Diogenes Laërtius

And as those lectures record, he gave Socrates as an example, who had put up with the public mockery of Aristophanes without getting angry.

Diogenes Laertius, the biographer of the philosophers, adds another scene.

Someone kicked Socrates in the middle of the street, and when his friends asked why he didn't take the man to court, he replied, "If a donkey had kicked me, would you have me take it to court as well?" The most common mistake with this rule is thinking it means swallowing what you feel, gritting your teeth and saying, "It's nothing." That isn't separating, that's suppressing, and whatever you suppress comes back at night.

Separating is something else.

At home, Socrates practiced the same thing.

His wife, Xanthippe, had a reputation for a fierce temper.

Diogenes Laertius tells how one day after shouting at him for a good while, she emptied a bucket of water over him, and Socrates drenched simply remarked, "I knew that after the thunder would come the rain." A single sentence turned a humiliating scene into an anecdote that has been told for more than 2,000 years.

That said, this humor has a boundary.

He needed nothing from Alcibiades, and that, precisely that, made Alcibiades admire him more than anyone alive.

Diogenes Laërtius, the biographer of the ancient philosophers, records an episode that points the same way.

It's said that Alcibiades offered Socrates a large plot of land on which to build himself a house, and Socrates turned it down with a comparison.

"If I needed a pair of sandals, wouldn't it be absurd to accept a whole ox-hide to make them from?" He needed very little, and whatever he didn't need, he didn't take, no matter who was offering.

The Greek school of philosophy had its inception with the seven immortalized thinkers upon whom was first conferred the appellation of Sophos, the wise.

According to Diogenes Laërtius, these were Thales, Solon, Chilon, Pittacus, Bias, Cleobulus, and Periander.

Water was conceived by Thales to be the primal principle or element upon which the earth floated like a ship, and earthquakes were the result of disturbances in this universal sea.

Since Thales was an Ionian, the school perpetuating his tenets became known as the Ionic.

It travels.

Two stories come down to us about him, and both are told by a later writer, Diogenes Laërtius.

In the first, Pythagoras is walking past a man who is beating a puppy.

He tells the man to stop.

Then, in the middle of the 19th century, it came back through two doors at once.

The first door was in France.

A teacher and writer named Allan Kardec started collecting what people said they were hearing from the dead in seances that were a popular craze at the time.

He sorted it, compared it, and in 1857 he published a book called The Spirits Book.

Athens and Mytilene were fighting over Sigeum, a promontory on the coast near the ruins of Troy itself, a piece of symbolism that was lost on nobody involved.

The Athenian commander was Phrynon, an Olympic victor, a champion in the pancration according to Diogenes Laertius.

The Mytilenean commander was a man named Patacus, and when the two generals agreed to settle the campaign in single combat, Patacus came prepared.

He'd reportedly concealed a fishing net beneath his shield, and when the moment came, he flung it over the Olympic champion, tangled him, and cut him down.

At such a time I worked through German tomes on ancient philosophy.

At such a time I read Apuleius and Lucian, Petronius and the Greek Anthology, Diogenes Laertius, and heaven knows what! My hunger was forgotten.

The garret to which I must return to pass the night never perturbed my thoughts.

On the whole it seems to me something to be rather proud of.

Socrates dies three nine nine BC when Plato's just at the end of his twenties.

And although there is one ancient report by Diogenes Laërtius that, that says that Plato did actually write dialogues, at least some dialogues when Socrates was alive because the d-report in Diogenes Laërtius does say that the dialogue on friendship, the Lysis, that Socrates himself actually read the Lysis.

But like, you know, so-- many people, myself included, think that that's like an embellished apocryphal story, that Socrates never read any of the-- any Platonic dialogues.

And, and so, you know, if, if, if Socrates dies at the start of the three nineties, which he, which he does, then, you know, Plato probably didn't start writing the dialogues the ne-very next day.

But scholars then begin to hypothesize that there were other texts that existed that explain some of the things we see in the historical record, even when we have no direct evidence for it.

So, like, we have direct evidence for The Republic because s- because we have The Republic.

We have direct evidence that Epicurus wrote a book called On Kingship because Diogenes Laërtius tells us that Epicurus wrote a book called On Kingship.

And so even though we, even though we don't have an Epicurean text called On Kingship, we know that there was such a text.