Vitae philosophorum

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[*](Fr. 117 D.):

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[*](Anth. Pal. vii. 78.):

If the great sun outshines the other stars,
1. If the great sea is mightier than the streams,
2. So Epicharmus’ wisdom all excelled,
3. Whom Syracuse his fatherland thus crowned.

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.

You have done well to get rid of your ailment, as we learn both from your own message and through Lamiscus that you have: we attended to the matter of the memoirs and went up to Lucania where we found the true progeny of Ocellus [to wit, his writings]. We did get the works On Law, On Kingship, Of Piety, and On the Origin of the Universe, all of which we have sent on to you; but the rest are, at present, nowhere to be found; if they should turn up, you shall have them.

This is Archytas’s letter; and Plato’s answer is as follows:

Plato to Archytas greeting.

I was overjoyed to get the memoirs which you sent, and I am very greatly pleased with the writer of them; he seems to be a right worthy descendant of his distant forbears. They came, so it is said, from Myra, and were among those who emigrated from Troy in Laomedon’s time, really good men, as the traditional story shows. Those memoirs of mine about which you wrote are not yet in a fit state; but such as they are I have sent them on to you. We both agree about their custody, so I need not give any advice on that head. Farewell.

These then are the letters which passed between them.

Four men have borne the name of Archytas: (1) our subject; (2) a musician, of Mytilene; (3) the compiler of a work On Agriculture; (4) a writer of epigrams. Some speak of a fifth, an architect, to whom is attributed a book On Mechanism which begins like this: These things I learnt from Teucer of Carthage. A tale is told of the musician that, when it was cast in his teeth that he could not be heard, he replied, Well, my instrument shall speak for me and win the day.

Aristoxenus says that our Pythagorean was never defeated during his whole generalship, though he once resigned it owing to bad feeling against him, whereupon the army at once fell into the hands of the enemy.

He was the first to bring mechanics to a system by applying mathematical principles; he also first

Alcmaeon of Croton, another disciple of Pythagoras, wrote chiefly on medicine, but now and again he touches on natural philosophy, as when he says, Most human affairs go in pairs. He is thought to have been the first to compile a physical treatise, so we learn from Favorinus in his Miscellaneous History; and he said that the moon [and] generally [the heavenly bodies] are in their nature eternal.

He was the son of Pirithous, as he himself tells us at the beginning of his treatise[*](Fr. 1 Diels): These are the words of Alcmaeon of Croton, son of Pirithous, which he spake to Brotinus, Leon and Bathyllus: Of things invisible, as of mortal things, only the gods have certain knowledge; but to us, as men, only inference from evidence is possible, and so on. He held also that the soul is immortal and that it is continuously in motion like the sun.

Hippasus of Metapontum was another Pythagorean, who held that there is a definite time which the

According to Demetrius in his work on Men of the Same Name, he left nothing in writing. There were two men named Hippasus, one being our subject, and the other a man who wrote The Laconian Constitution in five books; and he himself was a Lacedaemonian.

Philolaus of Croton was a Pythagorean, and it was from him that Plato requests Dion to buy the Pythagorean treatises.[*](Cf. iii. 9.) He (Dion) was put to death because he was thought to be aiming at a tyranny.[*](The subject of ἐτελεύτα would naturally be Philolaus, and so D. L. understood it; but the original reference was clearly to Dion.) This is what we have written upon him[*](Anth. Pal. vii. 126.):

Fancies of all things are most flattering;
1. If you intend, but do not, you are lost.
2. So Croton taught Philolaus to his cost,
3. Who fancied he would like to be their king.[*](Or in prose: My chief advice to all men is: to lull suspicion to rest. For even if you don’t do something, and people fancy you do, it is ill for you. So Croton, his native land, once put Philolaus to death, fancying he wished to have a tyrant’s house.)

His doctrine is that all things are brought about by necessity and in harmonious inter-relation. He was the first to declare that the earth moves in a circle,[*](i.e. round the central fire. See T. L. Heath, Aristarchus. 187 sqq.) though some say that it was Hicetas of Syracuse.

He wrote one book, and it was this work which, according to Hermippus, some writer said that Plato the philosopher, when he went to Sicily to Dionysius’s court, bought from Philolaus’s relatives

According to Demetrius in his work on Men of the Same Name, Philolaus was the first to publish the Pythagorean treatises, to which he gave the title On Nature, beginning as follows: Nature in the ordered universe was composed of unlimited and limiting elements, and so was the whole universe and all that is therein.

Eudoxus of Cnidos, the son of Aeschines, was an astronomer, a geometer, a physician and a legislator. He learned geometry from Archytas and medicine from Philistion the Sicilian, as Callimachus tells us in his Tables. Sotion in his Successions of Philosophers says that he was also a pupil of Plato. When he was about twenty-three years old and in straitened circumstances, he was attracted by the reputation of the Socratics and set sail for Athens with Theomedon the physician, who provided for his wants. Some even say that he was Theomedon’s favourite. Having disembarked at Piraeus he went up every day to Athens and, when he had attended the Sophists’ lectures, returned again to the port.

After spending two months there, he went home and, aided by the liberality of his friends, he proceeded to Egypt with Chrysippus the physician, bearing with him letters of introduction from Agesilaus

Some say that, when Plato gave a banquet, Eudoxus, owing to the numbers present, introduced the fashion of arranging couches in a semicircle. Nicomachus, the son of Aristotle, states that he declared pleasure to be the good.[*](The reference is to the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle (i. 12, 1101 b 27; x. 2, 1172 b 9 sq.). That Nicomachus wrote the treatise called after him was a common error into which Cicero also fell (De fin. v. § 12).)He was received in his native city with great honour, proof of this being the decree concerning him. But he also became famous throughout Greece, as legislator for his fellow-citizens, so we learn from Hermippus in his fourth book On the Seven Sages, and as the author of astronomical and geometrical treatises and other important works.

He had three daughters, Actis, Philtis and Delphis.

Eratosthenes in his writings addressed to Baton tells us that he also composed Dialogues of Dogs; others say that they were written by Egyptians in their own language and that he translated them and published them in Greece. Chrysippus of Cnidos, the son of Erineus, attended his lectures on the gods, the world, and the phenomena of the heavens,

Eudoxus also left some excellent commentaries. He had a son Aristagoras, who had a son Chrysippus, the pupil of Aëthlius. To this Chrysippus we owe a medical work on the treatment of the eye, speculations upon nature having occupied his mind.

Three men have borne the name of Eudoxus: (1) our present subject; (2) a historian, of Rhodes; (3) a Sicilian Greek, the son of Agathocles, a comic poet, who three times won the prize in the city Dionysia and five times at the Lenaea, so we are told by Apollodorus in his Chronology. We also find another physician of Cnidos mentioned by Eudoxus[*](The wording suggests that this physician’s name was not Eudoxus, but rather Chrysippus. He may have been the Chrysippus of Cnidos mentioned supra, vii. 186 (cf. Wilamowitz, Antig. v. Kar. 324-326); see, however, Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. Chrysippos, 15 and 16.) in his Geography as advising people to be always exercising their limbs by every form of gymnastics, and their sense-organs in the same way.

The same authority, Apollodorus, states that Eudoxus of Cnidos flourished about the 103rd Olympiad,[*](368-364 b.c.) and that he discovered the properties of curves. He died in his fifty-third year. When he was in Egypt with Chonuphis of Heliopolis, the sacred bull Apis licked his cloak. From this the priests foretold that he would be famous but shortlived, so we are informed by Favorinus in his Memorabilia.

There is a poem of our own upon him, which runs thus[*](Anth. Pal. vii. 744.):

It is said that at Memphis Eudoxus learned his coming fate from the bull with beautiful horns. No words did it utter; for whence comes speech to a bull? Nature did not

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provide the young bull Apis with a chattering tongue. But, standing sideways by him, it licked his robe, by which it plainly prophesied you shall soon die. Whereupon, soon after, this fate overtook him, when he had seen fifty-three risings of the Pleiades.

Eudoxus used to be called Endoxos (illustrious) instead of Eudoxus by reason of his brilliant reputation.

Having now dealt with the famous Pythagoreans, let us next discuss the so-called sporadic philosophers. And first we must speak of Heraclitus.