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previous: Lacydes This webpage reproduces one of the Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius published in the Loeb Classical Library, 1925 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Clitomachus

(Vol. I) Diogenes Laërtius
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

Book IV

 p437  Chapter 9
Carneades (c. 213‑129 B.C.)

62 Carneades, the son of Epicomus or (according to Alexander in his Successions of Philosophers) of Philocomus, was a native of Cyrene. He studied  p439 carefully the writings of the Stoics and particularly those of Chrysippus, and by combating these successfully he became so famous that he would often say:

The man's industry was unparalleled, although in physics he was not so strong as in ethics. Hence he would let his hair and nails grow long from intense devotion to study. Such was his predominance in philosophy that even the rhetoricians would dismiss their classes and repair to him to hear him lecture.

63 His voice was extremely power­ful, so that the keeper of the gymnasium sent to him and requested him not to shout so loud. To which he replied, "Then give me something by which to regulate my voice." Thereupon by a happy hit the man replied in the words, "You have a regulator in your audience." His talent for criticizing opponents was remarkable, and he was a formidable controversialist. And for the reasons already given he further declined invitations to dine out. One of his pupils was Mentor the Bithynian, who tried to ingratiate himself with a concubine of Carneades; so on one occasion (according to Favorinus in his Miscellaneous History), when Mentor came to leisure, Carneades in the course of his remarks let fall these lines by way of parody at his expense:

Thereupon the other got up and replied:

He seems to have shown some want of courage in the face of death, repeating often the words, "Nature which framed this whole will also destroy it." When he learnt that Antipater committed suicide by drinking a potion, he was greatly moved by the constancy with which he met his end, and exclaimed, "Give it then to me also." And when those about him asked "What?" "A honeyed draught," said he. At the time he died the moon is said to have been eclipsed, and one might well say that the brightest luminary in heaven next to the sun thereby gave token of her sympathy.

65 According to Apollodorus in his Chronology, he departed this life in the fourth year of the 162nd Olympiad​3 at the age of eighty-five years. Letters of his to Ariarathes, king of Cappadocia, are extant. Everything else was compiled by his pupils; he himself left nothing in writing. I have written upon him in logaoedic metre as follows:4

It is said that his eyes went blind at night without  p443 his knowing it, and he ordered the slave to light the lamp. The latter brought it and said, "Here it is." "Then," said Carneades, "read."

He had many other disciples, but the most illustrious of them all was Clitomachus, of whom we have next to speak.

There was another Carneades, a frigid elegiac poet.

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The Loeb Editor's Notes:

1 Carneades applies two lines from the Odyssey, namely IV.384 and (with a change to the masculine participle) II.268 or 401.

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2 Hom. Il. II.52.

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3 129‑128 B.C.

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4 Anth. Plan. V.39.

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