Examined Lives_ From Socrates to Nietzsc - By James S. Miller Page 0,1

the quest for wisdom seriously. For Greek and Roman philosophers, “philosophical discourse … originates in a choice of life and an existential option—not vice versa.”

Or, as Socrates puts it in the pages of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, “If I don’t reveal my views in a formal account, I do so by my conduct. Don’t you think that actions are more reliable evidence than words?”

In ancient Greece and Rome, it was widely assumed that the life of a philosopher would exemplify in practice a specific code of conduct and form of life. As a result, biographical details were routinely cited in appraisals of a philosophy’s value. That Socrates faced death with dignity, for example, was widely regarded as an argument in favor of his declared views on the conduct of life.

But did Socrates really face death with dignity? How can we be confident that we know the truth about how Socrates actually behaved? Faced with such questions, the distrust of modern philosophers for ad hominem argument tends to be reinforced by a similarly modern skepticism about the kinds of stories traditionally told about philosophers.

Consider the largest extant compilation of philosophical biographies, the anthology of Diogenes Laertius. This work starts with Thales of Miletus (c. 624–546 B.C.): “To him belongs the proverb ‘Know thyself,’ ” Diogenes Laertius writes with typically nonchalant imprecision, “which Antisthenes in his Successions of Philosophers attributes to Phemonoe, though admitting that it was appropriated by Chilon.” He describes Thales as the first absentminded professor: “It is said that once, when he was taken out of doors by an old woman in order that he might observe the stars, he fell into a ditch, and his cry for help drew from the old woman the retort, ‘How can you expect to know all about the heavens, Thales, when you cannot even see what is just before your feet?’ ”

The work of Diogenes Laertius has long vexed modern scholars. His compilation represents an evidently indiscriminate collection of material from a wide array of sources. Despite its uneven quality, his collection of maxims, excerpts from poems, and extracts from theoretical treatises remains a primary source for what little we know today about the doctrines held by a great many ancient Greek philosophers, from Thales and Heraclitus (c. 540–480 B.C.) to Epicurus (341–270 B.C.). Diogenes’ anecdotes, on the other hand, have often been discounted, in part because he makes no effort to evaluate the quality of his sources, in part because his biographies are riddled with contradictions, and in part because some of the stories he recounts simply beggar belief.

The stories preserved by Diogenes Laertius occupy a twilight zone between truth and fiction. From the start—in the Socratic dialogues of Plato—the life of the philosopher was turned into a kind of myth and treated as a species of poetry, entering into the collective imagination as a mnemonic condensation, in an exemplary narrative, of what a considered way of life might mean in practice. Joining a school of philosophy in antiquity often involved an effort, in the company of others, to follow in the footsteps of a consecrated predecessor, hallowed in a set of consecrated tales. Long before Christians undertook an “imitation of Christ,” Socratics struggled to imitate Socrates; Cynics aimed to live as austerely as the first Cynic, Diogenes; and Epicureans tried to emulate the life led by their eponymous master, Epicurus.

The telling of tales about spiritual heroes thus played a formative role in the philosophic schools of antiquity. The need for such narratives led to the crafting of idealized accounts that might enlighten and edify. In such dramatic dialogues as the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, Plato’s picture of Socrates facing death is meant to stir the imagination and to fortify the resolve of a student setting out on the uncertain path toward wisdom. As the classicist Arnaldo Momigliano has put it, Plato and his peers “experimented in biography, and the experiments were directed towards capturing the potentialities rather than the realities of individual lives … [Socrates] was not a dead man whose life could be recounted. He was the guide to territories as yet unexplored.”

Following in Plato’s footsteps, and experimenting with some of the earliest known forms in the West of biography and autobiography, a number of Hellenistic philosophers, including Seneca and Plutarch, similarly supposed that a part of their job was to convey precepts by presenting, in writing, an enchanting portrait of a preceptor: hence, Plutarch’s lives of the noble Greek and Roman statesmen, and Seneca’s account of himself in his Moral