Xenophanes
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Xenophanes of Colophon was a Greek philosopher, theologian, poet, and critic of Homer. He was born in Ionia and travelled throughout the Greek-speaking world in early classical antiquity.
Fictionalized portrait of Xenophanes from a 17th-century engraving
6th century BC depiction of an Ancient Greek symposium. Xenophanes criticized these drinking parties as they were celebrated in his time for their excesses and failures to honor the gods.
Xenophanes was likely the first philosopher to offer a naturalistic rather than a mythological explanation for St. Elmo's fire.
Diogenes Laertius
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Diogenes Laërtius was a biographer of the Greek philosophers. Little is definitively known about his life, but his surviving work, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, remains a primary source
1688 engraving of Diogenes Laërtius
Dionysiou monastery, codex 90, a 13th-century manuscript containing selections from Herodotus, Plutarch and (shown here) Diogenes Laertius
Title page of an edition in Greek and Latin, 1594
The Italian Renaissance scholar, painter, philosopher, and architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) modeled his own autobiography on Diogenes Laërtius's Life of Thales.