Abstract

The premise of this dissertation is the existence of a direct and correlative relationship between ancient philosophical work and ancient biographical data. The relationship emerges most clearly when anecdotal material is used to characterize a philosopher and his life. To explore and to demonstrate a tendency which I determined was wide-spread in ancient biographical material, I examined Diogenes Laertius' life of three pre-socratic philosophers. I then compared the biographical details, especially anecdotal material, to the still extant work of the three philosophers. ;A detailed, direct, and fascinatingly precise correlation between the two bodies of work soon becomes evident. And although several scholars have, at different times and for different philosophers and biographers, discussed some single example of the phenomenon, none, up to this point, has embarked on a systematic comparison of the biographies of the pre-socratic philosophers and their work. ;The dissertation, accordingly, addresses several issues. First, the problem of Diogenes Laertius who, after nearly a century of neglect, is once again object of scholarly scrutiny. A recent and important work, J. Mejer's 1978 Diogenes Laertius and his Hellenistic Background, argues for Diogenes Laertius' proper place in the classical intellectual and literary tradition, an argument further developed in this work. Second, the very notion of a correlation between biography and a subject's work has not always, or even generally, been admitted. In 1981, however, Mary R. Lefkowitz addressed the problem with customary clarity and common-sense in Lives of the Greek Poets. Her approach, which compares biographical data with the extant work of the subject, has brought new insight into the biographers and their methods; no less important, her methodology yields fresh and compelling interpretation of the subject's work. This dissertation humbly and gratefully follows her approach and extends it to the lives, and especially the deaths, of three philosophers, Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Democritus