Diogenes Laertius Book X - public domain translations

    The attached pdf contains complete Book X of Diogenes Laertius' "Lives of Eminent Philosophers" in Greek and in three English translations (Yonge's, Hicks' and Bailey's) available in the public domain.

    The idea is the same as with my recent Epicurus' public domain translations but this time it's a complete book 10 containing both Epicurus' and Laerius' words. I tried to make it look like an actual book so the file contains everything one may expect to see in a digital book - title page, clickable table of contents, numbered pages etc.

    Table of contents contains 12 entries. These are 'chapters' I came up with to divide the book. 6 entries are highlighted by design - these are Epicurus' words. Additionally, every page has a heading with information whether the current section was written by Laertius or Epicurus and shows estimated time of the composition (similarly to the translations headings).

    Each page contains one section as per Diogenes Laertius' notation and is marked as such at the top next to the chapter title. Every page has four sections - original passage in Greek is followed by three corresponding translations.

    If you have an idea how to improve the file or you spot something that needs to be corrected, please let me know.

    I hope you find the resource useful in your studies of Epicurean Philosophy. Enjoy.

    Quote from TauPhi

    The attached pdf contains complete Book X of Diogenes Laertius' "Lives of Eminent Philosophers" in Greek and in three English translations (Yonge's, Hicks' and Bailey's) available in the public domain.

    GREAT work! The comparative translations are really helpful, because, truly (especially as I've found in my attempts at translating) a number of 19th-century, British scholars literally punted and paraphrased rather than trying to find a way to make a mediopassive verb fit the context. I'm finding some sentences that don't even remotely contain the same verbs, objects, or subjects, and ignore declensions sometimes for the sake of making the concept generally digestible.

    Overwhelmingly the translators are great. There are just a few things that most will gloss over that aren't appropriate. The best example I can think of, which Don discovered, is that all translators (except for Stephen White 2021, as I found) incorrectly gloss over Epicurus' birthday on the "[early] tenth of Gamelion" (i.e. "early tenth" = "20th"), so many translators overlooked the ancient Greek slang of "early tenth", ignored it, punted their creativity, and incorrectly settled on "10th".

    No scholar is so infallible in their research that we should trust them 100%, and providing comparative texts really goes a long way in seeing patterns, preferences, and prejudices from the scholars. Thanks again for doing this! This is an unexpectedly pleasant surprise. :)

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