It is said, that at the time of the passage of the
Hellespont
by Xerxes, he was twenty years old, and that he lived to the age of seventy-two.
Diogenes Laertius
" He used to say "That it was better to have one friend of great value, than many friends who were good for nothing.
" Another saying of his was, that "The forum was an established place for men to cheat one another, and behave covetously.
" Being once insulted by a young man at a drinking party, he said, "O, young man, if now that you are young you cannot bear wine, when you are old you will have to bear water.
"
VI. Of things which are of use in life, he is said to have been the inventor of the anchor, and of the potter's wheel.
VII. The following letter of his is extant:
ANACHARSIS TO CROESUS.
O king of the Lydians, I am come to the country of the Greeks, in order to become acquainted with their customs and institutions; but I have no need of gold, and shall be quite contented if I return to Scythia a better man than I left it. However I will come to Sardis, as I think it very desirable to become a friend of yours.
1. Some propose to read karpon, fruit, instead of kapnon, smoke, here; others explain this saying as meaning that the Greeks avoided houses on the hills in order not to be annoyed with the smoke from the low cottages, and yet did not use coal, but wood, which made more smoke.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF ANACHARSIS
I. ANACHARSIS the Scythian was the son of Gnurus, and the brother of Caduides the king of the Scythians; but his mother was a Grecian woman; owing to which circumstance he understood both languages.
II. He wrote about the laws existing among the Scythians, and also about those in force among the Greeks, urging men to adopt a temperate course of life; and he wrote also about war, his works being in verse, and amounting to eight hundred lines: he gave occasion for a proverb, because he used great freedom of speech, so that people called such freedom the Scythian conversation.
III. But Sosicrates says that he came to Athens in the forty-seventh Olympiad, in the archonship of Eucrates. And Hermippus asserts that he came to Solon's house, and ordered one of the servants to go and tell his master that Anacharsis was come to visit him, and was desirous to see him, and, if possible, to enter into relations of hospitality with him. But when the servant had given the message, he was ordered by Solon to reply to him that, "Men generally limited such alliances to their own countrymen. " In reply to this Anacharsis entered the house, and told the servant that now he was in Solon's country, and that it was quite consistent for them to become connected with one another in this way. On this, Solon admired the readiness of the man, and admitted him, and made him one of his greatest friends.
IV. But after some time, when he had returned to Scythia, and shown a purpose to abrogate the existing institutions of his country, being exceedingly earnest, in his fondness for Grecian customs, he was shot by his brother while he was out hunting, and so he died, saying, "That he was saved on account of the sense and eloquence which he had brought from Greece, but slain in consequence of envy in his own family. " Some, however, relate that he was slain while performing some Grecian sacrificatory rites. And we have written this epigram on him:
When Anacharsis to his land returned,
His mind was turn'd, so that he wished to make
His countrymen all live in Grecian fashion--
So, ere his words had well escaped his lips,
A winged arrow bore him to the Gods.
V. He said that a vine bore three bunches of grapes. The first, the bunch of pleasure; the second, that of drunkenness; the third that of disgust. He also said that he marvelled that among the Greeks, those who were skilful in a thing contend together; but those who have no such skill act as judges of the contest. Being once asked how a person might be made not fond of drinking, he said, "If he always keeps in view the indecorous actions of drunken men. " He used also to say, that he marvelled how the Greeks, who make laws against those who behave with insolence, honour Athletae because of their beating one another. When he had been informed that the sides of a ship were four fingers thick, he said, "That those who sailed in one were removed by just that distance from death. " He used to say that oil was a provocative of madness, "because Athletae, when anointed in the oil, attacked one another with mad fury. "
"How is it," he used to say, "that those who forbid men to speak falsely, tell lies openly in their vintners' shops? " It was a saying of his, that he "marvelled why the Greeks, at the beginning of a banquet, drink out of small cups, but when they have drunk a good deal, then they turn to large goblets. " And this inscription is on his statues--"Restrain your tongues, your appetites, and your passions. " He was once asked if the flute was known among the Scythians; and he said, "No, nor the vine either. " At another time, the question was put to him, which was the safest kind of vessel? and he said, "That which is brought into dock. " He said, too, that the strangest things that he had seen among the Greeks was, that "They left the smoke1 in the mountains, and carried the wood down to their cities. " Once, when he was asked, which were the more numerous, the living or the dead? he said, "Under which head do you class those who are at sea. " Being reproached by an Athenian for being a Scythian, he said, "Well, my country is a disgrace to me, but you are a disgrace to your country. " When he was asked what there was among men which was both good and bad, he replied, "The tongue. " He used to say "That it was better to have one friend of great value, than many friends who were good for nothing. " Another saying of his was, that "The forum was an established place for men to cheat one another, and behave covetously. " Being once insulted by a young man at a drinking party, he said, "O, young man, if now that you are young you cannot bear wine, when you are old you will have to bear water. "
VI. Of things which are of use in life, he is said to have been the inventor of the anchor, and of the potter's wheel.
VII. The following letter of his is extant:
ANACHARSIS TO CROESUS.
O king of the Lydians, I am come to the country of the Greeks, in order to become acquainted with their customs and institutions; but I have no need of gold, and shall be quite contented if I return to Scythia a better man than I left it. However I will come to Sardis, as I think it very desirable to become a friend of yours.
1. Some propose to read karpon, fruit, instead of kapnon, smoke, here; others explain this saying as meaning that the Greeks avoided houses on the hills in order not to be annoyed with the smoke from the low cottages, and yet did not use coal, but wood, which made more smoke.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF MYSON
I. MYSON, the son of Strymon, as Sosicrates states, quoting Hermippus as his authority, a Chenean by birth, of some Aetaean or Laconian village, is reckoned one of the seven wise men, and they say that his father was tyrant of his country. It is said by some writers that when Anacharsis inquired if any one was wiser than he, the priestess at Delphi gave the answer which has been already quoted in the life of Thales in reference to Chilon:
I say that Myson the Aetaean sage,
The citizen of Chen, is wiser far
In his deep mind than you.
And that he, having taken a great deal of trouble, came to the village, and found him in the summer season fitting a handle to a plough, and he addressed him, "O Myson, this is not now the season for the plough. " "Indeed," said he, "it is a capital season for preparing one;" but others say, that the words of the oracle are the Etean sage, and they raise the question, what the word Etean means. So Parmenides says, that it is a borough of Laconia, of which Myson was a native; but Sosicrates, in his Successions says, that he was an Etean on his father's side, and a Chenean by his mother's. But Euthyphro, the son of Heraclides Ponticus, says that he was a Cretan, for that Etea was a city of Crete.
II. And Anaxilaus says that he was an Arcadian. Hipponax also mentions him, saying, "And Myson, whom Apollo stated to be the most prudent of all men. " But Aristoxenus, in his Miscellanies, says that his habits were not very different from those of Timon and Apemantus, for that he was a misanthrope. And that accordingly he was one day found in Lacedaemon laughing by himself in a solitary place, and when some one came up to him on a sudden and asked him why he laughed when he was by himself, he said, "For that very reason. " Aristoxenus also says that he was not thought much of, because he was not a native of any city, but only of a village, and that too one of no great note; and according to him, it is on account of this obscurity of his that some people attribute his sayings and doings to Pisistratus the tyrant, but he excepts Plato the philosopher, for he mentions Myson in his Protagoras, placing him among the wise men instead of Periander.
III. It used to be a common saying of his that men ought not to seek for things in words, but for words in things; for that things are not made on account of words, but that words are put together for the sake of things.
IV. He died when he had lived ninety-seven years.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF EPIMENIDES
I. EPIMENIDES, as Theopompus and many other writers tell us, was the son of a man named Phaedrus*, but some call him the son of Dosiadas; and others of Agesarchus. He was a Cretan by birth, of the city of Cnossus; but because he let his hair grow long, he did not look like a Cretan.
II. He once, when he was sent by his father into the fields to look for a sheep, turned out of the road at mid-day and lay down in a certain cave and fell asleep and slept there fifty-seven years; and after that, when he awoke, he went on looking for the sheep, thinking that he had been taking a short nap; but as he could not find it he went on to the field and there he found everything changed, and the estate in another person's possession, and so he came back again to the city in great perplexity, and as he was going into his own house he met some people who asked him who he was, until at last he found his younger brother who had now become an old man, and from him he learnt all the truth.
III. And when he was recognized he was considered by the Greeks as a person especially beloved by the Gods, on which account when the Athenians were afflicted by a plague, and the priestess at Delphi enjoined them to purify their city; they sent a ship and Nicias the son of Niceratus to Crete, to invite Epimenides to Athens; and he, coming there in the forty-sixth Olympiad, purified the city and eradicated the plague for that time; he took some black sheep and some white ones and led them up to the Areopagus, and from thence he let them go wherever they chose, having ordered the attendants to follow them, and wherever any one of them lay down they were to sacrifice him to the God who was the patron of the spot, and so the evil was stayed; and owing to this one may even now find in the different boroughs of the Athenians altars without names, which are a sort of memorial of the propitiation of the Gods that then took place. Some said that the cause of the plague was the pollution contracted by the city in the matter of Cylon, and that Epimenides pointed out to the Athenians how to get rid of it, and that in consequence they put to death two young men, Cratinus and Ctesilius*, and that thus the pestilence was put an end to.
And the Athenians passed a vote to give him a talent and a ship to convey him back to Crete, but he would not accept the money, but made a treaty of friendship and alliance between the Cnossians and Athenians.
IV. And not long after he had returned home he died, as Phlegon relates in his book on long-lived people, after he had lived a hundred and fifty-seven years; but as the Cretans report he had lived two hundred and ninety-nine; but as Xenophanes the Colophonian, states that he had heard it reported, he was a hundred and fifty-four years old when he died.
V. He wrote a poem of five thousand verses on the Generation and Theogony of the Curetes and Corybantes, and another poem of six thousand five hundred verses on the building of the Argo and the expedition of Jason to Colchis.
VI. He also wrote a treatise in prose on the Sacrifices in Crete, and the Cretan Constitution, and on Minos and Rhadamanthus, occupying four thousand lines.
Likewise he built at Athens the temple which is there dedicated to the venerable goddesses, as Lobon the Augur says in his book on Poets; and he is said to have been the first person who purified houses and lands, and who built temples.
VII. There are some people who assert that he did not sleep for the length of time that has been mentioned above, but that he was absent from his country for a considerable period, occupying himself with the anatomisation and examination of roots.
VIII. A letter of his is quoted, addressed to Solon the lawgiver, in which he discusses the constitution which Minos gave the Cretans. But Demetrius the Magnesian, in his treatise on Poets and Prose writers of the same name as one another, attempts to prove that the letter is a modern one, and is not written in the Cretan but in the Attic dialect, and the new Attic too.
IX. But I have also discovered another letter of his which runs thus:
EPIMENIDES TO SOLON.
Be of good cheer, my friend; for if Pisistratus had imposed his laws on the Athenians, they being habituated to slavery and not accustomed to good laws previously, he would have maintained his dominion for ever, succeeding easily in enslaving his fellow countrymen; but as it is, he is lording it over men who are no cowards, but who remember the precepts of Solon and are indignant at their bonds, and who will not endure the supremacy of a tyrant. But if Pisistratus does possess the city to-day, still I have no expectation that the supreme power will ever descend to his children. For it is impossible that men who have lived in freedom and in the enjoyment of most excellent laws should be slaves permanently; but as for yourself, do not you go wandering about at random, but come and visit me, for here there is no supreme ruler to be formidable to you; but if while you are wandering about any of the friends of Pisistratus should fall in with you, I fear you might suffer some misfortune.
He wrote thus.
X. But Demetrius says that some writers report that he used to receive food from the nymphs and keep it in a bullock's hoof; and that eating it in small quantities he never required any evacuations, and was never seen eating. And Timaeus mentions him in his second book.
XI. Some authors say also that the Cretans sacrifice to him as a god, for they say that he was the wisest of men; and accordingly, that when he saw the port of Munychia,1 at Athens, he said that the Athenians did not know how many evils that place would bring upon them: since, if they did, they would tear it to pieces with their teeth; and he said this a long time before the event to which he alluded. It is said also, that he at first called himself Aeacus; and that he foretold to the Lacedaemonians the defeat which they should suffer from the Arcadians; and that he pretended that he had lived several times. But Theopompus, in his Strange Stories, says that when he was building the temple of the Nymphs, a voice burst forth from heaven;--"Oh! Epimenides, build this temple, not for the Nymphs but for Jupiter. " He also foretold to the Cretans the defeat of the Lacedaemonians by the Arcadians as has been said before. And, indeed, they were beaten at Orchomenos.
XII. He pretended also, that he grew old rapidly, in the same number of days as he had been years asleep; at least, so Theopompus says. But Mysonianus*, in his Coincidences, says, that the Cretans call him one of the Curetes. And the Lacedaemonians preserve his body among them, in obedience to some oracle, as Sosilius the Lacedaemonian says.
XIII. There were also two other Epimenides, one the genealogist; the other, the man who wrote a history of Rhodes in the Doric dialect.
1. This refers to the result of the war which Antipater, who became regent of Macedonia on the death of Alexander the Great, carried on against the confederacy of Greek states, of which Athens was the head; and in which, after having defeated them at Cranon, he compelled the Athenians to abolish the democracy, and to admit a garrison into Munychia.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF PHERECYDES
I. PHERECYDES was a Syrian, the son of Babys, and, as Alexander says, in his Successions, he had been a pupil of Pittacus.
II. Theopompus says that he was the first person who ever wrote among the Greeks on the subject of Natural Philosophy and the Gods. And there are many marvellous stories told of him. For it is said that he was walking along the sea-shore at Samos, and that seeing a ship sailing by with a fair wind, he said that it would soon sink; and presently it sank before their eyes. At another time he was drinking some water which had been drawn up out of a well, and he foretold that within three days there would be an earthquake; and there was one. And as he was going up to Olympia, and had arrived at Messene, he advised his entertainer, Perilaus, to migrate from the city with all his family, but that Perilaus would not be guided by him; and afterwards Messene was taken.
III. And he is said to have told the Lacedaemonians to honour neither gold nor silver, as Theopompus says in his Marvels; and it is reported that Hercules laid this injunction on him in a dream, and that the same night he appeared also to the kings of Sparta, and enjoined them to be guided by Pherecydes; but some attribute these stories to Pythagoras.
IV. And Hermippus relates that when there was a war between the Ephesians and Magnesians, he, wishing the Ephesians to conquer, asked some one, who was passing by, from whence he came? and when he said, "From Ephesus," "Drag me now," said he, "by the legs, and place me in the territory of the Magnesians, and tell your fellow countrymen to bury me there after they have got the victory; and that he went and reported that Pherecydes had given him this order. And so they went forth the next day and defeated the Magnesians; and as Pherecydes was dead, they buried him there, and paid him very splendid honours.
V. But some writers say that he went to Delphi, and threw himself down from the Corycian hill; Aristoxenus, in his History of Pythagoras and his Friends, says that Pherecydes fell sick and died, and was buried by Pythagoras in Delos. But others say that he died of the lousy disease; and when Pythagoras came to see him, and asked him how he was, he put his finger through the door, and said, "You may see by my skin. " And from this circumstance that expression passed into a proverb among the philosophers, when affairs are going on badly; and those who apply it to affairs that are going on well, make a blunder. He used to say, also, that the Gods call their table thuoros.
VI. But Andron, the Ephesian, says that there were two men of the name of Pherecydes, both Syrians: one an astronomer, and the other a writer on God and the Divine Nature; and that this last was the son of Babys, who was also the master of Pythagoras. But Eratosthenes asserts that there was but one, who was a Syrian; and that the other Pherecydes was an Athenian, a genealogist; and the work of the Syrian Pherecydes is preserved and it begins thus:--"Jupiter, and Time, and Chthon existed externally. " And the name of Cthonia became Tellus, after Jupiter gave it to her as a reward. A sun-dial is also preserved, in the island of Syra, of his making.
VII. But Duris, in the second book of his Boundaries, says that this epigram was written upon him:
The limit of all wisdom is in me;
And would be, were it larger. But report
To my Pythagoras that he's the first
Of all the men that tread the Grecian soil;
I shall not speak falsehood, saying this.
And Ion, the Chian, says of him:
Adorned with valour while alive, and modesty,
Now that he's dead he still exists in peace;
For, like the wise Pythagoras, he studied
The manners and the minds of many nations.
And I myself have composed an epigram on him in the Pherecratean metre :
The story is reported,
That noble Pherecydes
Whom Syros calls her own,
Was eaten up by lice;
And so he bade his friends,
Convey his corpse away
To the Magnesian land,
That he might victory give
To holy Ephesus.
For well the God had said,
(Though he alone did know
Th' oracular prediction),
That this was fate's decree.
So in that land he lies.
This then is surely true,
That those who're really wise
Are useful while alive,
And e'en when breath has left them.
VIII. And he flourished about the fifty-ninth Olympiad. There is a letter of his extant in the following terms:
PHERECYDES TO THALES.
May you die happily when fate overtakes you. Disease has seized upon me at the same time that I received your letter. I am all over lice, and suffering likewise under a low fever. Accordingly, I have charged my servants to convey this book of mine to you, after they have buried me. And do you, if you think fit, after consulting with the other wise men, publish it; but if you do not approve of doing so, then keep it unpublished, for I am not entirely pleased with it myself. The subject is not one about which there is any certain knowledge, nor do I undertake to say that I have arrived at the truth; but I have advanced arguments, from which any one who occupies himself with speculations on the divine nature, may make a selection; and as to other points, he must exercise his intellect, for I speak obscurely throughout. I, myself, as I am afflicted more severely by this disease every day, no longer admit any physicians, or any of my friends. But when they stand at the door, and ask me how I am, I put out my finger to them through the opening of the door, and show them how I am eaten up with the evil; and I desired them to come to-morrow to the funeral of Pherecydes.
These, then, are they who were called wise men; to which list some writers add the name of Pisistratus. But we must also speak of the philosophers. And we will begin first with the Ionic philosophy, the founder of which school was Thales, who was the master of Anaximander.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF ANAXIMANDER
I. ANAXIMANDER, the son of Praxiadas, was a citizen of Miletus.
II. He used to assert that the principle and primary element of all things was the Infinity, giving no exact definition as to whether he meant air or water, or anything else. And he said that the parts were susceptible of change, but that the whole was unchangeable; and that the earth lay in the middle, being placed there as a sort of centre, of a spherical shape. The moon, he said, had a borrowed light, and borrowed it from the sun; and the sun he affirmed to be not less than the earth, and the purest possible fire.
III. He also was the first discoverer of the gnomon; and he placed some in Lacedaemon on the sun-dials there, as Favorinus says in his Universal History, and they showed the solstices and the equinoxes; he also made clocks. He was the first person, too, who drew a map of the earth and sea, and he also made a globe; and he published a concise statement of whatever opinions he embraced or entertained; and this treatise was met with by Apollodorus the Athenian.
IV. And Apollodorus, in his Chronicles, states, that in the second year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad, he was sixty-four years old. And soon after he died, having flourished much about the same time as Polycrates, the tyrant, of Samos. They say that when he sang, the children laughed; and that he, hearing of this, said, "We must then sing better for the sake of the children. "
V. There was also another Anaximander, a historian; and he too was a Milesian, and wrote in the Ionic dialect.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF ANAXAGORAS
I. ANAXAGORAS, the son of Hegesibulus, or Eubulus, was a citizen of Clazomenae. He was a pupil of Anaximenes, and was the first philosopher who attributed mind to matter, beginning his treatise on the subject in the following manner (and the whole treatise is written in a most beautiful and magnificent style): "All things were mixed up together; then Mind came and arranged them all in distinct order. " On which account he himself got the same name of Mind. And Timon speaks thus of him in his Silli:
They say too that wise Anaxagoras,
Deserves immortal fame; they call him Mind,
Because, as he doth teach, Mind came in season,
Arranging all which was confus'd before.
II. He was eminent for his noble birth and for his riches, and still more so for his magnanimity, inasmuch as he gave up all his patrimony to his relations; and being blamed by them for his neglect of his estate "Why, then," said he, "do not you take care of it? " And at last he abandoned it entirely, and devoted himself to the contemplation of subjects of natural philosophy, disregarding politics. So that once when some said to him "You have no affection for your country," "Be silent," said he, "for I have the greatest affection for my country," pointing up to heaven.
III.
It is said, that at the time of the passage of the Hellespont by Xerxes, he was twenty years old, and that he lived to the age of seventy-two. But Apollodorus, in his Chronicles, says that he flourished in the seventieth Olympiad, and that he died in the first year of the seventy-eighth. And he began to study philosophy at Athens, in the archonship of Callias, being twenty years of age, as Demetrius Phalerius tells us in his Catalogue of the Archons, and they say that he remained at Athens thirty years.
IV. He asserted that the sun was a mass of burning iron, greater than Peloponnesus; (but some attribute this doctrine to Tantalus), and that the moon contained houses, and also hills and ravines: and that the primary elements of everything were similarities of parts; for as we say that gold consists of a quantity of grains combined together, so too is the universe formed of a number of small bodies of similar parts. He further taught that Mind was the principle of motion: and that of bodies the heavy ones, such as the earth, occupied the lower situations; and the light ones, such as fire, occupied the higher places, and that the middle spaces were assigned to water and air. And thus that the sea rested upon the earth, which was broad, the moisture being all evaporated by the sun. And he said that the stars originally moved about in irregular confusion, so that at first the pole star, which is continually visible, always appeared in the zenith, but that afterwards it acquired a certain declination. And that the milky way was a reflection of the light of the sun when the stars did not appear. The comets he considered to be a concourse of planets emitting rays: and the shooting stars he thought were sparks as it were leaping from the firmament. The winds he thought were caused by the rarification of the atmosphere, which was produced by the sun. Thunder, he said, was produced by the collision of the clouds; and lightning by the rubbing together of the clouds. Earthquakes, he said, were produced by the return of the air into the earth. All animals he considered were originally generated out of moisture, and heat, and earthy particles: and subsequently from one another. And males he considered were derived from those on the right hand, and females from those on the left.
V. They say, also, that he predicted a fall of the stones which fell near Aegospotami, and which he said would fall from the sun: on which account Euripides, who was a disciple of his, said in his Phaethon that the sun was a golden clod of earth. He went once to Olympia wrapped in a leathern cloak as if it were going to rain; and it did rain. And they say that he once replied to a man who asked him whether the mountains at Lampsacus would ever become sea, "Yes, if time lasts long enough. "
VI. Being once asked for what end he had been born, he said, "For the contemplation of the sun, and moon, and heaven. " A man once said to him, "You have lost the Athenians;" "No," said he, "they have lost me. " When he beheld the tomb of Mausolus, he said, "A costly tomb is an image of a petrified estate. " And he comforted a man who was grieving because he was dying in a foreign land, by telling him, "The descent to hell is the same from every place. "
VII. He appears to have been the first person (according to the account given by Favorinus in his Universal History), who said that the Poem of Homer was composed in praise of virtue and justice: and Metro, of Lampsacus, who was a friend of his, adopted this opinion, and advocated it energetically, and Metrodorus was the first who seriously studied the natural philosophy developed in the writings of the great poet.
VIII. Anaxagoras was also the first man who ever wrote a work in prose; and Silenus, in the first book of his Histories, says, that in the archonship of Lysanias a large stone fell from heaven; and that in reference to this event Anaxagoras said, that the whole heaven was composed of stones, and that by its rapid revolutions they were all held together; and when those revolutions get slower, they fall down.
IX. Of his trial there are different accounts given. For Sotion, in his Succession of the Philosophers, says, that he was persecuted for impiety by Cleon because he said that the sun was a fiery ball of iron. And though Pericles, who had been his pupil, defended him, he was, nevertheless, fined five talents and banished. But Satyrus, in his Lives, says that it was Thucydides by whom he was impeached, as Thucydides was of the opposite party to Pericles; and that he was prosecuted not only for impiety, but also for Medison*; and that he was condemned to death in his absence. And when news was brought him of two misfortunes--his condemnation, and the death of his children; concerning the condemnation he said, "Nature has long since condemned both them and me. " But about his children, he said, "I knew that I had become the father of mortals. " Some, however, attribute this saying to Solon, and others to Xenophon. And Demetrius Phalereus, in his treatise on Old Age, says that Anaxagoras buried them with his own hands. But Hermippus, in his Lives, says that he was thrown into prison for the purpose of being put to death: but that Pericles came forward and inquired if any one brought any accusation against him respecting his course of life. And as no one alleged anything against him: "I then," said he, "am his disciple: do not you then be led away by calumnies to put this man to death; but be guided by me, and release him. " And he was released. But, as he was indignant at the insult which had been offered to him, he left the city.
But Hieronymus, in the second book of his Miscellaneous Commentaries, says that Pericles produced him before the court, tottering and emaciated by disease, so that he was released rather out of pity, than by any deliberate decision on the merits of his case. And thus much may be said about his trial. Some people have fancied that he was very hostile to Democritus, because he did not succeed in getting admission to him for the purposes of conversation.
X. And at last, having gone to Lampsacus, he died in that city. And it is said, that when the governors of the city asked him what he would like to have done for him, he replied, "That they would allow the children to play every year during the month in which he died. " And this custom is kept up even now. And when he was dead, the citizens of Lampsacus buried him with great honours, and wrote this epitaph on him:
Here Anaxagoras lies, who reached of truth
The farthest bounds in heavenly speculations.
We ourselves also have written an epigram on him:
Wise Anaxagoras did call the sun
A mass of glowing iron; and for this
Death was to be his fate. But Pericles
Then saved his friend; but afterwards he died
A victim of a weak philosophy.
XI. There were also three other people of the name of Anaxagoras; none of whom combined all kinds of knowledge; But one was an orator and a pupil of Isocrates; another was a statuary, who is mentioned by Antigonus; another is a grammarian, a pupil of Zenodotus.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF ARCHELAUS
I. ARCHELAUS was a citizen of either Athens or Miletus, and his father's name was Apollodorus; but, as some say, Mydon. He was a pupil of Anaxagoras, and the master of Socrates.
II. He was the first person who imported the study of natural philosophy from Ionia to Athens, and he was called the Natural Philosopher, because natural philosophy terminated with him, as Socrates introduced ethical philosophy. And it seems probable that Archelaus too meddled in some degree with moral philosophy; for in his philosophical speculations he discussed laws and what was honourable and just. And Socrates borrowed from him; and becaused he enlarged his principles, he was thought to be the inventor of them.
III. He used to say that there were two primary causes of generation, heat and cold; and that all animals were generated out of mud: and that what are accounted just and disgraceful are not so by nature, but only by law. And his reasoning proceeds in this way. He says, that water being melted by heat, when it is submitted to the action of fire, by which it is solidified, becomes earth; and when it is liquefied, becomes air. And, therefore, the earth is surrounded by air and influenced by it, and so is the air by the revolutions of fire. And he says that animals are generated out of hot earth, which sends up a thick mud, something like milk for their food. So too he says that it produced men.
And he was the first person who said that sound is produced by the percussion of the air; and that the sea is filtered in the hollows of the earth in its passage, and so is condensed; and that the sun is the greatest of the stars, and that the universe is boundless.
IV. But there were three other people of the name of Archelaus: one, a geographer, who described the countries traversed by Alexander; the second, a man who wrote a poem on objects which have two natures; and the third, an orator, who wrote a book containing the precepts of his art.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF SOCRATES
I. SOCRATES was the son of Sophroniscus, a statuary, and of Phaenarete, a midwife; as Plato records in his Miaetetus; he was a citizen of Athens, of the borough of Alopece.
II. Some people believed that he assisted Euripides in his poems; in reference to which idea, Mnesimachus speaks as follows:
The Phrygians are a new play of Euripides,
But Socrates has laid the main foundation. *
(* phrygana, sticks or faggots. )
And again he says:
Euripides : patched up by Socrates.
And Callias, in his Captives, says:
A. Are you so proud, giving yourself such airs?
B. And well I may, for Socrates is the cause.
And Aristophanes says, in his Clouds:
This is Euripides, who doth compose
Those argumentative wise tragedies.
III. But, having been a pupil of Anaxagoras, as some people say, but of Damon as the other story goes, related by Alexander in his Successions, after the condemnation of Anaxagoras, he became a disciple of Archelaus, the natural philosopher. And, indeed, Aristoxenus says that he was very intimate with him.
IV. But Duris says that he was a slave, and employed in carving stones. And some say that the Graces in the Acropolis are his work; and they are clothed figures. And that it is in reference to this that Timon says, in his Silli:
From them proceeded the stone polisher,
The reasoning legislator, the enchanter
Of all the Greeks, making them subtle arguers,
A cunning pedant, a shrewd Attic quibbler.
V. For he was very clever in all rhetorical exercises, as Idomeneus also assures us. But the thirty tyrants forbade him to give lessons in the art of speaking and arguing, as Xenophon tells us. And Aristophanes turns him into ridicule in his Comedies, as making the worse appear the better reason. For he was the first man, as Favorinus says in his Universal History, who, in conjunction with his disciple Aeschines, taught men how to become orators. And Idomeneus makes the same assertion in his essay on the Socratic School. He, likewise, was the first person who conversed about human life; and was also the first philosopher who was condemned to death and executed. And Aristoxenus, the son of Spintharas, says that he lent money in usury; and that he collected the interest and principal together, and then, when he had got the interest, he lent it out again. And Demetrius, of Byzantium, says that it was Criton who made him leave his workshop and instruct men, out of the admiration which he conceived for his abilities.
VI. He then, perceiving that natural philosophy had no immediate bearing on our interests, began to enter upon moral speculations, both in his workshop and in the marketplace. And he said that the objects of his search were
Whatever good or harm can man befall
In his own house.
And very often, while arguing and discussing points that arose, he was treated with great violence and beaten, and pulled about, and laughed at and ridiculed by the multitude. But he bore all this with great equanimity. So that once, when he had been kicked and buffeted about, and had borne it all patiently, and some one expressed his surprise, he said, "Suppose an ass had kicked me would you have had me bring an action against him? " And this is the account of Demetrius.
VII. But he had no need of travelling (though most philosophers did travel), except when he was bound to serve in the army. But all the rest of his life he remained in the same place, and in an argumentative spirit he used to dispute with all who would converse with him, not with the purpose of taking away their opinions from them, so much as of learning the truth, as far as he could do so, himself. And they say that Euripides gave him a small work of Heraclitus to read, and asked him afterwards what he thought of it, and he replied "What I have understood is good; and so, I think, what I have not understood is; only the book requires a Delian diver to get at the meaning of it. " He paid great attention also to the training of the body, and was always in excellent condition himself. Accordingly, he joined in the expedition to Amphipolis, and he it was who took up and saved Xenophon in the battle of Delian, when he had fallen from his horse; for when all the Athenians had fled, he retreated quietly, turning round slowly, and watching to repel any one who attacked him. He also joined in the expedition to Potidaea, which was undertaken by sea; for it was impossible to get there by land, as the war impeded the communication.
And they say that on this occasion he remained the whole night in one place; and that though he had deserved the prize of pre-eminent valour, he yielded it to Alcibiades, to whom Aristippus, in the fourth book of his treatise on the Luxury of the Ancients, says that he was greatly attached. But Ion, of Chios, says, that while he was a very young man he left Athens, and went to Samos with Archelaus. And Aristotle says, that he went to Delphi; and Favorinus also, in the first book of his Commentaries, says that he went to the Isthmus.
VIII. He was a man of great firmness of mind, and very much attached to the democracy, as was plain from his not submitting to Critias, when he ordered him to bring Leon of Salamis, a very rich man, before the thirty, for the purpose of being murdered. And he alone voted for the acquittal of the ten generals;1 and when it was in his power to escape out of prison he would not do it; and he reproved those who bewailed his fate, and even while in prison, he delivered those beautiful discourses which we still possess.
IX. He was a contented and venerable man. And once, as Pamphila says, in the seventh book of her Commentaries, when Alcibiades offered him a large piece of ground to build a house upon, he said, "But if I wanted shoes, and you had given me a piece of leather to make myself shoes, I should be laughed at if I took it. " And often, when he beheld the multitude of things which were being sold, he would say to himself, "How many things are there which I do not want. " And he was continually repeating these iambics:
For silver plate and purple useful are
For actors on the stage, but not for men.
And he showed his scorn of Archelaus the Macedonian, and Scopas the Crononian, and Eurylochus of Larissa, when he refused to accept their money, and to go and visit them. And he was so regular in his way of living, that it happened more than once when there was a plague at Athens, that he was the only person who did not catch it.
X. Aristotle says, that be had two wives. The first was Xanthippe, by whom he had a son named Lamprocles; the second was Myrto, the daughter of Aristides the Just; and he took her without any dowry, and by her he had two son Sophroniscus and Menexenus. But some say that Myrto was his first wife. And some, among whom are Satyrus, and Hieronymus, of Rhodes, say that he had them both at the same time. For they say that the Athenians, on account of the scarcity of men, passed a vote, with the view of increasing the population, that a man might marry one citizen, and might also have children by another who should be legitimate; on which account Socrates did so.
XI. And he was a man able to look down upon any who mocked him. And he prided himself upon the simplicity of his way of life; and never exacted any pay from his pupils. And he used to say, that the man who ate with the greatest appetite, had the least need of delicacies; and that he who drank with the greatest appetite, was the least inclined to look for a draught which is not at hand; and that those who want fewest things are nearest to the Gods. And thus much, indeed, one may learn from the comic poets; who, without perceiving it, praise him in the very matters for which they ridicule him. Aristophanes speaks thus :
Prudent man, who thus with justice long for mighty wisdom,
Happiness will be your lot in Athens, and all Greece too;
For you've a noble memory, and plenty of invention,
And patience dwells within your mind, and you are never tired,
Whether you're standing still or walking; and you care not for cold,
Nor do you long for breakfast time, nor e'er give in to hunger;
But wine and gluttony you shun, and and all such kind of follies.
And Ameipsias introduces him on the stage in a cloak, and speaks thus of him:
O Socrates, among few men the best,
And among many vainest; here at last
You come to us courageously-but where,
Where did you get that cloak? so strange a garment,
Some leather cutter must have given you
By way of joke: and yet this worthy man,
Though ne'er so hungry, never flatters any one.
Aristophanes too, exposes his contemptuous and arrogant disposition, speaking thus :
You strut along the streets, and look around you proudly,
And barefoot many ills endure, and hold your head above us.
And yet, sometimes he adapted himself to the occasion and dressed handsomely. As, for instance, in the banquet of Plato, where he is represented as going to find Agathon.
XII. He was a man of great ability, both in exhorting men to, and dissuading them from, any course; as, for instance, having discoursed with Theaetetus on the subject of knowledge, he sent him away almost inspired, as Plato says. And when Euthyphro had commenced a prosecution against his father for having killed a foreigner, he conversed with him on the subject of piety, and turned him from his purpose: and by his exhortations he made Lysis a most moral man. For he was very ingenious at deriving arguments from existing circumstances. And so he mollified his son Lamprocles when he was very angry with his mother, as Xenophon mentions somewhere in his works; and he wrought upon Glaucon, the brother of Plato, who was desirous to meddle with affairs of state, and induced him to abandon his purpose, because of his want of experience in such matters, as Xenophon relates. And, on the contrary, he persuaded Charmides to devote himself to politics, because he was a man very well calculated for such business. He also inspired Iphicrates, the general, with courage, by showing him the gamecocks of Midias the barber, pluming themselves against those of Callias; and Glauernides* said, that the state ought to keep him carefully, as if he were a pheasant or a peacock. He used also to say, that it was a strange thing that every one could easily tell what property he had, but was not able to name all his friends, or even to tell their number; so careless were men on that subject. Once when he saw Euclid exceedingly anxious about some dialectic arguments, he said to him, "O Euclid, you will acquire a power of managing sophists, but not of governing men. " For he thought that subtle hair-splitting on those subjects was quite useless; as Plato also records in the Euthydemus.
XIII. And when Charmides offered him some slaves, with the view to his making a profit of them, he would not have them; and, as some people say, he paid no regard to the beauty of Alcibiades.
XIV. He used to praise leisure as the most valuable of possessions, as Xenophon tells us in his Banquet. And it was a saying of his that there was one only good, namely, knowledge; and one only evil, namely ignorance; that riches and high birth had nothing estimable in them, but that, on the contrary, they were wholly evil. Accordingly, when some one told him that the mother of Antisthenes was a Thracian woman "Did you suppose," said he, "that so noble a man must be born of two Athenians? " And when Phaedo was reduced to a state of slavery, he ordered Crito to ransom him, and taught him, and made him a philosopher.
XV. And, moreover, he used to learn to play on the lyre when he had time, saying, that it it was not absurd to learn anything that one did not know; and further, he used frequently to dance, thinking such an exercise good for the health of the body, as Xenophon relates in his Banquet.
XVI. He used also to say that the daemon foretold the future to him;2
and that to begin well was not a trifling thing, but yet not far from a trifling thing; and that he knew nothing, except the fact of his ignorance. Another saying of his was, that those who bought things out of season, at an extravagant price, expected never to live till the proper season for them. Once, when he was asked what was the virtue of a young man, he said, "To avoid excess in everything. " And he used to say, that it was necessary to learn geometry only so far as might enable a man to measure land for the purposes of buying and selling. And when Euripides, in his Augur, had spoken thus of virtue :
'Tis best to leave these subjects undisturbed;
he rose up and left the theatre, saying that it was an absurdity to think it right to seek for a slave if one could not find him, but to let virtue be altogether disregarded. The question was once put to him by a man whether he would advise him to marry or not? And he replied, "Whichever you do, you will repent it. " He often said, that he wondered at those who made stone statues, when he saw how careful they were that the stone should be like the man it was intended to represent, but how careless they were of themselves, as to guarding against being like the stone. He used also to recommend young men to be constantly looking in the glass, in order that, if they were handsome, they might be worthy of their beauty; and if they were ugly, they might conceal their unsightly appearance by their accomplishments. He once invited some rich men to dinner, and when Xanthippe was ashamed of their insufficient appointments, he said, "Be of good cheer; for if our guests are sensible men, they will bear with us; and if they are not, we need not care about them. " He used to say, "That other men lived to eat, but that he ate to live. " Another saying of his was, "That to have a regard for the worthless multitude, was like the case of a man who refused to take one piece of money of four drachmas as if it were bad, and then took a heap of such coins and admitted them to be good. " When Aeschines said, "I am a poor man, and have nothing else, but I give you myself;" "Do you not," he replied, "perceive that you are giving me what is of the greatest value? " He said to some one, who was expressing indignation at being overlooked when the thirty had seized on the supreme power, "Do you, then, repent of not being a tyrant too? " A man said to him, "The Athenians have condemned you to death. " "And nature," he replied, "has condemned them. " But some attribute this answer to Anaxagoras. When his wife said to him, "You die undeservedly. " "Would you, then," he rejoined, "have had me deserve death? " He thought once that some one appeared to him in a dream, and said:
On the third day you'll come to lovely Phthia.
And so he said to Aeschines "In three days I shall die. " And when he was about to drink the hemlock, Apollodorus presented him with a handsome robe, that he might expire in it; and he said; "Why was my own dress good enough to live in; and not good enough to die in? " When a person said to him, "Such an one speaks ill of you;" "To be sure," said he, "for he has never learnt to speak well. " When Antisthenes turned the ragged side of his cloak to the light, he said, "I see your silly vanity through the holes in your cloak. " When some one said to him, "Does not that man abuse you? " "No," said he, "for that does not apply to me. " It was a saying of his, too, "That it is a good thing for a man to offer himself cheerfully to the attacks of the comic writers; for then, if they say anything worth hearing, one will be able to mend; and if they do not, then all they say is unimportant. "
XVII. He said once to Xanthippe, who first abused him, and then threw water at him, "Did I not say that Xanthippe was thundering now, and would soon rain? " When Alcibiades said to him, "The abusive temper of Xanthippe is intolerable;" "But I," he rejoined, "am used to it, just as I should be if I were always hearing the noise of a pulley; and you yourself endure to hear geese cackling. " To which Alcibiades answered, "Yes, but they bring me eggs and goslings. " "Well," rejoined Socrates, "and Xanthippe brings me children. " Once, she attacked him in the market-place, and tore his cloak off; his friends advised him to keep her off with his hands; "Yes, by Jove," said he, "that while we are boxing you may all cry out, 'Well done, Socrates, well done, Xanthippe. '" And he used to say, that one ought to live with a restive woman, just as horsemen manage violent-tempered horses; "and as they," said he, "when they have once mastered them, are easily able to manage all others; so I, after managing Xanthippe, can easily live with any one else whatever. "
XVIII. And it was in consequence of such sayings and actions as these, that the priestess at Delphi was witness in his favour, when she gave Chaerephon this answer, which is so universally known:
Socrates of all mortals is the wisest.
VI. Of things which are of use in life, he is said to have been the inventor of the anchor, and of the potter's wheel.
VII. The following letter of his is extant:
ANACHARSIS TO CROESUS.
O king of the Lydians, I am come to the country of the Greeks, in order to become acquainted with their customs and institutions; but I have no need of gold, and shall be quite contented if I return to Scythia a better man than I left it. However I will come to Sardis, as I think it very desirable to become a friend of yours.
1. Some propose to read karpon, fruit, instead of kapnon, smoke, here; others explain this saying as meaning that the Greeks avoided houses on the hills in order not to be annoyed with the smoke from the low cottages, and yet did not use coal, but wood, which made more smoke.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF ANACHARSIS
I. ANACHARSIS the Scythian was the son of Gnurus, and the brother of Caduides the king of the Scythians; but his mother was a Grecian woman; owing to which circumstance he understood both languages.
II. He wrote about the laws existing among the Scythians, and also about those in force among the Greeks, urging men to adopt a temperate course of life; and he wrote also about war, his works being in verse, and amounting to eight hundred lines: he gave occasion for a proverb, because he used great freedom of speech, so that people called such freedom the Scythian conversation.
III. But Sosicrates says that he came to Athens in the forty-seventh Olympiad, in the archonship of Eucrates. And Hermippus asserts that he came to Solon's house, and ordered one of the servants to go and tell his master that Anacharsis was come to visit him, and was desirous to see him, and, if possible, to enter into relations of hospitality with him. But when the servant had given the message, he was ordered by Solon to reply to him that, "Men generally limited such alliances to their own countrymen. " In reply to this Anacharsis entered the house, and told the servant that now he was in Solon's country, and that it was quite consistent for them to become connected with one another in this way. On this, Solon admired the readiness of the man, and admitted him, and made him one of his greatest friends.
IV. But after some time, when he had returned to Scythia, and shown a purpose to abrogate the existing institutions of his country, being exceedingly earnest, in his fondness for Grecian customs, he was shot by his brother while he was out hunting, and so he died, saying, "That he was saved on account of the sense and eloquence which he had brought from Greece, but slain in consequence of envy in his own family. " Some, however, relate that he was slain while performing some Grecian sacrificatory rites. And we have written this epigram on him:
When Anacharsis to his land returned,
His mind was turn'd, so that he wished to make
His countrymen all live in Grecian fashion--
So, ere his words had well escaped his lips,
A winged arrow bore him to the Gods.
V. He said that a vine bore three bunches of grapes. The first, the bunch of pleasure; the second, that of drunkenness; the third that of disgust. He also said that he marvelled that among the Greeks, those who were skilful in a thing contend together; but those who have no such skill act as judges of the contest. Being once asked how a person might be made not fond of drinking, he said, "If he always keeps in view the indecorous actions of drunken men. " He used also to say, that he marvelled how the Greeks, who make laws against those who behave with insolence, honour Athletae because of their beating one another. When he had been informed that the sides of a ship were four fingers thick, he said, "That those who sailed in one were removed by just that distance from death. " He used to say that oil was a provocative of madness, "because Athletae, when anointed in the oil, attacked one another with mad fury. "
"How is it," he used to say, "that those who forbid men to speak falsely, tell lies openly in their vintners' shops? " It was a saying of his, that he "marvelled why the Greeks, at the beginning of a banquet, drink out of small cups, but when they have drunk a good deal, then they turn to large goblets. " And this inscription is on his statues--"Restrain your tongues, your appetites, and your passions. " He was once asked if the flute was known among the Scythians; and he said, "No, nor the vine either. " At another time, the question was put to him, which was the safest kind of vessel? and he said, "That which is brought into dock. " He said, too, that the strangest things that he had seen among the Greeks was, that "They left the smoke1 in the mountains, and carried the wood down to their cities. " Once, when he was asked, which were the more numerous, the living or the dead? he said, "Under which head do you class those who are at sea. " Being reproached by an Athenian for being a Scythian, he said, "Well, my country is a disgrace to me, but you are a disgrace to your country. " When he was asked what there was among men which was both good and bad, he replied, "The tongue. " He used to say "That it was better to have one friend of great value, than many friends who were good for nothing. " Another saying of his was, that "The forum was an established place for men to cheat one another, and behave covetously. " Being once insulted by a young man at a drinking party, he said, "O, young man, if now that you are young you cannot bear wine, when you are old you will have to bear water. "
VI. Of things which are of use in life, he is said to have been the inventor of the anchor, and of the potter's wheel.
VII. The following letter of his is extant:
ANACHARSIS TO CROESUS.
O king of the Lydians, I am come to the country of the Greeks, in order to become acquainted with their customs and institutions; but I have no need of gold, and shall be quite contented if I return to Scythia a better man than I left it. However I will come to Sardis, as I think it very desirable to become a friend of yours.
1. Some propose to read karpon, fruit, instead of kapnon, smoke, here; others explain this saying as meaning that the Greeks avoided houses on the hills in order not to be annoyed with the smoke from the low cottages, and yet did not use coal, but wood, which made more smoke.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF MYSON
I. MYSON, the son of Strymon, as Sosicrates states, quoting Hermippus as his authority, a Chenean by birth, of some Aetaean or Laconian village, is reckoned one of the seven wise men, and they say that his father was tyrant of his country. It is said by some writers that when Anacharsis inquired if any one was wiser than he, the priestess at Delphi gave the answer which has been already quoted in the life of Thales in reference to Chilon:
I say that Myson the Aetaean sage,
The citizen of Chen, is wiser far
In his deep mind than you.
And that he, having taken a great deal of trouble, came to the village, and found him in the summer season fitting a handle to a plough, and he addressed him, "O Myson, this is not now the season for the plough. " "Indeed," said he, "it is a capital season for preparing one;" but others say, that the words of the oracle are the Etean sage, and they raise the question, what the word Etean means. So Parmenides says, that it is a borough of Laconia, of which Myson was a native; but Sosicrates, in his Successions says, that he was an Etean on his father's side, and a Chenean by his mother's. But Euthyphro, the son of Heraclides Ponticus, says that he was a Cretan, for that Etea was a city of Crete.
II. And Anaxilaus says that he was an Arcadian. Hipponax also mentions him, saying, "And Myson, whom Apollo stated to be the most prudent of all men. " But Aristoxenus, in his Miscellanies, says that his habits were not very different from those of Timon and Apemantus, for that he was a misanthrope. And that accordingly he was one day found in Lacedaemon laughing by himself in a solitary place, and when some one came up to him on a sudden and asked him why he laughed when he was by himself, he said, "For that very reason. " Aristoxenus also says that he was not thought much of, because he was not a native of any city, but only of a village, and that too one of no great note; and according to him, it is on account of this obscurity of his that some people attribute his sayings and doings to Pisistratus the tyrant, but he excepts Plato the philosopher, for he mentions Myson in his Protagoras, placing him among the wise men instead of Periander.
III. It used to be a common saying of his that men ought not to seek for things in words, but for words in things; for that things are not made on account of words, but that words are put together for the sake of things.
IV. He died when he had lived ninety-seven years.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF EPIMENIDES
I. EPIMENIDES, as Theopompus and many other writers tell us, was the son of a man named Phaedrus*, but some call him the son of Dosiadas; and others of Agesarchus. He was a Cretan by birth, of the city of Cnossus; but because he let his hair grow long, he did not look like a Cretan.
II. He once, when he was sent by his father into the fields to look for a sheep, turned out of the road at mid-day and lay down in a certain cave and fell asleep and slept there fifty-seven years; and after that, when he awoke, he went on looking for the sheep, thinking that he had been taking a short nap; but as he could not find it he went on to the field and there he found everything changed, and the estate in another person's possession, and so he came back again to the city in great perplexity, and as he was going into his own house he met some people who asked him who he was, until at last he found his younger brother who had now become an old man, and from him he learnt all the truth.
III. And when he was recognized he was considered by the Greeks as a person especially beloved by the Gods, on which account when the Athenians were afflicted by a plague, and the priestess at Delphi enjoined them to purify their city; they sent a ship and Nicias the son of Niceratus to Crete, to invite Epimenides to Athens; and he, coming there in the forty-sixth Olympiad, purified the city and eradicated the plague for that time; he took some black sheep and some white ones and led them up to the Areopagus, and from thence he let them go wherever they chose, having ordered the attendants to follow them, and wherever any one of them lay down they were to sacrifice him to the God who was the patron of the spot, and so the evil was stayed; and owing to this one may even now find in the different boroughs of the Athenians altars without names, which are a sort of memorial of the propitiation of the Gods that then took place. Some said that the cause of the plague was the pollution contracted by the city in the matter of Cylon, and that Epimenides pointed out to the Athenians how to get rid of it, and that in consequence they put to death two young men, Cratinus and Ctesilius*, and that thus the pestilence was put an end to.
And the Athenians passed a vote to give him a talent and a ship to convey him back to Crete, but he would not accept the money, but made a treaty of friendship and alliance between the Cnossians and Athenians.
IV. And not long after he had returned home he died, as Phlegon relates in his book on long-lived people, after he had lived a hundred and fifty-seven years; but as the Cretans report he had lived two hundred and ninety-nine; but as Xenophanes the Colophonian, states that he had heard it reported, he was a hundred and fifty-four years old when he died.
V. He wrote a poem of five thousand verses on the Generation and Theogony of the Curetes and Corybantes, and another poem of six thousand five hundred verses on the building of the Argo and the expedition of Jason to Colchis.
VI. He also wrote a treatise in prose on the Sacrifices in Crete, and the Cretan Constitution, and on Minos and Rhadamanthus, occupying four thousand lines.
Likewise he built at Athens the temple which is there dedicated to the venerable goddesses, as Lobon the Augur says in his book on Poets; and he is said to have been the first person who purified houses and lands, and who built temples.
VII. There are some people who assert that he did not sleep for the length of time that has been mentioned above, but that he was absent from his country for a considerable period, occupying himself with the anatomisation and examination of roots.
VIII. A letter of his is quoted, addressed to Solon the lawgiver, in which he discusses the constitution which Minos gave the Cretans. But Demetrius the Magnesian, in his treatise on Poets and Prose writers of the same name as one another, attempts to prove that the letter is a modern one, and is not written in the Cretan but in the Attic dialect, and the new Attic too.
IX. But I have also discovered another letter of his which runs thus:
EPIMENIDES TO SOLON.
Be of good cheer, my friend; for if Pisistratus had imposed his laws on the Athenians, they being habituated to slavery and not accustomed to good laws previously, he would have maintained his dominion for ever, succeeding easily in enslaving his fellow countrymen; but as it is, he is lording it over men who are no cowards, but who remember the precepts of Solon and are indignant at their bonds, and who will not endure the supremacy of a tyrant. But if Pisistratus does possess the city to-day, still I have no expectation that the supreme power will ever descend to his children. For it is impossible that men who have lived in freedom and in the enjoyment of most excellent laws should be slaves permanently; but as for yourself, do not you go wandering about at random, but come and visit me, for here there is no supreme ruler to be formidable to you; but if while you are wandering about any of the friends of Pisistratus should fall in with you, I fear you might suffer some misfortune.
He wrote thus.
X. But Demetrius says that some writers report that he used to receive food from the nymphs and keep it in a bullock's hoof; and that eating it in small quantities he never required any evacuations, and was never seen eating. And Timaeus mentions him in his second book.
XI. Some authors say also that the Cretans sacrifice to him as a god, for they say that he was the wisest of men; and accordingly, that when he saw the port of Munychia,1 at Athens, he said that the Athenians did not know how many evils that place would bring upon them: since, if they did, they would tear it to pieces with their teeth; and he said this a long time before the event to which he alluded. It is said also, that he at first called himself Aeacus; and that he foretold to the Lacedaemonians the defeat which they should suffer from the Arcadians; and that he pretended that he had lived several times. But Theopompus, in his Strange Stories, says that when he was building the temple of the Nymphs, a voice burst forth from heaven;--"Oh! Epimenides, build this temple, not for the Nymphs but for Jupiter. " He also foretold to the Cretans the defeat of the Lacedaemonians by the Arcadians as has been said before. And, indeed, they were beaten at Orchomenos.
XII. He pretended also, that he grew old rapidly, in the same number of days as he had been years asleep; at least, so Theopompus says. But Mysonianus*, in his Coincidences, says, that the Cretans call him one of the Curetes. And the Lacedaemonians preserve his body among them, in obedience to some oracle, as Sosilius the Lacedaemonian says.
XIII. There were also two other Epimenides, one the genealogist; the other, the man who wrote a history of Rhodes in the Doric dialect.
1. This refers to the result of the war which Antipater, who became regent of Macedonia on the death of Alexander the Great, carried on against the confederacy of Greek states, of which Athens was the head; and in which, after having defeated them at Cranon, he compelled the Athenians to abolish the democracy, and to admit a garrison into Munychia.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF PHERECYDES
I. PHERECYDES was a Syrian, the son of Babys, and, as Alexander says, in his Successions, he had been a pupil of Pittacus.
II. Theopompus says that he was the first person who ever wrote among the Greeks on the subject of Natural Philosophy and the Gods. And there are many marvellous stories told of him. For it is said that he was walking along the sea-shore at Samos, and that seeing a ship sailing by with a fair wind, he said that it would soon sink; and presently it sank before their eyes. At another time he was drinking some water which had been drawn up out of a well, and he foretold that within three days there would be an earthquake; and there was one. And as he was going up to Olympia, and had arrived at Messene, he advised his entertainer, Perilaus, to migrate from the city with all his family, but that Perilaus would not be guided by him; and afterwards Messene was taken.
III. And he is said to have told the Lacedaemonians to honour neither gold nor silver, as Theopompus says in his Marvels; and it is reported that Hercules laid this injunction on him in a dream, and that the same night he appeared also to the kings of Sparta, and enjoined them to be guided by Pherecydes; but some attribute these stories to Pythagoras.
IV. And Hermippus relates that when there was a war between the Ephesians and Magnesians, he, wishing the Ephesians to conquer, asked some one, who was passing by, from whence he came? and when he said, "From Ephesus," "Drag me now," said he, "by the legs, and place me in the territory of the Magnesians, and tell your fellow countrymen to bury me there after they have got the victory; and that he went and reported that Pherecydes had given him this order. And so they went forth the next day and defeated the Magnesians; and as Pherecydes was dead, they buried him there, and paid him very splendid honours.
V. But some writers say that he went to Delphi, and threw himself down from the Corycian hill; Aristoxenus, in his History of Pythagoras and his Friends, says that Pherecydes fell sick and died, and was buried by Pythagoras in Delos. But others say that he died of the lousy disease; and when Pythagoras came to see him, and asked him how he was, he put his finger through the door, and said, "You may see by my skin. " And from this circumstance that expression passed into a proverb among the philosophers, when affairs are going on badly; and those who apply it to affairs that are going on well, make a blunder. He used to say, also, that the Gods call their table thuoros.
VI. But Andron, the Ephesian, says that there were two men of the name of Pherecydes, both Syrians: one an astronomer, and the other a writer on God and the Divine Nature; and that this last was the son of Babys, who was also the master of Pythagoras. But Eratosthenes asserts that there was but one, who was a Syrian; and that the other Pherecydes was an Athenian, a genealogist; and the work of the Syrian Pherecydes is preserved and it begins thus:--"Jupiter, and Time, and Chthon existed externally. " And the name of Cthonia became Tellus, after Jupiter gave it to her as a reward. A sun-dial is also preserved, in the island of Syra, of his making.
VII. But Duris, in the second book of his Boundaries, says that this epigram was written upon him:
The limit of all wisdom is in me;
And would be, were it larger. But report
To my Pythagoras that he's the first
Of all the men that tread the Grecian soil;
I shall not speak falsehood, saying this.
And Ion, the Chian, says of him:
Adorned with valour while alive, and modesty,
Now that he's dead he still exists in peace;
For, like the wise Pythagoras, he studied
The manners and the minds of many nations.
And I myself have composed an epigram on him in the Pherecratean metre :
The story is reported,
That noble Pherecydes
Whom Syros calls her own,
Was eaten up by lice;
And so he bade his friends,
Convey his corpse away
To the Magnesian land,
That he might victory give
To holy Ephesus.
For well the God had said,
(Though he alone did know
Th' oracular prediction),
That this was fate's decree.
So in that land he lies.
This then is surely true,
That those who're really wise
Are useful while alive,
And e'en when breath has left them.
VIII. And he flourished about the fifty-ninth Olympiad. There is a letter of his extant in the following terms:
PHERECYDES TO THALES.
May you die happily when fate overtakes you. Disease has seized upon me at the same time that I received your letter. I am all over lice, and suffering likewise under a low fever. Accordingly, I have charged my servants to convey this book of mine to you, after they have buried me. And do you, if you think fit, after consulting with the other wise men, publish it; but if you do not approve of doing so, then keep it unpublished, for I am not entirely pleased with it myself. The subject is not one about which there is any certain knowledge, nor do I undertake to say that I have arrived at the truth; but I have advanced arguments, from which any one who occupies himself with speculations on the divine nature, may make a selection; and as to other points, he must exercise his intellect, for I speak obscurely throughout. I, myself, as I am afflicted more severely by this disease every day, no longer admit any physicians, or any of my friends. But when they stand at the door, and ask me how I am, I put out my finger to them through the opening of the door, and show them how I am eaten up with the evil; and I desired them to come to-morrow to the funeral of Pherecydes.
These, then, are they who were called wise men; to which list some writers add the name of Pisistratus. But we must also speak of the philosophers. And we will begin first with the Ionic philosophy, the founder of which school was Thales, who was the master of Anaximander.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF ANAXIMANDER
I. ANAXIMANDER, the son of Praxiadas, was a citizen of Miletus.
II. He used to assert that the principle and primary element of all things was the Infinity, giving no exact definition as to whether he meant air or water, or anything else. And he said that the parts were susceptible of change, but that the whole was unchangeable; and that the earth lay in the middle, being placed there as a sort of centre, of a spherical shape. The moon, he said, had a borrowed light, and borrowed it from the sun; and the sun he affirmed to be not less than the earth, and the purest possible fire.
III. He also was the first discoverer of the gnomon; and he placed some in Lacedaemon on the sun-dials there, as Favorinus says in his Universal History, and they showed the solstices and the equinoxes; he also made clocks. He was the first person, too, who drew a map of the earth and sea, and he also made a globe; and he published a concise statement of whatever opinions he embraced or entertained; and this treatise was met with by Apollodorus the Athenian.
IV. And Apollodorus, in his Chronicles, states, that in the second year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad, he was sixty-four years old. And soon after he died, having flourished much about the same time as Polycrates, the tyrant, of Samos. They say that when he sang, the children laughed; and that he, hearing of this, said, "We must then sing better for the sake of the children. "
V. There was also another Anaximander, a historian; and he too was a Milesian, and wrote in the Ionic dialect.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF ANAXAGORAS
I. ANAXAGORAS, the son of Hegesibulus, or Eubulus, was a citizen of Clazomenae. He was a pupil of Anaximenes, and was the first philosopher who attributed mind to matter, beginning his treatise on the subject in the following manner (and the whole treatise is written in a most beautiful and magnificent style): "All things were mixed up together; then Mind came and arranged them all in distinct order. " On which account he himself got the same name of Mind. And Timon speaks thus of him in his Silli:
They say too that wise Anaxagoras,
Deserves immortal fame; they call him Mind,
Because, as he doth teach, Mind came in season,
Arranging all which was confus'd before.
II. He was eminent for his noble birth and for his riches, and still more so for his magnanimity, inasmuch as he gave up all his patrimony to his relations; and being blamed by them for his neglect of his estate "Why, then," said he, "do not you take care of it? " And at last he abandoned it entirely, and devoted himself to the contemplation of subjects of natural philosophy, disregarding politics. So that once when some said to him "You have no affection for your country," "Be silent," said he, "for I have the greatest affection for my country," pointing up to heaven.
III.
It is said, that at the time of the passage of the Hellespont by Xerxes, he was twenty years old, and that he lived to the age of seventy-two. But Apollodorus, in his Chronicles, says that he flourished in the seventieth Olympiad, and that he died in the first year of the seventy-eighth. And he began to study philosophy at Athens, in the archonship of Callias, being twenty years of age, as Demetrius Phalerius tells us in his Catalogue of the Archons, and they say that he remained at Athens thirty years.
IV. He asserted that the sun was a mass of burning iron, greater than Peloponnesus; (but some attribute this doctrine to Tantalus), and that the moon contained houses, and also hills and ravines: and that the primary elements of everything were similarities of parts; for as we say that gold consists of a quantity of grains combined together, so too is the universe formed of a number of small bodies of similar parts. He further taught that Mind was the principle of motion: and that of bodies the heavy ones, such as the earth, occupied the lower situations; and the light ones, such as fire, occupied the higher places, and that the middle spaces were assigned to water and air. And thus that the sea rested upon the earth, which was broad, the moisture being all evaporated by the sun. And he said that the stars originally moved about in irregular confusion, so that at first the pole star, which is continually visible, always appeared in the zenith, but that afterwards it acquired a certain declination. And that the milky way was a reflection of the light of the sun when the stars did not appear. The comets he considered to be a concourse of planets emitting rays: and the shooting stars he thought were sparks as it were leaping from the firmament. The winds he thought were caused by the rarification of the atmosphere, which was produced by the sun. Thunder, he said, was produced by the collision of the clouds; and lightning by the rubbing together of the clouds. Earthquakes, he said, were produced by the return of the air into the earth. All animals he considered were originally generated out of moisture, and heat, and earthy particles: and subsequently from one another. And males he considered were derived from those on the right hand, and females from those on the left.
V. They say, also, that he predicted a fall of the stones which fell near Aegospotami, and which he said would fall from the sun: on which account Euripides, who was a disciple of his, said in his Phaethon that the sun was a golden clod of earth. He went once to Olympia wrapped in a leathern cloak as if it were going to rain; and it did rain. And they say that he once replied to a man who asked him whether the mountains at Lampsacus would ever become sea, "Yes, if time lasts long enough. "
VI. Being once asked for what end he had been born, he said, "For the contemplation of the sun, and moon, and heaven. " A man once said to him, "You have lost the Athenians;" "No," said he, "they have lost me. " When he beheld the tomb of Mausolus, he said, "A costly tomb is an image of a petrified estate. " And he comforted a man who was grieving because he was dying in a foreign land, by telling him, "The descent to hell is the same from every place. "
VII. He appears to have been the first person (according to the account given by Favorinus in his Universal History), who said that the Poem of Homer was composed in praise of virtue and justice: and Metro, of Lampsacus, who was a friend of his, adopted this opinion, and advocated it energetically, and Metrodorus was the first who seriously studied the natural philosophy developed in the writings of the great poet.
VIII. Anaxagoras was also the first man who ever wrote a work in prose; and Silenus, in the first book of his Histories, says, that in the archonship of Lysanias a large stone fell from heaven; and that in reference to this event Anaxagoras said, that the whole heaven was composed of stones, and that by its rapid revolutions they were all held together; and when those revolutions get slower, they fall down.
IX. Of his trial there are different accounts given. For Sotion, in his Succession of the Philosophers, says, that he was persecuted for impiety by Cleon because he said that the sun was a fiery ball of iron. And though Pericles, who had been his pupil, defended him, he was, nevertheless, fined five talents and banished. But Satyrus, in his Lives, says that it was Thucydides by whom he was impeached, as Thucydides was of the opposite party to Pericles; and that he was prosecuted not only for impiety, but also for Medison*; and that he was condemned to death in his absence. And when news was brought him of two misfortunes--his condemnation, and the death of his children; concerning the condemnation he said, "Nature has long since condemned both them and me. " But about his children, he said, "I knew that I had become the father of mortals. " Some, however, attribute this saying to Solon, and others to Xenophon. And Demetrius Phalereus, in his treatise on Old Age, says that Anaxagoras buried them with his own hands. But Hermippus, in his Lives, says that he was thrown into prison for the purpose of being put to death: but that Pericles came forward and inquired if any one brought any accusation against him respecting his course of life. And as no one alleged anything against him: "I then," said he, "am his disciple: do not you then be led away by calumnies to put this man to death; but be guided by me, and release him. " And he was released. But, as he was indignant at the insult which had been offered to him, he left the city.
But Hieronymus, in the second book of his Miscellaneous Commentaries, says that Pericles produced him before the court, tottering and emaciated by disease, so that he was released rather out of pity, than by any deliberate decision on the merits of his case. And thus much may be said about his trial. Some people have fancied that he was very hostile to Democritus, because he did not succeed in getting admission to him for the purposes of conversation.
X. And at last, having gone to Lampsacus, he died in that city. And it is said, that when the governors of the city asked him what he would like to have done for him, he replied, "That they would allow the children to play every year during the month in which he died. " And this custom is kept up even now. And when he was dead, the citizens of Lampsacus buried him with great honours, and wrote this epitaph on him:
Here Anaxagoras lies, who reached of truth
The farthest bounds in heavenly speculations.
We ourselves also have written an epigram on him:
Wise Anaxagoras did call the sun
A mass of glowing iron; and for this
Death was to be his fate. But Pericles
Then saved his friend; but afterwards he died
A victim of a weak philosophy.
XI. There were also three other people of the name of Anaxagoras; none of whom combined all kinds of knowledge; But one was an orator and a pupil of Isocrates; another was a statuary, who is mentioned by Antigonus; another is a grammarian, a pupil of Zenodotus.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF ARCHELAUS
I. ARCHELAUS was a citizen of either Athens or Miletus, and his father's name was Apollodorus; but, as some say, Mydon. He was a pupil of Anaxagoras, and the master of Socrates.
II. He was the first person who imported the study of natural philosophy from Ionia to Athens, and he was called the Natural Philosopher, because natural philosophy terminated with him, as Socrates introduced ethical philosophy. And it seems probable that Archelaus too meddled in some degree with moral philosophy; for in his philosophical speculations he discussed laws and what was honourable and just. And Socrates borrowed from him; and becaused he enlarged his principles, he was thought to be the inventor of them.
III. He used to say that there were two primary causes of generation, heat and cold; and that all animals were generated out of mud: and that what are accounted just and disgraceful are not so by nature, but only by law. And his reasoning proceeds in this way. He says, that water being melted by heat, when it is submitted to the action of fire, by which it is solidified, becomes earth; and when it is liquefied, becomes air. And, therefore, the earth is surrounded by air and influenced by it, and so is the air by the revolutions of fire. And he says that animals are generated out of hot earth, which sends up a thick mud, something like milk for their food. So too he says that it produced men.
And he was the first person who said that sound is produced by the percussion of the air; and that the sea is filtered in the hollows of the earth in its passage, and so is condensed; and that the sun is the greatest of the stars, and that the universe is boundless.
IV. But there were three other people of the name of Archelaus: one, a geographer, who described the countries traversed by Alexander; the second, a man who wrote a poem on objects which have two natures; and the third, an orator, who wrote a book containing the precepts of his art.
THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS, TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE
LIFE OF SOCRATES
I. SOCRATES was the son of Sophroniscus, a statuary, and of Phaenarete, a midwife; as Plato records in his Miaetetus; he was a citizen of Athens, of the borough of Alopece.
II. Some people believed that he assisted Euripides in his poems; in reference to which idea, Mnesimachus speaks as follows:
The Phrygians are a new play of Euripides,
But Socrates has laid the main foundation. *
(* phrygana, sticks or faggots. )
And again he says:
Euripides : patched up by Socrates.
And Callias, in his Captives, says:
A. Are you so proud, giving yourself such airs?
B. And well I may, for Socrates is the cause.
And Aristophanes says, in his Clouds:
This is Euripides, who doth compose
Those argumentative wise tragedies.
III. But, having been a pupil of Anaxagoras, as some people say, but of Damon as the other story goes, related by Alexander in his Successions, after the condemnation of Anaxagoras, he became a disciple of Archelaus, the natural philosopher. And, indeed, Aristoxenus says that he was very intimate with him.
IV. But Duris says that he was a slave, and employed in carving stones. And some say that the Graces in the Acropolis are his work; and they are clothed figures. And that it is in reference to this that Timon says, in his Silli:
From them proceeded the stone polisher,
The reasoning legislator, the enchanter
Of all the Greeks, making them subtle arguers,
A cunning pedant, a shrewd Attic quibbler.
V. For he was very clever in all rhetorical exercises, as Idomeneus also assures us. But the thirty tyrants forbade him to give lessons in the art of speaking and arguing, as Xenophon tells us. And Aristophanes turns him into ridicule in his Comedies, as making the worse appear the better reason. For he was the first man, as Favorinus says in his Universal History, who, in conjunction with his disciple Aeschines, taught men how to become orators. And Idomeneus makes the same assertion in his essay on the Socratic School. He, likewise, was the first person who conversed about human life; and was also the first philosopher who was condemned to death and executed. And Aristoxenus, the son of Spintharas, says that he lent money in usury; and that he collected the interest and principal together, and then, when he had got the interest, he lent it out again. And Demetrius, of Byzantium, says that it was Criton who made him leave his workshop and instruct men, out of the admiration which he conceived for his abilities.
VI. He then, perceiving that natural philosophy had no immediate bearing on our interests, began to enter upon moral speculations, both in his workshop and in the marketplace. And he said that the objects of his search were
Whatever good or harm can man befall
In his own house.
And very often, while arguing and discussing points that arose, he was treated with great violence and beaten, and pulled about, and laughed at and ridiculed by the multitude. But he bore all this with great equanimity. So that once, when he had been kicked and buffeted about, and had borne it all patiently, and some one expressed his surprise, he said, "Suppose an ass had kicked me would you have had me bring an action against him? " And this is the account of Demetrius.
VII. But he had no need of travelling (though most philosophers did travel), except when he was bound to serve in the army. But all the rest of his life he remained in the same place, and in an argumentative spirit he used to dispute with all who would converse with him, not with the purpose of taking away their opinions from them, so much as of learning the truth, as far as he could do so, himself. And they say that Euripides gave him a small work of Heraclitus to read, and asked him afterwards what he thought of it, and he replied "What I have understood is good; and so, I think, what I have not understood is; only the book requires a Delian diver to get at the meaning of it. " He paid great attention also to the training of the body, and was always in excellent condition himself. Accordingly, he joined in the expedition to Amphipolis, and he it was who took up and saved Xenophon in the battle of Delian, when he had fallen from his horse; for when all the Athenians had fled, he retreated quietly, turning round slowly, and watching to repel any one who attacked him. He also joined in the expedition to Potidaea, which was undertaken by sea; for it was impossible to get there by land, as the war impeded the communication.
And they say that on this occasion he remained the whole night in one place; and that though he had deserved the prize of pre-eminent valour, he yielded it to Alcibiades, to whom Aristippus, in the fourth book of his treatise on the Luxury of the Ancients, says that he was greatly attached. But Ion, of Chios, says, that while he was a very young man he left Athens, and went to Samos with Archelaus. And Aristotle says, that he went to Delphi; and Favorinus also, in the first book of his Commentaries, says that he went to the Isthmus.
VIII. He was a man of great firmness of mind, and very much attached to the democracy, as was plain from his not submitting to Critias, when he ordered him to bring Leon of Salamis, a very rich man, before the thirty, for the purpose of being murdered. And he alone voted for the acquittal of the ten generals;1 and when it was in his power to escape out of prison he would not do it; and he reproved those who bewailed his fate, and even while in prison, he delivered those beautiful discourses which we still possess.
IX. He was a contented and venerable man. And once, as Pamphila says, in the seventh book of her Commentaries, when Alcibiades offered him a large piece of ground to build a house upon, he said, "But if I wanted shoes, and you had given me a piece of leather to make myself shoes, I should be laughed at if I took it. " And often, when he beheld the multitude of things which were being sold, he would say to himself, "How many things are there which I do not want. " And he was continually repeating these iambics:
For silver plate and purple useful are
For actors on the stage, but not for men.
And he showed his scorn of Archelaus the Macedonian, and Scopas the Crononian, and Eurylochus of Larissa, when he refused to accept their money, and to go and visit them. And he was so regular in his way of living, that it happened more than once when there was a plague at Athens, that he was the only person who did not catch it.
X. Aristotle says, that be had two wives. The first was Xanthippe, by whom he had a son named Lamprocles; the second was Myrto, the daughter of Aristides the Just; and he took her without any dowry, and by her he had two son Sophroniscus and Menexenus. But some say that Myrto was his first wife. And some, among whom are Satyrus, and Hieronymus, of Rhodes, say that he had them both at the same time. For they say that the Athenians, on account of the scarcity of men, passed a vote, with the view of increasing the population, that a man might marry one citizen, and might also have children by another who should be legitimate; on which account Socrates did so.
XI. And he was a man able to look down upon any who mocked him. And he prided himself upon the simplicity of his way of life; and never exacted any pay from his pupils. And he used to say, that the man who ate with the greatest appetite, had the least need of delicacies; and that he who drank with the greatest appetite, was the least inclined to look for a draught which is not at hand; and that those who want fewest things are nearest to the Gods. And thus much, indeed, one may learn from the comic poets; who, without perceiving it, praise him in the very matters for which they ridicule him. Aristophanes speaks thus :
Prudent man, who thus with justice long for mighty wisdom,
Happiness will be your lot in Athens, and all Greece too;
For you've a noble memory, and plenty of invention,
And patience dwells within your mind, and you are never tired,
Whether you're standing still or walking; and you care not for cold,
Nor do you long for breakfast time, nor e'er give in to hunger;
But wine and gluttony you shun, and and all such kind of follies.
And Ameipsias introduces him on the stage in a cloak, and speaks thus of him:
O Socrates, among few men the best,
And among many vainest; here at last
You come to us courageously-but where,
Where did you get that cloak? so strange a garment,
Some leather cutter must have given you
By way of joke: and yet this worthy man,
Though ne'er so hungry, never flatters any one.
Aristophanes too, exposes his contemptuous and arrogant disposition, speaking thus :
You strut along the streets, and look around you proudly,
And barefoot many ills endure, and hold your head above us.
And yet, sometimes he adapted himself to the occasion and dressed handsomely. As, for instance, in the banquet of Plato, where he is represented as going to find Agathon.
XII. He was a man of great ability, both in exhorting men to, and dissuading them from, any course; as, for instance, having discoursed with Theaetetus on the subject of knowledge, he sent him away almost inspired, as Plato says. And when Euthyphro had commenced a prosecution against his father for having killed a foreigner, he conversed with him on the subject of piety, and turned him from his purpose: and by his exhortations he made Lysis a most moral man. For he was very ingenious at deriving arguments from existing circumstances. And so he mollified his son Lamprocles when he was very angry with his mother, as Xenophon mentions somewhere in his works; and he wrought upon Glaucon, the brother of Plato, who was desirous to meddle with affairs of state, and induced him to abandon his purpose, because of his want of experience in such matters, as Xenophon relates. And, on the contrary, he persuaded Charmides to devote himself to politics, because he was a man very well calculated for such business. He also inspired Iphicrates, the general, with courage, by showing him the gamecocks of Midias the barber, pluming themselves against those of Callias; and Glauernides* said, that the state ought to keep him carefully, as if he were a pheasant or a peacock. He used also to say, that it was a strange thing that every one could easily tell what property he had, but was not able to name all his friends, or even to tell their number; so careless were men on that subject. Once when he saw Euclid exceedingly anxious about some dialectic arguments, he said to him, "O Euclid, you will acquire a power of managing sophists, but not of governing men. " For he thought that subtle hair-splitting on those subjects was quite useless; as Plato also records in the Euthydemus.
XIII. And when Charmides offered him some slaves, with the view to his making a profit of them, he would not have them; and, as some people say, he paid no regard to the beauty of Alcibiades.
XIV. He used to praise leisure as the most valuable of possessions, as Xenophon tells us in his Banquet. And it was a saying of his that there was one only good, namely, knowledge; and one only evil, namely ignorance; that riches and high birth had nothing estimable in them, but that, on the contrary, they were wholly evil. Accordingly, when some one told him that the mother of Antisthenes was a Thracian woman "Did you suppose," said he, "that so noble a man must be born of two Athenians? " And when Phaedo was reduced to a state of slavery, he ordered Crito to ransom him, and taught him, and made him a philosopher.
XV. And, moreover, he used to learn to play on the lyre when he had time, saying, that it it was not absurd to learn anything that one did not know; and further, he used frequently to dance, thinking such an exercise good for the health of the body, as Xenophon relates in his Banquet.
XVI. He used also to say that the daemon foretold the future to him;2
and that to begin well was not a trifling thing, but yet not far from a trifling thing; and that he knew nothing, except the fact of his ignorance. Another saying of his was, that those who bought things out of season, at an extravagant price, expected never to live till the proper season for them. Once, when he was asked what was the virtue of a young man, he said, "To avoid excess in everything. " And he used to say, that it was necessary to learn geometry only so far as might enable a man to measure land for the purposes of buying and selling. And when Euripides, in his Augur, had spoken thus of virtue :
'Tis best to leave these subjects undisturbed;
he rose up and left the theatre, saying that it was an absurdity to think it right to seek for a slave if one could not find him, but to let virtue be altogether disregarded. The question was once put to him by a man whether he would advise him to marry or not? And he replied, "Whichever you do, you will repent it. " He often said, that he wondered at those who made stone statues, when he saw how careful they were that the stone should be like the man it was intended to represent, but how careless they were of themselves, as to guarding against being like the stone. He used also to recommend young men to be constantly looking in the glass, in order that, if they were handsome, they might be worthy of their beauty; and if they were ugly, they might conceal their unsightly appearance by their accomplishments. He once invited some rich men to dinner, and when Xanthippe was ashamed of their insufficient appointments, he said, "Be of good cheer; for if our guests are sensible men, they will bear with us; and if they are not, we need not care about them. " He used to say, "That other men lived to eat, but that he ate to live. " Another saying of his was, "That to have a regard for the worthless multitude, was like the case of a man who refused to take one piece of money of four drachmas as if it were bad, and then took a heap of such coins and admitted them to be good. " When Aeschines said, "I am a poor man, and have nothing else, but I give you myself;" "Do you not," he replied, "perceive that you are giving me what is of the greatest value? " He said to some one, who was expressing indignation at being overlooked when the thirty had seized on the supreme power, "Do you, then, repent of not being a tyrant too? " A man said to him, "The Athenians have condemned you to death. " "And nature," he replied, "has condemned them. " But some attribute this answer to Anaxagoras. When his wife said to him, "You die undeservedly. " "Would you, then," he rejoined, "have had me deserve death? " He thought once that some one appeared to him in a dream, and said:
On the third day you'll come to lovely Phthia.
And so he said to Aeschines "In three days I shall die. " And when he was about to drink the hemlock, Apollodorus presented him with a handsome robe, that he might expire in it; and he said; "Why was my own dress good enough to live in; and not good enough to die in? " When a person said to him, "Such an one speaks ill of you;" "To be sure," said he, "for he has never learnt to speak well. " When Antisthenes turned the ragged side of his cloak to the light, he said, "I see your silly vanity through the holes in your cloak. " When some one said to him, "Does not that man abuse you? " "No," said he, "for that does not apply to me. " It was a saying of his, too, "That it is a good thing for a man to offer himself cheerfully to the attacks of the comic writers; for then, if they say anything worth hearing, one will be able to mend; and if they do not, then all they say is unimportant. "
XVII. He said once to Xanthippe, who first abused him, and then threw water at him, "Did I not say that Xanthippe was thundering now, and would soon rain? " When Alcibiades said to him, "The abusive temper of Xanthippe is intolerable;" "But I," he rejoined, "am used to it, just as I should be if I were always hearing the noise of a pulley; and you yourself endure to hear geese cackling. " To which Alcibiades answered, "Yes, but they bring me eggs and goslings. " "Well," rejoined Socrates, "and Xanthippe brings me children. " Once, she attacked him in the market-place, and tore his cloak off; his friends advised him to keep her off with his hands; "Yes, by Jove," said he, "that while we are boxing you may all cry out, 'Well done, Socrates, well done, Xanthippe. '" And he used to say, that one ought to live with a restive woman, just as horsemen manage violent-tempered horses; "and as they," said he, "when they have once mastered them, are easily able to manage all others; so I, after managing Xanthippe, can easily live with any one else whatever. "
XVIII. And it was in consequence of such sayings and actions as these, that the priestess at Delphi was witness in his favour, when she gave Chaerephon this answer, which is so universally known:
Socrates of all mortals is the wisest.
