doxographers compilers of and commentators on the opinions of ancient Greek philosophers. ‘Doxographers’ is an English translation of the modern Latin term coined by Hermann Diels for the title of his work Doxographi Graeci (1879). Here Diels assembled a series of Greek texts in which the views of Greek philosophers from the archaic to the Hellenistic era are set out in a relatively schematic way. In a lengthy introduction Diels reconstructed the history of the writing of these opinions, the doxography; this reconstruction is now a standard part of the historiography of ancient philosophy. The doxography itself is important both as a source of information for early Greek philosophy and also because later writers, ancient, medieval, and modern, often relied on it rather than primary materials. The crucial text for Diels’s reconstruction was the book Physical Opinions of the Philosophers (Placita Philosophorum), traditionally ascribed to Plutarch but no longer thought to be by him. The work lists the views of various philosophers and schools under subject headings such as ‘What Is Nature?’ and ‘On the Rainbow.’ Out of this work and others Diels reconstructed a Collection of Opinions that he ascribed to Aetius (A.D. c.100), a person mentioned by Theodoret (fifth century) as the author of such a work. Diels took Aetius’s ultimate source to be Theophrastus, who wrote a more discursive Physical Opinions. Because Aetius mentions the views of Hellenistic philosophers writing after Theophrastus, Diels postulated an intermediate source, which he called the Vetusta Placita (c.100 B.C.). The most accessible doxographical material is in the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius (A.D. c.200), who is, however, mainly interested in biography. He arranges philosophers by schools and treats each school chronologically. I.M.