Witness — the source, profiled; every claim below carries its ground or says it has none

Diogenes Laertius

fl. early 3rd century CE · life dates approximate · 2 works served · 612 episodes · 165,542 words receipt — the witness cards

Inferred, not recorded: the latest philosophers his book knows belong to the turn of the third century, and no ancient author mentions him at all. Even the shape of his name is argued.

Who he was — as the tradition carries it; the grounds are named

Who he was, where he wrote, even whether 'Laertius' names a town, a family, or a flourish — the record is silent. The book is the only evidence its author existed. No ancient source on this shelf, or off it, tells his life. The house serves the silence as a fact about the record, not a defect of the man.

The vantage — what he could know, and from where

The record's great unknown: a reader with a library — place, station, and teachers unrecorded — who built lives out of other men's books and named the books as he went. His distance from his subjects runs from decades to eight centuries; his habit of showing the shelf is why so much of philosophy's lost library survives at all, as an index.

He steps into his own book only as a writer of epitaphs for its subjects.

There is an epigram of mine on him also D.L. 2.56-58 Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume I (Books I-V) · Diogenes Laertius

His method, in his own words — verbatim from the served record; every quote linked to its episode

Sentence one is already the whole method: a claim, its claimants, and their books, filed before any judgment.

are some who say that the study of philosophy had its beginning among the barbarians. They urge that the Persians have had their Magi, the Babylonians or Assyrians their Chaldaeans, and the Indians their Gymnosophists D.L. 1.1-2 Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume I (Books I-V) · Diogenes Laertius

Dates arrive with their disagreements attached — the variance served, not smoothed.

He died at the age of 78 (or, according to Sosicrates, of 90 years) D.L. 1.36-38 Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume I (Books I-V) · Diogenes Laertius

Lives end with the namesakes disambiguated — antiquity's own answer to 'which Xenophon?', and this house's oldest colleague.

There have been seven Xenophons: the first our subject himself; the second an Athenian, brother of Pythostratus, who wrote the Theseid, and himself the author, amongst other works, of a biography of Epaminondas and Pelopidas D.L. 2.58-60 Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume I (Books I-V) · Diogenes Laertius

How the record has read him — the reception's words, never the house's verdict

No one on this shelf — no one in antiquity at all — reviews him. His reception is modern: the accidental savior of philosophy's bibliography, valued for exactly the habit the method claims above show. The shelf will serve that verdict when it serves the books that give it.

His shelf in the house — the served works; every edition credited

The deeds he witnesses — curated events his works attest; the accounts face each other in each room

the Cylonian affair — c. 632 BCE the meeting of Solon and Croesus — c. 560-546 BCE (chronology disputed) battle of Delium — 424 BCE battle of Aegospotami — 405 BCE battle of Cunaxa — 401 BCE trial and death of Socrates — 399 BCE death of Alexander — 323 BCE

The record here: 166 works · 12,119 episodes served · profiles carry claims, claims carry grounds — episode, page, or an honest open

lives · deeds · times · the shelf · sources & licenses