Diogenes Laertius - Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

Everyone wants to live a meaningful life. Long before our own day of  self-help books offering twelve-step programs and other guides to attain  happiness, the philosophers of ancient Greece explored the riddle of  what makes a life worth living, producing a wide variety of ideas and  examples to follow. This rich tradition was recast by Diogenes Laertius  into an anthology, a miscellany of maxims and anecdotes, that  generations of Western readers have consulted for edification as well as  entertainment ever since the Lives of the Eminent Philosophers,  first compiled in the third century AD, came to prominence in  Renaissance Italy. To this day, it remains a crucial source for much of  what we know about the origins and practice of philosophy in ancient  Greece, covering a longer period of time and a larger number of  figures-from Pythagoras and Socrates to Aristotle and Epicurus-than any  other ancient source.