Vitae philosophorum

Diogenes Laertius

Diogenes Laertius. Hicks, R. D., editor. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1925.

Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus, a sculptor, and of Phaenarete, a midwife, as we read in the Theaetetus of Plato; he was a citizen of Athens and belonged to the deme Alopece. It was thought that he helped Euripides to make his plays; hence Mnesimachus[*](So Cobet for vulgate Mnesilochus, retained by Meineke, C.G.F. ii. 371.) writes:

This new play of Euripides is The Phrygians; and Socrates provides the wood for frying.[*](There is a pun in Φρύγες and φρύγανα (= firewood).)
And again he calls Euripides an engine riveted by Socrates. And Callias in The Captives[*](Meineke, C.G.F. ii. 739.):
  1. A. Pray why so solemn, why this lofty air?
  2. B. I’ve every right; I’m helped by Socrates.
Aristophanes[*](A mistake for Teleclides: see Meineke, Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ii. p. 371 sq. Dindorf conjectured that τὰς σωκρατογόμφους belongs to the same passage of Teleclides’ Clouds and might well follow σοφάς.) in The Clouds:
    ’Tis he composes for Euripides
  1. Those clever plays, much sound and little sense.

According to some authors he was a pupil of Anaxagoras, and also of Damon, as Alexander states in his Successions of Philosophers. When Anaxagoras was condemned, he became a pupil of Archelaus the physicist; Aristoxenus asserts that Archelaus was very fond of him. Duris makes him out to have been a slave and to have been employed on stonework, and the draped figures of the Graces on the Acropolis have by some been attributed to him. Hence the passage in Timon’s Silli[*](Fr. 25 d.):

V1_151
From these diverged the sculptor, a prater about laws, the enchanter of Greece, inventor of subtle arguments, the sneerer who mocked at fine speeches, half-Attic in his mock humility.
He was formidable in public speaking, according to Idomeneus; moreover, as Xenophon tells us, the Thirty forbade him to teach the art of words.

And Aristophanes attacks him in his plays for making the worse appear the better reason. For Favorinus in his Miscellaneous History says Socrates and his pupil Aeschines were the first to teach rhetoric; and this is confirmed by Idomeneus in his work on the Socratic circle.[*](Possibly the reference is to the same citation as in 19 which Diogenes Laertius may have found independently in two of his authorities. Diogenes himself notices the agreement between Favorinus and Idomeneus of Lampsacus, a much earlier author, for he was a disciple of Epicurus, whom he knew from 310 to 270 b.c.) Again, he was the first who discoursed on the conduct of life, and the first philosopher who was tried and put to death. Aristoxenus, the son of Spintharus, says of him that he made money; he would at all events invest sums, collect the interest accruing, and then, when this was expended, put out the principal again.

Demetrius of Byzantium relates that Crito removed him from his workshop and educated him, being struck by his beauty of soul;