Devices of Fictionalization in the Life of Aristippus of Cyrene

In the first chapter of the influential book The Content and the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore & London 1987), Hayden White argues that not even the minimal historiographic format of the chronicle and catalogue precludes the literary formulation of every story. In this study, I intend to show that in some cases the catalogue can even influ-ence the construction of literary fiction in a his-toriographic account, particularly in the subgenre of philosophical biography. With this aim, I will take the Life of Aristippus of Cyrene as a case study, mainly in the Lives and Doctrines of the Illustrious Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius (II 65-85): a good part of the sections of his biogra-phy responds to various titles in the catalogue of his works, precisely those of whose content we know little or nothing. If we add to this state of things that Aristippus is a stereotypical character in Middle Comedy, I believe that it is possible to clearly establish the mechanisms of literary fictionalization that operate in the narration of this peculiar biography.