But others consider that in some
particulars
it is a distinct sect, and in others not.
Diogenes Laertius
D.
YONGE
LIFE OF BION
I. BION was a native of the country around the Borysthenes; but as to who his parents were, and to what circumstances it was owing that he applied himself to the study of philosophy, we know no more than what he himself told Antigonus. For when Antigonus asked him:--
What art thou, say! from whence, from whom you came,
Who are your parents? tell thy race, thy name;
(Hom. Od. x. 335. Pope's Version, 387. )
He, knowing that he had been misrepresented to the king, said to him, "My father was a freedman, who used to wipe his mouth with his sleeve," (by which he meant that he used to sell salt fish). "As to his race, he was a native of the district of the Borysthenes; having no countenance, but only a brand in his face, a token of the bitter cruelty of his master. My mother was such a woman as a man of that condition might marry, taken out of a brothel. Then, my father being in arrears to the tax-gatherers, was sold with all his family, and with me among them; and as I was young and good looking, a certain orator purchased me, and when he died he left me everything. And I, having burnt all his books, and torn up all his papers, came to Athens and applied myself to the study of Philosophy:
Such was my father, and from him I came,
The honoured author of my birth and name.
(Hom. Il. vi. 211. Pope's Version, 254. )
This is all that I can tell you of myself: so that Persaeus and Philonides may give up telling these stories about me: and you may judge of me on my own merits. "
II. And Bion was truly a man of great versatility, and a very subtle philosopher, and a man who gave all who chose great opportunities of practising philosophy. In some respects he was of a gentle disposition, and very much inclined to indulge in vanity.
III. And he left behind him many memorials of himself in the way of writings, and also many apophthegms full of useful sentiments. As for instance, once when he was reproved for having failed to charm a young man, he replied, "You cannot possibly draw up cheese with a hook before it has got hard. " On another occasion he was asked who was the most miserable of men, and replied, "He who has set his heart on the greatest prosperity. " When he was asked whether it was advisable to marry (for this answer also is attributed to him), he replied, "If you marry an ugly woman you will have a punishment (poine), and if a handsome woman you will have one who is common" (koine). He called old age a port to shelter one from misfortune; and accordingly, he said that every one fled to it. He said that glory was the mother of years; that beauty was a good which concerned others rather than one's self; that riches were the sinews of business. To a man who had squandered his estate he said "The earth swallowed up Amphiaraus, but you have swallowed up the earth. " Another saying of his was that it was a great evil not to be able to bear evil. And he condemned those who burnt the dead as though they felt nothing, and then mocked them as though they did feel. And he was always saying that it was better to put one's own beauty at the disposal of another, than to covet the beauty of others; for that one who did so was injuring both his body and his soul. And he used to blame Socrates saying, that if he derived no advantage from Alcibiades he was foolish, and if he never derived any advantage from him he then deserved no credit. He used to say that the way to the shades below was easy; and accordingly, that people went there with their eyes shut. He used to blame Alcibiades, saying that while he was a boy he seduced husbands from their wives, and when he had become a young man he seduced the wives from their husbands. While most of the Athenians at Rhodes practised rhetoric, he himself used to give lectures on philosophical subjects; and to one who blamed him for this he said, "I have bought wheat, and I sell barley. "
It was a saying of his that the inhabitants of the shades below would be more punished if they carried water in buckets that were whole, than in such as were bored. To a chattering fellow who was soliciting him for aid, he said, "I will do what is sufficient for you, if you will send deputies to me, and forbear to come yourself. " Once when he was at sea in the company of some wicked men, he fell into the hands of pirates; and when the rest said, "We are undone, if we are known. " "But I," said he, "am undone if we are not known. " He used to say that self-conceit was the enemy of progress. Of a rich man who was mean and niggardly, he said, "That man does not possess his estate, but his estate possesses him. " He used to say that stingy men took care of their property as if it was their own, but derived no advantage from it as if it belonged to other people. Another of his sayings was, that young men ought to display courage, but that old men ought to be distinguished for prudence. And that prudence was as much superior to the other virtues as sight was to the other senses. And that it was not right to speak of old age, at which every one is desirous to arrive. To an envious man who was looking gloomy, he said, "I know not whether it is because some misfortune has happened to you, or some good fortune to some one else. " One thing that he used to say was, that a mean extraction was a bad companion to freedom of speech. For:--
It does enslave a man, however bold
His speech may be. 1
And another was that we ought to keep our friends, whatever sort of people they may be, so that we may not seem to have been intimate with wicked men, or to have abandoned good men.
IV. Very early in his career he abandoned the school of the Academy, and at the same time became a disciple of Crates. Then he passed over to the sect of the Cynics, taking their coarse cloak and wallet. For what else could ever have changed his nature into one of such apathy? After that he adopted the Theodorean principles, having become a disciple of Theodorus the Atheist, who was used to employ every kind of reasoning in support of his system of philosophy. After leaving him, he became a pupil of Theophrastus, the Peripatetic.
V. He was very fond of theatrical entertainments, and very skilful in distracting his hearers by exciting a laugh, giving things disparaging names. And because he used to avail himself of every species of reasoning, they relate that Eratosthenes said that Bion was the first person who had clothed philosophy in a flowery robe.
VI. He was also very ingenious in parodying passages, and adapting them to circumstances as they arose. As for instance, I may cite the following:--
Tender Archytas, born of tuneful lyre,
Whom thoughts of happy vanity inspire;
Most skilled of mortals in appeasing ire. 2
And he jested on every part of music and geometry.
VII. He was a man of very expensive habits, and on this account he used to go from city to city, and at times he would contrive the most amazing devices.
VIII. Accordingly, in Rhodes, he persuaded the sailors to put on the habiliments of philosophical students and follow him about; and then he made himself conspicuous by entering the gymnasium with this train of followers.
IX. He was accustomed also to adopt young men as his sons, in order to derive assistance from them in his pleasures, and to be protected by their affection for him. But he was a very selfish man, and very fond of quoting the saying, "The property of friends is common;" owing to which it is that no one is spoken of as a disciple of his, though so many men attended his school. And he made some very shameless; accordingly, Betion, one of his intimate acquaintances, is reported to have said once to Menedemus, "So Menedemus constantly spends the evening with Bion, and I see no harm in it. " He used also to talk with great impiety to those who conversed with him, having derived his opinions on this subject from Theodorus.
X. And when at a later period he became afflicted with disease, as the people of Chalcis said, for he died there, he was persuaded to wear amulets and charms, and to show his repentance for the insults that he had offered to the Gods. But he suffered fearfully for want of proper people to attend him, until Antigonus sent him two servants. And he followed him in a litter, as Favorinus relates in his Universal History. And the circumstances of his death we have ourselves spoken of in the following lines:
We hear that Bion the Borysthenite,
Whom the ferocious Scythian land brought forth,
Used to deny that there were Gods at all.
Now, if he'd persevered in this opinion,
One would have said he speaks just as he thinks;
Though certainly his thoughts are quite mistaken.
But when a lengthened sickness overtook him,
And he began to fear lest he should die;
This man who heretofore denied the Gods,
And would not even look upon a temple,
And mocked all those who e'er approached the Gods
With prayer or sacrifice; who ne'er, not even
For his own hearth, and home, and household table,
Regaled the Gods with savoury fat and incense,
Who never once said, "I have sinned, but spare me. "
Then did this atheist shrink, and give his neck
To an old woman to hang charms upon,
And bound his arms with magic amulets,
With laurel branches blocked his doors and windows,
Ready to do and venture anything
Rather than die. Fool that he was, who thought
To win the Gods to come into existence,
Whenever he might think he wanted them.
So wise too late when now mere dust and ashes,
He put his hand forth, Hail, great Pluto, Hail!
XI. There were ten people of the name of Bion. First of all, the one who flourished at the same time with Pherecydes of Syros, and who has left two books behind him, which are still extant; he was a native of Proconnesas. The second was a Syracusan, the author of a system of rhetoric. The third was the man of whom we have been speaking. The fourth was a pupil of Democritus, and a mathematician, a native of Abdera, who wrote in both the Attic and Ionic dialect. He was the person who first asserted that there were countries where there was night for six months, and day for six months. The fifth was a native of Soli; who wrote a history of Aethiopia. The sixth was a rhetorician, who has left behind him nine books, inscribed with the names of the Muses, which are still extant. The eighth was a Milesian statuary, who is mentioned by Polemo. The ninth was a tragic poet of the number of those who are called Tarsicans. The tenth was a statuary, a native of Clazomenae or Chios, who is mentioned by Hipponax.
1. This is a quotation from the Hippolytus of Euripides, v. 424.
2. I doubt if the wit of these parodies will be appreciated by the modern reader. The lines of Homer, which they are intended to parody, are:
Ho makar Atreide, moiregenes olbiodaimon. -Il. 3, 182.
hee su Peleide, panton ekpaglotat' andron. - Il. v. 146.
The first of which is translated by Pope:
Oh, blest Atrides, born of prosperous fate,
Successful monarch of a mighty state!
The Greek parody in the text is :
Ho pepon Archyta, psallegenes, olbiotyphe
Tes hypates eridos panton empeirotat' andron.
Maroon and midnight blue banner for Diogenes Laertius' Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers
BOOK I.
INTRODUCTION.
I. SOME say that the study of philosophy originated with the barbarians. In that among the Persians there existed the Magi,1 and among the Babylonians or Assyrians the Chaldaei,2 among the Indians the Gymnosophistae,3 and among the Celts and Gauls men who were called Druids4 and Semnothei, as Aristotle relates in his book on Magic, and Sotion in the twenty-third book of his Succession of Philosophers. Besides those men there were the Phoenician Ochus, the Thracian Zamolxis,5 and the Libyan Atlas. For the Egyptians say that Vulcan was the son of Nilus*, and that he was the author of philosophy, in which those who were especially eminent were called his priests and prophets.
II. From his age to that of Alexander, king of the Macedonians, were forty-eight thousand eight hundred and sixty-three years, and during this time there were three hundred and seventy-three eclipses of the sun, and eight hundred and thirty-two eclipses of the moon.
Again, from the time of the Magi, the first of whom was Zoroaster the Persian, to that of the fall of Troy, Hermodorus the Platonic philosopher, in his treatise on Mathematics, calculates that fifteen thousand years elapsed. But Xanthus the Lydian says that the passage of the Hellespont by Xerxes took place six thousand years after the time of Zoroaster,6 and that after him there was a regular succession of Magi under the names of Ostanes and Astrampsychos and Gobryas and Pazatas, until the destruction of the Persian empire by Alexander.
III. But those who say this, ignorantly impute to the barbarians the merits of the Greeks, from whom not only all philosophy, but even the whole human race in reality originated. For Musaeus was born among the Athenians, and Linus among the Thebans; and they say that the former, who was the son of Eumolpus, was the first person who taught the system of the genealogy of the gods, and who invented the spheres; and that he taught that all things originated in one thing, and when dissolved returned to that same thing; and that he died at Phalerum, and that this epitaph was inscribed on his tomb:
Phalerum's soil beneath this tomb contains
Musaeus dead, Eumolpus' darling son.
And it is from the father of Musaeus that the family called Eumolpidae among the Athenians derive their name. They say too that Linus was the son of Mercury and the Muse Urania; and that he invented a system of Cosmogony, and of the motions of the sun and moon, and of the generation of animals and fruits; and the following is the beginning of his poem,
There was a time when all the present world
Uprose at once.
From which Anaxagoras derived his theory, when he said that all things had been produced at the same time, and that then intellect had come and arranged them all in order.
They say, moreover, that Linus died in Euboea, having been shot with an arrow by Apollo, and that this epitaph was set over him:
The Theban Linus sleeps beneath this ground,
Urania's son with fairest garlands crown'd.
IV. And thus did philosophy arise among the Greeks, and indeed its very name shows that it has no connection with the barbarians. But those who attribute its origin to them, introduce Orpheus the Thracian, and say that he was a philosopher, and the most ancient one of all. But if one ought to call a man who has said such things about the gods as he has said, a philosopher, I do not know what name one ought to give to him who has not scrupled to attribute all sorts of human feelings to the gods, and even such discreditable actions as are but rarely spoken of among men; and tradition relates that he was murdered by women;7 but there is an inscription at Dium in Macedonia, saying that he was killed by lightning, and it runs thus:
Here the bard buried by the Muses lies,
The Thracian Orpheus of the golden lyre;
Whom mighty Jove, the Sovereign of the skies,
Removed from earth by his dread lightning's fire.
V. But they who say that philosophy had its rise among the barbarians, give also an account of the different systems prevailing among the various tribes. And they say that the Gymnosophists and the Druids philosophize, delivering their apophthegmns in enigmatical language, bidding men worship the gods and do no evil, and practise manly virtue.
VI. Accordingly Clitarchus, in his twelfth book, says that the Gymnosophists despise death, and that the Chaldaeans study astronomy and the science of soothsaying--that the Magi occupy themselves about the service to be paid to the gods, and about sacrifices and prayers, as if they were the only people to whom the deities listen: and that they deliver accounts of the existence and generation of the gods, saying that they are fire, and earth, and water; and they condemn the use of images, and above all things do they condemn those who say that the gods are male and female; they speak much of justice, and think it impious to destroy the bodies of the dead by fire; they allow men to marry their mothers or their daughters, as Sotion tells us in his twenty-third book; they study the arts of soothsaying and divination, and assert that the gods reveal their will to them by those sciences. They teach also that the air is full of phantoms, which, by emanation and a sort of evaporation, glide into the sight of those who have a clear perception; they forbid any extravagance of ornament, and the use of gold; their garments are white, their beds are made of leaves, and vegetables are their food, with cheese and coarse bread; they use a rush for a staff, the top of which they run into the cheese, and so taking up a piece of it they eat it. Of all kinds of magical divination they are ignorant, as Aristotle asserts in his book on Magic, and Dinon in the fifth book of his Histories. And this writer says, that the name of Zoroaster being interpreted means, a sacrifice to the stars; and Hermodorus makes the same statement. But Aristotle, in the first book of his Treatise on Philosophy, says, that the Magi are more ancient than the Egyptians; and that according to them there are two principles, a good demon and an evil demon, and that the name of the one is Jupiter or Oromasdes, and that of the other Pluto or Arimanius. And Hermippus gives the same account in the first book of his History of the Magi; and so does Eudoxus in his Period; and so does Theopompus in the eighth book of his History of the Affairs of Philip; and this last writer tells us also, that according to the Magi men will have a resurrection and be immortal, and that what exists now will exist hereafter under its own present name; and Eudemus of Rhodes coincides in this statement. But Hecataeus says, that according to their doctrines the gods also are beings who have been born. But Clearchus the Solensian, in his Treatise on Education says, that the Gymnosophists are descendants of the Magi; and some say that the Jews also are derived from them. Moreover, those who have written on the subject of the Magi condemn Herodotus; for they say that Xerxes would never have shot arrows against the sun, or have put fetters on the sea, as both sun and sea have been handed down by the Magi as gods, but that it was quite consistent for Xerxes to destroy the images of the gods.
VII. The following is the account that authors give of the philosophy of the Egyptians, as bearing on the gods and on justice. They say that the first principle is matter; then that the four elements were formed out of matter and divided, and that some animals were created, and that the sun and moon are gods, of whom the former is called Osiris and the latter Isis, and they are symbolised under the names of beetles and dragons, and hawks, and other animals, as Manetho tells us in his abridged account of Natural Philosophy, and Hecataeus confirms the statement in the first book of his History of the Philosophy of the Egyptians. They also make images of the gods, and assign them temples because they do not know the form of God. They consider that the world had a beginning and will have an end, and that it is a sphere; they think that the stars are fire, and that it is by a combination of them that the things on earth are generated; that the moon is eclipsed when it falls into the shadow of the earth; that the soul is eternal and migratory; that rain is caused by the changes of the atmosphere; and they enter into other speculations on points of natural history, as Hecataeus and Aristagoras inform us.
They also have made laws about justice, which they attribute to Mercury, and they consider those animals which are useful to be gods. They claim to themselves the merit of having been the inventors of geometry, and astrology, and arithmetic. So much then for the subject of invention.
VIII. But Pythagoras was the first person who invented the term Philosophy, and who called himself a philosopher; when he was conversing at Sicyon with Leon, who was tyrant of the Sicyonians or of the Phliasians (as Heraclides Ponticus relates in the book which he wrote about a dead woman); for he said that no man ought to be called wise, but only God. For formerly what is now called philosophy (philosophia) was called wisdom (sophia), and they who professed it were called wise men (sophoi), as being endowed with great acuteness and accuracy of mind; but now he who embraces wisdom is called a philosopher (philosophos).
But the wise men were also called Sophists. And not only they, but poets also were called Sophists: as Cratinus in his Archilochi calls Homer and Hesiod, while praising them highly.
IX. Now these were they who were accounted wise men. Thales, Solon, Periander, Cleobulus, Chilo, Bias, Pittacus. To these men add Anacharsis the Scythian, Myson the Chenean, Pherecydes the Syrian, and Epimenides the Cretan; and some add, Pisistratus, the tyrant: These then are they who were called the wise men.
X. But of Philosophy there arose two schools. One derived from Anaximander, the other from Pythagoras. Now, Thales had been the preceptor of Anaximander, and Pherecydes of Pythagoras. And the one school was called the Ionian, because Thales, being an Ionian (for he was a native of Miletus), had been the tutor of Anaximander; --but the other was called the Italian from Pythagoras, because he spent the chief part of his life in Italy. And the Ionic school ends with Clitomachus, and Chrysippus, and Theophrastus; and the Italian one with Epicurus; for Anaximander succeeded Thales, and he was succeeded again by Anaximenes, and he by Anaxagoras, and he by Archelaus, who was the master of Socrates, who was the originator of moral philosophy. And he was the master of the sect of the Socratic philosophers, and of Plato, who was the founder of the old Academy; and Plato's pupils were Speusippus and Xenocrates; and Polemo was the pupil of Xenocrates, and Crantor and Crates of Polemo. Crates again was the master of Arcesilaus, the founder of the Middle Academy, and his pupil was Lacydes, who gave the new Academy its distinctive principles. His pupil was Carneades, and he in his turn was the master of Clitomachus. And this school ends in this way with Clitomachus and Chrysippus.
Antisthenes was the pupil of Socrates, and the master of Diogenes the Cynic; and the pupil of Diogenes was Crates the Theban; Zeno the Cittiaean was his; Cleanthes was his; Chrysippus was his. Again it ends with Theophrastus in the following manner:
Aristotle was the pupil of Plato, Theophrastus the pupil of Aristotle; and in this way the Ionian school comes to an end.
Now the Italian school was carried on in this way. Pythagoras was the pupil of Pherecydes; his pupil was Telauges his son; he was the master of Xenophanes, and he of Parmenides; Parmenides of Zeno the Eleatic, he of Leucippus, he of Democritus: Democritus had many disciples, the most eminent of whom were Nausiphanes and Nausicydes, and they were the masters of Epicurus.
XI. Now, of Philosophers some were dogmatic and others were inclined to suspend their opinions. By dogmatic, I mean those who explain their opinions about matters, as if they could be comprehended. By those who suspend their opinions, I mean those who give no positive judgment, thinking that these things cannot be comprehended. And the former class have left many memorials of themselves; but the others have never written a line; as for instance, according to some people, Socrates, and Stilpo, and Philippus, and Menedemus, and Pyrrho, and Theodorus, and Carneades, and Bryson; and, as some people say, Pythagoras, and Aristo of Chios, except that he wrote a few letters. There are some men too who have written one work only, Melissus, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras; but Zeno wrote many works, Xenophanes still more; Democritus more, Aristotle more, Epicurus more, and Chrysippus more.
XII. Again, of philosophers some derived a surname from cities, as, the Elians, and Megaric sect, the Eretrians, and the Cyrenaics. Some from the places which they frequented, as the Academics and Stoics. Some from accidental circumstances, as the Peripatetics; or, from jests, as the Cynics.
Some again from their dispositions, as the Eudaemonics; some from an opinion, as the Elenctic, and Analogical schools. Some from their masters, as the Socratic and Epicurean philosophers; and so on. The Natural Philosophers were so called from their study of nature; the Ethical philosophers from their investigation of questions of morals (peri ta ethe).
The Dialecticians are they who devote themselves to quibbling on words.
XIII. Now there are three divisions of philosophy. Natural, Ethical, and Dialectic. Natural philosophy occupies itself about the world and the things in it; Ethical philosophy about life, and the things which concern us; Dialectics are conversant with the arguments by which both the others are supported.
Natural philosophy prevailed till the time of Archelaus; but after the time of Socrates, Ethical philosophy was predominant; and after the time of Zeno the Eleatic, Dialectic philosophy got the upper hand.
Ethical philosophy was subdivided into ten sects; the Academic, the Cyrenaic, the Elian, the Megaric, the Cynic, the Eretrian, the Dialectic, the Peripatetic, the Stoic, and the Epicurean. Of the old Academic school Plato was the president; of the middle, Arcesilaus; and of the New, Lacydes:--the Cyrenaic school was founded by Aristippus the Cyrenian; the Elian, by Phaedo, of Elis; the Megaric, by Euclid, of Megara; the Cynic, by Antisthenes, the Athenian; the Eretrian, by Menedemus, of Eretria; the Dialectic by Clitomachus, the Carthaginian; the Peripatetic, by Aristotle, the Stagirite; the Stoic, by Zeno, the Cittiaean; the Epicurean school derives its name from Epicurus, its founder.
But Hippobotus, in his Treatise on Sects, says that there are nine sects and schools: first, the Megaric; secondly, the Eretrian; thirdly, the Cyrenaic; fourthly, the Epicurean; fifthly, the Annicerean; sixthly, the Theodorean; seventhly, the sect of Zeno and the Stoics; eighthly, that of the Old Academy; and ninthly, the Peripatetic;--not counting either the Cynic, or the Eliac, or the Dialectic school. That also which is called the Pyhrronean is repudiated by many writers, on account of the obscurity of its principles.
But others consider that in some particulars it is a distinct sect, and in others not. For it does appear to be a sect--for what we call a sect, say they, is one which follows, or appears to follow, a principle which appears to it to be the true one; on which principle we correctly call the Sceptics a sect. But if by the name sect we understand those who incline to rules which are consistent with the principles which they profess, then the Pyrrhonean cannot be called a sect, for they have no rules or principles.
These, then, are the beginnings, these are the successive masters, these are the divisions, and schools of philosophy.
XIV. Moreover, it is not long ago, that a new Eclectic school was set up by Potamo, of Alexandria, who picked out of the doctrines of each school what pleased him most. And as he himself says, in his Elementary Instruction, he thinks that there are certain criteria of truth: first of all the faculty which judges, and this is the superior one; the other that which is the foundation of the judgment, being a most exact appearance of the objects. And the first principles of everything he calls matter, and the agent, and the quality, and the place. For they show out of what, and by what, and how, and where anything is done. The end is that to which everything is referred; namely, a life made perfect with every virtue, not without the natural and external qualities of the body.
But we must now speak of the men themselves; and first of all about Thales.
Notes by Yonge
1. "The religion of the ancient Persians was the worship of fire or of the elements, in which fire was symbolical of the Deity. At a later period in the time of the Greeks, the ancient worship was changed into the adoration of the stars (Sabaeism), especially of the sun and of the morning star. This religion was distinguished by a simple and majestic character. Its priests were called Magi. "-Tenneman's Manual of the History of Philosophy, Introd. ? 70.
2. "The Chaldeans were devoted to the worship of the stars and to astrology; the nature of their climate and country disposing them to it. The worship of the stars was revived by them and widely disseminated even subsequently to the Christian era. "-- -Tenneman's Manual of the History of Philosophy, Introd. ? 71.
3. "Cicero speaks of those who in India are accounted philosophers, living naked and enduring the greatest severity of winter without betraying any feeling of pain, and displaying the same insensibility when exposed to the flames. '--Tusc. Quaest. v. 27.
4. "The religion of the Britons was one of the most considerable parts of their government, and the Druids who were their priests, possessed great authority among them. Besides ministering at the altar, and directing all religious duties, they presided over the education of youth; they possessed both the civil and criminal jurisdiction; they decided all controversies among states as well as among private persons, and whoever refused to submit to their decree was exposed to the most severe penalties. The sentence of excommunication was pronounced against him; he was forbidden access to the sacrifices of public worship; he was debarred all intercourse with his fellow citizens even in the common affairs of life: his company was universally shunned as profane and dangerous, he was refused the protection of law, and death itself became an acceptable relief from the misery and infamy to which he was exposed. Thus the bonds of government, which were naturally loose among that rude and turbulent people, were happily corroborated by the terrors of their superstition.
"No species of superstition was ever more terrible than that of the Druids; besides the several penalties which it was in the power of the ecclesiastics to inflict in this world, they inculcated the eternal transmigration of souls, and thereby extended their authority as far as the fears of their timorous votaries. They practised their rites in dark groves or other secret recesses, and in order to throw a greater mystery over their religion, they communicated their doctrines only to the initiated, and strictly forbade the committing of them to writing, lest they should at any time be exposed to the examination of the profane and vulgar. Human sacrifices were practised among them; the spoils of war were often devoted to their divinities, and they punished with the severest tortures whoever dared to secrete any part of the consecrated offering. These treasures they kept secreted in woods and forests secured by no other guard than the terrrors of their religion; and their steady conquest over human avidity may be regarded as more signal than their prompting men to the most extraordinary and most violent efforts. No idolatrous worship ever attained such an ascendant over mankind as that of the ancient Gauls and Britons. And the Romans after their conquest, finding it impossible to reconcile those nations to the laws and institutions of their masters while it maintained its authority, were at last obliged to abolish it by penal statutes, a violence which had never in any other instance been resorted to by those tolerating conquerors. '--Hume's History of England, chap. 1. ? 1.
5. Zamolxis, or Zalmoxis, so called from the bear-skin (zalmos) in which he was wrapped as soon as he was born, was a Getan, and a slave cf Pythagoras at Samos; having been emancipated by his master, he travelled into Egypt; and on his return to his own country he introduced the ideas which he had acquired in his travels on the subject of civilisation, religion, and the immortality of the soul. He was made priest of the chief deity among the Getae, and was afterwards himself worshipped as a divine person. He was said to have lived in a subterraneous cavern for three years, and after that to have re-appeared among his countrymen. Herodotus however, who records these stories (iv. 95), expresses his disbelief of them, placing him before the time of Pythagoras by many years, and seems to incline to the belief that he was an indigenous Getan deity.
6. The real time of Zoroaster is, as may be supposed, very uncertain, but he is said by some eminent writers to have lived in the time of Darius Hystaspes; though others, apparently on better grounds, place him at a very far earlier date. He is not mentioned by Herodotus at all. His native country too is very uncertain. Some writers, among whom are Ctesias and Ammian, call him a Bactrian, while Porphyry speaks of him as a Chaldaean, and Pliny as a native of Proconnesus;--Niebuhr considers him a purely mythical personage. The great and fundamental article of the system (of the Persian theology) was the celebrated doctrine of the two principles; a bold and injudicious attempt of Eastern philosophy to reconcile the existence of moral and physical evil with the attributes of a beneficent Creator and governor of the world. The first and original being, in whom, or by whom the universe exists, is denominated, in the writings of Zoroaster, Time without bounds. . . . From either the blind or the intelligent operation of this infinite Time, which bears but too near an affinity to the Chaos of the Greeks, the two secondary but active principles of the universe were from all eternity produced; Ormusd and Ahriman, each of them possessed of the powers of creation, but each disposed by his invariable nature to exercise them with different designs; the principle of good is eternally absorbed in light, the principle of evil is eternally buried in darkness. The wise benevolence of Ormusd formed man capable of virtue, and abundantly provided his fair habitation with the materials of happiness. By his vigilant providence the motion of the planets, the order of the seasons, and the temperate mixture of the elements are preserved. But the maker of Ahriman has long since pierced Ormusd's Egg, or in other words, has violated the harmony of his works. Since that fatal irruption, the most minute articles of good and evil are intimately intermingled and agitated together; the rankest poisons spring up among the most salutary Plants; deluges, earthquakes, and conflagrations attest the conflict of nature, and the little world of man is perpetually shaken by vice and misfortune. While the rest of mankind are led away captives in the chains of their infernal enemy, the faithful Persian alone reserves his religious adoration for his friend and protector Ormusd, and fights under his banner of light, in the full confidence that he shall, in the last day, share the glory of his triumph. At that decisive period, the enlightened wisdom of goodness will render the power of Ormusd superior to the furious malice of his rival; Ahriman and his followers, disarmed and subdued, will sink into their native darkness, and virtue will maintain the eternal peace and harmony of the universe.
. . . As a legislator, Zoroaster "discovered a liberal concern for the public and private happiness seldom to be found among the visionary schemes of superstition. Fasting and celibacy, the common means of purchasing the divine favour, he condemns with abhorrence as a criminal rejection of the best gifts of Providence. "-Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, c. viii.
7. This is the account given by Virgil:
Spretae Ciconum quo munere matres
Inter sacra Deum nocturnique orgia Bacchi,
Discerptum latos juvenem sparsere per agros. -GEORG. IV. 520.
Which Dryden translates:
The Thracian matrons who the youth accus'd,
Of love disdain'd and marriage rites refus'd ;
With furies and nocturnal orgies fir'd,
At length against his sacred life conspir'd ;
Whom ev'n the savage beasts had spar'd they kill'd,
And strew'd his mangled limbs about the field.
Scanned and edited for Peitho's Web from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosopers, by Diogenes Laertius, Literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853
Note that some of Yonge's spelling of ancient names are different than more modern versions. Footnotes have been converted to endnotes.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF THALES
I. THALES, then, as Herodotus and Duris and Democritus say, was the son of Examyes and Cleobulina; of the family of the Thelidae, who are Phoenicians by descent, among the most noble of all the descendants of Cadmus and Agenor, as Plato testifies. And he was the first man to whom the name of Wise was given, when Damasias was Archon at Athens, in whose time also the seven wise men had that title given to them, as Demetrius Phalereus records in his Catalogue of the Archons. He was enrolled as a citizen at Miletus when he came thither with Neleus, who had been banished from Phoenicia; but a more common statement is that he was a native Milesian, of noble extraction.
II. After having been immersed in state affairs he applied himself to speculations in natural philosophy; though, as some people state, he left no writings behind him. For the book on Naval Astronomy, which is attributed to him is said in reality to be the work of Phocus the Samian. But Callimachus was aware that he was the discoverer of the Lesser Bear; for in his Iambics he speaks of him thus:
And, he, 'tis said, did first compute the stars
Which beam in Charles's wain, and guide the bark
Of the Phoenician sailor o'er the sea.
According to others he wrote two books, and no more, about the solstice and the equinox; thinking that everything else was easily to be comprehended. According to other statements, he is said to have been the first who studied astronomy, and who foretold the eclipses and motions of the sun, as Eudemus relates in his history of the discoveries made in astronomy; on which account Xenophanes and Herodotus praise him greatly; and Heraclitus and Democritus confirm this statement.
III. Some again (one of whom is Choerilus the poet) say that he was the first person who affirmed that the souls of men were immortal; and he was the first person, too, who discovered the path of the sun from one end of the ecliptic to the other; and who, as one account tells us, defined the magnitude of the sun as being seven hundred and twenty times as great as that of the moon. He was also the first person who called the last day of the month the thirtieth. And likewise the first to converse about natural philosophy, as some say. But Aristotle and Hippias say that he attributed souls also to lifeless things, forming his conjecture from the nature of the magnet, and of amber. And Pamphila relates that he, having learnt geometry from the Egyptians, was the first person to describe a right-angled triangle in a circle, and that he sacrificed an ox in honour of his discovery. But others, among whom is Apollodorus the calculator, say that it was Pythagoras who made this discovery. It was Thales also who carried to their greatest point of advancement the discoveries which Callimachus in his iambics says were first made by Euphorbus the Phrygian, such as those of the scalene angle, and of the triangle, and of other things which relate to investigations about lines. He seems also to have been a man of the greatest wisdom in political matters. For when Croesus sent to the Milesians to invite them to an alliance, he prevented them from agreeing to it, which step of his, as Cyrus got the victory, proved the salvation of the city. But Clytus relates, as Heraclides assures us, that he was attached to a solitary and recluse life.
IV. Some assert that he was married, and that he had a son named Cybisthus; others, on the contrary, say that he never had a wife, but that he adopted the son of his sister; and that once being asked why he did not himself become a father, he answered, that it was because he was fond of children. They say, too, that when his mother exhorted him to marry, he said, "No, by Jove, it is not yet time. " And afterwards, when he was past his youth, and she was again pressing him earnestly, he said, "It is no longer time. "
V. Hieronymus, of Rhodes, also tells us, in the second book of his Miscellaneous Memoranda, that when he was desirous to show that it was easy to get rich, he, foreseeing that there would be a great crop of olives, took some large plantations of olive trees, and so made a great deal of money.
VI. He asserted water to be the principle of all things, and that the world had life, and was full of daemons: they say, too, that he was the original definer of the seasons of the year, and that it was he who divided the year into three hundred and sixty-five days. And he never had any teacher except during the time that he went to Egypt, and associated with the priests. Hieronymus also says that he measured the Pyramids: watching their shadow, and calculating when they were of the same size as that was. He lived with Thrasybulus the tyrant of Miletus, as we are informed by Minyas.
VII. Now it is known to every one what happened with respect to the tripod that was found by the fishermen and sent to the wise men by the people of the Milesians, For they say that some Ionian youths bought a cast of their nets from some Milesian fishermen. And when the tripod was drawn up in the net there was a dispute about it; until the Milesians sent to Delphi: and the God gave them the following answer:
You ask about the tripod, to whom you shall present it;
'Tis for the wisest, I reply, that fortune surely meant it.
Accordingly they gave it to Thales, and he gave it to someone, who again handed it over to another, till it came to Solon. But he said that it was the God himself who was the first in wisdom; and so he sent it to Delphi. But Callimachus gives a different account of this in his Iambic taking the tradition which he mentions from Leander the Milesian; for he says that a certain Arcadian of the name of Bathycles, when dying, left a goblet behind him with an injunction that it should be given to the first of the wise men. And it was given to Thales, and went the whole circle till it came back to Thales, on which he sent it to Apollo Didymaeus, adding (according to Callimachus,) the following distich:
Thales, who's twice received me as a prize,
Gives me to him who rules the race of Neleus.
And the prose inscription runs thus:
Thales the son of Examyas, a Milesian, offers this to Apollo Didymaeus, having twice received it from the Greeks as the reward for virtue.
And the name of the son of Bathycles who carved the goblet about from one to the other, was Thyrion, as Eleusis tells us in his History of Achilles. And Alexander the Myndian agrees with him in the ninth book of his Traditions. But Eudoxus of Cnidos, and Euanthes of Miletus, say that one of the friends of Croesus received from the king a golden goblet, for the purpose of giving it to the wisest of the Greeks; and that he gave it to Thales, and that it came round to Chilon, and that he inquired of the God at Delphi who was wiser than himself; and that the God replied, Myson, whom we shall mention hereafter. (He is the man whom Eudoxus places among the seven wise men instead of Cleobulus ; but Plato inserts his name instead of Periander. ) The God accordingly made this reply concerning him:
I say that Myson the Aetoean sage,
The citizen of Chen, is wiser far
In his deep mind than you.
The person who went to the temple to ask the question was Anacharsis ; but again Daimachus the Platonic philosopher, and Clearchus, state that the goblet was sent by Croesus to Pittacus, and so was carried round to the different men. But Andron, in his book called The Tripod, says that the Argives offered the tripod as a prize for excellence to the wisest of the Greeks; and that Aristodemus, a Spartan, was judged to deserve it, but that he yielded the palm to Chilon; and Alcaeus mentions Aristodemus in these lines:
And so they say Aristodemus once
Uttered a truthful speech in noble Sparta:
'Tis money makes the man; and he who's none,
Is counted neither good nor honourable.
But some say that a vessel fully loaded was sent by Periander to Thrasybulus the tyrant of the Milesians; and that as the ship was wrecked in the sea, near the island of Cos, this tripod was afterwards found by some fishermen. Phanodicus says that it was found in the sea near Athens, and so brought into the city; and then, after an assembly had been held to decide on the disposal, it was sent to Bias--and the reason why we will mention in our account of Bias. Others say that this goblet had been made by Vulcan and presented by the Gods to Pelops, on his marriage; and that subsequently it came into the possession of Menelaus, and was taken away by Paris when he carried off Helen, and was thrown into the sea near Cos by her, as she said that it would become a cause of battle. And after some time, some of the citizens of Lebedos having bought a net, this tripod was brought up in it; and as they quarrelled with the fishermen about it, they went to Cos; and not being able to get the matter settled there, they laid it before the Milesians, as Miletus was their metropolis; and they sent ambassadors, who were treated with neglect, on which account they made war on the Coans; and after each side had met with many revolutions of fortune, an oracle directed that the tripod should be given to the wisest; and then both parties agreed that it belonged to Thales: and he, after it had gone the circuit of all the wise men, presented it to the Didymaean Apollo. Now, the assignation of the oracle was given to the Coans in the following words:
The war between the brave Ionian race
And the proud Meropes will never cease,
Till the rich golden tripod which the God,
Its maker, cast beneath the briny waves,
Is from your city sent, and justly given
To that wise being who knows all present things,
And all that's past, and all that is to come.
And the reply given to the Milesians was
You ask about the tripod
and so on, as I have related it before. And now we have said enough on this subject.
But Hermippus, in his Lives, refers to Thales what has been by some people reported of Socrates; for he recites that he used to say that he thanked fortune for three things: first of all, that he had been born a man and not a beast; secondly, that he was a man and not a woman; and thirdly, that he was a Greek and not a barbarian.
VIII. It is said that once he was led out of his house by an old woman for the purpose of observing the stars, and he fell into a ditch and bewailed himself, on which the old woman said to him--"Do you, O Thales, who cannot see what is under your feet, think that you shall understand what is in heaven? " Timon also knew that he was an astronomer, and in his Silli he praises him, saying:
Like Thales, wisest of the seven sages,
That great astronomer.
And Lobon, of Argos, says, that which was written by him extends to about two hundred verses; and that the following inscription is engraved upon his statue:
Miletus, fairest of Ionian cities,
Gave birth to Thales, great astronomer,
Wisest of mortals in all kinds of knowledge.
IX. And these are quoted as some of his lines :
It is not many words that real wisdom proves;
Breathe rather one wise thought,
Select one worthy object,
So shall you best the endless prate of silly men reprove. --
And the following are quoted as sayings of his: "God is the most ancient of all things, for he had no birth: the world is the most beautiful of things, for it is the work of God: place is the greatest of things, for it contains all things: intellect is the swiftest of things, for it runs through everything: necessity is the strongest of things, for it rules everything: time is the wisest of things, for it finds out everything. "
He said also that there was no difference between life and death. "Why, then," said some one to him, "do not you die? " "Because," said he, "it does make no difference. " A man asked him which was made first, night or day, and he replied "Night was made first by one day. " Another man asked him whether a man who did wrong, could escape the notice of the Gods. "No, not even if he thinks wrong," said he. An adulterer inquired of him whether he should swear that he had not committed adultery. "Perjury," said he, "is no worse than adultery. " When he was asked what was very difficult, he said, "To know one's self. " And what was easy, "To advise another. " What was most pleasant? "To be successful. " To the question, "What is the divinity? " he replied "That which has neither beginning nor end. " When asked what hard thing he had seen, he said, "An old man a tyrant. " When the question was put to him how a man might most easily endure misfortune, he said, "If he saw his enemies more unfortunate still. " When asked how men might live most virtuously and most justly, he said, "If we never do ourselves what we blame in others. " To the question, "Who was happy? " he made answer. "He who is healthy in his body, easy in his circumstances, and well-instructed as to his mind. " He said that men ought to remember those friends who were absent as well as those who were present, and not to care about adorning their faces, but to be beautified by their studies. "Do not," said he, "get rich by evil actions, and let not any one ever be able to reproach you with speaking against those who partake of your friendship. All the assistance that you give to your parents, the same you have a right to expect from your children. " He said that the reason of the Nile overflowing, was, that its streams were beaten back by the Etesian winds blowing in a contrary direction.
X. Apollodorus, in his Chronicles, says, that Thales was born in the first year of the thirty-fifth Olympiad; and he died at the age of seventy-eight years, or according to the statement of Sosicrates, at the age of ninety; for he died in the fifty-eighth Olympiad, having lived in the time of Croesus, to whom he promised that he would enable him to pass the Halys without a bridge, by turning the course of the river.
XI. There have also been other men of the name of Thales, as Demetrius of Magnesia says, in his Treatise on People and Things of the Same Name; of whom five are particularly mentioned, an orator of Calatia of a very affected style of eloquence; a painter of Sicyon, a great man; the third was one who lived in very ancient times, in the age of Homer and Hesiod and Lycurgus ; the fourth is a man who is mentioned by Duris in his work On Painting; the fifth is a more modern person, of no great reputation, who is mentioned by Dionysius in his Criticisms.
XII. But this wise Thales died while present as a spectator at a gymnastic contest, being worn out with heat and thirst and weakness, for he was very old, and the following inscription was placed on his tomb:
You see this tomb is small--but recollect,
The fame of Thales reaches to the skies.
I have also myself composed this epigram on him in the first book of my epigrams or poems in various metres:
O mighty sun our wisest Thales sat
Spectator of the games, when you did seize upon him;
But you were right to take him near yourself,
Now that his aged sight could scarcely reach to heaven.
XIII. The apophthegm, "know yourself," is his; though Antisthenes in his Successions, says that it belongs to Phemonoe, but that Chilon appropriated it as his own.
XIV. Now concerning the seven, (for it is well here to speak of them all together,) the following traditions are handed down. Damon the Cyrenaean, who wrote about the philosophers, reproaches them all, but most especially the seven. And Anaximenes says, that they all applied themselves to poetry. But Dicaearchus says, that they were neither wise men nor philosophers, but merely shrewd men, who had studied legislation. And Archetimus, the Syracusian, wrote an account of their having a meeting at the palace of Cypselus, at which he says that he himself was present. Ephorus says that they all except Thales met at the court of Croesus. And some say that they also met at the Pandionium,(1) and at Corinth, and at Delphi. There is a good deal of disagreement between different writers with respect to their apophthegms, as the same one is attributed by them to various authors. For instance there is the epigram:
Chilon, the Spartan sage, this sentence said:
Seek no excess--all timely things are good
There is also a difference of opinion with respect to their number. Leander inserts in the number instead of Cleobulus and Myson, Leophantus Gorsias, a native of either Lebedos or Ephesus; and Epimenides, the Cretan; Plato, in his Protagoras, reckons Myson among them instead of Periander. And Ephorus mentions Anacharsis in the place of Myson; some also add Pythagoras to the number. Dicaearchus speaks of four, as universally agreed upon, Thales, Bias, Pittacus, and Solon; and then enumerates six more, of whom we are to select three, namely, Aristodemus, Pamphilus, Chilon the Lacedaemonian, Cleobulus, Anacharsis, and Periander. Some add Acusilaus of Argos, the son of Cabas, or Scabras. But Hermippus, in his Treatise on the Wise Men says that there were altogether seventeen, out of whom different authors selected different individuals to make up the seven. These seventeen were Solon, Thales, Pittacus, Bias, Chilon, Myson, Cleobulus, Periander, Anacharsis, Acusilaus, Epimenides, Leophantus, Pherecydes, Aristodemus, Pythagoras, Lasus the son of Charmantides, or Sisymbrinus, or as Aristoxenus calls him the son of Chabrinus, a citizen of Hermione, and Anaxagoras.
LIFE OF BION
I. BION was a native of the country around the Borysthenes; but as to who his parents were, and to what circumstances it was owing that he applied himself to the study of philosophy, we know no more than what he himself told Antigonus. For when Antigonus asked him:--
What art thou, say! from whence, from whom you came,
Who are your parents? tell thy race, thy name;
(Hom. Od. x. 335. Pope's Version, 387. )
He, knowing that he had been misrepresented to the king, said to him, "My father was a freedman, who used to wipe his mouth with his sleeve," (by which he meant that he used to sell salt fish). "As to his race, he was a native of the district of the Borysthenes; having no countenance, but only a brand in his face, a token of the bitter cruelty of his master. My mother was such a woman as a man of that condition might marry, taken out of a brothel. Then, my father being in arrears to the tax-gatherers, was sold with all his family, and with me among them; and as I was young and good looking, a certain orator purchased me, and when he died he left me everything. And I, having burnt all his books, and torn up all his papers, came to Athens and applied myself to the study of Philosophy:
Such was my father, and from him I came,
The honoured author of my birth and name.
(Hom. Il. vi. 211. Pope's Version, 254. )
This is all that I can tell you of myself: so that Persaeus and Philonides may give up telling these stories about me: and you may judge of me on my own merits. "
II. And Bion was truly a man of great versatility, and a very subtle philosopher, and a man who gave all who chose great opportunities of practising philosophy. In some respects he was of a gentle disposition, and very much inclined to indulge in vanity.
III. And he left behind him many memorials of himself in the way of writings, and also many apophthegms full of useful sentiments. As for instance, once when he was reproved for having failed to charm a young man, he replied, "You cannot possibly draw up cheese with a hook before it has got hard. " On another occasion he was asked who was the most miserable of men, and replied, "He who has set his heart on the greatest prosperity. " When he was asked whether it was advisable to marry (for this answer also is attributed to him), he replied, "If you marry an ugly woman you will have a punishment (poine), and if a handsome woman you will have one who is common" (koine). He called old age a port to shelter one from misfortune; and accordingly, he said that every one fled to it. He said that glory was the mother of years; that beauty was a good which concerned others rather than one's self; that riches were the sinews of business. To a man who had squandered his estate he said "The earth swallowed up Amphiaraus, but you have swallowed up the earth. " Another saying of his was that it was a great evil not to be able to bear evil. And he condemned those who burnt the dead as though they felt nothing, and then mocked them as though they did feel. And he was always saying that it was better to put one's own beauty at the disposal of another, than to covet the beauty of others; for that one who did so was injuring both his body and his soul. And he used to blame Socrates saying, that if he derived no advantage from Alcibiades he was foolish, and if he never derived any advantage from him he then deserved no credit. He used to say that the way to the shades below was easy; and accordingly, that people went there with their eyes shut. He used to blame Alcibiades, saying that while he was a boy he seduced husbands from their wives, and when he had become a young man he seduced the wives from their husbands. While most of the Athenians at Rhodes practised rhetoric, he himself used to give lectures on philosophical subjects; and to one who blamed him for this he said, "I have bought wheat, and I sell barley. "
It was a saying of his that the inhabitants of the shades below would be more punished if they carried water in buckets that were whole, than in such as were bored. To a chattering fellow who was soliciting him for aid, he said, "I will do what is sufficient for you, if you will send deputies to me, and forbear to come yourself. " Once when he was at sea in the company of some wicked men, he fell into the hands of pirates; and when the rest said, "We are undone, if we are known. " "But I," said he, "am undone if we are not known. " He used to say that self-conceit was the enemy of progress. Of a rich man who was mean and niggardly, he said, "That man does not possess his estate, but his estate possesses him. " He used to say that stingy men took care of their property as if it was their own, but derived no advantage from it as if it belonged to other people. Another of his sayings was, that young men ought to display courage, but that old men ought to be distinguished for prudence. And that prudence was as much superior to the other virtues as sight was to the other senses. And that it was not right to speak of old age, at which every one is desirous to arrive. To an envious man who was looking gloomy, he said, "I know not whether it is because some misfortune has happened to you, or some good fortune to some one else. " One thing that he used to say was, that a mean extraction was a bad companion to freedom of speech. For:--
It does enslave a man, however bold
His speech may be. 1
And another was that we ought to keep our friends, whatever sort of people they may be, so that we may not seem to have been intimate with wicked men, or to have abandoned good men.
IV. Very early in his career he abandoned the school of the Academy, and at the same time became a disciple of Crates. Then he passed over to the sect of the Cynics, taking their coarse cloak and wallet. For what else could ever have changed his nature into one of such apathy? After that he adopted the Theodorean principles, having become a disciple of Theodorus the Atheist, who was used to employ every kind of reasoning in support of his system of philosophy. After leaving him, he became a pupil of Theophrastus, the Peripatetic.
V. He was very fond of theatrical entertainments, and very skilful in distracting his hearers by exciting a laugh, giving things disparaging names. And because he used to avail himself of every species of reasoning, they relate that Eratosthenes said that Bion was the first person who had clothed philosophy in a flowery robe.
VI. He was also very ingenious in parodying passages, and adapting them to circumstances as they arose. As for instance, I may cite the following:--
Tender Archytas, born of tuneful lyre,
Whom thoughts of happy vanity inspire;
Most skilled of mortals in appeasing ire. 2
And he jested on every part of music and geometry.
VII. He was a man of very expensive habits, and on this account he used to go from city to city, and at times he would contrive the most amazing devices.
VIII. Accordingly, in Rhodes, he persuaded the sailors to put on the habiliments of philosophical students and follow him about; and then he made himself conspicuous by entering the gymnasium with this train of followers.
IX. He was accustomed also to adopt young men as his sons, in order to derive assistance from them in his pleasures, and to be protected by their affection for him. But he was a very selfish man, and very fond of quoting the saying, "The property of friends is common;" owing to which it is that no one is spoken of as a disciple of his, though so many men attended his school. And he made some very shameless; accordingly, Betion, one of his intimate acquaintances, is reported to have said once to Menedemus, "So Menedemus constantly spends the evening with Bion, and I see no harm in it. " He used also to talk with great impiety to those who conversed with him, having derived his opinions on this subject from Theodorus.
X. And when at a later period he became afflicted with disease, as the people of Chalcis said, for he died there, he was persuaded to wear amulets and charms, and to show his repentance for the insults that he had offered to the Gods. But he suffered fearfully for want of proper people to attend him, until Antigonus sent him two servants. And he followed him in a litter, as Favorinus relates in his Universal History. And the circumstances of his death we have ourselves spoken of in the following lines:
We hear that Bion the Borysthenite,
Whom the ferocious Scythian land brought forth,
Used to deny that there were Gods at all.
Now, if he'd persevered in this opinion,
One would have said he speaks just as he thinks;
Though certainly his thoughts are quite mistaken.
But when a lengthened sickness overtook him,
And he began to fear lest he should die;
This man who heretofore denied the Gods,
And would not even look upon a temple,
And mocked all those who e'er approached the Gods
With prayer or sacrifice; who ne'er, not even
For his own hearth, and home, and household table,
Regaled the Gods with savoury fat and incense,
Who never once said, "I have sinned, but spare me. "
Then did this atheist shrink, and give his neck
To an old woman to hang charms upon,
And bound his arms with magic amulets,
With laurel branches blocked his doors and windows,
Ready to do and venture anything
Rather than die. Fool that he was, who thought
To win the Gods to come into existence,
Whenever he might think he wanted them.
So wise too late when now mere dust and ashes,
He put his hand forth, Hail, great Pluto, Hail!
XI. There were ten people of the name of Bion. First of all, the one who flourished at the same time with Pherecydes of Syros, and who has left two books behind him, which are still extant; he was a native of Proconnesas. The second was a Syracusan, the author of a system of rhetoric. The third was the man of whom we have been speaking. The fourth was a pupil of Democritus, and a mathematician, a native of Abdera, who wrote in both the Attic and Ionic dialect. He was the person who first asserted that there were countries where there was night for six months, and day for six months. The fifth was a native of Soli; who wrote a history of Aethiopia. The sixth was a rhetorician, who has left behind him nine books, inscribed with the names of the Muses, which are still extant. The eighth was a Milesian statuary, who is mentioned by Polemo. The ninth was a tragic poet of the number of those who are called Tarsicans. The tenth was a statuary, a native of Clazomenae or Chios, who is mentioned by Hipponax.
1. This is a quotation from the Hippolytus of Euripides, v. 424.
2. I doubt if the wit of these parodies will be appreciated by the modern reader. The lines of Homer, which they are intended to parody, are:
Ho makar Atreide, moiregenes olbiodaimon. -Il. 3, 182.
hee su Peleide, panton ekpaglotat' andron. - Il. v. 146.
The first of which is translated by Pope:
Oh, blest Atrides, born of prosperous fate,
Successful monarch of a mighty state!
The Greek parody in the text is :
Ho pepon Archyta, psallegenes, olbiotyphe
Tes hypates eridos panton empeirotat' andron.
Maroon and midnight blue banner for Diogenes Laertius' Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers
BOOK I.
INTRODUCTION.
I. SOME say that the study of philosophy originated with the barbarians. In that among the Persians there existed the Magi,1 and among the Babylonians or Assyrians the Chaldaei,2 among the Indians the Gymnosophistae,3 and among the Celts and Gauls men who were called Druids4 and Semnothei, as Aristotle relates in his book on Magic, and Sotion in the twenty-third book of his Succession of Philosophers. Besides those men there were the Phoenician Ochus, the Thracian Zamolxis,5 and the Libyan Atlas. For the Egyptians say that Vulcan was the son of Nilus*, and that he was the author of philosophy, in which those who were especially eminent were called his priests and prophets.
II. From his age to that of Alexander, king of the Macedonians, were forty-eight thousand eight hundred and sixty-three years, and during this time there were three hundred and seventy-three eclipses of the sun, and eight hundred and thirty-two eclipses of the moon.
Again, from the time of the Magi, the first of whom was Zoroaster the Persian, to that of the fall of Troy, Hermodorus the Platonic philosopher, in his treatise on Mathematics, calculates that fifteen thousand years elapsed. But Xanthus the Lydian says that the passage of the Hellespont by Xerxes took place six thousand years after the time of Zoroaster,6 and that after him there was a regular succession of Magi under the names of Ostanes and Astrampsychos and Gobryas and Pazatas, until the destruction of the Persian empire by Alexander.
III. But those who say this, ignorantly impute to the barbarians the merits of the Greeks, from whom not only all philosophy, but even the whole human race in reality originated. For Musaeus was born among the Athenians, and Linus among the Thebans; and they say that the former, who was the son of Eumolpus, was the first person who taught the system of the genealogy of the gods, and who invented the spheres; and that he taught that all things originated in one thing, and when dissolved returned to that same thing; and that he died at Phalerum, and that this epitaph was inscribed on his tomb:
Phalerum's soil beneath this tomb contains
Musaeus dead, Eumolpus' darling son.
And it is from the father of Musaeus that the family called Eumolpidae among the Athenians derive their name. They say too that Linus was the son of Mercury and the Muse Urania; and that he invented a system of Cosmogony, and of the motions of the sun and moon, and of the generation of animals and fruits; and the following is the beginning of his poem,
There was a time when all the present world
Uprose at once.
From which Anaxagoras derived his theory, when he said that all things had been produced at the same time, and that then intellect had come and arranged them all in order.
They say, moreover, that Linus died in Euboea, having been shot with an arrow by Apollo, and that this epitaph was set over him:
The Theban Linus sleeps beneath this ground,
Urania's son with fairest garlands crown'd.
IV. And thus did philosophy arise among the Greeks, and indeed its very name shows that it has no connection with the barbarians. But those who attribute its origin to them, introduce Orpheus the Thracian, and say that he was a philosopher, and the most ancient one of all. But if one ought to call a man who has said such things about the gods as he has said, a philosopher, I do not know what name one ought to give to him who has not scrupled to attribute all sorts of human feelings to the gods, and even such discreditable actions as are but rarely spoken of among men; and tradition relates that he was murdered by women;7 but there is an inscription at Dium in Macedonia, saying that he was killed by lightning, and it runs thus:
Here the bard buried by the Muses lies,
The Thracian Orpheus of the golden lyre;
Whom mighty Jove, the Sovereign of the skies,
Removed from earth by his dread lightning's fire.
V. But they who say that philosophy had its rise among the barbarians, give also an account of the different systems prevailing among the various tribes. And they say that the Gymnosophists and the Druids philosophize, delivering their apophthegmns in enigmatical language, bidding men worship the gods and do no evil, and practise manly virtue.
VI. Accordingly Clitarchus, in his twelfth book, says that the Gymnosophists despise death, and that the Chaldaeans study astronomy and the science of soothsaying--that the Magi occupy themselves about the service to be paid to the gods, and about sacrifices and prayers, as if they were the only people to whom the deities listen: and that they deliver accounts of the existence and generation of the gods, saying that they are fire, and earth, and water; and they condemn the use of images, and above all things do they condemn those who say that the gods are male and female; they speak much of justice, and think it impious to destroy the bodies of the dead by fire; they allow men to marry their mothers or their daughters, as Sotion tells us in his twenty-third book; they study the arts of soothsaying and divination, and assert that the gods reveal their will to them by those sciences. They teach also that the air is full of phantoms, which, by emanation and a sort of evaporation, glide into the sight of those who have a clear perception; they forbid any extravagance of ornament, and the use of gold; their garments are white, their beds are made of leaves, and vegetables are their food, with cheese and coarse bread; they use a rush for a staff, the top of which they run into the cheese, and so taking up a piece of it they eat it. Of all kinds of magical divination they are ignorant, as Aristotle asserts in his book on Magic, and Dinon in the fifth book of his Histories. And this writer says, that the name of Zoroaster being interpreted means, a sacrifice to the stars; and Hermodorus makes the same statement. But Aristotle, in the first book of his Treatise on Philosophy, says, that the Magi are more ancient than the Egyptians; and that according to them there are two principles, a good demon and an evil demon, and that the name of the one is Jupiter or Oromasdes, and that of the other Pluto or Arimanius. And Hermippus gives the same account in the first book of his History of the Magi; and so does Eudoxus in his Period; and so does Theopompus in the eighth book of his History of the Affairs of Philip; and this last writer tells us also, that according to the Magi men will have a resurrection and be immortal, and that what exists now will exist hereafter under its own present name; and Eudemus of Rhodes coincides in this statement. But Hecataeus says, that according to their doctrines the gods also are beings who have been born. But Clearchus the Solensian, in his Treatise on Education says, that the Gymnosophists are descendants of the Magi; and some say that the Jews also are derived from them. Moreover, those who have written on the subject of the Magi condemn Herodotus; for they say that Xerxes would never have shot arrows against the sun, or have put fetters on the sea, as both sun and sea have been handed down by the Magi as gods, but that it was quite consistent for Xerxes to destroy the images of the gods.
VII. The following is the account that authors give of the philosophy of the Egyptians, as bearing on the gods and on justice. They say that the first principle is matter; then that the four elements were formed out of matter and divided, and that some animals were created, and that the sun and moon are gods, of whom the former is called Osiris and the latter Isis, and they are symbolised under the names of beetles and dragons, and hawks, and other animals, as Manetho tells us in his abridged account of Natural Philosophy, and Hecataeus confirms the statement in the first book of his History of the Philosophy of the Egyptians. They also make images of the gods, and assign them temples because they do not know the form of God. They consider that the world had a beginning and will have an end, and that it is a sphere; they think that the stars are fire, and that it is by a combination of them that the things on earth are generated; that the moon is eclipsed when it falls into the shadow of the earth; that the soul is eternal and migratory; that rain is caused by the changes of the atmosphere; and they enter into other speculations on points of natural history, as Hecataeus and Aristagoras inform us.
They also have made laws about justice, which they attribute to Mercury, and they consider those animals which are useful to be gods. They claim to themselves the merit of having been the inventors of geometry, and astrology, and arithmetic. So much then for the subject of invention.
VIII. But Pythagoras was the first person who invented the term Philosophy, and who called himself a philosopher; when he was conversing at Sicyon with Leon, who was tyrant of the Sicyonians or of the Phliasians (as Heraclides Ponticus relates in the book which he wrote about a dead woman); for he said that no man ought to be called wise, but only God. For formerly what is now called philosophy (philosophia) was called wisdom (sophia), and they who professed it were called wise men (sophoi), as being endowed with great acuteness and accuracy of mind; but now he who embraces wisdom is called a philosopher (philosophos).
But the wise men were also called Sophists. And not only they, but poets also were called Sophists: as Cratinus in his Archilochi calls Homer and Hesiod, while praising them highly.
IX. Now these were they who were accounted wise men. Thales, Solon, Periander, Cleobulus, Chilo, Bias, Pittacus. To these men add Anacharsis the Scythian, Myson the Chenean, Pherecydes the Syrian, and Epimenides the Cretan; and some add, Pisistratus, the tyrant: These then are they who were called the wise men.
X. But of Philosophy there arose two schools. One derived from Anaximander, the other from Pythagoras. Now, Thales had been the preceptor of Anaximander, and Pherecydes of Pythagoras. And the one school was called the Ionian, because Thales, being an Ionian (for he was a native of Miletus), had been the tutor of Anaximander; --but the other was called the Italian from Pythagoras, because he spent the chief part of his life in Italy. And the Ionic school ends with Clitomachus, and Chrysippus, and Theophrastus; and the Italian one with Epicurus; for Anaximander succeeded Thales, and he was succeeded again by Anaximenes, and he by Anaxagoras, and he by Archelaus, who was the master of Socrates, who was the originator of moral philosophy. And he was the master of the sect of the Socratic philosophers, and of Plato, who was the founder of the old Academy; and Plato's pupils were Speusippus and Xenocrates; and Polemo was the pupil of Xenocrates, and Crantor and Crates of Polemo. Crates again was the master of Arcesilaus, the founder of the Middle Academy, and his pupil was Lacydes, who gave the new Academy its distinctive principles. His pupil was Carneades, and he in his turn was the master of Clitomachus. And this school ends in this way with Clitomachus and Chrysippus.
Antisthenes was the pupil of Socrates, and the master of Diogenes the Cynic; and the pupil of Diogenes was Crates the Theban; Zeno the Cittiaean was his; Cleanthes was his; Chrysippus was his. Again it ends with Theophrastus in the following manner:
Aristotle was the pupil of Plato, Theophrastus the pupil of Aristotle; and in this way the Ionian school comes to an end.
Now the Italian school was carried on in this way. Pythagoras was the pupil of Pherecydes; his pupil was Telauges his son; he was the master of Xenophanes, and he of Parmenides; Parmenides of Zeno the Eleatic, he of Leucippus, he of Democritus: Democritus had many disciples, the most eminent of whom were Nausiphanes and Nausicydes, and they were the masters of Epicurus.
XI. Now, of Philosophers some were dogmatic and others were inclined to suspend their opinions. By dogmatic, I mean those who explain their opinions about matters, as if they could be comprehended. By those who suspend their opinions, I mean those who give no positive judgment, thinking that these things cannot be comprehended. And the former class have left many memorials of themselves; but the others have never written a line; as for instance, according to some people, Socrates, and Stilpo, and Philippus, and Menedemus, and Pyrrho, and Theodorus, and Carneades, and Bryson; and, as some people say, Pythagoras, and Aristo of Chios, except that he wrote a few letters. There are some men too who have written one work only, Melissus, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras; but Zeno wrote many works, Xenophanes still more; Democritus more, Aristotle more, Epicurus more, and Chrysippus more.
XII. Again, of philosophers some derived a surname from cities, as, the Elians, and Megaric sect, the Eretrians, and the Cyrenaics. Some from the places which they frequented, as the Academics and Stoics. Some from accidental circumstances, as the Peripatetics; or, from jests, as the Cynics.
Some again from their dispositions, as the Eudaemonics; some from an opinion, as the Elenctic, and Analogical schools. Some from their masters, as the Socratic and Epicurean philosophers; and so on. The Natural Philosophers were so called from their study of nature; the Ethical philosophers from their investigation of questions of morals (peri ta ethe).
The Dialecticians are they who devote themselves to quibbling on words.
XIII. Now there are three divisions of philosophy. Natural, Ethical, and Dialectic. Natural philosophy occupies itself about the world and the things in it; Ethical philosophy about life, and the things which concern us; Dialectics are conversant with the arguments by which both the others are supported.
Natural philosophy prevailed till the time of Archelaus; but after the time of Socrates, Ethical philosophy was predominant; and after the time of Zeno the Eleatic, Dialectic philosophy got the upper hand.
Ethical philosophy was subdivided into ten sects; the Academic, the Cyrenaic, the Elian, the Megaric, the Cynic, the Eretrian, the Dialectic, the Peripatetic, the Stoic, and the Epicurean. Of the old Academic school Plato was the president; of the middle, Arcesilaus; and of the New, Lacydes:--the Cyrenaic school was founded by Aristippus the Cyrenian; the Elian, by Phaedo, of Elis; the Megaric, by Euclid, of Megara; the Cynic, by Antisthenes, the Athenian; the Eretrian, by Menedemus, of Eretria; the Dialectic by Clitomachus, the Carthaginian; the Peripatetic, by Aristotle, the Stagirite; the Stoic, by Zeno, the Cittiaean; the Epicurean school derives its name from Epicurus, its founder.
But Hippobotus, in his Treatise on Sects, says that there are nine sects and schools: first, the Megaric; secondly, the Eretrian; thirdly, the Cyrenaic; fourthly, the Epicurean; fifthly, the Annicerean; sixthly, the Theodorean; seventhly, the sect of Zeno and the Stoics; eighthly, that of the Old Academy; and ninthly, the Peripatetic;--not counting either the Cynic, or the Eliac, or the Dialectic school. That also which is called the Pyhrronean is repudiated by many writers, on account of the obscurity of its principles.
But others consider that in some particulars it is a distinct sect, and in others not. For it does appear to be a sect--for what we call a sect, say they, is one which follows, or appears to follow, a principle which appears to it to be the true one; on which principle we correctly call the Sceptics a sect. But if by the name sect we understand those who incline to rules which are consistent with the principles which they profess, then the Pyrrhonean cannot be called a sect, for they have no rules or principles.
These, then, are the beginnings, these are the successive masters, these are the divisions, and schools of philosophy.
XIV. Moreover, it is not long ago, that a new Eclectic school was set up by Potamo, of Alexandria, who picked out of the doctrines of each school what pleased him most. And as he himself says, in his Elementary Instruction, he thinks that there are certain criteria of truth: first of all the faculty which judges, and this is the superior one; the other that which is the foundation of the judgment, being a most exact appearance of the objects. And the first principles of everything he calls matter, and the agent, and the quality, and the place. For they show out of what, and by what, and how, and where anything is done. The end is that to which everything is referred; namely, a life made perfect with every virtue, not without the natural and external qualities of the body.
But we must now speak of the men themselves; and first of all about Thales.
Notes by Yonge
1. "The religion of the ancient Persians was the worship of fire or of the elements, in which fire was symbolical of the Deity. At a later period in the time of the Greeks, the ancient worship was changed into the adoration of the stars (Sabaeism), especially of the sun and of the morning star. This religion was distinguished by a simple and majestic character. Its priests were called Magi. "-Tenneman's Manual of the History of Philosophy, Introd. ? 70.
2. "The Chaldeans were devoted to the worship of the stars and to astrology; the nature of their climate and country disposing them to it. The worship of the stars was revived by them and widely disseminated even subsequently to the Christian era. "-- -Tenneman's Manual of the History of Philosophy, Introd. ? 71.
3. "Cicero speaks of those who in India are accounted philosophers, living naked and enduring the greatest severity of winter without betraying any feeling of pain, and displaying the same insensibility when exposed to the flames. '--Tusc. Quaest. v. 27.
4. "The religion of the Britons was one of the most considerable parts of their government, and the Druids who were their priests, possessed great authority among them. Besides ministering at the altar, and directing all religious duties, they presided over the education of youth; they possessed both the civil and criminal jurisdiction; they decided all controversies among states as well as among private persons, and whoever refused to submit to their decree was exposed to the most severe penalties. The sentence of excommunication was pronounced against him; he was forbidden access to the sacrifices of public worship; he was debarred all intercourse with his fellow citizens even in the common affairs of life: his company was universally shunned as profane and dangerous, he was refused the protection of law, and death itself became an acceptable relief from the misery and infamy to which he was exposed. Thus the bonds of government, which were naturally loose among that rude and turbulent people, were happily corroborated by the terrors of their superstition.
"No species of superstition was ever more terrible than that of the Druids; besides the several penalties which it was in the power of the ecclesiastics to inflict in this world, they inculcated the eternal transmigration of souls, and thereby extended their authority as far as the fears of their timorous votaries. They practised their rites in dark groves or other secret recesses, and in order to throw a greater mystery over their religion, they communicated their doctrines only to the initiated, and strictly forbade the committing of them to writing, lest they should at any time be exposed to the examination of the profane and vulgar. Human sacrifices were practised among them; the spoils of war were often devoted to their divinities, and they punished with the severest tortures whoever dared to secrete any part of the consecrated offering. These treasures they kept secreted in woods and forests secured by no other guard than the terrrors of their religion; and their steady conquest over human avidity may be regarded as more signal than their prompting men to the most extraordinary and most violent efforts. No idolatrous worship ever attained such an ascendant over mankind as that of the ancient Gauls and Britons. And the Romans after their conquest, finding it impossible to reconcile those nations to the laws and institutions of their masters while it maintained its authority, were at last obliged to abolish it by penal statutes, a violence which had never in any other instance been resorted to by those tolerating conquerors. '--Hume's History of England, chap. 1. ? 1.
5. Zamolxis, or Zalmoxis, so called from the bear-skin (zalmos) in which he was wrapped as soon as he was born, was a Getan, and a slave cf Pythagoras at Samos; having been emancipated by his master, he travelled into Egypt; and on his return to his own country he introduced the ideas which he had acquired in his travels on the subject of civilisation, religion, and the immortality of the soul. He was made priest of the chief deity among the Getae, and was afterwards himself worshipped as a divine person. He was said to have lived in a subterraneous cavern for three years, and after that to have re-appeared among his countrymen. Herodotus however, who records these stories (iv. 95), expresses his disbelief of them, placing him before the time of Pythagoras by many years, and seems to incline to the belief that he was an indigenous Getan deity.
6. The real time of Zoroaster is, as may be supposed, very uncertain, but he is said by some eminent writers to have lived in the time of Darius Hystaspes; though others, apparently on better grounds, place him at a very far earlier date. He is not mentioned by Herodotus at all. His native country too is very uncertain. Some writers, among whom are Ctesias and Ammian, call him a Bactrian, while Porphyry speaks of him as a Chaldaean, and Pliny as a native of Proconnesus;--Niebuhr considers him a purely mythical personage. The great and fundamental article of the system (of the Persian theology) was the celebrated doctrine of the two principles; a bold and injudicious attempt of Eastern philosophy to reconcile the existence of moral and physical evil with the attributes of a beneficent Creator and governor of the world. The first and original being, in whom, or by whom the universe exists, is denominated, in the writings of Zoroaster, Time without bounds. . . . From either the blind or the intelligent operation of this infinite Time, which bears but too near an affinity to the Chaos of the Greeks, the two secondary but active principles of the universe were from all eternity produced; Ormusd and Ahriman, each of them possessed of the powers of creation, but each disposed by his invariable nature to exercise them with different designs; the principle of good is eternally absorbed in light, the principle of evil is eternally buried in darkness. The wise benevolence of Ormusd formed man capable of virtue, and abundantly provided his fair habitation with the materials of happiness. By his vigilant providence the motion of the planets, the order of the seasons, and the temperate mixture of the elements are preserved. But the maker of Ahriman has long since pierced Ormusd's Egg, or in other words, has violated the harmony of his works. Since that fatal irruption, the most minute articles of good and evil are intimately intermingled and agitated together; the rankest poisons spring up among the most salutary Plants; deluges, earthquakes, and conflagrations attest the conflict of nature, and the little world of man is perpetually shaken by vice and misfortune. While the rest of mankind are led away captives in the chains of their infernal enemy, the faithful Persian alone reserves his religious adoration for his friend and protector Ormusd, and fights under his banner of light, in the full confidence that he shall, in the last day, share the glory of his triumph. At that decisive period, the enlightened wisdom of goodness will render the power of Ormusd superior to the furious malice of his rival; Ahriman and his followers, disarmed and subdued, will sink into their native darkness, and virtue will maintain the eternal peace and harmony of the universe.
. . . As a legislator, Zoroaster "discovered a liberal concern for the public and private happiness seldom to be found among the visionary schemes of superstition. Fasting and celibacy, the common means of purchasing the divine favour, he condemns with abhorrence as a criminal rejection of the best gifts of Providence. "-Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, c. viii.
7. This is the account given by Virgil:
Spretae Ciconum quo munere matres
Inter sacra Deum nocturnique orgia Bacchi,
Discerptum latos juvenem sparsere per agros. -GEORG. IV. 520.
Which Dryden translates:
The Thracian matrons who the youth accus'd,
Of love disdain'd and marriage rites refus'd ;
With furies and nocturnal orgies fir'd,
At length against his sacred life conspir'd ;
Whom ev'n the savage beasts had spar'd they kill'd,
And strew'd his mangled limbs about the field.
Scanned and edited for Peitho's Web from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosopers, by Diogenes Laertius, Literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853
Note that some of Yonge's spelling of ancient names are different than more modern versions. Footnotes have been converted to endnotes.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF THALES
I. THALES, then, as Herodotus and Duris and Democritus say, was the son of Examyes and Cleobulina; of the family of the Thelidae, who are Phoenicians by descent, among the most noble of all the descendants of Cadmus and Agenor, as Plato testifies. And he was the first man to whom the name of Wise was given, when Damasias was Archon at Athens, in whose time also the seven wise men had that title given to them, as Demetrius Phalereus records in his Catalogue of the Archons. He was enrolled as a citizen at Miletus when he came thither with Neleus, who had been banished from Phoenicia; but a more common statement is that he was a native Milesian, of noble extraction.
II. After having been immersed in state affairs he applied himself to speculations in natural philosophy; though, as some people state, he left no writings behind him. For the book on Naval Astronomy, which is attributed to him is said in reality to be the work of Phocus the Samian. But Callimachus was aware that he was the discoverer of the Lesser Bear; for in his Iambics he speaks of him thus:
And, he, 'tis said, did first compute the stars
Which beam in Charles's wain, and guide the bark
Of the Phoenician sailor o'er the sea.
According to others he wrote two books, and no more, about the solstice and the equinox; thinking that everything else was easily to be comprehended. According to other statements, he is said to have been the first who studied astronomy, and who foretold the eclipses and motions of the sun, as Eudemus relates in his history of the discoveries made in astronomy; on which account Xenophanes and Herodotus praise him greatly; and Heraclitus and Democritus confirm this statement.
III. Some again (one of whom is Choerilus the poet) say that he was the first person who affirmed that the souls of men were immortal; and he was the first person, too, who discovered the path of the sun from one end of the ecliptic to the other; and who, as one account tells us, defined the magnitude of the sun as being seven hundred and twenty times as great as that of the moon. He was also the first person who called the last day of the month the thirtieth. And likewise the first to converse about natural philosophy, as some say. But Aristotle and Hippias say that he attributed souls also to lifeless things, forming his conjecture from the nature of the magnet, and of amber. And Pamphila relates that he, having learnt geometry from the Egyptians, was the first person to describe a right-angled triangle in a circle, and that he sacrificed an ox in honour of his discovery. But others, among whom is Apollodorus the calculator, say that it was Pythagoras who made this discovery. It was Thales also who carried to their greatest point of advancement the discoveries which Callimachus in his iambics says were first made by Euphorbus the Phrygian, such as those of the scalene angle, and of the triangle, and of other things which relate to investigations about lines. He seems also to have been a man of the greatest wisdom in political matters. For when Croesus sent to the Milesians to invite them to an alliance, he prevented them from agreeing to it, which step of his, as Cyrus got the victory, proved the salvation of the city. But Clytus relates, as Heraclides assures us, that he was attached to a solitary and recluse life.
IV. Some assert that he was married, and that he had a son named Cybisthus; others, on the contrary, say that he never had a wife, but that he adopted the son of his sister; and that once being asked why he did not himself become a father, he answered, that it was because he was fond of children. They say, too, that when his mother exhorted him to marry, he said, "No, by Jove, it is not yet time. " And afterwards, when he was past his youth, and she was again pressing him earnestly, he said, "It is no longer time. "
V. Hieronymus, of Rhodes, also tells us, in the second book of his Miscellaneous Memoranda, that when he was desirous to show that it was easy to get rich, he, foreseeing that there would be a great crop of olives, took some large plantations of olive trees, and so made a great deal of money.
VI. He asserted water to be the principle of all things, and that the world had life, and was full of daemons: they say, too, that he was the original definer of the seasons of the year, and that it was he who divided the year into three hundred and sixty-five days. And he never had any teacher except during the time that he went to Egypt, and associated with the priests. Hieronymus also says that he measured the Pyramids: watching their shadow, and calculating when they were of the same size as that was. He lived with Thrasybulus the tyrant of Miletus, as we are informed by Minyas.
VII. Now it is known to every one what happened with respect to the tripod that was found by the fishermen and sent to the wise men by the people of the Milesians, For they say that some Ionian youths bought a cast of their nets from some Milesian fishermen. And when the tripod was drawn up in the net there was a dispute about it; until the Milesians sent to Delphi: and the God gave them the following answer:
You ask about the tripod, to whom you shall present it;
'Tis for the wisest, I reply, that fortune surely meant it.
Accordingly they gave it to Thales, and he gave it to someone, who again handed it over to another, till it came to Solon. But he said that it was the God himself who was the first in wisdom; and so he sent it to Delphi. But Callimachus gives a different account of this in his Iambic taking the tradition which he mentions from Leander the Milesian; for he says that a certain Arcadian of the name of Bathycles, when dying, left a goblet behind him with an injunction that it should be given to the first of the wise men. And it was given to Thales, and went the whole circle till it came back to Thales, on which he sent it to Apollo Didymaeus, adding (according to Callimachus,) the following distich:
Thales, who's twice received me as a prize,
Gives me to him who rules the race of Neleus.
And the prose inscription runs thus:
Thales the son of Examyas, a Milesian, offers this to Apollo Didymaeus, having twice received it from the Greeks as the reward for virtue.
And the name of the son of Bathycles who carved the goblet about from one to the other, was Thyrion, as Eleusis tells us in his History of Achilles. And Alexander the Myndian agrees with him in the ninth book of his Traditions. But Eudoxus of Cnidos, and Euanthes of Miletus, say that one of the friends of Croesus received from the king a golden goblet, for the purpose of giving it to the wisest of the Greeks; and that he gave it to Thales, and that it came round to Chilon, and that he inquired of the God at Delphi who was wiser than himself; and that the God replied, Myson, whom we shall mention hereafter. (He is the man whom Eudoxus places among the seven wise men instead of Cleobulus ; but Plato inserts his name instead of Periander. ) The God accordingly made this reply concerning him:
I say that Myson the Aetoean sage,
The citizen of Chen, is wiser far
In his deep mind than you.
The person who went to the temple to ask the question was Anacharsis ; but again Daimachus the Platonic philosopher, and Clearchus, state that the goblet was sent by Croesus to Pittacus, and so was carried round to the different men. But Andron, in his book called The Tripod, says that the Argives offered the tripod as a prize for excellence to the wisest of the Greeks; and that Aristodemus, a Spartan, was judged to deserve it, but that he yielded the palm to Chilon; and Alcaeus mentions Aristodemus in these lines:
And so they say Aristodemus once
Uttered a truthful speech in noble Sparta:
'Tis money makes the man; and he who's none,
Is counted neither good nor honourable.
But some say that a vessel fully loaded was sent by Periander to Thrasybulus the tyrant of the Milesians; and that as the ship was wrecked in the sea, near the island of Cos, this tripod was afterwards found by some fishermen. Phanodicus says that it was found in the sea near Athens, and so brought into the city; and then, after an assembly had been held to decide on the disposal, it was sent to Bias--and the reason why we will mention in our account of Bias. Others say that this goblet had been made by Vulcan and presented by the Gods to Pelops, on his marriage; and that subsequently it came into the possession of Menelaus, and was taken away by Paris when he carried off Helen, and was thrown into the sea near Cos by her, as she said that it would become a cause of battle. And after some time, some of the citizens of Lebedos having bought a net, this tripod was brought up in it; and as they quarrelled with the fishermen about it, they went to Cos; and not being able to get the matter settled there, they laid it before the Milesians, as Miletus was their metropolis; and they sent ambassadors, who were treated with neglect, on which account they made war on the Coans; and after each side had met with many revolutions of fortune, an oracle directed that the tripod should be given to the wisest; and then both parties agreed that it belonged to Thales: and he, after it had gone the circuit of all the wise men, presented it to the Didymaean Apollo. Now, the assignation of the oracle was given to the Coans in the following words:
The war between the brave Ionian race
And the proud Meropes will never cease,
Till the rich golden tripod which the God,
Its maker, cast beneath the briny waves,
Is from your city sent, and justly given
To that wise being who knows all present things,
And all that's past, and all that is to come.
And the reply given to the Milesians was
You ask about the tripod
and so on, as I have related it before. And now we have said enough on this subject.
But Hermippus, in his Lives, refers to Thales what has been by some people reported of Socrates; for he recites that he used to say that he thanked fortune for three things: first of all, that he had been born a man and not a beast; secondly, that he was a man and not a woman; and thirdly, that he was a Greek and not a barbarian.
VIII. It is said that once he was led out of his house by an old woman for the purpose of observing the stars, and he fell into a ditch and bewailed himself, on which the old woman said to him--"Do you, O Thales, who cannot see what is under your feet, think that you shall understand what is in heaven? " Timon also knew that he was an astronomer, and in his Silli he praises him, saying:
Like Thales, wisest of the seven sages,
That great astronomer.
And Lobon, of Argos, says, that which was written by him extends to about two hundred verses; and that the following inscription is engraved upon his statue:
Miletus, fairest of Ionian cities,
Gave birth to Thales, great astronomer,
Wisest of mortals in all kinds of knowledge.
IX. And these are quoted as some of his lines :
It is not many words that real wisdom proves;
Breathe rather one wise thought,
Select one worthy object,
So shall you best the endless prate of silly men reprove. --
And the following are quoted as sayings of his: "God is the most ancient of all things, for he had no birth: the world is the most beautiful of things, for it is the work of God: place is the greatest of things, for it contains all things: intellect is the swiftest of things, for it runs through everything: necessity is the strongest of things, for it rules everything: time is the wisest of things, for it finds out everything. "
He said also that there was no difference between life and death. "Why, then," said some one to him, "do not you die? " "Because," said he, "it does make no difference. " A man asked him which was made first, night or day, and he replied "Night was made first by one day. " Another man asked him whether a man who did wrong, could escape the notice of the Gods. "No, not even if he thinks wrong," said he. An adulterer inquired of him whether he should swear that he had not committed adultery. "Perjury," said he, "is no worse than adultery. " When he was asked what was very difficult, he said, "To know one's self. " And what was easy, "To advise another. " What was most pleasant? "To be successful. " To the question, "What is the divinity? " he replied "That which has neither beginning nor end. " When asked what hard thing he had seen, he said, "An old man a tyrant. " When the question was put to him how a man might most easily endure misfortune, he said, "If he saw his enemies more unfortunate still. " When asked how men might live most virtuously and most justly, he said, "If we never do ourselves what we blame in others. " To the question, "Who was happy? " he made answer. "He who is healthy in his body, easy in his circumstances, and well-instructed as to his mind. " He said that men ought to remember those friends who were absent as well as those who were present, and not to care about adorning their faces, but to be beautified by their studies. "Do not," said he, "get rich by evil actions, and let not any one ever be able to reproach you with speaking against those who partake of your friendship. All the assistance that you give to your parents, the same you have a right to expect from your children. " He said that the reason of the Nile overflowing, was, that its streams were beaten back by the Etesian winds blowing in a contrary direction.
X. Apollodorus, in his Chronicles, says, that Thales was born in the first year of the thirty-fifth Olympiad; and he died at the age of seventy-eight years, or according to the statement of Sosicrates, at the age of ninety; for he died in the fifty-eighth Olympiad, having lived in the time of Croesus, to whom he promised that he would enable him to pass the Halys without a bridge, by turning the course of the river.
XI. There have also been other men of the name of Thales, as Demetrius of Magnesia says, in his Treatise on People and Things of the Same Name; of whom five are particularly mentioned, an orator of Calatia of a very affected style of eloquence; a painter of Sicyon, a great man; the third was one who lived in very ancient times, in the age of Homer and Hesiod and Lycurgus ; the fourth is a man who is mentioned by Duris in his work On Painting; the fifth is a more modern person, of no great reputation, who is mentioned by Dionysius in his Criticisms.
XII. But this wise Thales died while present as a spectator at a gymnastic contest, being worn out with heat and thirst and weakness, for he was very old, and the following inscription was placed on his tomb:
You see this tomb is small--but recollect,
The fame of Thales reaches to the skies.
I have also myself composed this epigram on him in the first book of my epigrams or poems in various metres:
O mighty sun our wisest Thales sat
Spectator of the games, when you did seize upon him;
But you were right to take him near yourself,
Now that his aged sight could scarcely reach to heaven.
XIII. The apophthegm, "know yourself," is his; though Antisthenes in his Successions, says that it belongs to Phemonoe, but that Chilon appropriated it as his own.
XIV. Now concerning the seven, (for it is well here to speak of them all together,) the following traditions are handed down. Damon the Cyrenaean, who wrote about the philosophers, reproaches them all, but most especially the seven. And Anaximenes says, that they all applied themselves to poetry. But Dicaearchus says, that they were neither wise men nor philosophers, but merely shrewd men, who had studied legislation. And Archetimus, the Syracusian, wrote an account of their having a meeting at the palace of Cypselus, at which he says that he himself was present. Ephorus says that they all except Thales met at the court of Croesus. And some say that they also met at the Pandionium,(1) and at Corinth, and at Delphi. There is a good deal of disagreement between different writers with respect to their apophthegms, as the same one is attributed by them to various authors. For instance there is the epigram:
Chilon, the Spartan sage, this sentence said:
Seek no excess--all timely things are good
There is also a difference of opinion with respect to their number. Leander inserts in the number instead of Cleobulus and Myson, Leophantus Gorsias, a native of either Lebedos or Ephesus; and Epimenides, the Cretan; Plato, in his Protagoras, reckons Myson among them instead of Periander. And Ephorus mentions Anacharsis in the place of Myson; some also add Pythagoras to the number. Dicaearchus speaks of four, as universally agreed upon, Thales, Bias, Pittacus, and Solon; and then enumerates six more, of whom we are to select three, namely, Aristodemus, Pamphilus, Chilon the Lacedaemonian, Cleobulus, Anacharsis, and Periander. Some add Acusilaus of Argos, the son of Cabas, or Scabras. But Hermippus, in his Treatise on the Wise Men says that there were altogether seventeen, out of whom different authors selected different individuals to make up the seven. These seventeen were Solon, Thales, Pittacus, Bias, Chilon, Myson, Cleobulus, Periander, Anacharsis, Acusilaus, Epimenides, Leophantus, Pherecydes, Aristodemus, Pythagoras, Lasus the son of Charmantides, or Sisymbrinus, or as Aristoxenus calls him the son of Chabrinus, a citizen of Hermione, and Anaxagoras.
