Lives of Eminent Philosophers (incl. Epicurus' letters, Book X)

The books that he wrote were as follows: Of the Cosmos, two books. Of Elements. Of Seed. Of Fortune. Of Minimal Parts. Against Atoms and Images. Of Organs of Sense. A Course of Five Lectures on Heraclitus. On the Right Arrangement of Ethical Doctrine. Of Duty. Of Impulse. Of the Passions, two books. Of Kingship. Of the Spartan Constitution. Of Lycurgus and Socrates, three books. Of Law. On Divination. Dialogues on Love. Of the School of Eretria. Of Similars. Of Terms. Of Habit. Of Contradictions, three books. Of Discourse. Of Wealth. Of Fame. Of Death. Handbook of Dialectic, two books. Of Predicates. Of Ambiguous Terms. Letters.

Chrysippus, the son of Apollonius, came either from Soli or from Tarsus, as Alexander relates in his Successions. He was a pupil of Cleanthes. Before this he used to practise as a long-distance runner; but afterwards he came to hear Zeno, or, as Diocles and most people say, Cleanthes; and then, while Cleanthes was still living, withdrew from his school and attained exceptional eminence as a philosopher. He had good natural parts and showed the greatest acuteness in every branch of the subject; so much so that he differed on most points from Zeno, and from Cleanthes as well, to whom he often used to say that all he wanted was to be told what the doctrines were; he would find out the proofs for himself. Nevertheless, whenever he had contended against Cleanthes, he would afterwards feel remorse, so that he constantly came out with the lines : Blest in all else am I, save only where I touch Cleanthes: there I am ill-fortuned.

So renowned was he for dialectic that most people thought, if the gods took to dialectic, they would adopt no other system than that of Chrysippus. He had abundance of matter, but in style he was not successful. In industry he surpassed every one, as the list of his writings shows; for there are more than 705 of them. He increased their number by arguing repeatedly on the same subject, setting down anything that occurred to him, making many corrections and citing numerous authorities. So much so that in one of his treatises he copied out nearly the whole of Euripides’ Medea , and some one who had taken up the volume, being asked what he was reading, replied, The Medea of Chrysippus.

Apollodorus of Athens in his Collection of Doctrines , wishing to show that what Epicurus wrote with force and originality unaided by quotations was far greater in amount than the books of Chrysippus, says, to quote his exact words, If one were to strip the books of Chrysippus of all extraneous quotations, his pages would be left bare. So much for Apollodorus. Of Chrysippus the old woman who sat beside him used to say, according to Diocles, that he wrote 500 lines a day. Hecato says that he came to the study of philosophy, because the property which he had inherited from his father had been confiscated to the king’s treasury.

In person he was insignificant, as is shown by the statue in the Ceramicus, which is almost hidden by an equestrian statue hard by; and this is why Carneades called him Crypsippus or Horse-hidden. Once when somebody reproached him for not going with the multitude to hear Ariston, he rejoined, If I had followed the multitude, I should not have studied philosophy. When some dialectician got up and attacked Cleanthes, proposing sophistical fallacies to him, Chrysippus called to him, Cease to distract your elder from matters of importance; propound such quibbles to us juniors. Again, when somebody who had a question to ask was steadily conversing with him in private, and then upon seeing a crowd approaching began to be more contentious, he said: Ah! brother mine, thine eye is growing wild: To madness fast thou’rt changing, sane but now.

At wine-parties he used to behave quietly, though he was unsteady on his legs; which caused the woman-slave to say, As for Chrysippus, only his legs get tipsy. His opinion of himself was so high that when some one inquired, To whom shall I entrust my son? he replied, To me: for, if I had dreamt of there being anyone better than myself, I should myself be studying with him. Hence, it is said, the application to him of the line : He alone has understanding; the others flit shadow-like around; and But for Chrysippus, there had been no Porch. At last, however,—so we are told by Sotion in his eighth book,—he joined Arcesilaus and Lacydes and studied philosophy under them in the Academy.

And this explains his arguing at one time against, and at another in support of, ordinary experience, and his use of the method of the Academy when treating of magnitudes and numbers. On one occasion, as Hermippus relates, when he had his school in the Odeum, he was invited by his pupils to a sacrificial feast. There after he had taken a draught of sweet wine unmixed with water, he was seized with dizziness and departed this life five days afterwards, having reached the age of seventy-three years, in the 143rd Olympiad. This is the date given by Apollodorus in his Chronology. I have toyed with the subject in the following verses : Chrysippus turned giddy after gulping down a draught of Bacchus; he spared not the Porch nor his country nor his own life, but fared straight to the house of Hades.

Another account is that his death was caused by a violent fit of laughter; for after an ass had eaten up his figs, he cried out to the old woman, Now give the ass a drink of pure wine to wash down the figs. And thereupon he laughed so heartily that he died. He appears to have been a very arrogant man. At any rate, of all his many writings he dedicated none to any of the kings. And he was satisfied with one old woman’s judgement, says Demetrius in his work called Men of the Same Name. When Ptolemy wrote to Cleanthes requesting him to come himself or else to send some one to his court, Sphaerus undertook the journey, while Chrysippus declined to go. On the other hand, he sent for his sister’s sons, Aristocreon and Philocrates, and educated them. Demetrius above mentioned is also our authority for the statement that Chrysippus was the first who ventured to hold a lecture-class in the open air in the Lyceum.

There was another Chrysippus, a native of Cnidus, a physician, to whom Erasistratus says that he was under great obligation. And another besides, a son of the former, court-physician to Ptolemy, who on a false charge was dragged about and castigated with the lash. And yet another was a pupil of Erasistratus, and another the author of a work on Agriculture. To return to the philosopher. He used to propound arguments such as the following: He who divulges the mysteries to the uninitiated is guilty of impiety. Now the hierophant certainly does reveal the mysteries to the uninitiated, ergo he is guilty of impiety. Or again: What is not in the city is not in the house either: now there is no well in the city, ergo there is none in the house either. Yet another: There is a certain head, and that head you have not. Now this being so, there is a head which you have not, therefore you are without a head.

Again: If anyone is in Megara, he is not in Athens: now there is a man in Megara, therefore there is not a man in Athens. Again: If you say something, it passes through your lips: now you say wagon, consequently a wagon passes through your lips. And further: If you never lost something, you have it still; but you never lost horns, ergo you have horns. Others attribute this to Eubulides. There are people who run Chrysippus down as having written much in a tone that is gross and indecent. For in his work On the ancient Natural Philosophers at line 600 or thereabouts he interprets the story of Hera and Zeus coarsely, with details which no one would soil his lips by repeating.

Indeed, his interpretation of the story is condemned as most indecent. He may be commending physical doctrine; but the language used is more appropriate to street-walkers than to deities; and it is moreover not even mentioned by bibliographers, who wrote on the titles of books. What Chrysippus makes of it is not to be found in Polemo nor Hypsicrates, no, nor even in Antigonus. It is his own invention. Again, in his Republic he permits marriage with mothers and daughters and sons. He says the same in his work On Things for their own Sake not Desirable , right at the outset. In the third book of his treatise On Justice , at about line 1000, he permits eating of the corpses of the dead. And in the second book of his On the Means of Livelihood , where he professes to be considering a priori how the wise man is to get his living, occur the words:

And yet what reason is there that he should provide a living? For if it be to support life, life itself is after all a thing indifferent. If it be for pleasure, pleasure too is a thing indifferent. While if it be for virtue, virtue in itself is sufficient to constitute happiness. The modes of getting a livelihood are also ludicrous, as e.g. maintenance by a king; for he will have to be humoured: or by friends; for friendship will then be purchasable for money: or living by wisdom; for so wisdom will become mercenary. These are the objections urged against him. As the reputation of his writings stands so high, I have decided to make a separate catalogue of them, arranged according to the class of subject treated. And they are as follows: I. Logic. Logical Theses. The Philosopher’s Inquiries. Dialectical Definitions addressed to Metrodorus, six books. On the Terms used in Dialectic, addressed to Zeno, one book.

Art of Dialectic, addressed to Aristagoras, one book. Probable Hypothetical Judgements, addressed to Dioscurides, four books. II. Logic dealing with the subject matter. First series: Of Judgements, one book. Of Judgements which are not Simple, one book. Of the Complex Judgement, addressed to Athenades, two books. Of Negative Judgements, addressed to Aristagoras, three books. Of Affirmative Judgements, addressed to Athenodorus, one book. Of Judgements expressed by means of Privation, addressed to Thearus, one book. Of Indefinite Judgements, addressed to Dion, three books. On the Variety of Indefinite Judgements, four books. On Temporal Judgements, two books. On Judgements in the Perfect Tense, two books. Second series: Of a True Disjunctive Judgement, addressed to Gorgippides, one book. Of a True Hypothetical Judgement, addressed to Gorgippides, four books.

Choosing from Alternatives, addressed to Gorgippides, one book. A Contribution to the Subject of Consequents, one book. On the Argument which employs three Terms, also addressed to Gorgippides, one book. On Judgements of Possibility, addressed to Clitus, four books. A Reply to the Work of Philo on Meanings, one book. On the Question what are False Judgements, one book. Third series: Of Imperatives, two books. Of Asking Questions, two books. Of Inquiry, four books. Epitome of Interrogation and Inquiry, one book. Epitome of Reply, one book. Of Investigation, two books. Of Answering Questions, four books.

Fourth series: Of Predicates, addressed to Metrodorus, ten books. Of Nominatives and Oblique Cases, addressed to Phylarchus, one book. Of Hypothetical Syllogisms, addressed to Apollonides, one book. A Work, addressed to Pasylus, on Predicates, four books. Fifth series: Of the Five Cases, one book. Of Enunciations classified according to subject matter, one book. Of Modification of Significance, addressed to Stesagoras, two books. Of Proper Nouns, two books. III. Logic, as concerned with words or phrases and the sentence. First series: Of Singular and Plural Expressions, six books. On Single Words, addressed to Sosigenes and Alexander, five books. Of Anomalous Words or Phrases, addressed to Dion, four books. Of the Sorites Argument as applied to Uttered Words, three books. On Solecisms, one book. On Solecistic Sentences, addressed to Dionysius, one book. Sentences violating Ordinary Usage, one book. Diction, addressed to Dionysius, one book. Second series: Of the Elements of Speech and on Words Spoken, five books. Of the Arrangement of Words Spoken, four books.

Of the Arrangement and Elements of Sentences, addressed to Philip, three books. Of the Elements of Speech, addressed to Nicias, one book. Of the Relative Term, one book. Third series: Against Those who reject Division, two books. On Ambiguous Forms of Speech, addressed to Apollas, four books. On Figurative Ambiguities, one book. Of Ambiguity in the Moods of the Hypothetical Syllogism, two books. A Reply to the Work of Panthoides on Ambiguities, two books. Introduction to the Study of Ambiguities, five books. Epitome of the Work on Ambiguities, addressed to Epicrates, one book. Materials collected for the Introduction to the Study of Ambiguities, two books. IV. Logic as concerned with syllogisms and moods. First series: Handbook of Arguments and Moods, addressed to Dioscurides, five books.

Of Syllogisms, three books. Of the Construction of Moods, addressed to Stesagoras, two books. Comparison of the Judgements expressed in the Moods, one book. Of Reciprocal and Hypothetical Syllogisms, one book. To Agathon, or Of the Problems that remain, one book. On the Question what Premisses are capable of demonstrating a given Conclusion with the Aid of one or more Subsidiary Premisses, one book. Of Inferences, addressed to Aristagoras, one book. How the same Syllogism may be drawn up in several Moods, one book. Reply to the Objections brought against drawing out the same Argument syllogistically and without a Syllogism, two books. Reply to the Objections against the Analyses of Syllogisms, three books. Reply to Philo’s Work on Moods, addressed to Timostratus, one book. Collected Logical Writings, addressed to Timocrates and Philomathes: a Criticism of their Works on Moods and Syllogisms, one book.

Second series: On Conclusive Arguments, addressed to Zeno, one book. On the Primary Indemonstrable Syllogisms, addressed to Zeno, one book. On the Analysis of Syllogisms, one book. Of Redundant Arguments, addressed to Pasylus, two books. Of the Rules for Syllogisms, one book. Of Introductory or Elementary Syllogisms, addressed to Zeno, one book. Of the Introductory Moods, addressed to Zeno, three books. Of the Syllogisms under False Figures, five books. Syllogistic Arguments by Resolution in Indemonstrable Arguments, one book. Inquiries into the Moods: addressed to Zeno and Philomathes, one book. (This appears to be spurious.) Third series: On Variable Arguments, addressed to Athenades, one book. (This also is spurious.)

Variable Arguments concerning the Mean, three books. (Spurious.) A Reply to Ameinias’ Disjunctive Syllogisms, one book. Fourth series: On Hypotheses, addressed to Meleager, three books. Hypothetical Syllogisms upon the Laws, again addressed to Meleager, one book. Hypothetical Syllogisms to serve as Introduction, two books. Hypothetical Syllogisms consisting of Theorems, two books. Solutions of the Hypothetical Arguments of Hedylus, two books. Solutions of the Hypothetical Arguments of Alexander, three books. (Spurious.) On Explanatory Symbols, addressed to Laodamas, one book. Fifth series: Introduction to the Mentiens Argument, addressed to Aristocreon, one book. Arguments of the Mentiens Type, to serve as Introduction, one book. Of the Mentiens Argument, addressed to Aristocreon, six books. Sixth series: Reply to those who hold that Propositions may be at once False and True, one book.

To those who solve the Mentiens by dissecting it, addressed to Aristocreon, two books. Proofs showing that Indefinite Arguments ought not to be dissected, one book. Reply to Objections urged against those who condemn the Dissection of Indefinite Arguments, addressed to Pasylus, three books. Solution in the Style of the Ancients, addressed to Dioscurides, one book. On the Solution of the Mentiens, addressed to Aristocreon, three books. Solutions of the Hypothetical Arguments of Hedylus, addressed to Aristocreon and Apollas, one book. Seventh series: To those who maintain that the Premisses of the Mentiens are false, one book. Of the Sceptic who denies, addressed to Aristocreon, two books. Negative Arguments, to serve as Logical Exercises, one book. Of the Argument from Small Increments, addressed to Stesagoras, two books. Of the Arguments affecting Ordinary Suppositions and on those who are Inactive or Silent, addressed to Onetor, two books. Of the Fallacy of the Veiled Person, addressed to Aristobulus, two books.

On the Puzzle of the Man who escapes Detection, addressed to Athenades, one book. Eighth series: Of the Nobody Puzzle, addressed to Menecrates, eight books. Of the Arguments derived from the Indeterminate and the Determined, addressed to Pasylus, two books. Of the Nobody Argument, addressed to Epicrates, one book. Ninth series: Of Sophisms, addressed to Heraclides and Pollis, two books. Of Dialectical Puzzles, addressed to Dioscurides, five books. Reply to the Method of Arcesilaus, dedicated to Sphaerus, one book. Tenth series: Attack upon Common Sense, addressed to Metrodorus, six books. Defence of Common Sense, addressed to Gorgippides, seven books. V. Under Logic. Thirty-nine investigations outside the range of the four above-mentioned main divisions dealing with isolated logical investigations not included in separate wholes of the subjects enumerated. The total of the logical writings is three hundred and eleven.

1. Ethics dealing with the classification of ethical conceptions. First series: Outline of Ethical Theory, addressed to Theoporos, one book. Ethical Theses, one book. Probable Premisses for Ethical Doctrines, addressed to Philomathes, three books. Definitions of the Good or Virtuous, addressed to Metrodorus, two books. Definitions of the Bad or Vicious, addressed to Metrodorus, two books. Definitions of the Morally Intermediate, addressed to Metrodorus, two books. Definitions of the Generic Notions [in Ethics], addressed to Metrodorus, seven books. Definitions concerned with other Branches of Science, addressed to Metrodorus, two books. Second series: Of Similes, addressed to Aristocles, three books. Of Definitions, addressed to Metrodorus, seven books. Third series: Of the Objections wrongly urged against the Definitions, addressed to Laodamas, seven books.

Probabilities in Support of the Definitions, addressed to Dioscurides, two books. Of Species and Genera, addressed to Gorgippides, two books. Of Classifications, one book. Of Contraries, addressed to Dionysius, two books. Probable Arguments relative to the Classifications, Genera and Species, and the Treatment of Contraries, one book. Fourth series: Of Etymological Matters, addressed to Diocles, seven books. Points of Etymology, addressed to Diocles, four books. Fifth series: Of Proverbs, addressed to Zenodotus, two books. Of Poems, addressed to Philomathes, one book. On the Right Way of reading Poetry, two books. A Reply to Critics, addressed to Diodorus, one book.

2. Ethics dealing with the common view and the sciences and virtues thence arising. First series: Against the Touching up of Paintings, addressed to Timonax, one book. How it is we name each Thing and form a Conception of it, one book. Of Conceptions, addressed to Laodamas, two books. Of Opinion or Assumption, addressed to Pythonax, three books. Proofs that the Wise Man will not hold Opinions, one book. Of Apprehension, of Knowledge and of Ignorance, four books. Of Reason, two books. Of the Use of Reason, addressed to Leptines. Second series: That the Ancients rightly admitted Dialectic as well as Demonstration, addressed to Zeno, two books.

Of Dialectic, addressed to Aristocreon, four books. Of the Objections urged against the Dialecticians, three books. Of Rhetoric, addressed to Dioscurides, four books. Third series: Of formed State, or Habit, of Mind, addressed to Cleon, three books. Of Art and the Inartistic, addressed to Aristocreon, four books. Of the Difference between the Virtues, addressed to Diodorus, four books. Of the Characters of the several Virtues, one book. Of Virtues, addressed to Pollis, two books. 3. Ethics, dealing with things good and evil. First series: Of the Good or Morally Beautiful and Pleasure, addressed to Aristocreon, ten books. Proofs that Pleasure is not the End-in-chief of Action, four books. Proofs that Pleasure is not a Good, four books. Of the Arguments commonly used on Behalf of [Pleasure].

Having now completed our account of the philosophy of Ionia starting with Thales, as well as of its chief representatives, let us proceed to examine the philosophy of Italy, which was started by Pythagoras, son of the gem-engraver Mnesarchus, and according to Hermippus, a Samian, or, according to Aristoxenus, a Tyrrhenian from one of those islands which the Athenians held after clearing them of their Tyrrhenian inhabitants. Some indeed say that he was descended through Euthyphro, Hippasus and Marmacus from Cleonymus, who was exiled from Phlius, and that, as Marmacus lived in Samos, so Pythagoras was called a Samian.

From Samos he went, it is said, to Lesbos with an introduction to Pherecydes from his uncle Zoïlus. He had three silver flagons made and took them as presents to each of the priests of Egypt. He had brothers, of whom Eunomus was the elder and Tyrrhenus the second; he also had a slave, Zamolxis, who is worshipped, so says Herodotus, by the Getans, as Cronos. He was a pupil, as already stated, of Pherecydes of Syros, after whose death he went to Samos to be the pupil of Hermodamas, Creophylus’s descendant, a man already advanced in years. While still young, so eager was he for knowledge, he left his own country and had himself initiated into all the mysteries and rites not only of Greece but also of foreign countries.

Now he was in Egypt when Polycrates sent him a letter of introduction to Amasis; he learnt the Egyptian language, so we learn from Antiphon in his book On Men of Outstanding Merit , and he also journeyed among the Chaldaeans and Magi. Then while in Crete he went down into the cave of Ida with Epimenides; he also entered the Egyptian sanctuaries, and was told their secret lore concerning the gods. After that he returned to Samos to find his country under the tyranny of Polycrates; so he sailed away to Croton in Italy, and there he laid down a constitution for the Italian Greeks, and he and his followers were held in great estimation; for, being nearly three hundred in number, so well did they govern the state that its constitution was in effect a true aristocracy (government by the best).

This is what Heraclides of Pontus tells us he used to say about himself: that he had once been Aethalides and was accounted to be Hermes’ son, and Hermes told him he might choose any gift he liked except immortality; so he asked to retain through life and through death a memory of his experiences. Hence in life he could recall everything, and when he died he still kept the same memories. Afterwards in course of time his soul entered into Euphorbus and he was wounded by Menelaus. Now Euphorbus used to say that he had once been Aethalides and obtained this gift from Hermes, and then he told of the wanderings of his soul, how it migrated hither and thither, into how many plants and animals it had come, and all that it underwent in Hades, and all that the other souls there have to endure.

When Euphorbus died, his soul passed into Hermotimus, and he also, wishing to authenticate the story, went up to the temple of Apollo at Branchidae, where he identified the shield which Menelaus, on his voyage home from Troy, had dedicated to Apollo, so he said: the shield being now so rotten through and through that the ivory facing only was left. When Hermotimus died, he became Pyrrhus, a fisherman of Delos, and again he remembered everything, how he was first Aethalides, then Euphorbus, then Hermotimus, and then Pyrrhus. But when Pyrrhus died, he became Pythagoras, and still remembered all the facts mentioned.

There are some who insist, absurdly enough, that Pythagoras left no writings whatever. At all events Heraclitus, the physicist, almost shouts in our ear, Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, practised inquiry beyond all other men, and in this selection of his writings made himself a wisdom of his own, showing much learning but poor workmanship. The occasion of this remark was the opening words of Pythagoras’s treatise On Nature , namely, Nay, I swear by the air I breathe, I swear by the water I drink, I will never suffer censure on account of this work. Pythagoras in fact wrote three books. On Education , On Statesmanship , and On Nature.

But the book which passes as the work of Pythagoras is by Lysis of Tarentum, a Pythagorean, who fled to Thebes and taught Epaminondas. Heraclides, the son of Serapion, in his Epitome of Sotion , says that he also wrote a poem On the Universe , and secondly the Sacred Poem which begins: Young men, come reverence in quietude All these my words; thirdly On the Soul , fourthly Of Piety , fifthly Helothales the Father of Epicharmus of Cos , sixthly Croton , and other works as well. The same authority says that the poem On the Mysteries was written by Hippasus to defame Pythagoras, and that many others written by Aston of Croton were ascribed to Pythagoras.

Aristoxenus says that Pythagoras got most of his moral doctrines from the Delphic priestess Themistoclea. According to Ion of Chios in his Triagmi he ascribed some poems of his own making to Orpheus. They further attribute to him the Scopiads which begins thus: Be not shameless, before any man. Sosicrates in his Successions of Philosophers says that, when Leon the tyrant of Phlius asked him who he was, he said, A philosopher, and that he compared life to the Great Games, where some went to compete for the prize and others went with wares to sell, but the best as spectators; for similarly, in life, some grow up with servile natures, greedy for fame and gain, but the philosopher seeks for truth. Thus much for this part of the subject.

The contents in general of the aforesaid three treatises of Pythagoras are as follows. He forbids us to pray for ourselves, because we do not know what will help us. Drinking he calls, in a word, a snare, and he discountenances all excess, saying that no one should go beyond due proportion either in drinking or in eating. Of sexual indulgence, too, he says, Keep to the winter for sexual pleasures, in summer abstain; they are less harmful in autumn and spring, but they are always harmful and not conducive to health. Asked once when a man should consort with a woman, he replied, When you want to lose what strength you have.

He divides man’s life into four quarters thus: Twenty years a boy, twenty years a youth, twenty years a young man, twenty years an old man; and these four periods correspond to the four seasons, the boy to spring, the youth to summer, the young man to autumn, and the old man to winter, meaning by youth one not yet grown up and by a young man a man of mature age. According to Timaeus, he was the first to say, Friends have all things in common and Friendship is equality ; indeed, his disciples did put all their possessions into one common stock. For five whole years they had to keep silence, merely listening to his discourses without seeing him, until they passed an examination, and thenceforward they were admitted to his house and allowed to see him. They would never use coffins of cypress, because the sceptre of Zeus was made from it, so we are informed by Hermippus in his second book On Pythagoras.

Indeed, his bearing is said to have been most dignified, and his disciples held the opinion about him that he was Apollo come down from the far north. There is a story that once, when he was disrobed, his thigh was seen to be of gold; and when he crossed the river Nessus, quite a number of people said they heard it welcome him. According to Timaeus in the tenth book of his History , he remarked that the consorts of men bore divine names, being called first Virgins, then Brides, and then Mothers. He it was who brought geometry to perfection, while it was Moeris who first discovered the beginnings of the elements of geometry: Anticlides in his second book On Alexander affirms this,

and further that Pythagoras spent most of his time upon the arithmetical aspect of geometry; he also discovered the musical intervals on the monochord. Nor did he neglect even medicine. We are told by Apollodorus the calculator that he offered a sacrifice of oxen on finding that in a right-angled triangle the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the squares on the sides containing the right angle. And there is an epigram running as follows : What time Pythagoras that famed figure found, For which the noble offering he brought. He is also said to have been the first to diet athletes on meat, trying first with Eurymenes — so we learn from Favorinus in the third book of his Memorabilia —whereas in former times they had trained on dried figs, on butter, and even on wheatmeal, as we are told by the same Favorinus in the eighth book of his Miscellaneous History.

Some say it was a certain trainer named Pythagoras who instituted this diet, and not our Pythagoras, who forbade even the killing, let alone the eating, of animals which share with us the privilege of having a soul. This was the excuse put forward; but his real reason for forbidding animal diet was to practise people and accustom them to simplicity of life, so that they could live on things easily procurable, spreading their tables with uncooked foods and drinking pure water only, for this was the way to a healthy body and a keen mind. Of course the only altar at which he worshipped was that of Apollo the Giver of Life, behind the Altar of Horns at Delos, for thereon were placed flour and meal and cakes, without the use of fire, and there was no animal victim, as we are told by Aristotle in his Constitution of Delos.

He was the first, they say, to declare that the soul, bound now in this creature, now in that, thus goes on a round ordained of necessity. He too, according to Aristoxenus the musician, was the first to introduce weights and measures into Greece. It was he who first declared that the Evening and Morning Stars are the same, as Parmenides maintains. So greatly was he admired that his disciples used to be called prophets to declare the voice of God, besides which he himself says in a written work that after two hundred and seven years in Hades he has returned to the land of the living. Thus it was that they remained his staunch adherents, and men came to hear his words from afar, among them Lucanians, Peucetians, Messapians and Romans.

Down to the time of Philolaus it was not possible to acquire knowledge of any Pythagorean doctrine, and Philolaus alone brought out those three celebrated books which Plato sent a hundred minas to purchase. Not less than six hundred persons went to his evening lectures; and those who were privileged to see him wrote to their friends congratulating themselves on a great piece of good fortune. Moreover, the Metapontines named his house the Temple of Demeter and his porch the Museum, so we learn from Favorinus in his Miscellaneous History. And the rest of the Pythagoreans used to say that not all his doctrines were for all men to hear, our authority for this being Aristoxenus in the tenth book of his Rules of Pedagogy ,

where we are also told that one of the school, Xenophilus by name, asked by some one how he could best educate his son, replied, By making him the citizen of a well-governed state. Throughout Italy Pythagoras made many into good men and true, men too of note like the lawgivers Zaleucus and Charondas; for he had a great gift for friendship, and especially, when he found his own watchwords adopted by anyone, he would immediately take to that man and make a friend of him.

The following were his watchwords or precepts: don’t stir the fire with a knife, don’t step over the beam of a balance, don’t sit down on your bushel, don’t eat your heart, don’t help a man off with a load but help him on, always roll your bed-clothes up, don’t put God’s image on the circle of a ring, don’t leave the pan’s imprint on the ashes, don’t wipe up a mess with a torch, don’t commit a nuisance towards the sun, don’t walk the highway, don’t shake hands too eagerly, don’t have swallows under your own roof, don’t keep birds with hooked claws, don’t make water on nor stand upon your nail-and hair-trimmings, turn the sharp blade away, when you go abroad don’t turn round at the frontier.

This is what they meant. Don’t stir the fire with a knife: don’t stir the passions or the swelling pride of the great. Don’t step over the beam of a balance: don’t overstep the bounds of equity and justice. Don’t sit down on your bushel: have the same care of to-day and the future, a bushel being the day’s ration. By not eating your heart he meant not wasting your life in troubles and pains. By saying do not turn round when you go abroad, he meant to advise those who are departing this life not to set their hearts’ desire on living nor to be too much attracted by the pleasures of this life. The explanations of the rest are similar and would take too long to set out.

Above all, he forbade as food red mullet and blacktail, and he enjoined abstinence from the hearts of animals and from beans, and sometimes, according to Aristotle, even from paunch and gurnard. Some say that he contented himself with just some honey or a honeycomb or bread, never touching wine in the daytime, and with greens boiled or raw for dainties, and fish but rarely. His robe was white and spotless, his quilts of white wool, for linen had not yet reached those parts. He was never known to over-eat, to behave loosely, or to be drunk. He would avoid laughter and all pandering to tastes such as insulting jests and vulgar tales. He would punish neither slave nor free man in anger. Admonition he used to call setting right. He used to practise divination by sounds or voices and by auguries, never by burnt-offerings, beyond frankincense. The offerings he made were always inanimate; though some say that he would offer cocks, sucking goats and porkers, as they are called, but lambs never. However, Aristoxenus has it that he consented to the eating of all other animals, and only abstained from ploughing oxen and rams.

The same authority, as we have seen, asserts that Pythagoras took his doctrines from the Delphic priestess Themistoclea. Hieronymus, however, says that, when he had descended into Hades, he saw the soul of Hesiod bound fast to a brazen pillar and gibbering, and the soul of Homer hung on a tree with serpents writhing about it, this being their punishment for what they had said about the gods; he also saw under torture those who would not remain faithful to their wives. This, says our authority, is why he was honoured by the people of Croton. Aristippus of Cyrene affirms in his work On the Physicists that he was named Pythagoras because he uttered the truth as infallibly as did the Pythian oracle.

He is said to have advised his disciples as follows: Always to say on entering their own doors: Where did I trespass? What did I achieve? And unfulfilled what duties did I leave? Not to let victims be brought for sacrifice to the gods, and to worship only at the altar unstained with blood. Not to call the gods to witness, man’s duty being rather to strive to make his own word carry conviction. To honour their elders, on the principle that precedence in time gives a greater title to respect; for as in the world sunrise comes before sunset, so in human life the beginning before the end, and in all organic life birth precedes death.

And he further bade them to honour gods before demi-gods, heroes before men, and first among men their parents; and so to behave one to another as not to make friends into enemies, but to turn enemies into friends. To deem nothing their own. To support the law, to wage war on lawlessness. Never to kill or injure trees that are not wild, nor even any animal that does not injure man. That it is seemly and advisable neither to give way to unbridled laughter nor to wear sullen looks. To avoid excess of flesh, on a journey to let exertion and slackening alternate, to train the memory, in wrath to restrain hand and tongue, to respect all divination, to sing to the lyre and by hymns to show due gratitude to gods and to good men. To abstain from beans because they are flatulent and partake most of the breath of life; and besides, it is better for the stomach if they are not taken, and this again will make our dreams in sleep smooth and untroubled. Alexander in his Successions of Philosophers says that he found in the Pythagorean memoirs the following tenets as well.

The principle of all things is the monad or unit; arising from this monad the undefined dyad or two serves as material substratum to the monad, which is cause; from the monad and the undefined dyad spring numbers; from numbers, points; from points, lines; from lines, plane figures; from plane figures, solid figures; from solid figures, sensible bodies, the elements of which are four, fire, water, earth and air; these elements interchange and turn into one another completely, and combine to produce a universe animate, intelligent, spherical, with the earth at its centre, the earth itself too being spherical and inhabited round about.

There are also antipodes, and our down is their up. Light and darkness have equal part in the universe, so have hot and cold, and dry and moist; and of these, if hot preponderates, we have summer; if cold, winter; if dry, spring; if moist, late autumn. If all are in equilibrium, we have the best periods of the year, of which the freshness of spring constitutes the healthy season, and the decay of late autumn the unhealthy. So too, in the day, freshness belongs to the morning, and decay to the evening, which is therefore more unhealthy. The air about the earth is stagnant and unwholesome, and all within it is mortal; but the uppermost air is ever-moved and pure and healthy, and all within it is immortal and consequently divine.

The sun, the moon, and the other stars are gods; for, in them, there is a preponderance of heat, and heat is the cause of life. The moon is illumined by the sun. Gods and men are akin, inasmuch as man partakes of heat; therefore God takes thought for man. Fate is the cause of things being thus ordered both as a whole and separately. The sun’s ray penetrates through the aether, whether cold or dense—the air they call cold aether, and the sea and moisture dense aether —and this ray descends even to the depths and for this reason quickens all things.

All things live which partake of heat—this is why plants are living things —but all have not soul, which is a detached part of aether, partly the hot and partly the cold, for it partakes of cold aether too. Soul is distinct from life; it is immortal, since that from which it is detached is immortal. Living creatures are reproduced from one another by germination; there is no such thing as spontaneous generation from earth. The germ is a clot of brain containing hot vapour within it; and this, when brought to the womb, throws out, from the brain, ichor, fluid and blood, whence are formed flesh, sinews, bones, hairs, and the whole of the body, while soul and sense come from the vapour within.

First congealing in about forty days, it receives form and, according to the ratios of harmony, in seven, nine, or at the most ten, months, the mature child is brought forth. It has in it all the relations constituting life, and these, forming a continuous series, keep it together according to the ratios of harmony, each appearing at regulated intervals. Sense generally, and sight in particular, is a certain unusually hot vapour. This is why it is said to see through air and water, because the hot aether is resisted by the cold; for, if the vapour in the eyes had been cold, it would have been dissipated on meeting the air, its like. As it is, in certain [lines] he calls the eyes the portals of the sun. His conclusion is the same with regard to hearing and the other senses.

The soul of man, he says, is divided into three parts, intelligence, reason, and passion. Intelligence and passion are possessed by other animals as well, but reason by man alone. The seat of the soul extends from the heart to the brain; the part of it which is in the heart is passion, while the parts located in the brain are reason and intelligence. The senses are distillations from these. Reason is immortal, all else mortal. The soul draws nourishment from the blood; the faculties of the soul are winds, for they as well as the soul are invisible, just as the aether is invisible.

The veins, arteries, and sinews are the bonds of the soul. But when it is strong and settled down into itself, reasonings and deeds become its bonds. When cast out upon the earth, it wanders in the air like the body. Hermes is the steward of souls, and for that reason is called Hermes the Escorter, Hermes the Keeper of the Gate, and Hermes of the Underworld, since it is he who brings in the souls from their bodies both by land and sea; and the pure are taken into the uppermost region, but the impure are not permitted to approach the pure or each other, but are bound by the Furies in bonds unbreakable.

The whole air is full of souls which are called genii or heroes; these are they who send men dreams and signs of future disease and health, and not to men alone, but to sheep also and cattle as well; and it is to them that purifications and lustrations, all divination, omens and the like, have reference. The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or to evil. Blest are the men who acquire a good soul; [if it be bad] they can never be at rest, nor ever keep the same course two days together.

Right has the force of an oath, and that is why Zeus is called the God of Oaths. Virtue is harmony, and so are health and all good and God himself; this is why they say that all things are constructed according to the laws of harmony. The love of friends is just concord and equality. We should not pay equal worship to gods and heroes, but to the gods always, with reverent silence, in white robes, and after purification, to the heroes only from midday onwards. Purification is by cleansing, baptism and lustration, and by keeping clean from all deaths and births and all pollution, and abstaining from meat and flesh of animals that have died, mullets, gurnards, eggs and egg-sprung animals, beans, and the other abstinences prescribed by those who perform mystic rites in the temples.

According to Aristotle in his work On the Pythagoreans , Pythagoras counselled abstinence from beans either because they are like the genitals, or because they are like the gates of Hades . . . as being alone unjointed, or because they are injurious, or because they are like the form of the universe, or because they belong to oligarchy, since they are used in election by lot. He bade his disciples not to pick up fallen crumbs, either in order to accustom them not to eat immoderately, or because connected with a person’s death; nay, even, according to Aristophanes, crumbs belong to the heroes, for in his Heroes he says : Nor taste ye of what falls beneath the board ! Another of his precepts was not to eat white cocks, as being sacred to the Month and wearing suppliant garb—now supplication ranked with things good— sacred to the Month because they announce the time of day; and again white represents the nature of the good, black the nature of evil. Not to touch such fish as were sacred; for it is not right that gods and men should be allotted the same things, any more than free men and slaves. Not to break bread; for once friends used to meet over one loaf,

as the barbarians do even to this day; and you should not divide bread which brings them together; some give as the explanation of this that it has reference to the judgement of the dead in Hades, others that bread makes cowards in war, others again that it is from it that the whole world begins. He held that the most beautiful figure is the sphere among solids, and the circle among plane figures. Old age may be compared to everything that is decreasing, while youth is one with increase. Health means retention of the form, disease its destruction. Of salt he said it should be brought to table to remind us of what is right; for salt preserves whatever it finds, and it arises from the purest sources, sun and sea.

This is what Alexander says that he found in the Pythagorean memoirs. What follows is Aristotle’s. But Pythagoras’s great dignity not even Timon overlooked, who, although he digs at him in his Silli, speaks of Pythagoras, inclined to witching works and ways, Man-snarer, fond of noble periphrase. Xenophanes confirms the statement about his having been different people at different times in the elegiacs beginning: Now other thoughts, another path, I show. What he says of him is as follows: They say that, passing a belaboured whelp, He, full of pity, spake these words of dole: Stay, smite not ! ’Tis a friend, a human soul; I knew him straight whenas I heard him yelp ! Thus Xenophanes. But Cratinus also lampooned him both in the Pythagorizing Woman and also in The Tarentines , where we read : They are wont, If haply they a foreigner do find, To hold a cross-examination Of doctrines’ worth, to trouble and confound him With terms, equations, and antitheses Brain-bung’d with magnitudes and periphrases. Again, Mnesimachus in the Alcmaeon : To Loxias we sacrifice: Pythagoras his rite, Of nothing that is animate we ever take a bite.

And Aristophon in the Pythagorist : A. He told how he travelled in Hades and looked on the dwellers below, How each of them lives, but how different by far from the lives of the dead Were the lives of the Pythagoreans, for these alone, so he said, Were suffered to dine with King Pluto, which was for their piety’s sake. B. What an ill-tempered god for whom such swine, such creatures good company make; and in the same later: Their food is just greens, and to wet it pure water is all that they drink; And the want of a bath, and the vermin, and their old threadbare coats so do stink That none of the rest will come near them.

Pythagoras met his death in this wise. As he sat one day among his acquaintances at the house of Milo, it chanced that the house was set ablaze out of jealousy by one of the people who were not accounted worthy of admittance to his presence, though some say it was the work of the inhabitants of Croton anxious to safeguard themselves against the setting-up of a tyranny. Pythagoras was caught as he tried to escape; he got as far as a certain field of beans, where he stopped, saying he would be captured rather than cross it, and be killed rather than prate about his doctrines; and so his pursuers cut his throat. So also were murdered more than half of his disciples, to the number of forty or thereabouts; but a very few escaped, including Archippus of Tarentum and Lysis, already mentioned.

Dicaearchus, however, says that Pythagoras died a fugitive in the temple of the Muses at Metapontum after forty days’ starvation. Heraclides, in his Epitome of the Lives of Satyrus, says that, after burying Pherecydes at Delos, he returned to Italy and, when he found Cylon of Croton giving a luxurious banquet to all and sundry, retired to Metapontum to end his days there by starvation, having no wish to live longer. On the other hand, Hermippus relates that, when the men of Agrigentum and Syracuse were at war, Pythagoras and his disciples went out and fought in the van of the army of the Agrigentines, and, their line being turned, he was killed by the Syracusans as he was trying to avoid the beanfield; the rest, about thirty-five in number, were burned at the stake in Tarentum for trying to set up a government in opposition to those in power.

Hermippus gives another anecdote. Pythagoras, on coming to Italy, made a subterranean dwelling and enjoined on his mother to mark and record all that passed, and at what hour, and to send her notes down to him until he should ascend. She did so. Pythagoras some time afterwards came up withered and looking like a skeleton, then went into the assembly and declared he had been down to Hades, and even read out his experiences to them. They were so affected that they wept and wailed and looked upon him as divine, going so far as to send their wives to him in hopes that they would learn some of his doctrines; and so they were called Pythagorean women. Thus far Hermippus.

Pythagoras had a wife, Theano by name, daughter of Brontinus of Croton, though some call her Brontinus’s wife and Pythagoras’s pupil. He had a daughter Damo, according to the letter of Lysis to Hippasus, which says of him, I am told by many that you discourse publicly, a thing which Pythagoras deemed unworthy, for certain it is that, when he entrusted his daughter Damo with the custody of his memoirs, he solemnly charged her never to give them to anyone outside his house. And, although she could have sold the writings for a large sum of money, she would not, but reckoned poverty and her father’s solemn injunctions more precious than gold, for all that she was a woman.

They also had a son Telauges, who succeeded his father and, according to some, was Empedocles’ instructor. At all events Hippobotus makes Empedocles say : Telauges, famed Son of Theano and Pythagoras. Telauges wrote nothing, so far as we know, but his mother Theano wrote a few things. Further, a story is told that being asked how many days it was before a woman becomes pure after intercourse, she replied, With her own husband at once, with another man never. And she advised a woman going in to her own husband to put off her shame with her clothes, and on leaving him to put it on again along with them. Asked Put on what? she replied, What makes me to be called a woman.

To return to Pythagoras. According to Heraclides, the son of Serapion, he was eighty years old when he died, and this agrees with his own description of the life of man, though most authorities say he was ninety. And there are jesting lines of my own upon him as follows : Not thou alone from all things animate Didst keep, Pythagoras. All food is dead When boil’d and bak’d and salt-besprinkle-èd; For then it surely is inanimate. Again : So wise was wise Pythagoras that he Would touch no meats, but called it impious, Bade others eat. Good wisdom: not for us To do the wrong; let others impious be.

And again : If thou wouldst know the mind of old Pythagoras, Look on Euphorbus’ buckler and its boss. He says I’ve lived before. If, when he says he was, He was not, he was no-one when he was. And again, of the manner of his death : Woe! Woe! Whence, Pythagoras, this deep reverence for beans? Why did he fall in the midst of his disciples? A bean-field there was he durst not cross; sooner than trample on it, he endured to be slain at the cross-roads by the men of Acragas. He flourished in the 60th Olympiad and his school lasted until the ninth or tenth generation.

For the last of the Pythagoreans, whom Aristoxenus in his time saw, were Xenophilus from the Thracian Chalcidice, Phanton of Phlius, and Echecrates, Diocles and Polymnastus, also of Phlius, who were pupils of Philolaus and Eurytus of Tarentum. There were four men of the name of Pythagoras living about the same time and at no great distance from one another: (1) of Croton, a man with tyrannical leanings; (2) of Phlius, an athlete, some say a trainer; (3) of Zacynthus; (4) our subject, who discovered the secrets of philosophy [and taught them], and to whom was applied the phrase, The Master said ( Ipse dixit ), which passed into a proverb of ordinary life.

Some say there was also another Pythagoras, a sculptor of Rhegium, who is thought to have been the first to aim at rhythm and symmetry; another a sculptor of Samos; another a bad orator; another a doctor who wrote on hernia and also compiled some things about Homer; and yet another who, so we are told by Dionysius, wrote a history of the Dorian race. Eratosthenes says, according to what we learn from Favorinus in the eighth book of his Miscellaneous History , that the last-named was the first to box scientifically, in the 48th Olympiad, keeping his hair long and wearing a purple robe; and that when he was excluded with ridicule from the boys’ contest, he went at once to the men’s and won that;

this is declared by Theaetetus’s epigram : Know’st one Pythagoras, long-haired Pythagoras, The far-fam’d boxer of the Samians? I am Pythagoras; ask the Elians What were my feats, thou’lt not believe the tale. Favorinus says that our philosopher used definitions throughout the subject matter of mathematics; their use was extended by Socrates and his disciples, and afterwards by Aristotle and the Stoics. Further, we are told that he was the first to call the heaven the universe and the earth spherical, though Theophrastus says it was Parmenides, and Zeno that it was Hesiod.

It is said that Cylon was a rival of Pythagoras, as Antilochus was of Socrates. Pythagoras the athlete was also the subject of another epigram as follows : Gone to box with other lads Is the lad Pythagoras, Gone to the games Olympian Crates’ son the Samian. The philosopher also wrote the following letter: Pythagoras to Anaximenes. Even you, O most excellent of men, were you no better born and famed than Pythagoras, would have risen and departed from Miletus. But now your ancestral glory has detained you as it had detained me were I Anaximenes’s peer. But if you, the best men, abandon your cities, then will their good order perish, and the peril from the Medes will increase.

For always to scan the heavens is not well, but more seemly is it to be provident for one’s mother country. For I too am not altogether in my discourses but am found no less in the wars which the Italians wage with one another. Having now finished our account of Pythagoras, we have next to speak of the noteworthy Pythagoreans; after them will come the philosophers whom some denominate sporadic [ i.e. belonging to no particular school]; and then, in the next place, we will append the succession of all those worthy of notice as far as Epicurus, in the way that we promised. We have already treated of Theano and Telauges: so now we have first to speak of Empedocles, for some say he was a pupil of Pythagoras.

Empedocles was, according to Hippobotus, the son of Meton and grandson of Empedocles, and was a native of Agrigentum. This is confirmed by Timaeus in the fifteenth book of his Histories , and he adds that Empedocles, the poet’s grandfather, had been a man of distinction. Hermippus also agrees with Timaeus. So, too, Heraclides, in his treatise On Diseases , says that he was of an illustrious family, his grandfather having kept racehorses. Eratosthenes also in his Olympic Victories records, on the authority of Aristotle, that the father of Meton was a victor in the 71st Olympiad.

The grammarian Apollodorus in his Chronology tells us that He was the son of Meton, and Glaucus says he went to Thurii, just then founded. Then farther on he adds: Those who relate that, being exiled from his home, he went to Syracuse and fought in their ranks against the Athenians seem, in my judgement at least, to be completely mistaken. For by that time either he was no longer living or in extreme old age, which is inconsistent with the story. For Aristotle and Heraclides both affirm that he died at the age of sixty. The victor with the ridinghorse in the 71st Olympiad was This man’s namesake and grandfather, so that Apollodorus in one and the same passage indicates the date as well as the fact.

But Satyrus in his Lives states that Empedocles was the son of Exaenetus and himself left a son named Exaenetus, and that in the same Olympiad Empedocles himself was victorious in the horse-race and his son in wrestling, or, as Heraclides in his Epitome has it, in the foot-race. I found in the Memorabilia of Favorinus a statement that Empedocles feasted the sacred envoys on a sacrificial ox made of honey and barley-meal, and that he had a brother named Callicratides. Telauges, the son of Pythagoras, in his letter to Philolaus calls Empedocles the son of Archinomus.

That he belonged to Agrigentum in Sicily he himself testifies at the beginning of his Purifications : My friends, who dwell in the great city sloping down to yellow Acragas, hard by the citadel. So much for his family. Timaeus in the ninth book of his Histories says he was a pupil of Pythagoras, adding that, having been convicted at that time of stealing his discourses, he was, like Plato, excluded from taking part in the discussions of the school; and further, that Empedocles himself mentions Pythagoras in the lines : And there lived among them a man of superhuman knowledge, who verily possessed the greatest wealth of wisdom. Others say that it is to Parmenides that he is here referring.

Neanthes states that down to the time of Philolaus and Empedocles all Pythagoreans were admitted to the discussions. But when Empedocles himself made them public property by his poem, they made a law that they should not be imparted to any poet. He says the same thing also happened to Plato, for he too was excommunicated. But which of the Pythagoreans it was who had Empedocles for a pupil he did not say. For the epistle commonly attributed to Telauges and the statement that Empedocles was the pupil of both Hippasus and Brontinus he held to be unworthy of credence. Theophrastus affirms that he was an admirer of Parmenides and imitated him in his verses, for Parmenides too had published his treatise On Nature in verse.

But Hermippus’s account is that he was an admirer not so much of Parmenides as of Xenophanes, with whom in fact he lived and whose writing of poetry he imitated, and that his meeting with the Pythagoreans was subsequent. Alcidamas tells us in his treatise on Physics that Zeno and Empedocles were pupils of Parmenides about the same time, that afterwards they left him, and that, while Zeno framed his own system, Empedocles became the pupil of Anaxagoras and Pythagoras, emulating the latter in dignity of life and bearing, and the former in his physical investigations. Aristotle in his Sophist calls Empedocles the inventor of rhetoric as Zeno of dialectic. In his treatise On Poets he says that Empedocles was of Homer’s school and powerful in diction, being great in metaphors and in the use of all other poetical devices. He also says that he wrote other poems, in particular the invasion of Xerxes and a hymn to Apollo, which a sister of his (or, according to Hieronymus, his daughter) afterwards burnt. The hymn she destroyed unintentionally, but the poem on the Persian war deliberately, because it was unfinished.

And in general terms he says he wrote both tragedies and political discourses. But Heraclides, the son of Sarapion, attributes the tragedies to a different author. Hieronymus declares that he had come across forty-three of these plays, while Neanthes tells us that Empedocles wrote these tragedies in his youth, and that he, Neanthes, was acquainted with seven of them. Satyrus in his Lives says that he was also a physician and an excellent orator: at all events Gorgias of Leontini, a man pre-eminent in oratory and the author of a treatise on the art, had been his pupil. Of Gorgias Apollodorus says in his Chronology that he lived to be one hundred and nine.

Satyrus quotes this same Gorgias as saying that he himself was present when Empedocles performed magical feats. Nay more: he contends that Empedocles in his poems lays claim to this power and to much besides when he says : And thou shalt learn all the drugs that are a defence to ward off ills and old age, since for thee alone shall I accomplish all this. Thou shalt arrest the violence of the unwearied winds that arise and sweep the earth, laying waste the cornfields with their blasts; and again, if thou so will, thou shalt call back winds in requital. Thou shalt make after the dark rain a seasonable drought for men, and again after the summer drought thou shalt cause tree-nourishing streams to pour from the sky. Thou shalt bring back from Hades a dead man’s strength.

Timaeus also in the eighteenth book of his Histories remarks that Empedocles has been admired on many grounds. For instance, when the etesian winds once began to blow violently and to damage the crops, he ordered asses to be flayed and bags to be made of their skin. These he stretched out here and there on the hills and headlands to catch the wind and, because this checked the wind, he was called the wind-stayer. Heraclides in his book On Diseases says that he furnished Pausanias with the facts about the woman in a trance. This Pausanias, according to Aristippus and Satyrus, was his bosom-friend, to whom he dedicated his poem On Nature thus :

Give ear, Pausanias, thou son of Anchitus the wise! Moreover he wrote an epigram upon him : The physician Pausanias, rightly so named, son of Anchitus, descendant of Asclepius, was born and bred at Gela. Many a wight pining in fell torments did he bring back from Persephone’s inmost shrine. At all events Heraclides testifies that the case of the woman in a trance was such that for thirty days he kept her body without pulsation though she never breathed; and for that reason Heraclides called him not merely a physician but a diviner as well, deriving the titles from the following lines also :

My friends, who dwell in the grcat city sloping down to yellow Acragas, hard by the citadel, busied with goodly works, all hail! I go about among you an immortal god, no more a mortal, so honoured of all, as is meet, crowned with fillets and flowery garlands. Straightway as soon as I enter with these, men and women, into flourishing towns, I am reverenced and tens of thousands follow, to learn where is the path which leads to welfare, some desirous of oracles, others suffering from all kinds of diseases, desiring to hear a message of healing.

Timaeus explains that he called Agrigentum great, inasmuch as it had 800,000 inhabitants. Hence Empedocles, he continues, speaking of their luxury, said, The Agrigentines live delicately as if tomorrow they would die, but they build their houses well as if they thought they would live for ever. It is said that Cleomenes the rhapsode recited this very poem, the Purifications , at Olympia : so Favorinus in his Memorabilia. Aristotle too declares him to have been a champion of freedom and averse to rule of every kind, seeing that, as Xanthus relates in his account of him, he declined the kingship when it was offered to him, obviously because he preferred a frugal life.

With this Timaeus agrees, at the same time giving the reason why Empedocles favoured democracy, namely, that, having been invited to dine with one of the magistrates, when the dinner had gone on some time and no wine was put on the table, though the other guests kept quiet, he, becoming indignant, ordered wine to be brought. Then the host confessed that he was waiting for the servant of the senate to appear. When he came he was made master of the revels, clearly by the arrangement of the host, whose design of making himself tyrant was but thinly veiled, for he ordered the guests either to drink wine or have it poured over their heads. For the time being Empedocles was reduced to silence; the next day he impeached both of them, the host and the master of the revels, and secured their condemnation and execution. This, then, was the beginning of his political career.

Again, when Acron the physician asked the council for a site on which to build a monument to his father, who had been eminent among physicians, Empedocles came forward and forbade it in a speech where he enlarged upon equality and in particular put the following question: But what inscription shall we put upon it? Shall it be this? Acron the eminent physician of Agrigentum, son of Acros, is buried beneath the steep eminence of his most eminent native city? Others give as the second line: Is laid in an exalted tomb on a most exalted peak. Some attribute this couplet to Simonides.

Subsequently Empedocles broke up the assembly of the Thousand three years after it had been set up, which proves not only that he was wealthy but that he favoured the popular cause. At all events Timaeus in his eleventh and twelfth books (for he mentions him more than once) states that he seems to have held opposite views when in public life and when writing poetry. In some passages one may see that he is boastful and selfish. At any rate these are his words: All hail! I go about among you an immortal god, no more a mortal, etc. At the time when he visited Olympia he demanded an excessive deference, so that never was anyone so talked about in gatherings of friends as Empedocles.

Subsequently, however, when Agrigentum came to regret him, the descendants of his personal enemies opposed his return home; and this was why he went to Peloponnesus, where he died. Nor did Timon let even him alone, but fastens upon him in these words: Empedocles, too, mouthing tawdry verses; to all that had independent force, he gave a separate existence; and the principles he chose need others to explain them. As to his death different accounts are given. Thus Heraclides, after telling the story of the woman in a trance, how that Empedocles became famous because he had sent away the dead woman alive, goes on to say that he was offering a sacrifice close to the field of Peisianax. Some of his friends had been invited to the sacrifice, including Pausanias.

Then, after the feast, the remainder of the company dispersed and retired to rest, some under the trees in the adjoining field, others wherever they chose, while Empedocles himself remained on the spot where he had reclined at table. At daybreak all got up, and he was the only one missing. A search was made, and they questioned the servants, who said they did not know where he was. Thereupon someone said that in the middle of the night he heard an exceedingly loud voice calling Empedocles. Then he got up and beheld a light in the heavens and a glitter of lamps, but nothing else. His hearers were amazed at what had occurred, and Pausanias came down and sent people to search for him. But later he bade them take no further trouble, for things beyond expectation had happened to him, and it was their duty to sacrifice to him since he was now a god.

Hermippus tells us that Empedocles cured Panthea, a woman of Agrigentum, who had been given up by the physicians, and this was why he was offering sacrifice, and that those invited were about eighty in number. Hippobotus, again, asserts that, when he got up, he set out on his way to Etna; then, when he had reached it, he plunged into the fiery craters and disappeared, his intention being to confirm the report that he had become a god. Afterwards the truth was known, because one of his slippers was thrown up in the flames; it had been his custom to wear slippers of bronze. To this story Pausanias is made (by Heraclides) to take exception.

Diodorus of Ephesus, when writing of Anaximander, declares that Empedocles emulated him, displaying theatrical arrogance and wearing stately robes. We are told that the people of Selinus suffered from pestilence owing to the noisome smells from the river hard by, so that the citizens themselves perished and their women died in childbirth, that Empedocles conceived the plan of bringing two neighbouring rivers to the place at his own expense, and that by this admixture he sweetened the waters. When in this way the pestilence had been stayed and the Selinuntines were feasting on the river bank, Empedocles appeared; and the company rose up and worshipped and prayed to him as to a god. It was then to confirm this belief of theirs that he leapt into the fire.

These stories are contradicted by Timaeus, who expressly says that he left Sicily for Peloponnesus and never returned at all; and this is the reason Timaeus gives for the fact that the manner of his death is unknown. He replies to Heraclides, whom he mentions by name, in his fourteenth book. Pisianax, he says, was a citizen of Syracuse and possessed no land at Agrigentum. Further, if such a story had been in circulation, Pausanias would have set up a monument to his friend, as to a god, in the form of a statue or shrine, for he was a wealthy man. How came he, adds Timaeus, to leap into the craters, which he had never once mentioned though they were not far off? He must then have died in Peloponnesus.

It is not at all surprising that his tomb is not found; the same is true of many other men. After urging some such arguments Timaeus goes on to say, But Heraclides is everywhere just such a collector of absurdities, telling us, for instance, that a man dropped down to earth from the moon. Hippobotus assures us that formerly there was in Agrigentum a statue of Empedocles with his head covered, and afterwards another with the head uncovered in front of the Senate House at Rome, which plainly the Romans had removed to that site. For portrait-statues with inscriptions are extant even now. Neanthes of Cyzicus, who tells about the Pythagoreans, relates that, after the death of Meton, the germs of a tyranny began to show themselves, that then it was Empedocles who persuaded the Agrigentines to put an end to their factions and cultivate equality in politics.

Moreover, from his abundant means he bestowed dowries upon many of the maidens of the city who had no dowry. No doubt it was the same means that enabled him to don a purple robe and over it a golden girdle, as Favorinus relates in his Memorabilia, and again slippers of bronze and a Delphic laurel-wreath. He had thick hair, and a train of boy attendants. He himself was always grave, and kept this gravity of demeanour unshaken. In such sort would he appear in public; when the citizens met him, they recognized in this demeanour the stamp, as it were, of royalty. But afterwards, as he was going in a carriage to Messene to attend some festival, he fell and broke his thigh; this brought an illness which caused his death at the age of seventy-seven. Moreover, his tomb is in Megara.

As to his age, Aristotle’s account is different, for he makes him to have been sixty when he died; while others make him one hundred and nine. He flourished in the 84th Olympiad. Demetrius of Troezen in his pamphlet Against the Sophists said of him, adapting the words of Homer : He tied a noose that hung aloft from a tall cornel-tree and thrust his neck into it, and his soul went down to Hades. In the short letter of Telauges which was mentioned above it is stated that by reason of his age he slipped into the sea and was drowned. Thus and thus much of his death. There is an epigram of my own on him in my Pammetros in a satirical vein, as follows :

Thou, Empedocles, didst cleanse thy body with nimble flame, fire didst thou drink from everlasting bowls. I will not say that of thine own will thou didst hurl thyself into the stream of Etna; thou didst fall in against thy will when thou wouldst fain not have been found out. And another : Verily there is a tale about the death of Empedocles, how that once he fell from a carriage and broke his right thigh. But if he leapt into the bowls of fire and so took a draught of life, how was it that his tomb was shown still in Megara?

His doctrines were as follows, that there are four elements, fire, water, earth and air, besides friendship by which these are united, and strife by which they are separated. These are his words : Shining Zeus and life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis, who lets flow from her tears the source of mortal life, where by Zeus he means fire, by Hera earth, by Aidoneus air, and by Nestis water. And their continuous change, he says, never ceases, as if this ordering of things were eternal. At all events he goes on : At one time all things uniting in one through Love, at another each carried in a different direction through the hatred born of strife.

The sun he calls a vast collection of fire and larger than the moon; the moon, he says, is of the shape of a quoit, and the heaven itself crystalline. The soul, again, assumes all the various forms of animals and plants. At any rate he says : Before now I was born a boy and a maid, a bush and a bird, and a dumb fish leaping out of the sea. His poems On Nature and Purifications run to 5000 lines, his Discourse on Medicine to 600. Of the tragedies we have spoken above.

Epicharmus of Cos, son of Helothales, was another pupil of Pythagoras. When three months old he was sent to Megara in Sicily and thence to Syracuse, as he tells us in his own writings. On his statue this epigram is written : If the great sun outshines the other stars, If the great sea is mightier than the streams, So Epicharmus’ wisdom all excelled, Whom Syracuse his fatherland thus crowned. He has left memoirs containing his physical, ethical and medical doctrines, and he has made marginal notes in most of the memoirs, which clearly show that they were written by him. He died at the age of ninety.

Archytas of Tarentum, son of Mnesagoras or, if we may believe Aristoxenus, of Hestiaeus, was another of the Pythagoreans. He it was whose letter saved Plato when he was about to be put to death by Dionysius. He was generally admired for his excellence in all fields; thus he was generalissimo of his city seven times, while the law excluded all others even from a second year of command. We have two letters written to him by Plato, he having first written to Plato in these terms: Archytas wishes Plato good health.