Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

 Table of Contents

 Book I .

 Prologue

 and this idea was borrowed by Anaxagoras when he declared that all things were originally together until Mind came and set them in order. Linus died i

 And thus it was from the Greeks that philosophy took its rise: its very name refuses to be translated into foreign speech.

 But the advocates of the theory that philosophy took its rise among the barbarians go on to explain the different forms it assumed in different countr

 Thales

 But according to others he wrote nothing but two treatises, one On the Solstice and one On the Equinox History of Astronomy.

 Accordingly they give it to Thales, and he to another, and so on till it comes to Solon, who, with the remark that the god was the most wise, sent it

 But the prose inscription is:

 and it was given in reply to a question put by Anacharsis. Daimachus the Platonist and Clearchus allege that a bowl was sent by Croesus to Pittacus an

 Some relate that a vessel with its freight was sent by Periander to Thrasybulus, tyrant of Miletus, and that, when it was wrecked in Coan waters, the

 That of the Milesians beginning Who shall possess the tripod? has been quoted above. So much for this version of the story.

 His writings are said by Lobon of Argos to have run to some two hundred lines. His statue is said to bear this inscription:

 Of songs still sung these verses belong to him:

 Here too are certain current apophthegms assigned to him:

 I may also cite one of my own, from my first book, Epigrams in Various Metres

 To him belongs the proverb Know thyself, which Antisthenes in his Successions of Philosophers attributes to Phemonoë, though admitting that it was a

 Nor is there any agreement how the number is made up for Maeandrius, in place of Cleobulus and Myson, includes Leophantus, son of Gorgiadas, of Lebed

 Solon

 and

 He also persuaded the Athenians to acquire the Thracian Chersonese. And lest it should be thought that he had acquired Salamis by force only and not o

 Solon inserted one of his own:

 Thereafter the people looked up to him, and would gladly have had him rule them as tyrant he refused, and, early perceiving the designs of his kinsma

 That he foresaw the tyranny of Pisistratus is proved by a passage from a poem of his:

 When Pisistratus was already established, Solon, unable to move the people, piled his arms in front of the generals' quarters, and exclaimed, My coun

 and Solon, perceiving this, treated them with scant respect. Excellent, too, is his provision that the guardian of an orphan should not marry the moth

 and to have replied thus:

 Of the songs sung this is attributed to Solon:

 He flourished, according to Sosicrates, about the 46th Olympiad, in the third year of which he was archon at Athens it was then that he enacted his l

 An epigram of my own is also contained in the collection of Epigrams in Various Metres mentioned above, where I have discoursed of all the illustrious

 It is said that he was the author of the apophthegm Nothing too much, Ne quid nimis. According to Dioscurides in his Memorabilia,

 Chilon

 The inscription on his statue runs thus:

 His apophthegm is: Give a pledge, and suffer for it. A short letter is also ascribed to him.

 Pittacus

 He also wrote poems in elegiac metre, some 600 lines, and a prose work On Laws for the use of the citizens.

 To him belongs the apophthegm, Know thine opportunity.

 The advice seems to have been prompted by his situation. For he had married a wife superior in birth to himself: she was the sister of Draco, the son

 Bias

 and Hipponax thus: More powerful in pleading causes than Bias of Priene.

 My own epitaph is:

 He wrote a poem of 2000 lines on Ionia and the manner of rendering it prosperous. Of his songs the most popular is the following:

 For this earns most gratitude the headstrong spirit often flashes forth with harmful bane.

 Cleobulus

 His apophthegm was: Moderation is best. And he wrote to Solon the following letter:

 Periander

 My own epitaph on him is:

 To him belongs the maxim: Never do anything for money leave gain to trades pursued for gain. He wrote a didactic poem of 2000 lines. He said that tho

 Anacharsis

 It was a saying of his that the vine bore three kinds of grapes: the first of pleasure, the next of intoxication, and the third of disgust. He said he

 Myson

 His curiosity aroused, Anacharsis went to the village in summer time and found him fitting a share to a plough and said, Myson, this is not the seaso

 Aristoxenus in his Historical Gleanings says he was not unlike Timon and Apemantus, for he was a misanthrope. At any rate he was seen in Lacedaemon la

 Epimenides

 Pherecydes

 Ion of Chios says of him:

 There is also an epigram of my own in the Pherecratean metre:

 Book II .

 Anaximander

 Anaximenes

 Anaxagoras

 He was eminent for wealth and noble birth, and furthermore for magnanimity, in that he gave up his patrimony to his relations. For, when they accused

 I also have written an epigram upon him:

 There have been three other men who bore the name of Anaxagoras [of whom no other writer gives a complete list]. The first was a rhetorician of the sc

 Archelaus

 Socrates

 And again he calls Euripides an engine riveted by Socrates. And Callias in The Captives :

 Aristophanes in The Clouds

 According to some authors he was a pupil of Anaxagoras, and also of Damon, as Alexander states in his Successions of Philosophers. When Anaxagoras was

 that frequently, owing to his vehemence in argument, men set upon him with their fists or tore his hair out and that for the most part he was despise

 He showed his contempt for Archelaus of Macedon and Scopas of Cranon and Eurylochus of Larissa by refusing to accept their presents or to go to their

 This disdainful, lofty spirit of his is also noticed by Aristophanes when he says:

 he got up and left the theatre. For he said it was absurd to make a hue and cry about a slave who could not be found, and to allow virtue to perish in

 and he told Aeschines, On the third day I shall die. When he was about to drink the hemlock, Apollodorus offered him a beautiful garment to die in:

 For this he was most envied and especially because he would take to task those who thought highly of themselves, proving them to be fools, as to be s

 Dionysodorus denies that he wrote the paean. He also composed a fable of Aesop, not very skilfully, beginning:

 So he was taken from among men and not long afterwards the Athenians felt such remorse that they shut up the training grounds and gymnasia. They bani

 Xenophon

 There is another on the circumstances of his death:

 Aeschines

 Aristippus

 He is said to have ordered a partridge to be bought at a cost of fifty drachmae, and, when someone censured him, he inquired, Would not you have give

 Aristippus, however, put on the dress and, as he was about to dance, was ready with the repartee:

 He made a request to Dionysius on behalf of a friend and, failing to obtain it, fell down at his feet. And when some one jeered at him, he made reply,

 he retorted:

 This is stated by Diocles in his work On the Lives of Philosophers other writers refer the anecdotes to Plato. After getting in a rage with Aeschine

 Phaedo

 Euclides

 He too was a dialectician and was supposed to have been the first who discovered the arguments known as the Veiled Figure and the Horned One. When

 The successors of Euclides include Ichthyas, the son of Metallus, an excellent man, to whom Diogenes the Cynic has addressed one of his dialogues Cli

 Stilpo

 In character Stilpo was simple and unaffected, and he could readily adapt himself to the plain man. For instance, when Crates the Cynic did not answer

 The pun upon καινοῦ (new) and καὶ νοῦ (mind as well) recurs vi. 3.

 Crito

 Simon

 Glaucon

 Simmias

 Cebes

 Menedemus

 and Timon as follows:

 He was a man of such dignity that, when Eurylochus of Casandrea was invited by Antigonus to court along with Cleïppides, a youth of Cyzicus, he declin

 which are from the Omphale, a satiric drama of Achaeus. Therefore it is a mistake to say that he had read nothing except the Medea

 Book III

 Plato

 From that time onward, having reached his twentieth year (so it is said), he was the pupil of Socrates. When Socrates was gone, he attached himself to

 Furthermore he said that, according to Homer, beyond all men the Egyptians were skilled in healing. Plato also intended to make the acquaintance of th

 Moreover, there are verses of Timon which refer to Plato:

 Then there is Timon who puns on his name thus:

 Alexis again in the Meropis :

 And Alexis in the Olympiodorus :

 And in the Parasite :

 Anaxilas, again, in the Botrylion Circe Rich Women

 And another:

 And he wrote thus upon Dion:

 This, they say, was actually inscribed upon his tomb at Syracuse.

 And another:

 And again:

 And again:

 Further, Molon, being his enemy, said, It is not wonderful that Dionysius should be in Corinth, but rather that Plato should be in Sicily. And it se

 There is also an epitaph of my own which runs thus:

He was eminent for wealth and noble birth, and furthermore for magnanimity, in that he gave up his patrimony to his relations. For, when they accused him of neglecting it, he replied, "Why then do you not look after it?" And at last he went into retirement and engaged in physical investigation without troubling himself about public affairs. When some one inquired, "Have you no concern in your native land?" "Gently," he replied, "I am greatly concerned with my fatherland," and pointed to the sky.

He is said to have been twenty years old at the invasion of Xerxes and to have lived seventy-two years. Apollodorus in his Chronology says that he was born in the 70th Olympiad, 10 and died in the first year of the 88th Olympiad. 11 He began to study philosophy at Athens in the archonship of Callias 12 when he was twenty; Demetrius of Phalerum states this in his list of archons; and at Athens they say he remained for thirty years.

He declared the sun to be a mass of red-hot metal and to be larger than the Peloponnesus, though others ascribe this view to Tantalus; he declared that there were dwellings on the moon, and moreover hills and ravines. He took as his principles the homoeomeries or homogeneous molecules; for just as gold consists of fine particles which are called gold-dust, so he held the whole universe to be compounded of minute bodies having parts homogeneous to themselves. His moving principle was Mind; of bodies, he said, some, like earth, were heavy, occupying the region below, others, light like fire, held the region above, while water and air were intermediate in position. For in this way over the earth, which is flat, the sea sinks down after the moisture has been evaporated by the sun. In the beginning the stars moved in the sky as in a revolving dome, so that the celestial pole which is always visible was vertically overhead; but subsequently the pole took its inclined position. He held the Milky Way to be a reflection of the light of stars which are not shone upon by the sun; comets to be a conjunction of planets which emit flames; shooting-stars to be a sort of sparks thrown off by the air. He held that winds arise when the air is rarefied by the sun's heat; that thunder is a clashing together of the clouds, lightning their violent friction; an earthquake a subsidence of air into the earth.

Animals were produced from moisture, heat, and an earthy substance; later the species were propagated by generation from one another, males from the right side, females from the left.

There is a story that he predicted the fall of the meteoric stone at Aegospotami, which he said would fall from the sun. 13 Hence Euripides, who was his pupil, in the Phathon calls the sun itself a "golden clod." 14 Furthermore, when he went to Olympia, he sat down wrapped in a sheep-skin cloak as if it were going to rain; and the rain came. When some one asked him if the hills at Lampsacus would ever become sea, he replied, "Yes, it only needs time." Being asked to what end he had been born, he replied, "To study sun and moon and heavens." To one who inquired, "You miss the society of the Athenians?" his reply was, "Not I, but they miss mine." When he saw the tomb of Mausolus, he said, "A costly tomb is an image of an estate turned into stone." 15 To one who complained that he was dying in a foreign land, his answer was, "The descent to Hades is much the same from whatever place we start."

Favorinus in his Miscellaneous History says Anaxagoras was the first to maintain that Homer in his poems treats of virtue and justice, and that this thesis was defended at greater length by his friend Metrodorus of Lampsacus, who was the first to busy himself with Homer's physical doctrine. Anaxagoras was also the first to publish a book with diagrams. 16 Silenus 17 in the first book of his History gives the archonship of Demylus 18 as the date when the meteoric stone fell, and says that Anaxagoras declared the whole firmament to be made of stones; that the rapidity of rotation caused it to cohere; and that if this were relaxed it would fall. 19

Of the trial of Anaxagoras different accounts are given. Sotion in his Succession of the Philosophers says that he was indicted by Cleon on a charge of impiety, because he declared the sun to be a mass of red-hot metal; that his pupil Pericles defended him, and he was fined five talents and banished. Satyrus in his Lives says that the prosecutor was Thucydides, the opponent of Pericles, and the charge one of treasonable correspondence with Persia as well as of impiety; and that sentence of death was passed on Anaxagoras by default. When news was brought him that he was condemned and his sons were dead, his comment on the sentence was, "Long ago nature condemned both my judges and myself to death"; and on his sons, "I knew that my children were born to die." Some, however, tell this story of Solon, and others of Xenophon. That he buried his sons with his own hands is asserted by Demetrius of Phalerum in his work On Old Age. Hermippus in his Lives says that he was confined in the prison pending his execution; that Pericles came forward and asked the people whether they had any fault to find with him in his own public career; to which they replied that they had not. "Well," he continued, "I am a pupil of Anaxagoras; do not then be carried away by slanders and put him to death. Let me prevail upon you to release him." So he was released; but he could not brook the indignity he had suffered and committed suicide. Hieronymus in the second book of his Scattered Notes states that Pericles brought him into court so weak and wasted from illness that he owed his acquittal not so much to the merits of his case as to the sympathy of the judges. So much then on the subject of his trial.

He was supposed to have borne Democritus a grudge because he had failed to get into communication with him. 20 At length he retired to Lampsacus and there died. And when the magistrates of the city asked if there was anything he would like done for him, he replied that he would like them to grant an annual holiday to the boys in the month in which he died; and the custom is kept up to this day. So, when he died, the people of Lampsacus gave him honourable burial and placed over his grave the following inscription: 21

Here Anaxagoras, who in his quest

Of truth scaled heaven itself, is laid to rest.