 Today we're going to be talking about Democritus of Abdrah, but for the next couple of weeks in general we're going to be talking about what I call archetypes of Hellenistic philosophy. This is earlier philosophical figures whose influence resonates throughout the Hellenistic period in a way they become paradigms for the philosophical schools that we're going to discuss. So for example, the Stoics adopt Heraclitus of Ephesus as their sort of honorary proto-Stoic, and the Epicureans who defend an atomistic view are clearly influenced by Democritus. The influence of Socrates is the most widespread, and I'll discuss how that is, is influenced not only in the Stoics but also on skeptics, cynics, etc., we'll discuss that next time we meet. We'll also talk about some people, Diogenes of Sennob, the cynic, Aristotelus of Cyrene, who founded a school of hedonism quite a bit different than that of the Epicureans, and then of course Aristotle whose school was founded inspired by him in the Hellenistic age called the Lyceum or the Peripatos, and then Pyrrho of Elis and his influence on a form of radical skepticism called Peronian skepticism. So for the next two weeks, two or three, two weeks we will be going through these figures and talking about how they influence Hellenistic philosophy, and we'll mostly be doing so on the basis of reading chapters out of this obscure book by a guy named Diogenes Laertius about whom, other than the fact that he wrote this source book of biography and doxography about ancient philosophers, we know nothing. So we don't know that he looked anything like that, completely fanciful drawing of him in a later textbook. We have no idea what he looked like, where he came from, what his education was, what his own philosophical views were, nothing. Okay, and he's a very late writer, third century of the common era, you know, third century AD, so coming at the very end of what I've defined as the Hellenistic period. And he wrote this massive biography, it's in ten books, and each book is divided into about ten chapters, each of which deal with a different philosopher, and since most of the philosophical writings from ancient Greece have been lost, it turns out that we depend on Diogenes Laertius for a lot of what we know about these other philosophers. And unfortunately, he doesn't view philosophy the same way we do now, he thinks of it as a source of amusing anecdotes and tidbits and invective and comedy and things like that. So his entire purpose in putting this biography together is a lot different than, you know, trying to get to the bottom of the nature of the universe or of what one should do ethically and so forth. But we need him as a source for these earlier philosophers. And so in the supplementary readings, the next four readings are the chapters on these philosophers I take to be archetypes of Hellenistic philosophy in Diogenes Laertius.