The of Praxiphanes in the testimony of Diogenes Laertius *

We can attach few certainties to the name of Praxiphanes. Among these, there emerges a lively attention to issues related to language and to literary production. Wehrli, who has collected twenty-three fragments and testimonia for Praxiphanes, brings most of them together under Literaturwissenschaft (8-23 Wehrli). ¹ But it is difficult to reconstruct the arguments or even the titles of his works, and even more difficult to understand whether Praxiphanes’ activity in this field should be attributed to the tendency, typical of the second generation of Peripatos students, to develop fully their method of inquiry into the works and authors that was cultivated all along in the sphere of the school. ² This is the method that is characterized, as is well known, by the reconstruction of the lives of authors from passages of their works, by the accumulation of actual or imagined data, by the use of evidence - especially the 478nanecdote - that is capable of giving a universal dimension to individual, minor facts, but that is also useful in depicting the ethos of the authors. In other words, it is the method that takes its name from Chamaeleon. ³ Can we discover any trace of Praxiphanes’ adherence to this method, given his recognized attention to literary production? I believe that one response, perhaps minimal, yet significant given the extreme shortage of material, comes from the testimony of Diogenes Laertius on the https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315127255/f4aca814-b910-4b45-b225-030d1586837c/content/inline478_1.tif"/> of Praxiphanes (3.8 = 11 Wehrli = 22 Matelli), which I propose to analyze in the following pages. ⁴ Wehrli sharply circumscribes it in his text, because he does not consider the context at all, and he clothes it with a generic meaning, because he postulates in the https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315127255/f4aca814-b910-4b45-b225-030d1586837c/content/inline478_2.tif"/> a response by Praxiphanes to Plato’s so-called attack on poetry, which is as vague as it is difficult to prove. ⁵