Diogenes the Stoic (1)

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Chief among the famous scholars of Babylonia whose international standing ensured the transmission of culture was Diogenes the Stoic. We do not know whether he was a Greek or a Babylonian by parentage. He was born around 240 BCE. Strabo says, ambigously, that he was called the Babylonian because ‘we do not call men after Seleukeia if they are from there’. If he was a native Babylonian, his Greek name would have been used in addition to a Babylonian name according to the practice attested for two local governors at Uruk.

Diogenes grew up in Mesopotamia perhaps two generations after Berossus. He was eventually appointed head of the flourishing school of Stoic philosophers in Athens. There he had many influential pupils including Archedemus of Tarsus who later founded a school of Stoic philosophy in Babylonia, according to Plutarch. As a venerable scholar in his mid-eighties Diogenes led a mission of Stoic scholars from Athens to Rome in 156/5 BCE, together with Carneades, who was head of the Platonic Academy at Athens. There he made a great impression, so that Cicero, writing more than two centuries later, called him ‘a great and important Stoic’. He was the first Stoic teacher to visit Rome, where he lectured extensively. Some of his best work was done in grammar, and many modern scholars claim that traditional grammar began within the Stoic movement, Diogenes’ treatise Techne peri phones being the source for later handbooks. Thus he continued the tradition known from the cuneiform study of Sumerian and Babylonian grammar, extant from around 1800 BCE, and this background helps to explain why the Stoics in general were so interested in studying grammar. At about the same time the Indian grammarian Pāṇini, born in north-west India, wrote his grammar of Sanskrit. The appendices to that work listed words by classification as parts of speech, in the same way as some cuneiform lists give groups of words by parts of speech. Like the Stoic grammarians, Pāṇini’s work tried to establish the proper use of language, using the analysis to determine what was correct.

Bibliography

Stephanie Dalley

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