The first nine probably date from the 3rd century BC, they are usually included among the Cynic epistles, and reflect how the Cynic philosophers viewed him as prefiguring many of their ideas ; the tenth letter is quoted by Diogenes Laertius, it is addressed to Croesus, the proverbially rich king of Lydia, it too is fictitious:

:" He marvelled that among the Greeks, those who were skillful in a thing vie in competition ; those who have no skill, judge " — Diogenes Laertius, of Anacharsis.

v. 32 ; Diogenes Laertius i. 101-5 ; Athenaeus, iv.

According to Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch he fled to Lampsacus due to a backlash against his pupil Pericles.

Diogenes Laertius reports the story that he was prosecuted by Cleon for impiety, but Plutarch says that Pericles sent his former tutor, Anaxagoras, to Lampsacus for his own safety after the Athenians began to blame him for the Peloponnesian war.

According to Diogenes Laertius, in response to Alexander's claim to have been the son of Zeus-Ammon, Anaxarchus pointed to his bleeding wound and remarked, " See the blood of a mortal, not ichor, such as flows from the veins of the immortal gods.

" Diogenes Laertius also says that Nicocreon, the tyrant of Cyprus, commanded him to be pounded to death in a mortar, and that he endured this torture with fortitude and Cicero relates the same story.

The only surviving complete works by Epicurus are three letters, which are to be found in book X of Diogenes Laertius ' Lives of Eminent Philosophers, and two groups of quotes: the Principal Doctrines, reported as well in Diogenes ' book X, and the Vatican Sayings, preserved in a manuscript from the Vatican Library.

Epicurus ' cheerful demeanor, as he continued to work despite dying from a painful stone blockage of his urinary tract lasting a fortnight, according to his successor Hermarchus and reported by his biographer Diogenes Laertius, further enhanced his status among his followers.

( Diogenes Laertius quoting Cleanthes ; quoted also by Seneca, Epistle 107.

Diogenes Laertius states that Xenophon was sometimes known as the " Attic Muse " for the sweetness of his diction ; very few poets wrote in the Attic dialect.

Diogenes Laertius, a fourth source for information about Zeno and his teachings, citing Favorinus, says that Zeno's teacher Parmenides was the first to introduce the Achilles and the Tortoise Argument.

By the 16th century, the works of Diogenes Laertius were being printed in Europe.

Epicurus ' philosophy of the physical world is found in his Letter to Herodotus: Diogenes Laertius 10. 34-83.

The subject of this type evidently refers to a story related by Diogenes Laertius that the Selinuntines were afflicted with a pestilence from the marshy character of the lands adjoining the neighboring river, but that this was cured by works of drainage, suggested by Empedocles.

In comparison, Socrates accepted no fee, instead professed a self-effacing posture, which he exemplified by Socratic questioning ( i. e. the Socratic method, although Diogenes Laertius wrote that Protagoras — a sophist — invented the " Socratic " method ).

According to Diogenes Laertius, he had a brother named Dropidas and was an ancestor ( six generations removed ) of Plato.

The passage in which the above occurs has been described as " elaborately ironical ", making it unclear which of its aspects may be taken seriously, although Diogenes Laertius later confirms that there were indeed seven such individuals who were held in high esteem for their wisdom well before Plato's time.

Unlike with Aristotle, we have no complete works by the Megarians or the early Stoics, and have to rely mostly on accounts ( sometimes hostile ) by later sources, including prominently Diogenes Laertius, Sextus Empiricus, Galen, Aulus Gellius, Alexander of Aphrodisias and Cicero.

Diogenes Laertius says Pythagoras died in a fire in Milo's house, but Dicaearchus says Pythagoras died in the temple of the Muses at Metapontum of self-imposed starvation.

Diogenes Laertius, after quoting a famous epigram by Cleobulus ( one of ancient Greece's ' seven sages ') in which a maiden sculptured on a tomb is imagined to proclaim her eternal vigilance, quotes Simonides commenting on it in a poem of his own: Stone is broken even by mortal hands.

The biographical notices, the author avers, are condensed from the Onomatologion or Pinax of Hesychius of Miletus ; other sources were the excerpts of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, the chronicle of Georgius Monachus, the biographies of Diogenes Laertius and the works of Athenaeus and Philostratus.

Diogenes Laertius (;, Diogenēs Laertios ; fl.

* In the BBC TV series Sherlock episode " The Reichenbach Fall ", the Diogenes Club is shown ; Watson goes there, desperate to see Mycroft Holmes, gets into trouble for talking, and is briskly and not too gently escorted to the Stranger's Room by two muffle-shoed bouncers who hold a cloth pad to his mouth to prevent further noise.

A further single, The Man I'm Not Today / My Diogenes Heart was released later in 2008.

Diogenes further describes this river as having its source near the Mountains of the Moon, near the swamp whence the Nile was said to also have its source.

Diogenes states that Heraclitus ' work was " a continuous treatise On Nature, but was divided into three discourses, one on the universe, another on politics, and a third on theology.

Diogenes Laërtius states that " great jealousy nearly put his life in danger in Athens ," but there may be confusion with Anaxagoras who is mentioned in the same passage.

Diogenes Laërtius, on the authority of Sotion and Panaetius, gives a long list of books whose authorship is ascribed to Aristippus, though he also says that Sosicrates of Rhodes states that he wrote nothing.

Herodotus speaks of him as contemporary with Hippocrates, the father of Peisistratus, and Diogenes Laertius states that he was an old man in the 52nd Olympiad ( 572 BC ), and that he was elected an ephor in Sparta in the 56th Olympiad ( 556 / 5 BC ).

According to Diogenes, Dicaearchus claimed that the seven " were neither wise men nor philosophers, but merely shrewd men, who had studied legislation.

When Plato gave Socrates ' definition of man as " featherless bipeds " and was much praised for the definition, Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, " Behold!

Diogenes Laërtius says that his works filled ten volumes, but of these, only fragments remain.

No writings of Diogenes survived even though he is reported to have authored over ten books, a volume of letters and seven tragedies.

Diogenes Laertius, an Epicurean philosopher of the third century, includes the story of Epimenides in his book On the Lives, Opinions, and Sayings of Famous Philosophers, in chapter ten in his section on the Seven Sages of Greece, precursors to the first philosophers.

In 1067, he had been considered as a possible husband for the empress Eudokia Makrembolitissa, widowed wife of Constantine X, but she eventually set her heart on Romanos IV Diogenes.

It is also possible that Diogenes visited Athens and Antisthenes before his exile, and returned to Sinope.

However, it was not always possible to find suitable quotations for every chapter, so many were simply invented by Dexter and attributed to non-existent sources, the most common of which was Diogenes Small.

Their pompous discoverer named them for figures of Victorian literature ( such as Bulwer-Lytton and Rudyard Kipling ); but the clerk who processed his transmission, Roger Pilgham, replaced the names with a fanciful series of his own devising: Alphanor, Barleycorn, Chrysanthe, Diogenes, Elfland, Fiame, Goshen, Hardacres, Image, Jezebel, Krokinole, Lyonesse, Madagascar, Nowhere, Olliphane, Pilgham ( after himself ), Quinine, Raratonga, Somewhere, Tantamount, Unicorn, Valisande, Walpurgis, Xion, Ys and Zacaranda.

It has been suggested that Diogenes was an Epicurean, or a Skeptic.

One of the dialogues attributed to Lucian, his avowed imitator, who frequently mentions him, is called Menippus, but since the sub-title (" The Oracle of the Dead ") resembles that of a work ascribed to Menippus by Diogenes Laërtius, it has been suggested that it is imitated from his Necromancy.