Bios Philosophos is the sixth volume to have issued from Diatribai, a biennial colloquium on post-classical philosophy. Its immediate predecessor focused on the idea of the contemplative life after Plato and Aristotle, and offered illuminating chapters on Hellenistic and Roman understandings of theoria. The present volume continues this focus on the contemplative life, but now approaches the theme from the perspective of biography. What were post-classical authors doing when they wrote Lives of philosophers? This question has been the subject of a number of monographs and edited volumes in recent decades. What distinguishes this volume is the strictness of its focus on philosophers, as distinct from statesmen and saints, and its corresponding lack of emphasis on Pagan–Christian conversations in Late Antiquity.
T. Bénatouïl's opening chapter establishes that fourth-century b.c.e. Academics and Peripatetics used biographical research to defend philosophical positions. Bénatouïl focuses on Dicaearchus. The biographical fragments we have from Dicaearchus attest to his praise of political action over contemplation, but they also suggest that he elided action and contemplation rather than preferring one to the other. According to Bénatouïl, the politically prominent ‘seven wise men’, but not Pythagoras, represented Dicaearchus’ ideal. Biography, as distinct from the philosophical treatise, was especially well suited to representing a view of the best life that combined action and contemplation.
Even a treatise or a poem might be read as a sort of biography, however, if we understand a work to reflect its author's character. P.S. Horky, in a captivating if conjectural exploration of a complicated passage from Diogenes Laertius’ Empedocles, argues that Aristotle presented Empedocles as a democrat on the basis of his poetry, and that Timaeus of Tauromenium challenged this view of Empedocles by rejecting Aristotle's principle of interpretation. For Timaeus, Empedocles was a ‘Demosthenic philosopher’ critical of kingship and concerned to protect the people's rights, even if selections of his poetry suggest he was too arrogant to brook any authority at all.
D. De Sanctis's analysis of Epicurean Lives considers another departure from the biographical practices of the Peripatetics. The latter proceeded by means of structured anecdotes, but Epicurean biographies tended to assert their protagonists’ excellence of character, and then illustrate their virtues by quoting from letters. The prevalence of epistolary evidence in Epicurean biographies testifies to Epicurus’ own reliance on letter-writing and to the archival techniques that had arisen in the Garden to catalogue and protect Epicurus’ writings. De Sanctis finds little polemical intent in these Lives. They were intended instead to renew the devotion of the Garden's members to Epicurus’ doctrines and way of life.
As the Lives of Epicureans and countless other texts attest, there was nothing in the genre of the Life itself that prevented it from depicting philosophers and poets as well as statesmen. All the more puzzling, then, that Plutarch, an ‘icon of biography’ (p. 8), seems not to have taken a philosopher as the protagonist of a Life. J. Opsomer's chapter makes us feel the force of that puzzle. To address it, he offers a compelling interpretation of several entries in the Moralia that touch on the issue, a review of the Lives’ programmatic statements, and a brisk tour of ‘just a few examples’ of scenes where philosophers assume supporting roles in the Lives themselves. In the end, it is not entirely clear why Plutarch omitted philosophers, but Opsomer succeeds in mapping the lines of approach to this question that Plutarch's corpus allows.
Lucian's Life of Demonax represents the sort of philosophical Life that Plutarch never attempted. K. Schlapbach's contribution examines this work alongside two others – The Death of Peregrinus and Nigrinus’ Philosophy. She convincingly argues that Lucian demonstrates his philosophical distinctiveness most clearly through his portraits of philosophers (p. 127). Demonax in particular seems to represent Lucian's philosophical ideal, in so far as the author ‘for once spares the protagonist his mockery’ (p. 142). And yet, as Schlapbach shows, Demonax is peculiarly un-Socratic. Demonax's pithy riddles are conversation-stoppers, the opposite of Socrates’ fertile questions. As Plato stands to Socrates, so Lucian stands to Demonax; the first meant to unlock dialectic as a window onto nature, the latter, as Schlapbach puts it, ‘to show that all meaning is dependent on context and interpretation’ (p. 151).
Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius, on S. Schorn's reading, explores another theme of a Platonic stamp, that of the philosopher-king. Building on the work of J.J. Flinterman, Schorn interprets three encounters between philosopher and king in the Life in light of the long tradition of ‘mirrors of princes’. The most peculiar of these cases is Apollonius’ encounter with Phraotes, a fellow-philosopher and perhaps even a Pythagorean of sorts, but one whom Apollonius does not attempt to transform into the utopian ideal of philosopher-king. Philostratus ultimately considers the gap between philosopher and king difficult, perhaps impossible, to overcome.
The Life of Apollonius, alongside myriad pagan and Christian Lives of the same period, might be considered a hagiography, in so far as Apollonius is not only morally admirable and worthy of imitation, but ‘holy’ and deserving of veneration. I. Männlein-Robert argues that Iamblichus’ Life of Pythagoras and Porphyry's Life of Plotinus are not meant to be merely morally edifying, but to serve protreptic and polemical purposes: they lead readers towards a broader philosophical encounter and steer them away from stray paths. Porphyry's choice of a near-contemporary protagonist hints at the audience he addresses – not only already-convinced Platonists, but an expansive literary readership Porphyry intends to introduce to Plotinus’ works. Iamblichus’ Life of Pythagoras, by contrast, has the polemical intent of leading readers away from Porphyry, whose works Iamblichus also criticised elsewhere (p. 199).
M. Becker considers Porphyry's and Iamblichus’ influence on the subsequent development of Neoplatonist biography through the ‘scale of virtues’, a way of organising virtues that emerged with Plotinus’ distinction between political and purificatory virtues, and developed ultimately into Iamblichus’ seven-fold division. The ‘scale of virtues’ has been shown to have influenced biographies of the fifth century (especially Marinus’ Life of Proclus) and later. Becker claims that Eunapius’ Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists should be added to the list of Marinus’ forerunners.
What has come down to us of Damascius’ Life of Isidore has led some scholars to link it to Eunapius’ Lives and others to question whether this work belongs to the genre of biography at all. F. Trabattoni argues that although the Life of Isidore is not exclusively a biography, it is nevertheless essentially biographical in its predominant focus on one person, held up for admiration (though not uncritically), for the sake of improving the reader's moral character (pp. 262–4). For Damascius, the presiding scholarch of the Academy, when Justinian ordered it closed in 529, to depict his predecessor Isidore as ‘a Platonic philosopher at the height of his skill and responsibility’ was no trivial matter. In its immediate context, Damascius’ Life contributed to the preservation of the philosophical tradition that produced him. And it did so in part by illustrating the pagan philosopher's link to the divine, in ways that bore some resemblance to the beliefs of Damascius’ Christian persecutors (pp. 267–8).
M. Regali concludes the volume with an examination of two Lives of Plato: the one Olympiodorus uses to introduce his commentary on the Alcibiades I and the later, anonymous Prolegomena to Plato's Philosophy. According to Regali, most of the innovations in the Prolegomena serve to place greater emphasis than Olympiodorus had on the cathartic nature of Plato's Life, which is to say Plato's separation from the sensible world and his connection to the divine. The Prolegomena accordingly legitimates the tradition of teaching Plato's texts as a sort of divine succession.
This volume covers a vast chronological range of authors, from Dicaearchus and Timaeus, both active while the philosophical schools of Classical Greece were rather young, to Damascius and Olympiodorus, who witnessed those schools’ demise at the hands of Christian emperors. With such a wide aperture, the volume is inevitably a collage of insights rather than a univocal account of the phenomenon in question. Christian interlocutors are heard when necessary, as in Männlein-Robert's discussion of polemic in Iamblichus and Trabattoni's treatment of the supernatural in Damascius, but this volume's emphasis on pagan philosophy inevitably mutes some of the intellectual drama that A. Urbano and others have recently detailed. This focus has the virtue, however, of calling readers’ attention to surprising continuities and internal debates within the long tradition of philosophical biography.
