The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers · Character
Dionysius of Heraclea
Nicknamed 'the Deserter,' this Stoic defected to the Cyrenaics after an eye disease convinced him that pain was not, in fact, indifferent.
supporting
Also known as Dionysius the Carthaginian
First appearance: Dionysius
As a supporting figure in The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Dionysius of Heraclea is not background color—the story leans on what they do once the chapter opens.
Tyrant at whose court Aristippus was favored; he tested Aristippus with courtesans and engaged in philosophical dialogues.
Dionysius is the great apostate of the early Stoic school, a man whose body overruled his doctrine. A former poet and devoted pupil of Zeno, he abandoned the porch for the Cyrenaic garden the moment his eyes began to torture him — a defection his rivals never let him forget. His career is a cautionary tale about how philosophy fares when suffering arrives, and his late-life starvation, after eighty years of luxury, gives his story a bleak, almost allegorical shape.
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- Major Philosophers and Biographers
- Protagonist
- Diverse Pre-Socratics, Sophists, and Later Philosophers
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Monimus’s feigned madness and destruction of the money is the emotional and psychological peak because it dram…
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