Diogenes Laertius

Diogenes Laërtius
Διογένης Λαέρτιος
1688 engraving of Diogenes Laërtius
Born	180 AD Ancient Greece
Died	240 AD

Diogenes Laërtius (/daɪˌɒdʒɪniːz leɪˈɜːrʃiəs/ dy-OJ-in-eez lay-UR-shee-əs;^[1] Ancient Greek: Διογένης Λαέρτιος, Laertios; fl. 3rd century AD) was a biographer of the Greek philosophers. Little is definitively known about his life, but his surviving book Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is a principal source for the history of ancient Greek philosophy. His reputation is controversial among scholars because he often repeats information from his sources without critically evaluating it. In many cases, he focuses on insignificant details of his subjects' lives while ignoring important details of their philosophical teachings and he sometimes fails to distinguish between earlier and later teachings of specific philosophical schools.^{[citation needed]} However, unlike many other ancient secondary sources, Diogenes Laërtius tends to report philosophical teachings without trying to reinterpret or expand on them, and so his accounts are often closer to the primary sources. Due to the loss of so many of the primary sources on which Diogenes relied, his work has become the foremost surviving source on the history of Greek philosophy.