"“And he used to associate with himself, in…" — Diogenes Laertius (#c1550)

Card #c1550IR // #c1550Synthesis

“And he used to associate with himself, in the composition of his tragedies, two other poets, named Alexander and Homer; and whenever he was disturbed by his maid-servants or by the dogs, he paid no attention to them, studying above all things to live in tranquillity. They tell a story, that Aratus asked him how he could procure an entire and correct copy of Homer’s poetry, and he answered, ‘If he could fall in with an old manuscript which had never been corrected.’ And all his works used to lie about at random, and at times half eaten by mice; so that once when he was reading them to Zopyrus, the orator, and unrolling a volume, he read whatever passages came first, and when he got to the middle of the book he found a great gap, which he had not previously perceived, so very indifferent was he about such matters.” — Diogenes Laertius, *Lives of Eminent Philosophers*, Book IX, *Life of Timon*, VI (trans. C. D. Yonge, 1853) **Surface Gloss:** Pyrrho's chief disciple Timon tells the poet Aratus that the only trustworthy copy of Homer is an ancient one that scholars have never "corrected," while leaving his own scrolls scattered on the floor to be half-eaten by mice. **The Uncorrected-Source Rule**: When you need ground truth, bypass the "improved," harmonized, and heavily edited executive summaries; hunt down the oldest, rawest, un-sanitized record before the editors fixed what they didn't understand. And apply **Mouse-Eaten Detachment** to your own output: do the work at high velocity, then refuse to be precious about your own archive.

— In our words · Source: Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Diogenes Laertius)

[Use when]

Use when auditing a corrupted data pipeline where middle-managers or editors have "cleaned" the raw logs, or when curing yourself of perfectionist preciousness over your own past work. ---

[Why it matters]

Pyrrho's chief disciple Timon tells the poet Aratus that the only trustworthy copy of Homer is an ancient one that scholars have never "corrected," while leaving his own scrolls scattered on the floor to be half-eaten by mice. In Diogenes' *Life of Timon* (drawn from Antigonus of Carystus), Timon of Phlius embodies the lived literary and philological practice of Pyrrhonian scepticism during the rise of Hellenistic Alexandrian scholarship. When the poet Aratus asks how to obtain a reliable text of Homer, Timon's reply—"an old manuscript which had never been corrected" (*adiōrthōtois*)—is a direct sceptical strike against the Alexandrian *diorthōtai* (scholarly editors like Zenodotus). To a Pyrrhonist, dogmatic "correction" overlays the evident historical appearance (*phainomenon*) of the ancient text with the editor's private, speculative theories of what Homer *ought* to have written. Conversely, Timon's treatment of his own 20,000 verses of satires (*Silli*) and dramas—leaving them on the floor to be chewed hollow by mice and reading unbothered across the missing middle—demonstrates that the sceptic treats even his own anti-dogmatic writings as disposable utensils, neverfetishizing his own text. **[INTERPRETATION: PRISCA THEOLOGIA / ESOTERIC]** In the Renaissance humanist and *prisca theologia* recovery of antiquity, Timon's maxim on the "old manuscript which had never been corrected" became the golden rule of *ad fontes* (back to the sources)—the conviction that the oldest, least-tampered-with monuments of the *prisci* (ancient sages and poets) preserve the purest trace of primordial wisdom, whereas later scholastic commentators and grammarians corrupt the fountainhead every time they "improve" it. At the same time, Timon's mouse-eaten scrolls were read in the Renaissance satirical tradition (Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne) as the emblem of true philosophical detachment from literary vanity: the sage who mocks the "over-busy Sophists" in his *Silli* proves his freedom from the cage of letters by letting the mice edit his own masterpieces.

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