Empedocles Burning in the Crater of Etna, French manuscript, c. 1405.
70 Diodorus of Ephesus, writing about Anaximander,102 declares that Empedocles emulated him, affecting theatrical pomp and sporting stately attire. When a pestilence attacked the people of Selinus103 because of the foul smell of the river nearby, so that the inhabitants were dying and their women suffering miscarriages, Empedocles conceived the plan of diverting the course of two nearby rivers, bringing their water to the place at his own expense; and by combining the streams he sweetened the water. When the pestilence had thus been brought to an end and the people of Selinus were feasting on the riverbank, Empedocles appeared, whereupon the citizens rose up, made obeisance, and prayed to him as to a god. It was therefore to confirm their belief that he leaped into the fire.
71,72 These authors are contradicted by Timaeus, who expressly declares that Empedocles withdrew to the Peloponnese and never returned at all; hence nothing is known about his death. He replies to Heraclides, whom he mentions by name in his fourth book. There he says that Peisianax was a citizen of Syracuse and had no land in Agrigentum. Furthermore, Pausanias
Hippobotus says that in Agrigentum there used to be a statue of Empedocles with his head covered, and that it was later found in front of the Roman Senate with the head uncovered; the Romans had evidently transported it there. For painted images with inscriptions are carried about even now. Neanthes of Cyzicus, who has also spoken of the Pythagoreans, says that after the death of Meton104 the beginnings of a tyranny began to show themselves, and it was then that Empedocles persuaded the Agrigentines to put an end to their quarrels and practice political equality.
73 Moreover, from his large fortune he gave dowries to the young women in the city who had not been provided for. It was this fortune that enabled him to don a purple robe and a golden sash, as Favorinus says in his Reminiscences. He also wore bronze slippers and a Delphic wreath. He had thick hair and a retinue of slaves. Gloomy of countenance, his demeanor never varied. Such was his appearance in public; and the citizens who encountered him found in his demeanor the sign of a kind of royalty. Later, when traveling by carriage to attend a festival in Messene, he fell and broke his thigh. Falling ill after this injury, he died at the age of seventy-seven. His tomb is in Megara.
74 As to his age, Aristotle is of a different opinion. He says that Empedocles was sixty when he died; others say he was one hundred and nine. He flourished in the eighty-fourth Olympiad.105 Demetrius of Troezen, in his book Against the Sophists, says of him, adapting the Homeric verses:
He fastened a noose from a tall cornel tree,
Thrusting it round his neck, and his soul went down to Hades.106
And in the letter of Telauges I mentioned earlier it says that owing to his advanced years he slipped into the sea and died. Let these accounts of his death suffice.
75 My own satirical epigram about him in Pammetros107 runs as follows:
And you, Empedocles, on cleansing your body with nimble flame,
Drank fire from everlasting craters;
I shall not say that you threw yourself willingly into Etna’s stream,
But fell in unwillingly, hoping not to be found out.
and another:
Yes, there is a tale about Empedocles’ death,
That he once fell from a carriage and broke his right thigh;
But if he leaped into craters of fire and drained the cup of life,
How could one still see his tomb in Megara?
76 His doctrines were as follows. There are four elements: fire, water, earth, and air; and there is Love, by which they are combined, and Strife, by which they are separated. He says,
Shining Zeus and life-bearing Hera, Aidoneus108 and Nestis,109 who with her tears swells the mortal stream.
By Zeus he means fire, by Hera earth, by Aidoneus air, and by Nestis water.
“And their continual change,” he says, “never ceases,” as if such an arrangement were eternal; at any rate, he adds:
At one time by Love all things uniting in one,
At another each borne apart by the hatred of Strife.
77 He says that the sun is an immense aggregation of fire, and that it is larger than the moon; the moon, he says, has the shape of a discus, and the heaven itself is crystalline. And the soul assumes the manifold forms of animals and plants. At any rate he says,
By now I have been born a boy and a girl,
A bush and a bird, and a sunlit fish leaping from the sea.
His poems On Nature and Purifications run to five thousand lines, his Discourse on Medicine to six hundred. We have already spoken of his tragedies.
Epicharmus
78 Epicharmus,110 son of Helothales, was from Cos. He too studied with Pythagoras. At the age of three months he was brought from Sicily to Megara, and from there to Syracuse,111 as he says himself in his writings. His statue bears this inscription:
If the great sun outshines the other stars,
And the sea is mightier than the rivers,
So Epicharmus’ wisdom surpassed all the rest,
He whom Syracuse, his fatherland, has crowned.
He has left some memoirs in which he discourses on nature, ethics, and medicine. In most of these memoirs he made marginal notes, which plainly show they were written by him. He died at the age of ninety.
Archytas
79,80 Archytas of Tarentum,112 son of Mnesagoras (or of Histiaeus, according to Aristoxenus), was also a Pythagorean. It was his letter that saved Plato when he was about to be put to death by Dionysius.113 He was widely admired for his all-around excellence. And thus he served seven times as his city’s general, though all others were excluded by law from serving for more than one year. There are two letters written to him by Plato, since Archytas had written to him first as follows.
Archytas to Plato, good health.
You have done well to get rid of your ailment, of which we got word from your own message and Lamiscus’ report. As for the memoirs, we attended to the matter and went up to Lucania, where we found Ocellus’ offspring.114 We obtained the works On Law, On Kingship, On Piety, and On the Creation of the Universe, and have sent them off to you. The rest, at present, cannot be found; if they turn up, you will have them.
81 So wrote Archytas, and Plato wrote back as follows:
Plato to Archytas, greetings.
I was overjoyed to receive the memoirs you sent and am greatly pleased with their author; he seems to me a man worthy of his ancestors. For they are said to have been from Myra115 and were among those who emigrated from Troy in Laomedon’s116 day—brave men, as the traditional story makes clear. My own memoirs, which you alluded to in your letter, are not yet satisfactory; but such as they are I have sent them off to you. About their custody we both agree, so I need not advise you further. Farewell.
These then are the letters they exchanged.
82 There have been four men named Archytas: the first is our present subject; the second was a musician from Mytilene; the third, the author of On Agriculture; and the fourth, a writer of epigrams. Some say there was a fifth, an architect, whose book On Mechanism begins “These things I learned from Teucer of Carthage.”117 It is reported of the musician that when reproached because he could not be heard, he replied, “Well, my instrument competes and speaks for me.”
Aristoxenus says our Pythagorean was never defeated when serving as general; but on one occasion, owing to a grudge against him, he resigned his command, whereu
pon his men were immediately taken captive.
83 He was the first to make mechanics methodical by applying mathematical principles; he was also the first to employ mechanical motion in a geometrical figure, when he tried, by means of a section of a half-cylinder, to find two mean proportionals in order to double the cube.118 And in geometry he was the first to discover the cube, as Plato says in the Republic.119
Alcmeon
Alcmeon was from Croton. He too was a student of Pythagoras. He writes chiefly about medicine, though he sometimes discourses on natural phenomena, as when he says, “Most human things come in pairs.” He is thought to have been the first to write a treatise on nature, as Favorinus says in his Miscellaneous History, and he held that the moon, in general <…>120 possesses an eternal nature.
He was the son of Pirithus, as he says himself at the beginning of his treatise: “These are the words of Alcmeon of Croton, son of Pirithus, which he addressed to Brotinus, Leon, and Bathyllus:121 ‘Of things invisible, as of mortal things, it is for the gods to have clear knowledge, for men to conjecture from evidence,’” and so forth. He also declared that the soul is immortal and that it is in constant motion, like the sun.
Hippasus
84 Hippasus of Metapontum122 was another Pythagorean. He claimed that changes in the universe require definite intervals of time and that the all is limited and endowed with perpetual motion.
Demetrius, in his Men of the Same Name, says that Hippasus left no written work. There were two men named Hippasus, one being our present subject, the other a man who wrote a Constitution of the Lacedemonians in five books; he himself was a Lacedemonian.123
Philolaus
Philolaus of Croton124 was a Pythagorean. It was from him that Plato asked Dion to buy the Pythagorean treatises.125 He died because he was suspected of aiming at a tyranny.126 I have written about him as follows:
Bronze hydria (water jar), mid-fifth century BC, Greek.
Suspicion, I say, counts most of all;
For even if you do nothing, but are suspected, you are lost.
Thus Croton, his fatherland, did away with Philolaus,
Who thought he’d like to be their tyrant.
85 He thought that all things come into being by necessity and harmony. He was the first to say that the earth moves in a circle,127 though some say that it was Hicetas of Syracuse128 who did so.
He wrote one book; and it was this book, according to Hermippus, that some writer said that Plato the philosopher, when he came to Sicily to the court of Dionysius,129 bought from the relatives of Philolaus for forty Alexandrine minas of silver, and that from it he transcribed the Timaeus.130 Others say Plato received it for having interceded with Dionysius for the release from custody of a young man, a student of Philolaus.
Demetrius, in his Men of the Same Name, says Philolaus was the first of the Pythagoreans to publish a work titled On Nature, which begins as follows: “Nature in the universe was composed of unlimited and limiting elements, as was the entire universe and all it contains.”
Eudoxus
86 Eudoxus of Cnidus, the son of Aeschines, was an astronomer, a geometer, a doctor, and a legislator.131 He studied geometry with Archytas and medicine with Philistion of Sicily,132 as Callimachus says in his Tablets. Sotion, in his Successions, says he was also a student of Plato. When he was about twenty-three and in straitened circumstances, the fame of the Socratics attracted him, and he set sail for Athens with Theomedon the doctor, who supported him; some say he was Theomedon’s beloved. Disembarking at the Piraeus, Eudoxus went up to Athens every day, attended the sophists’ lectures, and returned to the port.
87 After two months he returned home and, assisted by contributions from his friends, sailed to Egypt with Chrysippus the doctor, with a letter of introduction from Agesilaus to Nectanabis,133 who recommended him to the priests. He spent sixteen months there, having shaved his beard and eyebrows,134 and it was there, some say, that he wrote his Octaeteris.135 From there he went to Cyzicus and the Propontis136 to give lectures; later he went to the court of Mausolus.137
88 He then returned to Athens with a great many disciples; some say he did this to annoy Plato, who had originally snubbed him. Some report that at a drinking party given by Plato, Eudoxus, owing to the number of guests, introduced the practice of arranging couches in a semicircle. Nicomachus, son of Aristotle, says he declared pleasure to be the good.138 Eudoxus was welcomed in his native city with great honor, as the decree concerning him makes clear.139 But he also became highly renowned throughout Greece, having written laws for his fellow citizens, as Hermippus says in the fourth book of his work On the Seven Sages, as well as astronomical, geometrical, and other noteworthy works.
89 He had three daughters—Actis, Philtis, and Delphis. Eratosthenes, in his work Against Baton, says that Eudoxus also composed Dialogues of the Dogs,140 but others say that the Egyptians wrote these in their own language, and that Eudoxus translated and published them for the Greeks. Chrysippus of Cnidus,
90 There have been three men named Eudoxus; the first is our present subject; the second was a historian from Rhodes; and the third a Sicilian Greek, Agathocles’ son, a comic poet who won three victories at the Dionysia and five at the Lenaea,142 as Apollodorus says in his Chronology. We also find another doctor from Cnidus;143 Eudoxus, in his Map of the Earth, says that this man was always advising people to move their limbs, using every form of exercise, and to keep their organs of sense active in the same way.
Astronomical papyrus of Eudoxus of Cnidus (detail III). Egyptian (Greek period), second century BC.
The same author144 says that Eudoxus of Cnidus flourished in the 103rd Olympiad145 and that he discovered the properties of curves. He died at the age of fifty-three. When he was in Egypt with Chonuphis of Heliopolis,146 the bull, Apis,147 licked his cloak. The priests therefore declared that Eudoxus would be renowned but short-lived, as Favorinus says in his Reminiscences.
91 Our own verses about him run as follows:
At Memphis, they say, Eudoxus learned his fate
From the bull with beautiful horns.
The beast said naught; for whence comes speech to a bull?
Nature gave no wagging tongue to the young bull Apis.
But standing beside Eudoxus, it licked his robe,
Imparting the prophecy “you are not long for the world.”
Hence his fate soon overtook him
When he had seen fifty-three risings of the Pleiades.
Eudoxus used to be called Endoxus (“renowned”) because of his brilliant reputation.
Now that we have dealt with the eminent Pythagoreans, let us take up the so-called scattered148 philosophers. We should speak first of Heraclitus.
1 Thales of Miletus (c. 624–c. 546 BC) was one of the Seven Sages; Diogenes discusses his life and views at 1.22–44. He is mentioned later as the founder of philosophy in Ionia (1.122).
2 The term “Tyrrhenians” was generally used by the Greeks to refer to the people known to us as Etruscans, occupants of the region now called Tuscany. These Tyrrhenians were thought to have migrated to Italy from points farther east, and so the Greeks often associated them with the Pelasgians, a catch-all name for various pre-Greek peoples of the Aegean basin. Here, Diogenes seems to refer to Pelasgians when he speaks of an Athenian expulsion—Athens did in fact drive a non-Greek population out of Lemnos—but calls them Tyrrhenians. Linguistic evidence suggests there may in fact be close links between the Tyrrhenians (Etruscans) and the indigenous population of Lemnos.
3 A city in the northeast Peloponnese.
4 Pherecydes of Syros (fl. c. 550 B
C) was the author of Heptamychos, which described the creation of the world. Diogenes discusses his life and work at 1.116–22.
5 Zamolxis, better known as Zalmoxis or Salmoxis, was mentioned by Diogenes as a Thracian philosopher at 1.1. The legend that he was a slave to Pythagoras is recounted by Herodotus (Histories 4.95–96), though Herodotus himself doubts its veracity.
6 Otherwise unknown.
7 Polycrates was tyrant of Samos from about 535 to 522 BC; Amasis II was a pharaoh of Egypt during the same period. According to Herodotus, the two rulers forged a warm alliance and corresponded with each other.
8 Either Antiphon of Athens (fifth century BC), a sophist and dream interpreter, or his namesake, an Attic orator (c. 480–411 BC).
9 Diogenes uses “Chaldaeans” here to mean Eastern mystics associated with magic and numerology (the name can also refer to a Mesopotamian nation). The Magi were Persian priests skilled in astronomy, astrology, and other mystic wisdom.
10 Epimenides of Crete (late seventh century BC), a semimythical sage and poet, is discussed by Diogenes at 1.109–15. In mythology, the cave of Mt. Ida was the birthplace of Zeus.
11 A Greek colony on the southernmost coast of Italy and the site of Pythagoras’s first school of philosophy.
12 Aethalides, son of Hermes, was a mythic hero associated with the expedition of the Argonauts. Pythagoras believed in transmigration of souls and traced his own previous incarnations back to Aethalides.
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers Page 51