Socrates in the Ancient Biographical Tradition: From the Anonymous PHib. 182 to Diogenes Laertius

Tiziano Dorandi cnrs

1 in the Ancient Biographical Tradition

The life of Socrates, understood as the continuous narrative of the primary events in his life, from birth until death, received only modest attention from ancient authors. A few of the incidents of his life—his difficult marriage with ; the actual or presumed bigamy with Myrto, daughter of the Aris- tides nicknamed “The Just”; the meeting with the young ; the association with Alcibiades; and his independent and honest spirit during the rule of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens—were indeed in broad and continuous circulation. Socratic literature, however, was dominated by the incidents linked to his trial for impiety and his capital punishment, even if the scope of these works was more philosophical than biographical (see ssr i b–d). Except for Diogenes Laertius (third-century ce) we have no traces of proper “biographies” of Socrates comparable in structure and content to the many “Lives” of Plato and . Compiled up until late Antiquity, these biogra- phies of Plato and Aristotle owed their fortune to the fact that from a certain era they served as introductions for readers of the works of the two philosophers in the Neoplatonic curriculum of higher education. The fact that Socrates wrote nothing, or that he led the “normal” life of an average Athenian citizen, may be among the reasons explaining or perhaps justifying the lack of interest in his biography throughout Antiquity. But we have no evidence that allows us to go beyond the level of hypothesis. I am well aware that Plato’s and , and likewise ’s , constitute important stages in the story of Greek biography, as they offer “a description that could be adapted and incorporated into full biographical accounts,” especially because they “encapsulate in an exemplary manner the main characteristics of the person’s life” (Hägg 2012, 23). This is not, however, the biographical genre I wish to consider. Nor do I want to insist on Albrecht Dihle’s disputed hypothesis according to which Plato’s Apology represents “the earliest and most accomplished literary work to embody in its entirety the ‘biographical element’” (Dihle 1970, 13; cf. Hägg 2012, 12).

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An interest in the “biography” of Socrates began or more likely was intensi- fied in the first Hellenistic period. Unfortunately these works are mostly lost. From this great shipwreck we have recovered a few pieces of flotsam. Chief among them are those found in the Life of Socrates of Diogenes Laertius. Also of note is another book, this one in a very poor state of preservation. It is found in a papyrus of the third-century bc, from el-Hibeh. Both Diogenes Laertius and the el-Hibeh papyrus are essential to reconstructing the ancient biographical tradition of Socrates. It would be useful to add yet another text, the biography that the Epicurean Philodemus of Gadara (first-century bce) wrote of Socrates. I have recently worked on his meager and disconnected fragments, which have been shorn of context. They constituted one book, not otherwise identified, of his Collection of the Philosophers. As with Diogenes, it is likely that Philodemus’ account of Socrates was accompanied by his accounts of the Socratics. Because I have already dealt with this (Dorandi 2015, 168–170), I will not repeat myself. Nor will I take into consideration the short biographical sketch in the Suda (σ 829 = ssr i d 2) derived from the Onomatologos (A Biographical Dictionary of Learned Men) of Hesychius of Miletus (sixth-century ce). Diogenes Laertius and Hesychius shared an unidentified source, probably a lost work from the Hellenistic period. What we read from Hesychius on Socrates in the Suda does not differ from Diogenes’ account.

2 Socrates’ Portrait in PHib. 182

Let me to begin with a few pages on the papyrus of el-Hibeh, although there are doubts about its “biographical” character. This text is important to discuss here for several reasons. The first is the antiquity of the document, which dates back to a time close to the composition of the book On Socrates of the Peripetetic Aristoxenus of Tarentum (fourth-century bce). Some ancient authors call Aristoxenus’ book a bios; we also know that it was founded on the testimony of his father, Spintharus (born c. 425bce), who apparently knew Socrates. A few fragments of it remain (fr. 51–60 Wehrli), mostly transmitted by later authors who cite it second hand, through Porphyry’s Philosophos Historia. Their reliability has been suitably re-evaluated in recent years.1 The second reason is that the el-Hibeh papyrus is inexplicably omitted from Giannantoni’s collection (as have the few remains of Philodemus) and has enjoyed little

1 See Stavru (in this volume).