        • Born to statuary Sophroniscus and midwife Phænarete, citizen of Alopece.
        • Some say he was a slave who carved stones; the clothed Graces on the Acropolis are attributed to him.
        • Studied under Anaxagoras, then Archelaus the natural philosopher after Anaxagoras’s condemnation.
        • Reputed co-author of Euripides’ tragedies; comic poets Mnesimachus and Callias jest about it.
        • Turned from natural philosophy to ethics: the good and harm that befall a man in his own house.
      • Rhetoric and Philosophical Method
        • First to teach oratory with disciple Æschines; first to converse about human life.
        • The Thirty forbade his lessons in speaking and arguing; Aristophanes mocked him for making the worse appear the better reason.
        • Sought truth in argument, not merely to strip away his interlocutors’ opinions.
        • Bore mob violence calmly: "Suppose an ass had kicked me, would you have had me bring an action against him?"
        • On Heraclitus: "What I have understood is good; only the book requires a Delian diver."
        • He knew nothing except his ignorance, though his dæmon foretold the future to him.
      • Civic Courage and Military Valor
        • Devoted to democracy; alone voted to acquit the ten generals.
        • Defied Critias, refusing to deliver Leon of Salamis to the Thirty for murder.
        • Refused to escape prison; reproved mourners and discoursed beautifully — first philosopher condemned and executed.
        • Saved Xenophon at Delium, retreating calmly while Athens fled; fought at Potidæa.
        • Yielded the prize of valor to Alcibiades, his beloved.
      • Simplicity and Self-Sufficiency
        • Refused Alcibiades’ land: "If I wanted shoes, I should be laughed at if I took it."
        • "How many things are there which I do not want"; spurned money from Archelaus of Macedon and other princes.
        • Taught without pay; those who want fewest things are nearest to the Gods.
        • So temperate he alone escaped the plague; refused Charmidas’s offered slaves.
        • Ransomed Phædo from slavery, made him a philosopher.
      • Family, Friends, and Persuasion
        • Married Xanthippe and Myrto, Aristides’ dowerless daughter; some say he kept both at once.
        • Soothed Lamprocles’ anger at his mother; turned Euthyphron from prosecuting his father.
        • Redirected Glaucon from politics, drew Charmidas into it; made Lysis moral.
        • "Men count their property but cannot name their friends."
        • Chided Euclid: he would manage sophists, not govern men.
        • Praised leisure; played the lyre and danced, since one should learn what one does not know.
    • Wisdom, Trial, and Aftermath (Life of Socrates · II)
      • Practical Sayings
        • Virtue: avoid excess in everything; learn geometry only to measure land for buying and selling.
        • Marriage: "Whichever you do, you will repent it."
        • Self-image: people polish statues to resemble men while letting themselves become stone.
        • Mirror: young men should study their reflection—to be worthy of beauty or hide ugliness with accomplishments.
        • Living: other men live to eat, but Socrates ate to live.
        • Self-gift: Æschines offered himself; Socrates called it the greatest value.
      • Marriage and Xanthippe
        • Thunder and rain: after abuse and water, "Did I not say Xanthippe thunders and soon rains?"
        • Pulley and geese: he endured her like a pulley; she brought children as geese bring eggs.
        • Market-place tussle: she tore his cloak; he joked friends would cheer "Well done, Socrates, well done, Xanthippe."
        • Horseman rule: manage a restive wife like a violent horse; after Xanthippe, anyone is easy.
      • Envy and Accusation
        • Delphic oracle: priestess declared Socrates of all mortals the wisest.
        • Envy: wisdom and convicting pretenders drew envy, especially from Anytus.
        • Anytus's grudge: unable to bear jesting, set Aristophanes, then persuaded Meletus to prosecute.
        • Accusers: Anytus for magistrates, Lycon for orators, Meletus for poets.
        • Indictment: impiety, introducing strange deities, and corrupting the young; death demanded.
        • Spurious speech: Polycrates' accusation is false—it mentions Conon's walls built after Socrates' death.
      • Trial and Condemnation
        • Lysias's defense: a fine speech but unsuitable—like fine clothes that do not fit.
        • Penalty proposal: offered a small fine, then claimed maintenance in the Prytaneum as his due.
        • Verdict: condemned by 281 votes; death added by eighty more.
        • Athenian sentence: "The Athenians have condemned you."—"And nature them," some say Anaxagoras said.
        • Phaedo: he died after many admirable conversations recorded in Plato's Phaedo.
      • Death and Last Words
        • Dream of Phthia: "On the third day you'll come to lovely Phthia"; he told Æschines he would die in three days.
        • Hemlock robe: "Why was my own dress good enough to live in, and not good enough to die in?"
        • Wife's lament: "You die undeservedly."—"Would you have had me deserve death?"
        • Paean and fable: he reportedly composed a paean and an Aesopic fable, authorship disputed.
      • Aftermath and Successors
        • Athenian repentance: closed gymnasia, banished accusers, condemned Meletus; bronze statue by Lysippus.
        • Anytus's exile: Heraclea expelled him on arrival.
        • Ingratitude precedent: Athenians fined Homer as mad and mocked Tyrtæus, yet honored Astydamas.
        • Socratic school: chiefs Plato, Xenophon, Antisthenes; Plato founded the Academy.
        • Dating: born in Apsephion's archonship; died aged seventy in first year of 95th Olympiad.
        • Other Socrateses: historian, peripatetic, epigrammatist, writer of invocations to the Gods.
    • Life of Xenophon – Life of Æschines
      • Life of Xenophon
        • Socrates' call: Blocked in a lane, Socrates asked where men become virtuous; Xenophon followed, becoming his disciple.
        • First memoirist: He first recorded Socratic conversations as Memorabilia and first wrote a history of philosophers.
        • Cyrus expedition: Invited by Proxenus, he asked Delphi how to go, not whether; Socrates blamed the evasion but approved.
        • Exile and patrons: Condemned by Athens as a Spartan-lover; served Agesilaus, then settled at Scillus under Lacedæmonian protection.
        • Family and loss: Sons Gryllus and Diodorus; Gryllus died heroically at Mantinea, and Xenophon crowned himself again on hearing he fell gloriously.
        • Legacy: Called the Attic Muse for sweet diction; wrote some forty books, including Cyropædia, Anabasis, and Hellenica.
      • Life of Æschines
        • Socratic fidelity: Industrious from boyhood; Socrates praised "the son of the sausage-seller" as the one who honored him properly.
        • Escape story: Idomeneus said Æschines urged Socrates to flee; Plato credited Crito, favoring Aristippus.
        • Disputed dialogues: Seven dialogues circulated under his name; Menedemus and Persæus accused him of taking Socratic works from Xanthippe or Pasiphon.
        • Poverty and Sicily: Needy, he sold dialogues to Dionysius in Sicily; later in Athens he wrote speeches for litigants instead of competing as a sophist.
        • Rhetorical skill: Known for oratory, imitating Gorgias; Lysias attacked him in a speech On Sycophancy.
        • Canonical esteem: Panætius ranked his dialogues genuine alongside Plato, Xenophon, and Antisthenes.
    • Aristippus: Adaptability and the Art of Pleasure (Life of Aristippus · I)
      • Socratic Rogue
        • First fee-charging Socratic: Aristippus coined money from pupils and sent some to Socrates, who refused it.
        • Hated by Xenophon: Xenophon's attack on pleasure targeted Aristippus, putting the argument in Socrates' mouth.
        • Supreme adaptor: fitted every place, time, and person, and bore all changes of fortune easily.
        • Favored by Dionysius: enjoyed what lay before him and did not toil for what was absent.
        • Mocked epithets: Diogenes called him the king's dog; Timon snarled at his luxurious softness.
      • Courtier's Self-Possession
        • Partridge price: fifty drachmas meant no more to him than an obol would to another man.
        • Three courtesans: took all three from Dionysius, then dismissed them—mastery lay in easy disregard.
        • Tyrant's spit: endured the insult, like sea spray endured while fishing for a sturgeon.
        • Vegetables reply: "If you knew how to behave among men, you would not be washing vegetables."
        • Philosophy's yield: "the power of associating confidently with everybody."
      • Pleasure Defended
        • Gods' festivals: extravagance cannot be a fault if it appears in the festivals of the gods.
        • Laws abrogated: philosophers would still live the same; wisdom shapes conduct beyond law.
        • Expense and virtue: Dionysius lives expensively and well, so the two can coexist.
        • Lais possessed: "I possess her, but I am not possessed by her"—enjoy pleasure without slavery.
        • Drinking boast: a mule can drink much without being drunk; capacity is not wisdom.
      • Teaching by Wit
        • Broken horses: educated men surpass uneducated as broken horses surpass unbroken.
        • Theatre stone: an educated son will at least not sit like one stone on another.
        • Slave price: five hundred drachmas buys a slave; "buy him, and you will have a pair."
        • Fee purpose: took money from acquaintances to teach them what they ought to spend on.
        • Socrates vs. Dionysius: went to Socrates for instruction (παιδεῖα), to Dionysius for diversion (παιδιᾶ).
      • Legacy and Doctrine
        • Four Aristippi: the Cyrenaic, an Arcadian historian, a grandson called μητροδίδαντος, and a New Academic.
        • Disputed corpus: credited with histories, dialogues, letters, and dissertations—or, by Sosicrates, nothing.
        • Chief good: defined as "a gentle motion tending to sensation," the core Cyrenaic hedonist stamp.
    • Cyrenaic Successors and Radical Hedonism (Life of Aristippus · II)
      • Successors and Schools
        • Lineage: Aristippus's pupils included daughter Arete, Æthiops, and Antipater; Arete taught the mother-taught Aristippus, who taught Theodorus.
        • Later Cyrenaic labels: Hegesias, Anniceris, and Theodorus founded the Hegesiac, Annicerean, and Theodorean branches.
        • Phaedo's heirs: a parallel succession is named: the Eretrians.
      • Cyrenaic Doctrine
        • Two emotions: pleasure is a moderate motion, pain a rough one; all animals seek pleasure and shun pain.
        • Chief good: bodily pleasure is desired for itself; happiness is an aggregate of particular pleasures, not the final end.
        • Not Epicurean tranquillity: pleasure is not absence of pain; both are motions, while undisturbedness is a sleep-like neutral state.
        • Pleasure from any cause: even shameful actions yield pleasure that is good; justice and honour are conventional, not natural.
        • Bodily over mental: corporeal pleasures and pains outweigh mental ones; mental feelings may arise from one's country's fortunes.
        • Sensations and causes: sensations alone are graspable; their causes are unknowable, so natural philosophy is abandoned as impossible.
      • Hegesiaci
        • No stable happiness: body's sensations, mind's sympathy, and fortune preclude complete happiness; life and death can both be desirable.
        • Indifferent externals: wealth, poverty, slavery, freedom, birth, and glory do not affect pleasure; nothing is naturally pleasant or unpleasant.
        • Radical self-interest: the wise man acts only for himself; he rejects gratitude, friendship, and beneficence as merely useful.
        • Avoiding pain: chief good is living free from trouble and pain; errors deserve pardon, since no one errs intentionally.
      • Annicerei
        • Social bonds restored: Annicereans accept friendship, gratitude, filial duty, and patriotism; wise man can be happy even under annoyance.
        • Friendship from benevolence: friends are not kept for advantage; one should endure deprivation for them, though pleasure remains chief good.
        • Custom over reason: confidence and disdain for opinion come from trained deference to others' sentiments, not from reason alone.
      • Theodorean System
        • Radical hedonism: joy and grief are the chief goods; knowledge brings joy, ignorance grief; pleasure and pain are intermediate.
        • No friends or fatherland: the wise are self-sufficient and need no friends; a wise man's country is the world.
        • Conventional morality: theft, adultery, and sacrilege are not naturally disgraceful; the wise may indulge passions when opinion is ignored.
        • Theological influence: Theodorus rejected popular gods and wrote On Gods, from which Epicurus drew principal ideas.
      • Life and Wit of Theodorus
        • "Theos" nickname: Stilpo tricked Theodorus into accepting the title "god"; he was nearly tried by the Areopagus.
        • Banished wit: compared Athens to Semele and himself to Bacchus; told Lysimachus he would not return unless Ptolemy sent him.
        • Metrocles exchange: Theodorus told the leek-washing Cynic he would not need vegetables if he knew how to associate with men.
        • Later life: honored by Megas in Cyrene; on exile he quipped, "You drive me from Africa to Greece."
        • Namesakes: a catalogue lists twenty Theodoroi—geometers, orators, painters, Stoics, physicians, and poets.
    • Life of Phædo – Life of Simon
      • Life of Phædo
        • Ransom and freedom: enslaved after Elis fell, Socrates had him ransomed; he studied philosophy as a free man.
        • Genuine dialogues: Zopyrus, Simon, Nicias, Medius, Scythian Discourses; some attributions disputed.
        • Succession and school: Plistanus, then Menedemus and Asclepiades; Eliac school became Eretrian.
      • Life of Euclides
        • Founder and school: native of Megara, studied Parmenides; successors called Megaric, Contentious, Dialecticians.
        • Chief good is unity: called prudence, God, intellect; all contrary to good denied.
        • Rejects comparative reasoning: arguments from like or unlike are useless; reason about things directly.
        • Six dialogues: Lamprias, Æschines, Phœnix, Crito, Alcibiades, Amatory.
        • Dialectical heirs: Eubulides’ paradoxes—Liar, Sorites, Horned, Bald; Alexinus, Euphantus, Diodorus Cronus.
      • Life of Stilpo
        • Rhetorical mastery: Megarian who outshone contemporaries and drew pupils from other schools, including Zeno.
        • Wit and simplicity: joked with Crates; called himself “a real genuine man” before wondering crowds.
        • Against universal forms: “man in general” speaks of nobody; present things cannot be the ancient vegetable.
        • Patronage and loss: honored by Ptolemy and Demetrius; when Megara fell, he lost nothing because he kept his learning.
        • Dialogues and death: wrote nine frigid-style dialogues; died in old age after drinking wine to hasten death.
      • Life of Crito
        • Devoted friend: Athenian who cared for Socrates and saw that he never lacked anything.
        • Sons as pupils: Critobulus, Hermogenes, Epigenes, and Ctesippus all studied with Socrates.
        • Seventeen dialogues: one volume on teaching, statesmanship, law, the divine, knowledge, and science.
      • Life of Simon
        • Leather-cutter philosopher: recorded Socrates’ workshop conversations; dialogues called “leathern.”
        • Thirty-three dialogues: combined in one volume; topics include gods, justice, courage, laws, music, and number.
        • First Socratic dialogues: some say he first reduced Socrates’ conversations into dialogue form.
        • Independence: refused Pericles’ support, saying he would not sell his freedom of speech.
    • Life of Menedemus
      • Origins and School
        • Lineage: Son of Clisthenes, a poor noble builder and tent-maker; Menedemus learned both trades.
        • Desertion: Sent as a garrison soldier to Megara, he deserted and went to Plato’s Academy.
        • Mentors: With Asclepiades he studied under Stilpo, then Phaedo’s followers; he later admired only Stilpo.
        • School labels: His group was called Elean, then Eretrian, after his native city.
        • Sarcastic barb: Alexinius mocked him: “A wise man has no need to draw a tent nor a decree.”
      • Severe and Free-Spoken Character
        • Reputation: Crates called him the “Eretrian bull”; Timon, a “frowning, bristling, frothy sage.”
        • Silent rebukes: He drew an insulting picture of an insolent youth instead of words.
        • Radish retort: To a profligate: “Do you not know radishes also have pleasant juice?”
        • Kingly reply: To Antigonus’s revel question he sent back: “Tell him he is the son of a king.”
        • Olive warning: At a sumptuous dinner he ate only olives, silently rebuking extravagance.
      • Paradoxes of Temperament
        • Nervous vanity: While working as a builder, he screened Asclepiades whenever anyone passed.
        • Stage fright: Setting down incense in public, he missed the burner entirely.
        • Superstition: Unknowingly eating discarded meat made him sick until Asclepiades blamed the idea, not the meat.
        • Athletic frame: Even in old age he kept an athlete’s firm, ruddy body; his statue shows him nearly naked.
        • Gentle hostility: Harsh in speech but wonderfully gentle in action, he even helped Alexinus’s wife.
      • Philosophical Style
        • Irregular school: He kept no order or arranged seats; listeners stood or sat as they happened.
        • Simple axioms: He rejected negative and complex axioms, accepting only simple affirmations.
        • Anti-dialectics: Alexinus’s father-beating question he answered evasively, refusing yes/no conditions.
        • Highest good: “It is a much greater good to desire what is proper” than to succeed in all desires.
        • Unwritten thought: He wrote nothing and held no principle tenaciously, yet argued until black in the face.
      • Friendship and Hospitality
        • Orestes bond: His friendship with Asclepiades rivaled that of Pylades and Orestes.
        • Shared household: They married mother and daughter, kept one house; Menedemus still called Asclepiades doorkeeper after death.
        • Bequest contest: Each refused to take the larger share of a three-thousand-piece bequest, so neither received any.
        • Literary table: He entertained poets and musicians, loving Homer, Sophocles, and Achaeus.
        • Simple banquets: Beans, lupins, fruit, and a small cup; guests supplied pillows.
      • Political Career and Death
        • Rise: Once called a trifler, he became chief magistrate and envoy of Eretria.
        • Embassy: Persuaded Demetrius to remit fifty talents from the city’s annual two-hundred-talent payment.
        • Antigonus: The king called himself his pupil; Menedemus drafted a plain, unflattering victory decree.
        • Accusation: Charged with betraying the city, he fled to Oropus, was expelled from the Amphiaraus temple, and returned secretly.
        • Death: Broken-hearted at Antigonus’s court, he died; Heraclides says he starved himself for seven days, aged seventy-four.
  • Book III
    • Birth, Doctrine, and Political Trials (Life of Plato · I)
      • Origins and Family
        • Lineage: son of Ariston and Perictione, descended from Solon on his mother’s side, from Codrus on his father’s side.
        • Mythic nativity: Ariston, seeing Apollo in a dream after abandoning his pursuit of Perictione, left her untouched until Plato’s birth.
        • Birth and death: born in the 88th Olympiad; died aged eighty-one, or eighty-four per Neanthes.
        • Siblings: brothers Adimantus and Glaucon; sister Potone, mother of Speusippus.
        • Rename: born Aristocles; called Plato for his robust build, wide forehead, or breadth of style.
      • Education and Formation
        • Early teachers: studied letters under Dionysius and gymnastics under the wrestler Ariston of Argos.
        • Artistic youth: painted, wrote dithyrambs, lyrics, and tragedies before turning to philosophy.
        • Socratic conversion: aged twenty, heard Socrates, burnt his poems, and became his pupil.
        • Wider studies: after Socrates, studied with Cratylus and Hermogenes; traveled to Megara, Cyrene, Italy, and Egypt.
        • Military record: fought at Tanagra, Corinth, and Delium, where he won the prize of valor.
      • Doctrines and Innovations
        • Synthesis: combined Heraclitean sensation, Pythagorean intellect, and Socratic politics.
        • Theory of Ideas: eternal intelligible models; particulars are named by partaking of them as copies.
        • Debt to Epicharmus: Alcimus shows Plato transcribed much of the comic poet on sensation, intellect, and ideas.
        • Debt to Sophron: brought the mime-writer’s books to Athens and drew on them for moral speculations.
        • Firsts: introduced dialogue form, analytical method, the terms antipodes, elements, dialectics, and divine providence.
      • Sicilian Voyages and Politics
        • First voyage: criticized Dionysius I’s tyranny, was sold into slavery at Ægina, ransomed by Anniceris.
        • Second voyage: asked Dionysius II for land to found an ideal constitution; promise unfulfilled; Archytas secured his release.
        • Third voyage: went to reconcile Dion and Dionysius, failed, and returned home.
        • Political abstention: stayed out of Athenian politics; refused to legislate for Arcadians and Thebans unless they accepted equality.
        • Defense of Chabrias: alone defended the general on a capital charge, braving the sycophant’s threats of hemlock.
      • Reputation and Legacy
        • Socrates’ dream: saw a cygnet on his knees that flew up singing; next day pronounced Plato that bird.
        • Personal gravity: so modest and well regulated as a youth that he was never seen to laugh excessively.
        • Comic mockery: Theopompus, Anaxandrides, Timon, and Alexis ridiculed his solemn manner and name.
        • Public honor: at the Olympic games all the Greeks turned to look at him; a Persian erected his statue in the Academy.
        • The Academy: settled in the suburban grove of Hecademus and taught there.
    • Plato's Loves, Feuds, Doctrines, Legacy (Life of Plato · II)
      • Comic Poets’ Mockery
        • Comic poets: Amphis, Cratinus, Alexis, and Anaxilas lampoon Plato’s airs, gloomy looks, and useless curiosities.
        • Onions and saltpetre: Plato’s study of nature becomes a joke about learning saltpetre and onions.
        • Immortality in comedy: Alexis’s verses about body dying and soul rising echo Plato’s doctrine.
      • Loves and Epigrams
        • Aster and Dion: epigrams mourn Aster as morning star and Dion as honored friend buried at Syracuse.
        • Phaedrus and Alexis: a shared epigram laments both beloveds and warns the mind against self-torment.
        • Archianassa: her wrinkles still hold “genial love”; her youthful beauty once scorched beholders.
        • Agathon kiss: Plato’s soul hovers on his lips, wanting to migrate into Agathon.
        • Apple epigrams: apples offered teach that beauty is fleeting and even Xanthippe will decay.
        • Attributed verses: epitaph for Eretrians, Venus debating Muses, and a gold/halter tale round out the collection.
      • Rivalries and Textual Disputes
        • Molon’s quip: less marvel at Dionysius at Corinth than at Plato in Sicily.
        • Xenophon feud: rival Banquet, Defence of Socrates, and Moral Reminiscences; neither mentions the other, and Plato calls Cyropædia a romance.
        • Antisthenes quarrel: shown arguing in a circle, Antisthenes wrote Sathon; Socrates said Lysis lied about him.
        • Aristippus and Æschines: Plato faults Aristippus for missing Socrates’ death and gives Æschines’ prison speech to Crito.
        • Patient auditor: Aristotle alone sat through Plato’s On the Soul when all the rest left.
        • Textual transmission: Philip of Opus copied Laws from waxen tablets; Republic was allegedly found in Protagoras’ Contradictions.
      • Sayings and Habits
        • Habit over stake: condemns dice-playing because the habit is no trifle.
        • Passion and punishment: asks Xenocrates to flog a slave because anger makes him unfit to punish.
        • Horse-pride: dismounts from a horse, fearing he will catch “horse-pride”; advises drunkards to look in a mirror.
        • Truth and sleep: truth is the sweetest thing to hear or speak; “no one while sleeping is good for anything.”
        • Fame: “A man must first make a name, and the monument will follow.”
      • Death, Will, and School
        • Death: died in Philip’s reign, some say of “Plato’s lice”; buried in the Academy.
        • Will: leaves farms and goods to Adimantus, frees a slave, names executors including Speusippus.
        • Epitaphs: tomb verses liken him to Æsculapius, healer of the soul, and his soul to an eagle borne to Olympus.
        • Disciples: Speusippus, Xenocrates, Aristotle, Dion, and many others, including two women in men’s clothes.
      • Dialogues and Doctrines
        • Dialogue perfected: though Zeno and Alexamenus wrote dialogues, Plato gave the form its final polish and first honour.
        • Two modes: Platonic discourse guides through speculation or practice, and investigates through midwifery, trial, demonstration, or distinction.
        • Classifications: dialogues divide by subject into natural, logical, ethical, and political, not by dramatic labels.
        • Dogmatism: Plato states his own views via Socrates, Timæus, an Athenian poet, and an Eleatic stranger; refutes through Thrasymachus.
        • Inductive argument: refutes by contraries, establishes by consequents, as in the proof that the soul is immortal.
        • Prose-poetry style: Aristotle called the treatises something between poems and prose.
    • Plato's Dialogues, Soul, and Cosmos (Life of Plato · III)
      • The Tetralogical Arrangement
        • Tragedy analogy: as Thespis, Æschylus, and Sophocles perfected tragedy, Socrates added ethics and Plato dialectic to philosophy.
        • Fifty-six dialogues: arranged in nine tetralogies, with Republic and Laws counted as single works.
        • First tetralogy: Euthyphron, Defence of Socrates, Criton, Phædo — portrays the philosopher's life and death.
        • Later tetralogies: group logical, tentative, moral, and political dialogues by shared subject and method.
        • Two titles per work: one from the chief speaker, one from the subject.
      • Alternative Divisions and Spurious Works
        • Trilogies: Aristophanes the grammarian groups dialogues in triads, e.g. Republic, Timæus, Critias.
        • Variable openings: some begin with Republic, others with Alcibiades, Theages, Euthyphro, or Defence of Socrates.
        • Spurious dialogues: Midon, Eryxias, Alcyon, Axiochus, and others are rejected by critics.
        • Attribution caveat: Alcyon may be by Leon, according to Phavorinus.
      • Style, Marks, and Interpretation
        • Deliberate obscurity: Plato varies terms and senses to keep his system unintelligible to the ignorant.
        • Interpreting arguments: requires asking what is said, why it is said, and whether it is true.
        • Marginal signs: × marks style, ※ doctrines, obelus rejection, Ceraunium connection of ideas.
        • Wisdom defined: knowledge of intelligible real things, with the gods and disembodied soul as objects.
      • Soul and Cosmology
        • Immortal soul: clothed in many bodies, self-moving, threefold; reason in head, passion in heart, appetite near navel and liver.
        • Soul's structure: harmonic circles — the circle of the same produces knowledge, the circle of the different engenders opinion.
        • Two principles: God and matter; matter is formless and unordered, brought by God into a settled cosmos of four elements.
        • Geometric elements: fire is pyramid, air octagon, water eicosagon, earth cube — earth alone unchangeable.
        • World as living god: one, spherical, imperishable; fire makes it visible, earth firm; time is the moving image of eternity.
      • Ethics, Friendship, and Politics
        • The end: to become like God; virtue suffices for happiness, though bodily and external goods are useful instruments.
        • Divine superintendence: gods oversee human affairs; dæmons exist; justice is God's law enforcing posthumous punishment.
        • Three kinds of good: goods of soul, body, and external goods — justice and courage, health and strength, friends and wealth.
        • Three friendships: natural kinship, companionship (Pylades and Orestes), and hospitality between strangers; some add love.
        • Five constitutions: democracy, aristocracy, oligarchy, monarchy, and tyranny.
    • Plato’s Systematic Divisions of Things (Life of Plato · IV)
      • Political Order and Law
        • Forms of government: democracy, aristocracy, oligarchy, monarchy, tyranny; Carthage’s kingship rests on law, Sparta’s and Macedonia’s on family.
        • Tyranny: a single ruler governs a cajoled or constrained people, unlike lawful kingship.
        • Rule has five modes: law, nature, custom, family, force — natural rule makes the male rule the female.
        • Law is twofold: written law regulates cities; unwritten custom forbids nakedness and women’s clothes.
        • Lawfulness is threefold: good laws, obedience to them, or good customs; lawlessness mirrors bad, disobeyed, or absent laws.
      • Justice, Virtue, and Happiness
        • Justice has three objects: piety toward the gods, fair dealing with men, respect for the dead.
        • Nobility has four sources: virtuous, royal, or illustrious ancestors, or one’s own magnanimity.
        • Virtue has four species: prudence, justice, manly gallantry, and temperance govern action, bargains, dangers, and appetites.
        • Happiness has five parts: wisdom in counsel, healthy senses and body, good fortune, good reputation, and riches.
        • Good things are three kinds: possessed, shared, or realized in oneself — as justice, abstract good, and being virtuous.
      • Knowledge, Science, and Discourse
        • Knowledge is threefold: practical, productive, and theoretical — politics and flute-playing act; building produces; geometry contemplates.
        • Medicine has five species: pharmaceutical, manual, dietetic, diagnostic, and remedial.
        • Discourse has five heads: political, rhetorical, private, dialectic, and professional.
        • Rhetoric has six species: exhortation, dissuasion, accusation, defence, encomium, and blame.
        • Correct speaking has four rules: right content, right amount, right audience, right time.
      • Soul, Power, and Beneficence
        • Soul has three parts: reason deliberates, appetite desires food and embrace, passion feels confidence and anger.
        • Power is fourfold: intellect, body, army and riches, and the capacity to act or be acted upon.
        • Beneficence is fourfold: through money, personal exertion, knowledge, or words.
        • Philanthropy is threefold: greeting all, aiding the unfortunate, and being a pleasant boon companion.
        • Good counsel uses three times: past instances, present conditions, future consequences.
      • Value, Being, and Art
        • Good has four kinds: private virtue, virtue and justice themselves, suitable food/exercise/medicine, and skilled flute playing or acting.
        • Existing things are good, bad, or neutral: intemperance and folly injure; walking and eating may help or hurt.
        • Contraries oppose goods, evils, or neutrals: justice vs injustice, extravagance vs stinginess, heavy vs light.
        • Beauty is threefold: praiseworthy face, useful instrument or house, and laws/habits beautiful by utility.
        • Arts are three kinds: preparatory (mining/woodcutting), alterative (metalwork/carpentry), and instrumental (horsemanship/music).
      • Further Divisions
        • Ends of affairs are four: law, nature, art, and chance.
        • Music is threefold: mouth alone (song), mouth and hands (singing to harp), hands alone (harp playing).
        • Voice is twofold: animated versus inanimate; animated voice includes lettered human speech and unlettered animal sounds.
        • Being divides by parts: some things are indivisible (unity, point, sound); divisible things have similar or dissimilar parts.
        • Being divides by relation: independent existences need no extra explanation; relatives need comparison — greater, faster, more beautiful.
  • Book IV
    • Life of Speusippus – Life of Crantor
      • Life of Speusippus
        • Successor: Plato's nephew, headed the Academy eight years from the 108th Olympiad.
        • Temperament: passionate and pleasure-loving, unlike Plato; once threw a puppy into a well.
        • Innovations: first to probe what is common to the sciences and to publish Isocrates' secrets.
        • Pupils: Lasthenea and Axiothea of Plato's circle studied with him; he charged fees.
        • End: paralyzed and despairing, he summoned Xenocrates and took his own life.
      • Life of Xenocrates
        • Character: solemn and grave; Plato urged him to sacrifice to the Graces.
        • Self-mastery: Phryne called him a statue, not a man, after failing to seduce him.
        • Trustworthiness: Athenians freed him alone from the oath required of witnesses.
        • Contentment: returned most of Alexander's gift, saying Alexander had more mouths to feed.
        • Incorruptibility: the sole ambassador Philip could not bribe; quoted Homer to free captives.
        • Civic humiliation: sold as a metic for unpaid tax, bought and freed by Demetrius Phalereus.
      • Life of Polemo
        • Conversion: drunk and garlanded, he burst in on Xenocrates' lecture on temperance and was won over.
        • Constancy: afterwards never changed voice or expression, unmoved by a mad dog or city panic.
        • Method: urged practice in action, not dialectical cleverness; he lectured while walking.
        • Model: imitated Xenocrates, praising his guileless nature and chaste, Doric severity.
        • Taste: loved Sophocles; called Homer an epic Sophocles and Sophocles a tragic Homer.
        • End: died of decline at a great age; Crates succeeded him.
      • Life of Crates
        • Succession: Polemo's devoted pupil and successor; the two shared the same tomb.
        • Esteem: Arcesilaus called the pair gods or a remnant of the golden race.
        • Circle: messmate of Crantor; Arcesilaus lived in Crantor's house with them.
        • Legacy: left philosophy, comedies, and speeches; disciples Arcesilaus and Bion.
        • Namesakes: one of ten Crates, he was the sixth, an Academic philosopher.
      • Life of Crantor
        • Circle: from Soli, he studied under Xenocrates with Polemo, and charmed Arcesilaus.
        • Admiration: prized Polemo for never speaking in too high or too low a key.
        • Patronage: Arcesilaus sought his recommendation; he left the younger man twelve talents.
        • Poetry: sealed his poems in Athena's temple; his love verses are ascribed to Antagoras.
        • Taste: most admired Homer and Euripides for writing tragically and sympathetically.
        • Legacy: left 30,000 lines; his On Mourning was most admired; he died of dropsy.
    • Life of Arcesilaus
      • Philosophical Legacy
        • Middle Academy founder: first to suspend judgment because of contrariety of reasons on either side.
        • Dialectic method: first to argue both sides; made Plato’s question-and-answer method more contentious.
        • No writings: suspended judgment on everything, so reportedly left no book; one work may have been thrown into fire.
        • Succession: succeeded Crates as head of the school; a man named Socrates willingly yielded.
        • Influences: admired Plato and possessed his writings; also thought highly of Pyrrho.
        • Dialectical studies: engaged with Eretrian school and Diodorus; Ariston and Timon mocked his eclectic loyalties.
      • Early Life and Education
        • Origins: son of Seuthes or Scythes, born in Pitane; one of four brothers, guardian Mœreas, brother Pylades.
        • Teachers: studied mathematics with Autolycus, music with Xanthus, then Theophrastus, finally Crantor in the Academy.
        • Crantor’s adoption: answered Euripides’ Andromeda line, sealing intimacy; Theophrastus lamented losing him.
        • Poetic gift: wrote epigrams, including verses to Attalus and to Menodorus; tried his hand at poetry.
        • Literary tastes: read Homer every night, called him his beloved; praised Pindar’s rich voice and vocabulary.
      • Character and Conduct
        • Manner of speech: concise, emphatic, fond of axioms; used “I think” and “so-and-so will not agree.”
        • Sharp wit: mocked a debauched arguer about cup sizes; silenced a young man: “Will no one stop his mouth with the knout?”
        • Severity with kindness: many feared his sarcasm but bore it; he was affable, generous, and service-minded.
        • Hidden charity: slipped a purse under sick Ctesibius’s pillow; later sent him a thousand drachmas.
        • Liberality: displayed silver and gold plate lavishly; never reclaimed lent plate from a poor borrower.
        • Lifestyle: lived openly with courtesans Theodote and Philæte; Ariston the Stoic called him a corrupter of youth.
      • Politics, Friendships, and Death
        • Independence from kings: alone didn’t court Antigonus, yet served as ambassador and succeeded.
        • Academy life: spent time in the Academy and Piræus discoursing, avoiding public affairs; visits to Hierocles drew rumors.
        • Teaching generosity: advised pupils to join other masters; personally introduced a Chian youth to Hieronymus.
        • Witty apophthegm: no one leaves Epicureans for other sects because people make eunuchs of men, but no one makes men of eunuchs.
        • Will and death: left everything to brother Pylades; died at 75 after drinking unmixed wine, beloved by Athenians.
    • Life of Bion – Life of Clitomachus
      • Life of Bion
        • Humble origins: son of a freedman fish-seller and a brothel woman, sold with family, then freed by an orator.
        • Self-disclosure to Antigonus: he told his true lowly origins to the king, letting his own merits be judged.
        • Apophthegms: witty sayings on marriage, old age, wealth, friendship, and pride; e.g. riches are the sinews of business.
        • Teachers: he moved from the Academy to Crates, the Cynics, Theodorus, then Theophrastus.
        • Style and character: first to clothe philosophy in a flowery robe; theatrical and parodic, shamelessly adopting young men for pleasure.
        • Deathbed repentance: after lifelong impiety from Theodorus, he sought amulets and charms as he feared death.
      • Life of Lacydes
        • Founder of New Academy: succeeded Arcesilaus; grave, industrious, sociable man with many imitators.
        • Housekeeping anecdote: sealed his store-chest and threw the ring through the hole, but servants copied the trick and stole freely.
        • Lacydeum and succession: held school in Attalus's garden; uniquely resigned while alive to Telicles and Evander, then Hegesinus, then Carneades.
        • Witty sayings: told Attalus statues should be seen at a distance; to critics, "if not now, when?"
        • Death: died of paralysis brought on by drinking, after presiding over the school twenty-six years.
      • Life of Carneades
        • Stoic engagement: read all Stoics, especially Chrysippus; wrote replies, saying "if Chrysippus had not lived, I should never have existed."
        • Devotion and voice: ethics consumed him; orators came to hear him; his loud voice drew a gymnasium protest.
        • Debating style: vehement and hard to refute; declined invitations; parodied Mentor's attempt to seduce his mistress.
        • Fear of death: often said nature would dissolve him; after Antipater's suicide asked for mead, not poison.
        • Legacy: left no writings; letters to Ariarathes exist; died at eighty-five with a lunar eclipse; Clitomachus chief disciple.
      • Life of Clitomachus
        • Carthaginian origins: named Asdrubal; lectured in Carthaginian before coming to Athens at forty.
        • Pupil of Carneades: Carneades had him educated in literature and trained him carefully; his industry produced over four hundred books.
        • Successor and expositor: succeeded Carneades; illustrated Academic principles through writings, drawing on Academic, Peripatetic, and Stoic doctrines.
        • Sequel: Timon attacked the Academics as unprofitable chatterers; the narrative turns to Aristotle and the Peripatetics.
  • Book V
    • Aristotle's Career, Exile, and Wisdom (Life of Aristotle · I)
      • Origins and Character
        • Lineage: son of Nicomachus and Phaestias of Stagira; descended from Asclepius; his father was physician to Amyntas.
        • Appearance: lisping voice, thin legs, small eyes; wore conspicuous dress, rings, and carefully styled hair.
        • Family: had son Nicomachus by Herpyllis, his concubine.
        • Plato's pupil: most eminent of Plato's pupils; joined at seventeen and remained about twenty years.
      • Break from Plato and the Lyceum
        • Rift with Plato: left while Plato was alive; Plato said he kicked them like a hatched chick.
        • Secession: returned from embassy to Philip to find Xenocrates heading the Academy; chose the Lyceum instead.
        • Peripatetic name: from walking while discussing until anointing time; others say from walking with Alexander.
        • Teaching method: trained pupils to debate any set question, like an orator; mocked Isocrates when he gave them seats.
        • School governance: in imitation of Xenocrates, appointed a new president every ten days.
      • Hermias, Philip, and Alexander
        • Hermias of Atarneus: lived with eunuch tyrant; married his daughter or niece, or his former concubine.
        • Hymn to Hermias: wrote a hymn to Virtue for Atarneus's king; later used as impiety evidence.
        • Royal tutor: lived at Macedonian court, entrusted with Alexander as pupil at about fifteen.
        • Restoring Stagira: asked Philip to rebuild his destroyed native city and made laws for its citizens.
        • Callisthenes: left him with Alexander against advice; he spoke too freely, and his doom came true.
      • Trial, Flight, and Death
        • Impiety charge: Eurymedon (or Demophilus) prosecuted over the Hymn to Hermias and the epigram at Delphi.
        • Defense speech: first to compose a forensic defense; said "pears on pear-trees grow; on fig-trees, figs."
        • Retreat to Chalcis: after thirteen years in Athens, retired secretly to Chalcis.
        • Death: died at about sixty-three from aconite, according to Eumelus, or from disease.
        • Chronology: born in 99th Olympiad; headed Lyceum thirteen years; died in 114th, same year as Demosthenes.
        • Detractors: Theocritus mocked him for honoring Hermias the eunuch; Timon called him empty.
      • Will, Habits, and Sayings
        • Executor and family: Antipater executor; trustees guard children until Nicanor marries daughter; Theophrastus could marry her if Nicanor died.
        • Herpyllis provision: if she remarries, give a talent, maids, and a house in Chalcis or Stagira.
        • Household justice: no serving boy sold; some slaves freed on conditions; statues and dedications commissioned.
        • Daily habits: bathed in warm oil and sold it; slept with bronze ball over dish; its fall woke him.
        • Education: roots bitter, fruit sweet; requires natural qualifications, instruction, and practice.
        • Sayings: liars lose belief; pity the condition; hope is a waking dream; gratitude grows old quickest.
    • Sayings, Corpus, and Doctrine (Life of Aristotle · II)
      • Sayings
        • Abuse: told a slanderer he might beat him in absence; to a chattering abuser, he had not listened.
        • Beauty: best of all recommendations, called “the gift of a fair appearance.”
        • Education: ornament in prosperity, refuge in adversity, and the best viaticum for old age.
        • Philosophy: lets him do without command what others do from fear of the laws.
        • Friendship: one soul in two bodies; “the man who has friends has no friend.”
        • Justice: a virtue of soul distributing to each person what is deserved.
      • The Corpus
        • Scale: nearly four hundred genuine works, totaling 445,270 lines.
        • Range: spans logic, rhetoric, ethics, politics, physics, poetry, and natural history.
        • Political research: recorded constitutions of 158 cities, including democratic, oligarchic, aristocratic, and tyrannical.
        • Occasional writings: letters to rulers and friends, poems, proverbs, and victory lists.
      • Architecture of Philosophy
        • Twofold division: philosophy is practical and theoretical; practical covers ethics, politics, and household, theoretical covers physics and logic.
        • Logic’s role: not a special division, but an instrument for every art, brought to high accuracy.
        • Two aims: the persuasive and the true; rhetoric and dialectic serve persuasion, analytics and philosophy serve truth.
        • Logical works: Topics for discovery, Analytics for judgment, disputation works for use.
        • Criterion of truth: perception of imagined effects and intelligence concerning ethical, political, economic, and legal matters.
      • Ethics and Happiness
        • Chief good: exercise of virtue in a perfect life.
        • Happiness: needs goods of soul, body, and external goods; virtue alone insufficient, vice alone sufficient for misery.
        • Virtues: not reciprocal; a prudent, just man can be incontinent; the wise man has moderate passions.
        • Friendship and love: friendship equals mutual benevolence; divided into kindred, love, hospitality; love into sensual and philosophical.
        • Wise man’s life: engages in politics, marries, lives with a king; among three lives he prefers the speculative.
        • Knowledge: acquisition of general knowledge serves acquisition of virtue.
      • Theology, Soul, and Legacy
        • God: incorporeal, unmoved, with providence over heavenly bodies and earthly things by sympathy.
        • Fifth element: beyond the four elements, it composes heavenly bodies and has its own circular motion.
        • Soul: incorporeal first entelechy of a physical, organic body existing in capacity for life.
        • Entelechy explained: actuality in operation, as awake, or in habit, as asleep; life-capacity must be in the body.
        • Natural philosophy: unmatched in tracing effects back to their causes.
        • Namesakes and successor: eight Aristotles existed; the most eminent friend Theophrastus is next.
    • Life of Theophrastus – Life of Strato
      • Life of Theophrastus
        • Life: Born at Eresus to Melantas; studied under Leucippus, Plato, then Aristotle; succeeded him as school head.
        • Character: Acute, industrious, and benevolent; tutor of Menander; drew two thousand disciples and royal patronage.
        • Aristotle's regard: Renamed Tyrtamus “Theophrastus” for divine eloquence; said he needed a bridle, Callisthenes a spur.
        • Trial: Nearly punished for impiety; exiled by Sophocles’ law against philosophers, restored when it was repealed.
        • Sayings: Better an unbridled horse than an unarranged discourse; time is the dearest thing a man can spend.
        • Death and will: Died at eighty-five; “when we begin to live, we are dying”; left garden to friends and books to Neleus.
      • Life of Strato
        • Succession: Strato of Lampsacus, son of Arcesilaus, succeeded Theophrastus and led the school eighteen years.
        • Surname: Named “the Natural Philosopher” for unmatched diligence in investigating physical nature.
        • Royal tutor: Preceptor of Ptolemy Philadelphus, reportedly receiving eighty talents for his teaching.
        • Works: Wrote on kingship, justice, gods, beginnings, and many natural-philosophical topics.
        • Death: Grew so thin and weak that he died without being noticed.
        • Will: Left the school to Lycon, with books, property, slave grants, and freedoms for servants.
    • Life of Lycon – Life of Demetrius
      • Life of Lycon
        • Successor: Lycon of Troas, son of Astyanax, led the Peripatos after Strato and presided for 44 years.
        • Teaching: Boys need modesty and rivalry, as horses need spur and bridle; he was especially skilled at educating youth.
        • Oratory: A surpassingly sweet speaker, whose grace Antigonus compared to fruit perfect on the tree.
        • Sayings: Late learners accuse themselves with impossible prayers; bad deliberation reads truth through distorted mirrors; few seek the Olympic crown of life.
        • Character: Neat in dress, devoted to gymnasium and athletics; loved by Eumenes and Attalus, but resisted Antigonus.
        • Will: His detailed will freed servants, rewarded friends, secured the garden for philosophy, and arranged modest burial.
      • Life of Demetrius
        • Politician: Demetrius of Phalerum, pupil of Theophrastus, governed Athens for ten years and raised its revenues and buildings.
        • Fall: After impeachment, his 360 statues were destroyed; he fled to Ptolemy, later was imprisoned, and died from an asp bite.
        • Court counsel: He warned Ptolemy about succession: give the kingdom to another and you lose it yourself.
        • Writings: A prolific Peripatetic, composing works on law, politics, rhetoric, poetry, and Aesop’s fables with oratorical force.
        • Sayings: Virtues outlast statues; eyebrows can overshadow a whole life; friends should come uninvited to those in distress.
        • Namesakes: Diogenes lists twenty notable Demetrii, including orators, grammarians, poets, and a statuary.
    • Life of Heraclides
      • Life and Philosophical Lineage
        • Origin: Son of Euthyphron, born wealthy at Heraclea in Pontus.
        • Education: Disciple of Speusippus, then Pythagoreans; adopted Plato, finally pupil of Aristotle.
        • Appearance: Large, finely dressed, so Athenians nicknamed him Pompicus instead of Ponticus; quiet and noble.
      • Writings and Style
        • Corpus: Many dialogues across ethics, physics, grammar, music, rhetoric, history, geometry, dialectics.
        • Ethical and physical works: On Justice, On Piety, On Temperance, On the Soul, On the Heavenly Bodies.
        • Literary and historical works: On the Age of Homer and Hesiod, Three Tragedians, On the Pythagoreans, On Inventions.
        • Modes: Some dialogues follow comic writers, some tragedians, like Pleasure and Shades Below.
        • Style: Conversational, moderate, suited to philosophers and men of affairs; varied, elevated, persuasive.
      • Political Deed and Death Legends
        • Political deed: Slew the tyrant and freed Heraclea, according to Demetrius of Magnesia.
        • Serpent ruse: At death, he hid his body and put a serpent in his bed to seem deified; the funeral crowd exposed it.
        • Epigram: Diogenes' verses mock the failed serpent transformation and reveal the truth.
        • Oracle variant: Hermippus says he bribed Delphi to prescribe a golden crown and hero honors for Heraclides.
        • Aftermath: Crowned in the theatre, he died of apoplexy; ambassadors were stoned; priestess died by a serpent.
      • Controversies and Critics
        • Tragedies: Aristoxenus says he composed tragedies and ascribed them to Thespis.
        • Plagiarism: Chamaeleon says he stole essays on Homer and Hesiod and published them as his own.
        • Forgery fooled: A forged Sophocles tragedy (Parthenopæus) deceived him; acrostic 'Pancalus' exposed it.
        • Scorn: Dionysius taunted that Heraclides knew no letters and had no shame.
        • Critic: Autodorus the Epicurean contradicted his arguments in On Justice.
      • Fourteen Namesakes
        • First: This Heraclides heads Diogenes' list of fourteen namesakes.
        • Professions: Other namesakes include historians, orators, physicians, poets, a sculptor, and an astronomer.
        • Lembos: The Callatian namesake wrote a Succession and On Ships, hence the nickname Lembos.
  • Book VI
    • Life of Antisthenes
      • Formation and Turn to Philosophy
        • Origins: Athenian with a Thracian mother; to taunts of illegitimacy he answered, “The mother of the Gods too is a Phrygian.”
        • Bravery: at Tanagra his courage made Socrates say the son of two Athenians could not have been so brave.
        • Early rhetoric: studied under Gorgias, which shaped the rhetorical style of his dialogues.
        • Socratic turn: walked forty furlongs daily from the Piraeus to hear Socrates, learning endurance and indifference.
        • Founding the Cynics: he made labor a good, citing Hercules and Cyrus, and became the school’s original founder.
      • Core Doctrines
        • Virtue: teachable; the nobly born and the virtuously disposed are the same people.
        • Happiness: virtue alone suffices, needing nothing except the strength of Socrates.
        • Self-sufficiency: the wise man owns everything belonging to others and needs nothing outside himself.
        • Law: the wise man is guided by the law of virtue, not the established laws of the state.
        • Fortification: prudence is the safest fortress, for it can neither fall nor be betrayed.
      • Character and Apophthegms
        • Pleasure: “I would rather go mad than feel pleasure.”
        • Learning: the most necessary study is “to unlearn one’s bad habits.”
        • Flatterers: better to fall among crows, who eat the dead, than among flatterers, who eat the living.
        • Memory: lost memoranda should have been written on the mind, not on paper.
        • Corruption: cities perish when they cannot distinguish worthless citizens from virtuous ones.
      • Encounters and Rebukes
        • Plato: seeing Plato’s bile in a dish, he said, “I see your bile, but not your conceit.”
        • Athenians: voting asses to be horses equals making unskilled men generals by vote.
        • Diogenes: when asked for a tunic, he told him to fold his cloak.
        • Deathbed: to Diogenes offering a sword, he answered, “I said from suffering, not from life.”
        • Adulterer: a runaway adulterer could have avoided his danger “for one obol.”
      • Legacy and School
        • Cynosarges: he lectured at the gymnasium named Cynosarges, giving the Cynics their name.
        • Style: first to double his cloak, wearing no other garment and carrying a stick and wallet.
        • Reputation: Theopompus praised his persuasiveness; Xenophon found him most delightful and temperate.
        • Stoic bridge: he founded the more manly Stoic school, laying the basis for Diogenes’ apathy, Crates’ temperance, and Zeno’s patience.
        • Writings: ten volumes of dialogues and treatises survive; Timon mocked him as a “universal chatterer.”
    • Cynic Defiance, Poverty, and Wit (Life of Diogenes · I)
      • Exile and the Defaced Coin
        • Public bank scandal: Diogenes or his father adulterated Sinope's coinage; father died in prison, Diogenes fled.
        • Oracle's permission: Apollo sanctioned “changing the currency”—Diogenes took it literally and was banished.
        • Forcing Antisthenes: put his head under the stick, saying no stick was hard enough to drive him away while Antisthenes spoke.
      • The Cynic Discipline
        • Mouse as model: seeing a mouse need no bed or dark taught him a remedy for poverty.
        • First Cynic gear: doubled cloak for sleep, wallet for food, any spot for eating, sleeping, and conversing.
        • Barrel home: when a promised house failed, he occupied a cask in the Temple of Cybele.
        • Hardening: rolled in summer sand, embraced snow-covered statues in winter, enduring everything.
      • War on Pretension
        • Philosophers mocked: Euclides' school was gall, Plato's discussions disguise, games a marvel to fools.
        • Man's wisdom fluctuates: pilots, physicians, philosophers show man wisest; soothsayers and the vainglorious make him foolish.
        • Virtue neglected: men compete in punching and kicking, no one emulates virtue; grammarians know Ulysses' woes, not their own.
        • Hypocrisy exposed: misers blame money yet love it; people sacrifice for health then eat harmfully.
        • Plato exchanges: “trample on Plato's pride” episode and “I said share, not eat all” fig rebuke.
      • Slave Philosopher and Teacher
        • Sold as slave: when auctioned, claimed “I can govern men”; told the crier to advertise a master for sale.
        • Obedience rationale: even a slave physician or pilot is obeyed, so Xeniades' household should obey him.
        • Practical education: taught Xeniades' sons riding, shooting, slinging, plain food, silence, and self-service.
        • Face-down burial: “in a little while everything will be turned upside down,” alluding to rising Macedonians.
      • Encounters and Apophthegms
        • Alexander stopped: “Cease to shade me from the sun”; Alexander later wished to be Diogenes if not Alexander.
        • Calling men: “Holloa, men!”—then beat away the dregs who gathered.
        • Against superstition: told a praying woman every place is full of God; sent someone to beat prostraters.
        • Nature over convention: confidence vs fortune, nature vs law, reason vs suffering.
        • Simple lessons: child drinking from hands made him discard cup; boy eating lentils with crust made him discard spoon.
        • Refuting logic: “I do not see horns”; got up and walked to answer “motion is impossible.”
    • Diogenes the Dog's Cynic Bite (Life of Diogenes · II)
      • Clashes with Plato
        • Dog comeback: "I have come back to those who sold me" — turns insult into self-possession.
        • Featherless man: Diogenes plucks a cock; Plato adds "with broad flat nails."
        • Ideas vs particulars: "I see a table and cup, but no tableness or cupness" — empiricist jab.
        • Vegetables versus court: "If you had washed vegetables, you would not have courted Dionysius."
      • Exposing Vanity and Power
        • Daylight lamp: "I am looking for a man" — Athens lacks real humanity.
        • Olympic crowd: "A great multitude, but very few men."
        • Conquerors: Dioxippus masters slaves; Diogenes masters men.
        • Self-named dog: Alexander is "great king"; Diogenes replies "the dog" who fawns on givers, barks at refusers, bites rogues.
      • The Art of the Sharp Retort
        • Demagogues: servants of the people; garlands, blossoms of glory.
        • Great thieves: officials lead off a little thief — power steals more.
        • Honeyed halter: a speech made solely to please is a sweet trap.
        • Root of evil: covetousness is the metropolis of all evils.
        • Wine preference: "That which belongs to another."
      • Cynic Self-Sufficiency
        • Easy life overlaid: gods gave ease; honey, cakes, and unguents buried it.
        • Practice disappointment: asking for a statue trains endurance against denial.
        • No need for slaves: "Manes can live without Diogenes; I without Manes."
        • Banishment: exile from Sinope made him a philosopher.
        • Hunger in the market: "I was hungry in the market-place" — nature overrides custom.
      • Life Lessons and Mockery
        • Marriage timing: young men not yet; old men never.
        • Begging vs philosophy: people give to beggars, not to philosophers, because they could become lame but never philosophers.
        • Blushing youth: "Courage, my boy, that is the complexion of virtue."
        • Foolish adornment: a woman in a litter is "the cage not suited to the animal."
    • The Shameless Art of Living (Life of Diogenes · III)
      • Wit Against Folly
        • A dog among gawkers: those who stared at his market-place dinner were the dogs, not he
        • Poisoned mead: beautiful courtesans enchant kings, yet work their ruin
        • Ivory scabbard, lead sword: a handsome youth's chatter betrayed a worthless soul
        • Nature's design: forcing man to womanhood is worse than nature's plan
        • The sun in privies: no pollution from entering unclean places
      • Philosophy as Practice
        • Two exercises: mind and body; neither perfect without the other
        • Habit makes virtue: artisans attain accuracy by practice; souls need the same training
        • Contempt of pleasure: inured to austerity, one finds pleasure in despising pleasure
        • Freedom of speech: the most excellent thing among men
        • Ready for fortune: philosophy's gain — prepared for every kind of fate
      • Nature Against Convention
        • Citizen of the world: no city claims him; liberty outranks every law
        • All things belong to the wise: gods own all, gods befriend the wise, friends share all
        • Wives and children in common: marriage null; persuasion, not contract, joins couples
        • No impiety: temple goods, any animal, even human flesh — all permitted by nature
        • Law is order: without it no city stands; birth and reputation veil wickedness
      • The Art of Governing Men
        • Sold as a teacher: captured by pirates, he cried "I know how to govern men"
        • The buyer needs a master: Xeniades bought him and made him tutor of his sons
        • A good genius: the household flourished, said Xeniades
        • Lions are never slaves: keepers feed lions, yet fear them
        • Persuasion's charm: Onesicritus and his sons all stayed to study with Diogenes
      • Death and Disputed Legacy
        • Three deaths told: raw ox-foot, holding his breath, or a dog's bite
        • Self-chosen silence: friends found him head-covered, still — he fled remaining life
        • Honors after death: pillar with a marble dog at Corinth's gate; bronze statues at home
        • Writings disputed: tragedies like Thyestes ascribed to friend Philiscus, not him
        • Five Diogeneses: the Cynic is but third; namesakes include a Stoic and a natural philosopher
    • Life of Monimus – The Life of Menedemus
      • Life of Monimus
        • Path to Cynicism: a Corinthian money-changer’s slave, he feigned madness and scattered the coins until freed, then joined Diogenes.
        • Menander’s witness: Hippocomus calls him a wise wallet-bearer who scorned proverbs, teaching that all opinion is vanity.
        • Writings: jests mingled with serious treatises, two essays on Appetites, and an Exhortation.
      • Life of Onesicritus
        • Origins: called an Æginetan by some, but Demetrius the Magnesian says he came from Astypalæa; eminent disciple of Diogenes.
        • Parallel to Xenophon: one joined Cyrus, the other Alexander; one wrote the Cyropædia, the other Alexander’s education and panegyric, as copy to original.
        • Fellow pupils: Menander Drymus, an admirer of Homer; Hegesæus of Sinope, nicknamed Clœus; and Philiscus the Æginetan.
      • Life of Crates
        • Conversion: Theban heir who turned his inheritance into money, then gave it to citizens; Diogenes reportedly made him throw it into the sea.
        • Cynic practice: nicknamed Door-opener, he entered every house to advise; he abused prostitutes deliberately to train for enduring reproaches.
        • Sayings: no man is without fault, as no pomegranate lacks a worthless seed; those living with flatterers are as desolate as calves among wolves.
        • Marriage: gave his daughter to pupils “on trial for a month”; told his son Pasicles a brothel was the only marriage his father designed for him.
        • Death: his own verses call him a noble hunchback going to Pluto, bent double by old age.
      • Life of Metrocles
        • Conversion: a despairing pupil of Theophrastus, he starved himself after a public embarrassment; Crates fed him lupins and argued natural habits are no harm.
        • Burning writings: he burnt his Theophrastian notes, or his own works, calling them “phantoms of infernal dreams.”
        • Doctrine: a house is bought with money, education with time and industry; wealth is mischievous unless properly used.
        • End and school: suffocated himself at a great age; pupils included Theombrotus, Cleomenes, Demetrius, Timarchus, Echecles, and Menippus of Sinope.
      • Life of Hipparchia
        • Choice: sister of Metrocles, she rejected wealth, birth, and beauty in suitors, threatening suicide unless given to Crates.
        • Crates’ test: he laid out his furniture as the bridegroom and all his property; she chose him, wore his dress, and appeared with him everywhere.
        • Sophism: since Theodorus does no wrong beating himself, Hipparchia does no wrong beating Theodorus; she stayed unashamed when he pulled her clothes.
        • Defense: she left the loom for philosophy, not by a wrong decision; Crates’ surviving letters philosophize in a style little inferior to Plato.
      • Life of Menippus
        • Rise: a Phoenician slave who became rich and won Corinthian citizenship through importunate, miserly habits.
        • Writings: nothing serious, all ridicule; thirteen volumes include Description of the Dead, Wills, and letters in which gods appear.
        • Fall: he lost his money in a snare, despaired, and hanged himself; some say his books were jokingly composed by Dionysius and Zopyrus.
        • Namesakes: five other Menippi are recorded; this one is the Cynic usurer and satirist.
      • The Life of Menedemus
        • Superstition: disciple of Colotes, he dressed as a fury with zodiac-embroidered hat and ashen staff, claiming to report wrongdoers to hell’s deities.
        • Ethics only: Cynics abolish logic, natural philosophy, and liberal studies; a man should investigate only the good and ill within his house.
        • Virtue: chief good is living according to virtue; virtue can be taught, once gained is never lost, and the wise man is faultless and loved.
        • Self-sufficiency: live plainly on simple food, a cloak, and any shelter; to want nothing is to be like the gods.
        • Road to Stoicism: Cynicism is a short road to virtue; Zeno of Citium, Crates’ disciple, founded the Stoic school on this way of life.
  • Book VII
    • Shipwreck, Discipline, and the Stoa (Life of Zeno · I)
      • Origins and Appearance
        • Heritage: Citium, Cyprus, a Greek city with a Phoenician colony; son of Mnaseas or Demeas.
        • Physique: thin, tall, dark, with weak legs and a bent head; nicknamed “Egyptian clematis.”
        • Temperament: frugal, reserved, avoided crowds, and modest to the point of false shame.
      • Conversion and Teachers
        • Oracle: to live excellently, become “of the same complexion as the dead”—study ancient books.
        • Shipwreck: lost his Phoenician purple cargo at Piraeus, then followed Crates after reading Xenophon.
        • Training: studied under Crates, Stilpon, Xenocrates, and Polemo for twenty years.
        • Crates’ cure: broke a jar of lentil porridge over Zeno to shame him out of false modesty.
        • Loyalty: gave money to relieve Crates’ difficulties and proudly claimed “Of Cittium” as his origin.
      • Works and the Stoa
        • Writings: Republic, On Life according to Nature, On Passions, On Duty, and many more.
        • Teaching place: spoke in the Painted Stoa, deliberately making that colonnade tranquil.
        • School name: followers were first called Zenonians, then Stoics from the Stoa.
      • Honors and Antigonus
        • Athenian decree: golden crown, public tomb in the Ceramicus, praised for virtue and temperance.
        • Antigonus’ invitation: the king wanted Zeno to instruct him and all Macedonians in virtue.
        • Zeno’s reply: too old to come, he sent Persaeus and Philonides as able teachers.
        • Royal grief: after his death Antigonus cried, “What a spectacle have I lost,” and sought his burial.
      • Character and Sayings
        • Self-discipline: ate little loaves and honey, avoided romance, and slipped away from banquets.
        • Crowd control: sat at the bench’s end, charged fees, and compared a balustrade to intrusive listeners.
        • Concise teaching: “Two ears, one mouth”; vanity unbecoming in youth; a friend is “another I.”
        • Sharp rebukes: mirrored the pertinacious youth, exposed the epicure’s greed, and mocked perfumed men.
        • Duty: first to use the word kathēkon and to write a treatise on it; prized dialectic highly.
    • Zeno's Life and Stoic Foundations (Life of Zeno · II)
      • Character and Conduct
        • Good advice: Zeno revised Hesiod: he who heeds good counsel surpasses one who comprehends alone, because he acts.
        • Social ease: austerity, like bitter lupins, is soaked sweet at dinner parties; he indulged freely.
        • Self-mastery: better to trip with the feet than with the tongue.
        • Gradual goodness: goodness is attained little by little, but is not itself a small thing.
        • Endurance: fireless food, thin cloak; winter, rain, heat, and disease could not bend his iron frame.
        • Proverbial temperance: comic poets mocked his dried figs and water, making “more temperate than Zeno” a proverb.
      • Death and Honors
        • Death scene: tripped, broke a toe, struck the ground, quoted Niobe “I come: why call me so?” and strangled himself.
        • Lifespan disputed: 98 healthy years, or 72 per Persaeus; Apollonius says he led the school 48 years.
        • Public honors: buried in the Ceramicus; decrees witnessed his virtue.
        • Epitaphs: praised as finding a new way to heaven by virtue, temperance, modesty; founder of a “great novel school.”
      • Disciples and Succession
        • **Persaeus
    • Stoic Truth, Language, and Logic (Life of Zeno · III)
      • Criterion of Truth
        • Comprehensive impression: criterion of truth derived from a real object, per Chrysippus, Antipater, Apollodorus.
        • Sensation and preconception: Chrysippus’ only criteria; Boethus adds intellect, sensation, appetite, knowledge.
        • Right reason: Posidonius and earlier Stoics make it one criterion.
      • Voice and Language
        • Voice: percussion of air; human voice is articulate, emitted by intellect, and a body.
        • Word and sentence: word is articulate but nonsignifying; sentence is significant voice expressing thought.
        • Letters and parts: twenty-four letters; sentence has noun, common noun, verb, conjunction, article.
        • Style: five excellences — good Greek, clearness, conciseness, suitableness, elegance; vices are barbarism and solecism.
        • Poetry: metrical or rhythmical diction, avoiding prose, imitating divine and human beings.
      • Definitions and Division
        • Definition: sentence analyzing an idea; description is a plainer, figurative route to knowledge.
        • Genus and species: genus comprehends many ideas; species falls under genus; highest genus is the existent, lowest species is Socrates.
        • Division: genus into proximate species; contrary division by negation; partition by place.
        • Ambiguity: one expression signifying two or more things in the same utterance.
      • Dialectic and Enunciation
        • Dialectic: science of true, false, and neither; studies signifying words and signified things.
        • Enunciation: manifestation of ideal perception; imperfect (“writes”) vs perfect (“Socrates writes”).
        • Categorem: predicate added to nominative case; direct, indirect, and reciprocal forms.
        • Axiom: complete assertion true or false; questions and interrogations are neither.
      • Propositions and Arguments
        • Simple axioms: affirmative, negative, privative, categorical, definite, indefinite.
        • Non-simple axioms: conditional, adjunctive, conjunctive, disjunctive, causal, augmentative, diminutive.
        • Truth conditions: conditional true when opposite of conclusion contradicts premiss; causal true when consequence is necessary but not reciprocal.
        • Modalities: possible, impossible, necessary, non-necessary, and probable propositions.
        • Argument structure: lemma, assumption, conclusion; conclusive vs inconclusive, syllogistic vs unsyllogistic.
        • Indemonstrables: Chrysippus’ five basic forms ground all conclusive arguments.
    • Stoic Logic and Ethical System (Life of Zeno · IV)
      • Logic: Argument and Fallacy
        • Five non-demonstrative modes: conditionals and disjunctives yield conclusions from opposed or remaining terms.
        • Truth chains: truth follows truth, falsehood follows falsehood; truth can arise from falsehood, but falsehood never from truth.
        • Logical fallacies: veiled, sorites, horned, and “nobody” arguments confound by hidden assumptions or indefinite terms.
        • Logic crowns wisdom: the Stoics make the logician the only wise person because argument governs natural and moral philosophy.
      • Ethics: Foundation and Divisions
        • Ethical topics: inclination, good and bad, passions, virtue, chief good, primary estimation, actions, becoming, exhortation.
        • First inclination: every animal is bound to its own existence and self-preservation, not to pleasure.
        • Pleasure is accessory: nature seeks what fits the constitution; pleasure arises incidentally, as flourishing does in plants.
        • Chief good: live according to nature, meaning virtue and universal reason, the common law identified with Jupiter.
      • Virtue: Unity and Variety
        • Virtue defined: a consistent, harmonious disposition of mind, sought for itself; happiness is its enduring inner harmony.
        • Speculative vs. unspeculative: prudence and justice guide; health and strength are accessory results, found even in the worthless.
        • Teachability: virtue can be taught, proven by bad men becoming good.
        • Primitive virtues: prudence, manly courage, justice, temperance; subordinate virtues branch from them.
      • Goods: Classifications
        • Threefold good: what is advantageous, the agent who partakes of virtue, and accessories like joy and mirth.
        • Kinds of goods: mental, external, and neither; final, efficient, or both; habits, dispositions, or activities.
        • Every good is useful: expedient, necessary, profitable, beautiful, eligible, just — the beautiful good is virtue.
        • All goods are equal: the good admits no relaxation or extension; the beautiful is the only good.
      • Indifferents and Value
        • Indifferents: life, health, pleasure, wealth, reputation are neither beneficial nor injurious; only virtue truly benefits.
        • Use test: anything usable well or ill cannot be good — wealth and health fail the test.
        • Preferred things: have value and aid life according to nature; rejected things lack value; pure indifferents neither attract nor repel.
    • Stoic Ethics, Passions, and Physics (Life of Zeno · V)
      • Preferred Things and Duty
        • Preferred indifferents: ability and improvement for their own sake, wealth and birth for results, strength and health for both.
        • Duty (καθῆκον): Zeno's term for conduct reason selects as matching nature; applies even to plants and animals.
        • Classes of acts: some are duties, some contrary to duty, some neither (straw-picking, holding a pen).
        • Duties vary: unconditional health-care, circumstantial self-sacrifice, always virtue, occasional acts; boyish obedience is intermediate.
      • Mind and the Passions
        • Eight-part mind: five senses, voice, intellect, and generative power; error perverts intellect and breeds perturbations.
        • Perturbation: irrational, unnatural movement of mind; four genera are grief, fear, desire, pleasure — themselves judgments.
        • Grief and fear: grief is irrational contraction, fear is expectation of evil; species include pity, envy, shame, anxiety.
        • Desire and pleasure: desire is irrational appetite covering want, anger, love, enmity; pleasure is irrational elation covering delight and malice.
        • Soul-diseases: love of glory or pleasure mirrors bodily gout; good states are rational joy, caution, and will.
      • The Wise Man's Character
        • Impassivity: the sage has no strong propensities; the bad man's apathy is only hard-heartedness.
        • Godlike piety: sage alone is priestly and honours parents after the gods; bad man is atheist in hostility or disregard.
        • Equality of offences: all sins are equal; the sage therefore pities no one and never relaxes lawful punishments.
        • Social sage: he enters politics, marries, raises children, exercises, prays; as Cynic he may eat human flesh if occasion demands.
        • Freedom and kingship: only the wise are free, kings, magistrates; the foolish are mad and the wicked slaves.
        • Friendship: belongs only to the virtuous; a friend is desired for his own sake and a community of life.
      • Virtue and the Good
        • Reciprocity of virtues: whoever has one virtue has all; prudence, courage, justice, and temperance share common precepts.
        • No middle state: virtue and vice exclude intermediates; a man is either straight or crooked, just or unjust.
        • Virtue and happiness: virtue alone suffices for happiness, say Zeno and Chrysippus; Panætius and Posidonius add health and strength.
        • Virtue's perdurance: Cleanthes says virtue cannot be lost, Chrysippus that drunkenness or melancholy can destroy it.
      • Society, Love, and Physics
        • Natural justice: justice exists by nature, not convention; no justice-obligations extend to animals.
        • Love: wise men love youths showing aptitude; love is friendship's effort to benefit another for visible beauty.
        • Chosen life: the logical/rational life is best; the sage may exit for country, friends, or incurable suffering.
        • Community and politics: women are common among the wise; the best constitution mixes democracy, kingship, and aristocracy.
        • Physics divided: species include bodies, principles, elements, Gods, boundaries, place, vacuum; genera are world, elements, causes.
    • Stoic Physics of Cosmos and Soul (Life of Zeno · VI)
      • The Two Principles and the Four Elements
        • Two principles: the active, which is reason or God, and the passive, which is matter
        • Matter: an existence without any distinctive quality, the passive substratum of all
        • God: eternal reason existing throughout all matter, making everything
        • Principles vs elements: principles are ungenerated and formless; elements are bodily and destructible
        • Four elements: fire, water, air, earth — hot, moist, cold, dry; fire highest as aether
      • The World: Shape, Order, and Perishability
        • World's three senses: God himself; the arrangement of the stars; the compound of both
        • World as animal: ensouled and rational, mind pervading every part as soul pervades the body
        • Shape and bounds: one, finite, spherical, ringed by an infinite incorporeal void
        • Time: incorporeal, an interval of the world's motion; past and future unlimited, present limited
        • Perishability: generated and so perishable by fire, though Panaetius calls it imperishable
      • God, Nature, Fate, and Divination
        • God: immortal, rational, perfect, blessed, foreknowing animal, yet not human in form
        • Names of God: Zeus, Athena, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter name his pervading powers
        • God's substance: variously the whole world, the heaven, the aether, or the fixed stars
        • Nature: self-moving habit holding the world together by rational principles
        • Fate: all things produced by fate, a connected cause, the reason governing the world
        • Divination: universal because Providence exists; Panaetius alone denies its foundation
      • The Heavens and Atmospheric Phenomena
        • Stars: fixed stars move with the whole heaven; planets by their own separate motions
        • Sun and moon: sun pure fire, larger than earth, spherical; moon earthy, borrowing its light
        • Eclipses: sun hidden by the moon's passage; moon shadowed by the earth at full moon
        • Seasons and weather: sun's approach and retreat make seasons; clouds yield rainbow, rain, hail, lightning
        • Zones and circles: five heavenly circles and five terrestrial zones, two of them habitable
      • The Soul, Sensation, and Generation
        • Soul: a warm spirit, born with us, bodily; individual souls perishable, the world's soul immortal
        • Survival: Cleanthes holds all souls endure until the conflagration; Chrysippus only the wise
        • Eight parts: five senses, generative faculty, voice, and reason; the dominant part in the heart
        • Sensation: sight by a cone of air from eye to object; hearing by air struck in waves
        • Seed: capable of producing things of like nature; the female seed is unproductive
      • Matter, Body, and Divine Beings
        • Primary matter: substance of all things; as a whole never greater or less, in particulars variable
        • Body: finite substance, subject to change, infinitely divisible; Chrysippus denies its infinity
        • Daemons: beings sympathetic to mankind, surveyors of all human affairs
        • Heroes: souls of virtuous men which have left their bodies
    • Life of Ariston – Life of Sphærus
      • Life of Ariston
        • Chief good: live in perfect indifference to everything intermediate between virtue and vice.
        • Scope of philosophy: only ethics concerns us; physics is above us, logic has nothing to do with us.
        • Dialectic: reasonings are like cobwebs—artfully constructed but utterly useless.
        • Virtue: not many virtues nor one under many names, but behaving in a certain manner toward a certain thing.
        • School and disputes: taught at Cynosarges as founder; Persæus trapped him over opinion, and he mocked Arcesilaus's denial of the senses.
        • Death: bald, got sunstroke, and died—a jesting epigram follows.
      • Life of Herillus
        • Chief good: knowledge — always refer everything to living according to knowledge, never misled by ignorance.
        • Knowledge: a habit not departing from reason in the reception of perceptions.
        • Ends: no single fixed chief good; circumstances change it, and only the wise aim at the true end.
        • Style: books are few lines but full of power and contain arguments against Zeno.
        • Anecdote: Zeno had his youthful admirer's head shaved to drive the boy's followers away.
      • Life of Dionysius
        • Chief good: pleasure, because his eye disease made it impossible to call pain indifferent.
        • Background: son of Theophantus of Heraclea; studied under Heraclides, Alexinus, Menedemus, then Zeno.
        • Desertion: left the Stoa for the Cyrenaics, frequented brothels, and indulged in open luxury.
        • Death: starved himself at nearly eighty years of age.
      • Life of Cleanthes
        • Origins: boxer from Assos, came to Athens with four drachmas, and held to Zeno's doctrines.
        • Industry: drew water by night, philosophized by day; called Phreantles and a second Heracles.
        • Character: slow but patient; called an ass, said he alone could bear Zeno's burdens.
        • Sayings: he blamed his own gray hair without brains; praised Arcesilaus for establishing duty by actions.
        • Practice: wrote Zeno's lectures on oyster shells and ox-blades for lack of paper.
        • Succession and death: succeeded Zeno despite many eminent pupils; died at eighty after nineteen years with Zeno.
      • Life of Sphærus
        • Pupil: native of the Bosphorus, studied under Cleanthes after Zeno's death.
        • Wax pomegranates: deceived by the king's trick, but answered that he assented only to probable, not comprehended, perception.
        • Ptolemy: told Mnesistratus that Ptolemy was a man with such-and-such qualities, and a king.
        • Writings: treatises across physics, ethics, politics, and dialectic, from On the World to On the Lacedæmonian Constitution.
    • Life of Chrysippus
      • Early Life and Pupilage
        • Origins: son of Apollonius of Soli or Tarsus; trained as a runner before turning to philosophy.
        • Succession: pupil of Cleanthes and Zeno; became eminent while still living and teaching.
        • Independence: wanted Stoic dogmas but insisted on finding his own demonstrations, often dissenting from both masters.
        • Remorse: regretted his vehemence against Cleanthes, confessing himself fortunate except in that friendship.
      • Character and Reputation
        • Dialectical genius: reputed so acute that divine dialectic would be no different from Chrysippus’s.
        • Prodigious industry: wrote over 705 books, composing about 500 lines daily.
        • Quotation habit: filled pages with other authors’ lines; Apollodorus joked that stripped of citations his books would be empty.
        • Arrogance: never dedicated a work to a king, slighted Ptolemy’s invitation, and declared himself the best teacher available.
      • Anecdotes and Death
        • Wit: told a critic that following the crowd would have prevented him from becoming a philosopher.
        • Composure: mocked a dialectician for dragging Cleanthes into petty sophistry; only his legs seemed drunk at parties.
        • Death by wine: drank sweet unmixed wine at a sacrifice, fell giddy, and died five days later at seventy-three.
        • Rival story: some say he died laughing at an ass eating figs after ordering wine for it.
      • Philosophical Practice and Controversies
        • Academic influence: studied with Arcesilaus and Lacydes, learning to argue both sides and treat magnitudes Academically.
        • Sophisms: delighted in puzzles about sin, absent wells, missing heads, and the waggon coming out of the mouth.
        • Shocking doctrines: wrote that mothers, daughters, and sons may be married, and even urged eating the dead.
        • Indecent myth: retold Jupiter and Juno’s story in six hundred lines he claimed were natural but many deemed filthy.
        • Critique of livelihood: argued the wise man needs no provision; earning money makes friendship and wisdom mercenary.
      • Written Corpus
        • Logical works: 311 treatises on dialectic terms, propositions, syllogisms, fallacies, and ambiguity.
        • Ethical works: definitions of good, bad, and neutral things, plus treatises on virtues, pleasure, and means of support.
        • Other writings: etymologies, proverbs, poetry, rhetoric, and replies to critics across philosophy’s main divisions.
  • Book VIII
    • Pythagoras: Life, Lore, and Legacy (Life of Pythagoras · I)
      • A Wandering Sage’s Formation
        • Origins: son of Mnesarchus, a seal engraver, from Samos; some call him Tyrrhenian.
        • Education: studied under Pherecydes, then Hermodamas, and entered Greek and barbarian mysteries.
        • Travels: visited Egypt, Chaldea, Crete’s Idaean cave, and the holiest places of temples.
        • Crotona: fled Samian tyranny, gave Italy laws, and led some three hundred disciples toward aristocracy.
      • Soul, Legend, and the Divine
        • Metempsychosis: claimed his soul had lived as Aethalides, Euphorbus, Hermotimus, and Pyrrhus before Pythagoras.
        • Proof: as Hermotimus, he identified the shield Menelaus had dedicated at Apollo’s temple.
        • Divine aura: disciples took him for Apollo from the Hyperboreans; he had a golden thigh and a river hailed him.
        • Soul’s circle: he first taught that the soul passes a necessary circle, confined in different bodies at different times.
      • Numbers, Nature, and Writings
        • Mathematics: perfected geometry, focused on arithmetic, and found the numerical relation of sounds on a string.
        • Theorem: hecatomb offered when he discovered the square of the hypotenuse equals the squares of the other sides.
        • Cosmology: monad generates indefinite dyad, numbers, figures, solids, four elements, and a spherical living world.
        • Firsts: introduced measures and weights to Greeks; identified Hesperus and Lucifer as the same star.
        • Writings: treatises on education, politics, and natural philosophy exist; some are attributed to disciples.
      • The Pythagorean Discipline
        • Common life: friends held all goods in common, and friendship was equality.
        • Silence: disciples kept silence for five years, listening, before being admitted to see him.
        • Diet: forbade beans, animal hearts, erythinus, and melanurus; ate bread, honey, and vegetables.
        • Restraint: never overate, drank wine by day, laughed, or punished anyone in anger.
        • Self-examination: daily verse: “In what have I transgressed? What have I done? What omitted?”
      • Symbols, Ethics, and Influence
        • Symbols: cryptic precepts such as “Do not stir the fire with a sword” meant do not provoke the powerful.
        • Oaths: forbade swearing; every man should make himself worthy of belief without an oath.
        • Honor: honor gods, dæmones, heroes, parents, and the law; make enemies friends.
        • Influence: drew Lucanians, Peucetians, Messapians, Romans; formed lawgivers Zaleucus and Charondas.
        • Name: Aristippus says he was called Pythagoras for speaking truth no less than the Delphic god.
    • Pythagorean Cosmos, Soul, and Precepts (Life of Pythagoras · II)
      • Cosmic Physics
        • Balanced opposites: heat, cold, dryness, and moisture divide the world equally and govern seasons; their balance is fairest spring.
        • Two aethers: lower air is still, diseased, mortal; upper air is ever-moving, pure, salubrious, divine.
        • Celestial gods: sun, moon, stars are gods because heat, the cause of life, predominates; the moon shines by borrowed light.
        • Providence and fate: men share the divine principle, so God provides for them; fate orders the world generally and particularly.
        • Vivifying heat: the sun's ray pierces cold and dense aether, descends into depths, and vitalizes heat-sharing beings; plants are animate.
      • Soul and Embodiment
        • Soul's origin: torn from warm and cold aether, therefore immortal and distinct from life.
        • Seed and embryo: seed is a warm brain-drop; animals arise only from seeds, never spontaneously; birth follows harmonic months.
        • Senses: sight is hot vapour; eyes are “gates of the sun”; cold vapour would dissipate in air.
        • Tripartite soul: intuition and mind are shared with animals; reason alone human; mind in heart, reason and deliberation in brain.
        • Soul's bonds and nature: veins, arteries, and nerves link it; blood nourishes it; reasons are its winds; reasoning sense immortal.
      • Afterlife and Daemones
        • Mercury's stewardship: he conducts pure souls upward and gives impure ones to Furies; hence Conductor, Commercial, Infernal.
        • Air full of souls: daemones and heroes send dreams and tokens of disease and health to men and cattle.
        • Their cultic work: daemones oversee purifications, expiations, divination, and oracular predictions.
        • Moral power: chief privilege is persuading the soul to good or bad; the happy never keep the same mind long.
      • Ethical and Ritual Precepts
        • Virtue and harmony: virtue is harmony, health, universal good, and God; friendship is harmonious equality; oaths are justice.
        • Honouring gods and heroes: praise gods always in white with chaste body; heroes receive honours only after midday.
        • Purity rules: washings, sprinklings, and abstinence from flesh, eggs, beans, and unclean things purify.
        • Bean taboo: beans resemble body parts or hell-gates, dry plants, or represent universal nature; death before trampling them.
        • Food and table rules: avoid white poultry and sacred fish, never break bread; salt reminds guests of justice.
        • Mathematics and health: sphere and circle are most beautiful; health is form's permanence, disease its destruction.
      • Death and Legacy
        • Death at Crotona: a jealous rival burned Milo's house; Pythagoras was slain at a bean-field, refusing to trample it.
        • Variant deaths: he starved at Metapontum or was killed by Syracuseans while skirting a bean-field.
        • Hermippus' ruse: he hid underground, learned events from his mother, then claimed to return from Hades as a god.
        • Family: wife Theano, daughter Damo guarded his commentaries, and son Telauges succeeded him and reportedly taught Empedocles.
        • Legacy: school lasted nine or ten generations; “Ipse dixit” arose from his authority; he flourished near the sixtieth Olympiad.
        • Innovations and letter: first to call the universe cosmos and earth round; letter urges Anaximenes to prefer country to astronomy.
    • Life of Empedocles – Life of Archytas
      • Life of Empedocles
        • Origins: Agrigentine aristocrat from a horse-breeding family; Olympic victor grandfather; ancient sources disagree on parentage.
        • Teachers and influences: Pythagorean initiate who divulged school secrets; emulated Parmenides or Xenophanes in verse; drew on Anaxagoras.
        • Rhetoric and poetry: Aristotle called him inventor of rhetoric and a Homeric genius; wrote On Nature, Purifications, tragedies; family burned some works.
        • Wonder-worker: Cured plague at Selinus by rerouting rivers; kept a corpse fresh thirty days; claimed power over winds, rain, and death.
        • Politics and persona: Refused sovereign power, advanced civic equality, funded dowries; dressed with bronze-soled slippers and garland like a divine king.
        • Death and doctrine: Rumored to leap into Etna or vanish at a feast; taught four elements, love and strife, and transmigration of souls.
      • Life of Epicharmus
        • Origin and school: Born in Cos, brought to Sicily as an infant; pupil of Pythagoras, honored by Syracuse.
        • Writings: Left Commentaries on natural philosophy, medicine, and aphorisms; he explicitly claimed authorship in notes.
        • Death: Died at ninety; his statue bore an inscription ranking him with sun and sea.
      • Life of Archytas
        • Pythagorean statesman: Tarentine general of universal esteem; elected seven times despite a one-year term law; never defeated.
        • Plato's ally: Saved Plato from Dionysius by letter; exchanged letters and commentaries on law, kingship, piety, and cosmology.
        • Mathematical mechanician: First to apply mathematical principles to mechanics; advanced descriptive geometry and the doubling of the cube.
        • Character under envy: When envy made him resign command, his army was at once captured; his virtue remained widely admired.
    • Life of Alcmæon – Life of Eudoxus
      • Life of Alcmæon
        • Pythagorean physician: Crotona-born pupil of Pythagoras; chief writings medical, with natural philosophy.
        • First natural philosopher: reputedly first to write a treatise on natural philosophy, per Phavorinus.
        • Two-sided human affairs: most human matters admit two sides; gods alone know invisible and mortal things.
        • Moon and soul: moon keeps its nature eternally; soul is immortal and moves perpetually like the sun.
      • Life of Hippasus
        • Pythagorean of Metapontum: pupil of Pythagoras; left no writings, per Demetrius.
        • Cosmic cycle: declared the world’s changes occur in a definite time; universe finite and perpetually moving.
        • Namesake caution: another Hippasus, a Lacedæmonian, wrote on the Spartan constitution in five books.
      • Life of Philolaus
        • Pythagorean from Crotona: Plato sought his master’s books through Dion; Philolaus died suspected of tyranny.
        • Harmony and necessity: all things arise from harmony and necessity; first to affirm the earth moves in a circle.
        • One book, source of Timæus: Hermippus says Plato bought it in Sicily for forty silver minæ and copied his Timæus.
        • Natural philosophy pioneer: Demetrius calls him first Pythagorean to write on nature; work opened on finite and infinite bodies.
      • Life of Eudoxus
        • Polymath of Cnidus: son of Æschines; astronomer, geometrician, physician, lawgiver; studied under Archytas, Philistion, and Plato.
        • Travels and study: poor, drawn to Athens and the Socratics; later spent a year and four months in Egypt, then taught at Cyzicus and Propontis.
        • Egyptian science: shaved eyebrows like priests and composed the Octaeteris; visited court of Mausolus; returned to Athens with many disciples.
        • Pleasure as the good: Nicomachus reports Eudoxus held pleasure to be the good; he also introduced semicircular seating at Plato’s banquet.
        • Honored lawgiver: received honors at home, gave laws to Cnidus, wrote on astronomy and geometry, and left dialogues and Reminiscences.
        • Legacy and namesakes: inventor of the theory of crooked lines; three later Eudoxi; died at fifty-three after Apis licked his garment.
  • Book IX
    • Life of Heraclitus – Life of Melissus
      • Life of Heraclitus
        • Arrogant spirit: mocked Homer, Hesiod, and Pythagoras; abundant learning does not form the mind.
        • True wisdom: knowing the one idea that steers everything; he called opinion the sacred disease.
        • Against Ephesus: urged fighting for law as for one’s city; attacked the banishment of Hermodorus; refused to legislate a corrupt state.
        • Misanthrope and death: lived on mountain plants, caught dropsy, tried evaporating it in cow dung, and died.
        • Obscure book: deposited in Artemis’ temple, written darkly so only capable readers could grasp it; divided into universe, politics, and theology.
        • Physics: all things from fire and into fire; opposites harmonize; the upward and downward road; evaporation shapes stars, seasons, and eclipses.
      • Life of Xenophanes
        • Poet-critic: attacked Homer and Hesiod for their stories of the gods; recited his own verses into extreme old age.
        • Cosmology: four elements, infinite unchangeable worlds; clouds formed from vapour drawn up from the sun.
        • God: spherical, unlike man, all-seeing and all-hearing; wholly intellect, wisdom, and eternity.
        • Principles: everything generated is perishable; soul is spirit; the many is inferior to unity; associate with tyrants as little or as pleasantly as possible.
      • Life of Parmenides
        • Pupil of Xenophanes: later followed the Pythagorean Aminias; honored him with a shrine and chose the tranquil philosophic life.
        • Twofold philosophy: truth rests on certainty, opinion on unreliable evidence; reason is the test, the senses untrustworthy.
        • Cosmology: first to make the earth spherical and central; fire and earth are maker and matter; mind and soul are the same.
        • Discoveries: first to identify Hesperus and Lucifer as one star; gave laws to his city; devised the “Achilles” argument.
      • Life of Melissus
        • Statesman-admiral: Samian pupil of Parmenides, active in politics and elected admiral; honored for private virtue.
        • Monism: the universe is infinite, unchanging, immovable, one, like itself, and complete; motion is only apparent.
        • Gods: no definition of them is needed, for no certain knowledge of them exists.
    • Life of Zeno, the Eleatic – Life of Democritus
      • Life of Zeno, the Eleatic
        • Identity: native of Velia; son of Teleutagoras by nature, adopted son of Parmenides.
        • Dialectics: Aristotle named him the inventor of dialectics, as Empedocles was of rhetoric.
        • Paradox: first to raise the “Achilles” question, though Phavorinus credits Parmenides.
        • Tyrant plot: arrested for conspiring against Nearches; named the tyrant’s friends as accomplices.
        • Defiance: bit the tyrant; some say he bit off his nose or tongue before being killed.
        • Doctrines: several worlds and no vacuum; all things come from hot, cold, dry, and moist interchanging.
      • Life of Leucippus
        • Origins: native of Velia, Abdera, or Melos; pupil of Zeno.
        • Atomism: first philosopher to make atoms principles of things.
        • Universe: infinite, part plenum, part vacuum; worlds form and dissolve back into it.
        • Cosmogony: bodies fall into the vacuum, form a vortex, and like joins like to produce a spherical world.
        • Celestial order: sun outermost, moon nearest earth; stars ignite by motion; earth revolves at centre, shaped like a drum.
        • Necessity: worlds’ growth and destruction depend on necessity, whose character he left unexplained.
      • Life of Democritus
        • Origins and teachers: Abdera-born; learned from Magi/Chaldaeans and Leucippus; admired Pythagoras, though no direct pupil.
        • Travels and resourcefulness: chose the smaller cash share to fund journeys to Egypt, Persia, India, Ethiopia.
        • Way of life: lived humbly, tested perceptions in solitude, sometimes among tombs; foretold events and gained fame.
        • Honors: recited Great World to answer charges of squandering; received five hundred talents, statues, and public burial.
        • Atomist system: atoms and void are principles; everything else is opinion; worlds are infinite, created, perishable; soul and mind identical.
        • Ethics and writings: chief good is cheerfulness, a calm soul free from fear and superstition; Thrasylus catalogued his many works.
    • Life of Protagoras – Life of Diogenes, of Apollonia
      • Life of Protagoras
        • Relativism: “Man is the measure of all things” — existence is relative to the perceiver.
        • Agnosticism: About the gods he could not know; this treatise opening led to banishment and public book-burning.
        • Paid teaching: First to charge pupils, asking one hundred minae; rose from porter to admired sophist.
        • Rhetorical innovation: First to argue both sides of every question and to stage contests of argument.
        • Method: Founded word-based disputation; devised “Socratic” and “uncontradictable” reasonings.
        • Legacy: Wrote on gods, virtue, republic, and contradictions; died shipwrecked en route to Sicily.
      • Life of Diogenes, of Apollonia
        • Element: Air is the basic element; condensation and rarefaction create worlds.
        • Cosmology: Infinite worlds and infinite vacuum; earth is round and fixed at the center.
        • Conservation: Nothing arises from nothing, and nothing perishes into nothing.
        • Earth: Its position comes from hot circumvolutions; its consistency comes from cold.
        • Method: Treatises should begin from undisputed principles, stated simply and with dignity.
        • Reputation: Pupil of Anaximenes, contemporary of Anaxagoras; unpopular and endangered at Athens.
    • Apatheia, Suspended Judgment, and Happiness (Life of Anaxarchus · I)
      • Life of Anaxarchus
        • Origins and circle: Abderite; pupil of Diogenes of Smyrna or Metrodorus of Chios; companion of Alexander in the 110th Olympiad.
        • Grudge with Nicocreon: at a banquet he jested that only a satrap's head was wanting; the Cyprian tyrant never forgot.
        • Death in the mortar: pounded to death with iron pestles, he cried, "Beat the bag of Anaxarchus, you will not beat Anaxarchus himself."
        • Final defiance: when Nicocreon ordered his tongue cut out, he bit it off and spat it at him.
        • The Happy: his evenness of temper and tranquil life earned the name; he rebuked Alexander's self-deification by showing his blood.
        • Moral frankness: he readily reproved men and led them to temperance, practicing the calm he preached.
      • Life of Pyrrho
        • Origins and training: painter from Elis; pupil of Bryson, then Anaxarchus; accompanied him to India's Gymnosophists and the Magi.
        • Core doctrine: nothing is honourable, disgraceful, just, or unjust by nature; custom and law govern, so suspend judgment.
        • Practice of indifference: avoided nothing, encountering wagons, precipices, and dogs; friends saved him, though he acted deliberately.
        • Settled calm: he washed a pig, stayed serene in storms and surgery, but admitted it is hard to put off humanity.
        • Sceptical school: called Pyrrhoneans, doubters, sceptics, ephectics; every reason has an equal contrary, and reason purges itself like a cathartic.
        • Ten modes: differences among animals, humans, senses, states, laws, customs, and myths make reality unknowable.
    • Sceptical Modes and Suspension of Judgment (Life of Anaxarchus · II)
      • The Ten Modes
        • Sixth mode: nothing is perceived alone; air, light, moisture, heat, and other powers alter every appearance.
        • Seventh mode: distance, position, and place change size, shape, smoothness, and color; the sun and dove's neck vary.
        • Eighth mode: qualities depend on magnitude and quantity; moderate wine invigorates, excess weakens.
        • Ninth mode: frequency dulls wonder; earthquakes and the sun seem ordinary where familiar.
        • Tenth mode: right, father, and day are relative; what is known only in relation is unknown in itself.
      • Agrippa's Five Additional Modes
        • Disagreement: every philosophical or popular question is full of uncertainty and contradiction.
        • Infinite regress: one truth is established only by another truth, so no undeniable truth is reached.
        • Relation: no object is perceived independently and entirely by itself, only in relation to something else.
        • Hypothesis: accepting absolute principles without examination is arbitrary; the contrary can be laid down.
        • Reciprocal proof: circular reasoning, e.g. proving porosity by evaporation and evaporation by porosity.
      • Denial of Dogmatic Foundations
        • No demonstration: it relies on self-evident items needing proof or indemonstrable principles that collapse if any is wrong.
        • No criterion: judging the criterion requires another criterion, and disagreements make any test impossible.
        • No signs: signs are neither sensible nor intelligible; visible signs are superfluous, invisible signs impossible.
        • No causes: cause is relative; neither body nor incorporeal thing can produce anything, so cause is unreal.
        • No motion, learning, or production: each fails because being/non-being cannot move, be taught, or be produced.
        • No natural good or evil: no good is good for everyone; conflicting opinions are equally supported.
      • Defense of Scepticism
        • Appearances vs natures: Sceptics know it is day, that fire burns, and that someone moves, but not how.
        • No dogmatic assertion: “we define nothing” is an admission, not a dogma, unlike claiming the world is spherical.
        • Evident prevails: Timon and Ænesidemus follow what is evident, custom, and law without affirming hidden natures.
        • Criterion is the evident: appearances serve as the Sceptic criterion, though they are not a test of truth.
        • Life preserved: Sceptics avoid and seek by custom, obey laws, and suspend judgment outside practical necessities.
      • Chief Good and Tranquillity
        • Chief good: suspension of judgment is the goal; tranquillity follows like its shadow.
        • Necessary pains: hunger, thirst, and pain cannot be avoided by reason; only judgment about them is suspended.
        • Practical conformity: Sceptics live without disquiet, following custom and law in matters of life.
    • Life of Timon
      • Life and Wanderings
        • Origins: son of Timarchus, Phliasian; studied dancing before philosophy.
        • Conversion: left dancing for Stilpo at Megara, then married and moved to Elis to join Pyrrho.
        • Family: son Xanthus trained in medicine and made successor in Pyrrho’s school.
        • Career: earned a fortune as a sophist in Chalcedon, then settled in Athens until death.
        • Death: died near ninety; called himself Cyclops because he had only one eye.
      • The Silli and Other Works
        • Prolific output: tragedies, comedies, satyr plays, amatory poems; about 20,000 verses.
        • Silli: three volumes of sceptical parodies lampooning dogmatic philosophers.
        • Form: first volume is continuous narration; second and third are dialogues.
        • Content: second book covers ancient philosophers, third the modern ones—sometimes called the epilogue.
      • Character and Habits
        • Temperament: fond of drinking, gardens, and solitude; aimed above all at tranquillity.
        • Negligence: manuscripts lay about half-eaten by mice; he read even torn pages without concern.
        • Endurance: vigorous constitution let him easily go without dinner.
        • Contradiction: mocked Arcesilaus in Silli, yet praised him in Funeral Banquet of Arcesilaus.
      • Wit and One-Liners
        • Self-deprecation: as a one-eyed man, he called himself Cyclops.
        • To Arcesilaus in the forum: “What are you doing here, where we freemen are?”
        • Four eyes jest: he, his one-eyed pupil, and a seeing man had only four eyes between them.
        • On coming from Thebes: “To laugh at you all when I see you face to face.”
      • Successors and School
        • Decline: Menodotus said the school ceased until Ptolemy of Cyrene re-established it.
        • Direct pupils: Dioscorides, Nicolochus, Euphranor, and Praylus.
        • Lineage: Euphranor taught Eubulus, then Ptolemy, then Heraclides, then Ænesidemus.
        • Sceptic chain: Ænesidemus → Zeuxippus → Zeuxis → Antiochus → Menodotus → Sextus Empiricus.
  • Book X
    • School, Slander, Succession (Life of Epicurus · I)
      • Origins and Turn to Philosophy
        • Athenian birth: Son of Neocles and Chærestrate of Gargettus, Philaidæ; raised in Samos, came to Athens at eighteen.
        • Call to philosophy: Began at fourteen (or twelve); contempt for grammarians unable to explain Hesiod’s Chaos turned him to philosophy.
        • Democritus catalyst: Hermippus says grammar teacher met Democritus’s books and embraced natural philosophy; Timon mocked his origins.
        • Family circle: Brothers Neocles, Chæredemus, and Aristobulus were study companions; slave Mus joined them.
        • School foundation: Established his own school at Mitylene and Lampsacus, then Athens; presided over it for thirty-two years.
      • Hostile Accusations
        • Stoic calumny: Diotimus published fifty obscene letters under Epicurus’s name; Posidonius, Sotion, Dionysius attacked him.
        • Alleged profligacy: Accused of assisting his mother’s purifications, teaching cheaply, and living with courtesan Leontium.
        • Plagiarism and birth: Said to have stolen Democritus’s atomism and Aristippus’s doctrine of pleasure, and to be illegitimate.
        • Flattery of patrons: Letters to Mithras, Idomeneus, and youth Pythocles allegedly servile; Epictetus called him debauched.
        • Timocrates’ testimony: Former disciple claimed vomiting twice daily, lavish eating, ill health, and courtesans in the school.
      • Defense of Character
        • Refutation by witnesses: Kindness proved by bronze statues, devoted friends, and a school that never decayed.
        • Gratitude and gentleness: Filial piety, beneficence to brothers, kindness to servants, and universal philanthropy.
        • Pious restraint: Avoided politics in hard times while showing unspeakable affection for gods and country.
        • Pleasure and frugality: Made pleasure the chief good yet lived on water and plain bread; asked for Cytherean cheese to feast.
        • Garden community: Bought garden for eighty minæ; rejected Pythagorean common stock, saying friends trust one another.
      • Philosophical Style and Rivalries
        • Perspicuity: Wrote plainly for clarity, even in rhetoric; Aristophanes the grammarian called the style vulgar.
        • Epistolary ethics: Letters replaced greetings with “May you act well” and “May you live virtuously.”
        • Self-instruction: Called himself his own teacher; attacked Nausiphanes as Lungs, Blockhead, Humbug, and Fornicator.
        • Teachers attributed: Diocles says he favored Anaxagoras and Archelaus; Apollodorus names Nausiphanes and Praxiphanes.
        • Rival-baiting: Mocked Plato’s followers, Aristotle as glutton, Protagoras as porter, Democritus as Lerocritus, Cynics as enemies of Greece.
      • Last Days and Will
        • Final illness: Died at seventy-two of the stone after a fortnight; bathed, drank wine, urged friends to remember his doctrines.
        • Last letter: Told Idomeneus that philosophical recollection made cheerfulness outweigh violent bodily suffering.
        • Testamentary trust: Left property to Amynomachus and Timocrates, all books to Hermarchus, securing garden and house for successors.
        • Commemorative calendar: Willed offerings for family and himself; birthday on Gamelion 10 and monthly reunion on the 20th.
        • Care for kin and slaves: Provided guardians for Metrodorus’s and Polyænus’s children, care for Nicanor, and freedom for four slaves.
      • Disciples and Succession
        • Metrodorus: Foremost pupil; virtuous and unmoved by death; took Leontium as concubine; died seven years before Epicurus.
        • Polyænus and Hermarchus: Polyænus mild and friendly; Hermarchus, poor rhetorician, succeeded and wrote against Plato and Aristotle.
        • Leonteus and Themista: Married pair of Lampsacus; Colotes and Idomeneus also prominent among Epicurus’s students.
        • Later school heads: Polystratus, Dionysius, and Basilides followed; Apollodorus, “tyrant of the gardens,” wrote over 400 books.
        • Prolific corpus: Over three hundred volumes, entirely original, containing no citation from other sources.
    • Epicurean Canon and Atomist Physics (Life of Epicurus · II)
      • Corpus and Divisions
        • Prolific rival: Chrysippus parroted Epicurus, padding equal-sized books without correction
        • Chief works: thirty-seven treatises on nature plus Canon, ethics, and letters form the system
        • Three epitomes: letters to Herodotus, Pythocles, and Menoeceus condense physics, heavens, and lives
        • Three divisions: canonical (criterion), physical (nature), ethical (choice and chief good); dialectics rejected
      • Canon: The Criteria
        • Criteria of truth: senses, preconceptions, passions — some add intellect's perceptive impressions
        • Senses are irrational: they neither remember nor add anything; equal in value, they cannot judge one another
        • Reason depends on senses: all reasoning is founded on sensation, so reason cannot overrule it
        • Obscure by analogy: things not directly seen are judged through analogy, proportion, or combination
        • Passions: pleasure and pain are natural and foreign; all choice and avoidance are judged by them
      • Preconception and Judgment
        • Preconception: recollection of an often-perceived object, a general idea within us
        • Settled terms: each word requires a prior notion; without it, inquiry runs to mere words or infinite demonstration
        • Opinion as supposition: true when supported, false when contradicted, by testimony
        • Waiting: suspend pronouncement until nearer evidence shows what a distant thing is
      • Physics: Atoms and Void
        • Nothing from nothing: being neither arises from nonbeing nor perishes into nonbeing; the whole is eternal
        • Body and void: senses prove bodies; void is necessary for containment and motion
        • Atoms: indivisible, full, indestructible elements; combinations dissolve, atoms remain
        • Atomic properties: only magnitude and weight; color varies by position; countless forms explain differences
        • Motion: atoms move continually and equally fast through void, colliding and re-acting
        • Infinity: universe and worlds are infinite; finite limits would require an external reference
      • Images and Perception
        • Images: thin surface films emitted by solids, preserving shape, arrangement, and motion
        • Rapidity: images traverse void instantly, slowed only by resistance
        • Sight: objects send same-colored, same-shaped images into us, producing continuous perception
        • Instant production: images form directly in space, light and depthless
        • Appearances are real: dream and madness visions act on us; what has no reality cannot act
    • From Senses to Atoms and Worlds (Life of Epicurus · III)
      • Error and Direct Perception
        • Error’s root: a preconceived expectation is not confirmed by evidence.
        • Twofold mental motion: direct perception plus an individual conception that overreaches it.
        • Truth criterion: confirmed or uncontradicted by evidence is true; otherwise false.
        • Guard the criteria: neither reject direct perception nor let falsehood become equally established.
      • Hearing and Smell
        • Sound current: a stream of fine, kindred particles from the source preserves identity and relation.
        • Audible feeling: the current strikes us like a light whisper; air is not “formed” by the voice.
        • Smell: object-specific emanations act on the organ, well or ill suited to it.
      • Atoms: Attributes and Limits
        • Intrinsic attributes: atoms have only form, weight, magnitude, and what form entails.
        • Imperishable core: change in compounds leaves something solid and indestructible; otherwise all would vanish.
        • Restricted sizes: atoms vary in magnitude, but not every magnitude exists; atoms are invisible.
        • No infinite divisibility: finite bodies cannot contain infinitely many particles or be transformed indefinitely.
        • Minimal measure: the smallest sensible particle is an abstract limit, not an aggregate.
      • Infinity and Atomic Motion
        • Infinite has no high or low: any point above or below is relative; no absolute limit exists.
        • Only two transfer directions: motion is conceived as single upward or downward passage through the infinite.
        • Equal atomic speed: unimpeded atoms move “as rapid as thought,” heavy or light, large or small.
        • Perceptible vs thinkable motion: atoms oscillate in indivisible instants; continuous motion is only a sense-level result.
      • Soul and Sensation
        • Soul is bodily: a fine, mobile aggregate diffused through the body, akin to spirit mixed with heat.
        • Soul’s parts: the rational part sits in the chest; the irrational part is diffused through the body.
        • Sensation needs both: the soul is the seat of feeling, but only works through the body’s envelopment.
        • Mutual sympathy: soul reflects bodily affections and communicates back; partial injury may not destroy all feeling.
        • Sleep and death: sleep comes when soul parts concentrate or escape; death is their final dispersion.
        • Only vacuum is incorporeal: vacuum serves as place of movement; the soul acts and suffers, so it must be bodily.
      • Qualities, Time, and Worlds
        • Qualities are real but not substances: forms, hues, and weights constitute a body’s essence, not its parts.
        • Accidents: transient attributes have perceived character and reality, but no independent existence.
        • Time: known by analogy and common measures, not by any special essence.
        • Worlds: finite aggregates arise from the infinite and are eventually destroyed.
        • World-shapes: worlds vary, spherical, elliptical, and otherwise, but not every shape exists.
    • Natural Philosophy and Celestial Calm (Life of Epicurus · IV)
      • Physics and Happiness
        • Physics first: physiology determines causes of the highest phenomena and underpins ethics.
        • Heavenly science calms: happiness comes from knowing celestial nature and analogous earthly facts.
        • Astronomy alone is useless: knowledge of star motions without natural causes leaves fear unresolved.
        • Sensation judges: attend to general and particular evidence to trace confusion and fear to their sources.
        • Memorized summary: Letter to Herodotus gives principles enough for beginners and adepts to live tranquilly.
      • Nature, Language, and Origins
        • Immanent generation: animals and plants are produced by the world itself, not by germs imported from the infinite.
        • Circumstance and reason: nature is instructed and constrained by events; reason later perfects borrowed discoveries.
        • First names from feeling: varied sounds shaped by passions and ideas formed words by original agreement.
        • Convention refines speech: uniform terms made language concise; educated men coined words for non-sensible notions.
      • Heavens Are Not Divine
        • No blessed administrator: a perfectly happy being does not regulate the world; care, favor, and anger imply weakness.
        • Mindless stars: the fiery globes do not possess happiness or move by reflection and wisdom.
        • Necessity, not will: order follows from the first impulse impressed at the world’s formation.
        • Truth over tradition: respect established beliefs only when they do not contradict evidence; contradictions trouble the soul.
      • World-Formation
        • Bounded cosmos: the world is a heaven-enclosed collection of stars, earth, and all visible things.
        • Extremity and dissolution: the boundary may be rare or dense, revolving or still, of any shape; its destruction ends all.
        • Infinite worlds: such collections form in interworld spaces made of plenum and vacuum, not absolute emptiness.
        • Seeds unite: germs from one or several worlds or the between-space converge, organize, and grow into a world.
        • Stars first, earth later: sun, moon, and stars form separately, then are enclosed; earth and sea grow by fiery and airy additions.
      • Celestial Method
        • Appearances, not hypotheses: explain heavenly facts by possible causes that agree with the senses; avoid fables.
        • No single explanation: many causes can produce each celestial phenomenon; one-only theories oppose facts.
        • Analogies from daily life: compare celestial events to visible happenings under our eyes; periodic regularity thus holds no terror.
        • Freedom from anxiety: the aim is not system-building but a life undisturbed by fear.
      • Celestial Puzzles
        • Apparent size: the sun and stars are as large as they appear to us; in themselves they may differ slightly.
        • Risings and settings: may be lighting and extinguishing, or passage above and below the earth.
        • Solar paths and days: intertropical motion and day length fit obliquity, air resistance, nourishment, or region crossed.
        • Lunar appearances: phases and face may come from turning, fiery air, or interposed bodies; light may be own or borrowed.
        • Eclipses and prognostics: eclipses come from extinction or interposition; stellar signs from coincidence or changes in air.
    • Heavenly Causes, the Wise Man, Death (Life of Epicurus · V)
      • Method: Many Causes for Heavenly Phenomena
        • Sensible analogy: explain celestial effects by causes observed in daily experience, not one fixed story.
        • Reject fables: any account that abandons sensory evidence invites superstition and false piety.
        • Folly of single cause: assigning one cause to all phenomena suits ignorant astronomers who hand the universe to the gods.
        • Presages: animal omens are fortuitous coincidences, not divine signs.
        • Pythocles' task: imprint these precepts to escape fables and discover analogous truths; first master principles, criteria, passions, chief good.
      • Weather and Earth
        • Clouds and rain: air condensation, atomic agency, earth/water emanations, or other causes produce them.
        • Thunder and lightning: wind in cloud cavities, ruptures, fire, collisions; lightning precedes thunder because light travels faster.
        • Thunderbolts and hurricanes: condensed winds or fire bursting clouds; whirlwinds follow descending gusts.
        • Earthquakes and winds: wind penetrating caverns, falls inside earth, or accumulating matter; winds from re-union of water or added particles.
        • Hail, snow, dew, frost, ice: condensations of aqueous or ethereal particles; ice from scalene atoms displacing round ones.
      • Celestial Appearances
        • Rainbow: reflection on moist air or a property of light/air; its circle follows equal sight-distances or atomic re-union.
        • Lunar halo: air moving toward the moon intercepts its rays, or the moon emits particles forming a circular veil.
        • Comets and wandering stars: partial conflagrations, periodic movements, or air gyrations; not one uniform cause.
        • Stellar motion: fixed stars may be held by air or lack of suitable material; apparent lagging from speed, contrary motion, or space traversed.
        • Falling stars: detached star particles, wind-ignited substances, inflammable atoms, or condensed vapors catching fire.
      • The Wise Man According to Epicurus
        • Resilience: the sage stays happy under torture, may feel grief, but never groans; reason conquers hatred, envy, contempt.
        • Wisdom is irreversible: once wise, a person cannot fall back under the passions or voluntarily lose progress toward wisdom.
        • Independence: avoids love, drunkenness, politics, tyranny, Cynicism, and beggary; may marry only in special circumstances.
        • Practical wisdom: cares for property, avoids assemblies, resists fortune, grieves no friend, and will die for a friend.
        • Friendship: gratitude to friends absent or present; friendship begins from need and shared pleasure; not all faults are equal.
        • Happiness: highest happiness admits no increase, like God's; human happiness admits addition and subtraction of pleasures.
      • Letter to Menoeceus: Gods and Death
        • Right time: no one is too young or too old to study philosophy and care for the soul's health.
        • True idea of God: gods exist, but are incorruptible and happy; impiety is applying vulgar opinions, not denying gods.
        • Death is nothing to us: all good and evil lie in sensation; death is only deprivation of sensation.
    • Death, Pleasure, and the Prudent Life (Life of Epicurus · VI)
      • Death Is Nothing to Us
        • Death: nothing to us; when we exist death is not, and when death is present we do not exist.
        • Fear of death: absurd to dread what causes no grief when present; correct knowledge makes mortality pleasant and ends longing for immortality.
        • Time and future: wise man enjoys time by agreeableness, not length; future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours.
        • Living and dying: living well and dying well are one care; the wise man does not think not-living an evil.
      • Pleasure as the Chief Good
        • Pleasure: beginning and end of happy life; first good connate with all animals, the standard for all choice and avoidance.
        • Kinds of pleasure: Epicurus admits both state and motion; freedom from pain/disquietude is state, joy and cheerfulness are motion.
        • Selection: every pleasure good by nature, but not every pleasure chosen; many pains are worth enduring for greater pleasure.
        • True pleasure: freedom of body from pain and soul from confusion, not revels or sensual enjoyment; sober contemplation banishes vain opinions.
        • Soul vs body: soul's pains and pleasures exceed the flesh's, since flesh feels only the present while soul feels past, present, and future.
        • Contentment: simple tastes perfect health and make us fearless of fortune; those best able to do without luxury enjoy it most.
      • Prudence, Virtue, and the Gods
        • Prudence: more valuable than philosophy; all virtues spring from it; pleasant life inseparable from prudent, honorable, just living.
        • Virtues: chosen for pleasure's sake, like medicine for health; virtue alone is inseparable from pleasure.
        • Gods: happy and imperishable, they feel no anger or gratitude; wise man has holy opinions and no fear of death.
        • Fortune and necessity: necessity is inexorable, fortune unstable; our will is free, and better unfortunate with reason than fortunate irrationally.
        • Physics: knowledge of nature banishes fears of heavenly bodies, death, and pain; unmixed pleasure is impossible without it.
        • Divination: he discards it; even if it exists, its revelations are nothing to us.
      • Desires, Pain, and Natural Limits
        • Desires classified: natural and necessary, natural but not necessary, neither natural nor necessary from vain opinion.
        • Natural needs: easily provided; drink when thirsty removes pain; vain desires are insatiable.
        • Pain: extreme pain lasts a short time; long diseases contain more pleasure than pain for the flesh.
        • Pleasure's limit: removal of all pain; once want is gone, flesh pleasure is not increased but only diversified.
        • Senses as criteria: all senses must be trusted; reject none or no standard remains, and confound induction with immediate certainty and you err.
      • Security, Friendship, and Justice
        • Security: power and wealth give limited safety; real security is tranquillity and freedom from ambition.
        • Friendship: most important good wisdom provides; protects against evil and makes life together agreeable.
        • Justice: mutual covenant against injury, no independent existence; just man is free from disquietude, unjust fears detection.
        • Law: just only while useful for social relations; ceases to be just when it ceases to be useful.
        • Social conduct: win friends, avoid enemies, and keep aloof from those beyond reach.
• Core Conclusion and Practical Takeaways
  • Philosophy as a Way of Life
    • Philosophy's goal: not doctrine but a transformed, self-sufficient character proved by how one lives
    • Virtue is teachable: bad men becoming good shows character is trained, not inherited
    • The turn inward: Socrates abandoned cosmology for the good and harm in a man's own house
    • Practice over theory: Polemo urged action; souls, like artisans, reach accuracy by habit
    • Voluntary hardship: Cynic endurance of cold, hunger, and contempt inures the mind to fortune
  • Daily Disciplines of the Sages
    • Nightly audit: Pythagoras' verse — "In what have I transgressed? What have I done? What omitted?"
    • Silence first: five years of listening before teaching; speech sealed by silence, silence by opportunity
    • Two ears, one mouth: Zeno's ratio for hearing twice as much as one speaks
    • Training against refusal: Diogenes begged alms of statues so denial would not sting
    • Plain food, hard body: beans, lupins, a small cup; mind and body are perfected only together
  • Mindset Shifts
    • Suspension of judgment: equal arguments on both sides yield tranquillity, which follows like a shadow
    • Indifferents distinguished: health, wealth, and reputation are usable well or ill, hence not goods
    • Possession without slavery: "I possess her, but am not possessed"; enjoy pleasure without being mastered
    • Citizen of the world: the wise man's country is the cosmos, not one city
    • Measure by need: Bias refused Croesus' gold, having twice as much as he desired
  • Ethics in Action
    • Justice as covenant: law is just only while useful; injustice dies when the uninjured share the outrage
    • Friendship above all: one soul in two bodies; friends come uninvited to those in distress
    • Unlearn bad habits: Antisthenes called this the most necessary of all studies
    • Rule after obeying: Solon taught rulers to submit to rule first, and to counsel what is best
    • Turn enemies into friends: serve both, withholding blame from friends and openings from enemies
  • The Great Divides and Final Verdicts
    • Dogmatists versus Sceptics: one affirms comprehension, the other suspends judgment and may write nothing
    • Chief good contested: virtue alone, pleasure, knowledge, cheerfulness, or suspension of judgment
    • Two roots of philosophy: the Ionian line from Thales, the Italian from Pythagoras
    • Happiness defined: a healthy body, easy circumstances, and a well-instructed mind
    • Philosophy's yield: the power of associating confidently with everybody