The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
of all the faculty which judges, and this is the superior one; the
other that which is the foundation of the judgment, being a most exact
appearance of the objects. And the first principles of everything he
calls matter, and the agent, and the quality, and the place. For they
show out of what, and by what, and how, and where anything is done. The
end is that to which everything is referred; namely, a life made perfect
with every virtue, not without the natural and external qualities of the
body.
But we must now speak of the men themselves; and first of all about
Thales.
LIFE OF THALES.
I. Thales, then, as Herodotus and Duris and Democritus say, was the
son of Euxamius and Cleobule; of the family of the Thelidæ, who are
Phœnicians by descent, among the most noble of all the descendants of
Cadmus and Agenor, as Plato testifies. And he was the first man to whom
the name of Wise was given, when Damasius was Archon at Athens, in whose
time also the seven wise men had that title given to them, as Demetrius
Phalereus records in his Catalogue of the Archons. He was enrolled as
a citizen at Miletus when he came thither with Neleus, who had been
banished from Phœnicia; but a more common statement is that he was a
native Milesian, of noble extraction.
II. After having been immersed in state affairs he applied himself to
speculations in natural philosophy; though, as some people state, he
left no writings behind him. For the book on Naval Astronomy, which is
attributed to him is said in reality to be the work of Phocus the Samian.
But Callimachus was aware that he was the discoverer of the Lesser Bear;
for in his Iambics he speaks of him thus:
And, he, ’tis said, did first compute the stars
Which beam in Charles’s wain, and guide the bark
Of the Phœnician sailor o’er the sea.
According to others he wrote two books, and no more, about the solstice
and the equinox; thinking that everything else was easily to be
comprehended. According to other statements, he is said to have been the
first who studied astronomy, and who foretold the eclipses and motions
of the sun, as Eudemus relates in his history of the discoveries made in
astronomy; on which account Xenophanes and Herodotus praise him greatly;
and Heraclitus and Democritus confirm this statement.
III. Some again (one of whom is Chœrilus the poet) say that he was the
first person who affirmed that the souls of men were immortal; and he was
the first person, too, who discovered the path of the sun from one end
of the ecliptic to the other: and who, as one account tells us, defined
the magnitude of the sun as being seven hundred and twenty times as great
as that of the moon. He was also the first person who called the last
day of the month the thirtieth. And likewise the first to converse about
natural philosophy, as some say. But Aristotle and Hippias say that he
attributed souls also to lifeless things, forming his conjecture from the
nature of the magnet, and of amber. And Pamphile relates that he, having
learnt geometry from the Egyptians, was the first person to describe a
right-angled triangle in a circle, and that he sacrificed an ox in honour
of his discovery. But others, among whom is Apollodorus the calculator,
say that it was Pythagoras who made this discovery. It was Thales also
who carried to their greatest point of advancement the discoveries which
Callimachus in his iambics says were first made by Euphebus the Phrygian,
such as those of the scalene angle, and of the triangle, and of other
things which relate to investigations about lines. He seems also to have
been a man of the greatest wisdom in political matters. For when Crœsus
sent to the Milesians to invite them to an alliance, he prevented them
from agreeing to it, which step of his, as Cyrus got the victory, proved
the salvation of the city. But Clytus relates, as Heraclides assures us,
that he was attached to a solitary and recluse life.
IV. Some assert that he was married, and that he had a son named
Cibissus; others, on the contrary, say that he never had a wife, but that
he adopted the son of his sister; and that once being asked why he did
not himself become a father, he answered, that it was because he was fond
of children. They say, too, that when his mother exhorted him to marry,
he said, “No, by Jove, it is not yet time.” And afterwards, when he was
past his youth, and she was again pressing him earnestly, he said, “It is
no longer time.”
V. Hieronymus, of Rhodes, also tells us, in the second book of his
Miscellaneous Memoranda, that when he was desirous to show that it was
easy to get rich, he, foreseeing that there would be a great crop of
olives, took some large plantations of olive trees, and so made a great
deal of money.
VI. He asserted water to be the principle of all things, and that the
world had life, and was full of dæmons: they say, too, that he was the
original definer of the seasons of the year, and that it was he who
divided the year into three hundred and sixty-five days. And he never had
any teacher except during the time that he went to Egypt, and associated
with the priests. Hieronymus also says that he measured the Pyramids:
watching their shadow, and calculating when they were of the same size
as that was. He lived with Thrasybulus the tyrant of Miletus, as we are
informed by Minyas.
VII. Now it is known to every one what happened with respect to the
tripod that was found by the fishermen and sent to the wise men by the
people of the Milesians. For they say that some Ionian youths bought a
cast of their net from some Milesian fishermen. And when the tripod was
drawn up in the net there was a dispute about it; until the Milesians
sent to Delphi: and the God gave them the following answer:—
You ask about the tripod, to whom you shall present it;
’Tis for the wisest, I reply, that fortune surely meant it.
Accordingly they gave it to Thales, and he gave it to some one, who again
handed it over to another, till it came to Solon. But he said that it
was the God himself who was the first in wisdom; and so he sent it to
Delphi. But Callimachus gives a different account of this in his Iambics,
taking the tradition which he mentions from Leander the Milesian; for he
says that a certain Arcadian of the name of Bathycles, when dying, left a
goblet behind him with an injunction that it should be given to the first
of the wise men. And it was given to Thales, and went the whole circle
till it came back to Thales, on which he sent it to Apollo Didymæus,
adding (according to Callimachus,) the following distich:—
Thales, who’s twice received me as a prize,
Gives me to him who rules the race of Neleus.
And the prose inscription runs thus:—
Thales the son of Examius, a Milesian, offers this to Apollo
Didymæus, having twice received it from the Greeks as the
reward for virtue.
And the name of the son of Bathycles who carried the goblet about from
one to the other, was Thyrion, as Eleusis tells us in his History of
Achilles. And Alexander the Myndian agrees with him in the ninth book of
his Traditions. But Eudoxus of Cnidos, and Evanthes of Miletus, say that
one of the friends of Crœsus received from the king a golden goblet, for
the purpose of giving it to the wisest of the Greeks; and that he gave
it to Thales, and that it came round to Chilo, and that he inquired of
the God at Delphi who was wiser than himself; and that the God replied,
Myson, whom we shall mention hereafter. (He is the man whom Eudoxus
places among the seven wise men instead of Cleobulus; but Plato inserts
his name instead of Periander.) The God accordingly made this reply
concerning him:—
I say that Myson, the Œtæan sage,
The citizen of Chen, is wiser far
In his deep mind than you.
The person who went to the temple to ask the question was Anacharsis; but
again Dædacus, the Platonic philosopher, and Clearchus, state that the
goblet was sent by Crœsus to Pittacus, and so was carried round to the
different men. But Andron, in his book called The Tripod, says that the
Argives offered the tripod as a prize for excellence to the wisest of the
Greeks; and that Aristodemus, a Spartan, was judged to deserve it, but
that he yielded the palm to Chilo; and Alcæus mentions Aristodemus in
these lines:—
And so they say Aristodemus once
Uttered a truthful speech in noble Sparta:
’Tis money makes the man; and he who’s none,
Is counted neither good nor honourable.
But some say that a vessel fully loaded was sent by Periander to
Thrasybulus the tyrant of the Milesians; and that as the ship was wrecked
in the sea, near the island of Cos, this tripod was afterwards found
by some fishermen. Phanodicus says that it was found in the sea near
Athens, and so brought into the city; and then, after an assembly had
been held to decide on the disposal, it was sent to Bias—and the reason
why we will mention in our account of Bias. Others say that this goblet
had been made by Vulcan, and presented by the Gods to Pelops, on his
marriage; and that subsequently it came into the possession of Menelaus,
and was taken away by Paris when he carried off Helen, and was thrown
into the sea near Cos by her, as she said that it would become a cause
of battle. And after some time, some of the citizens of Lebedos having
bought a net, this tripod was brought up in it; and as they quarrelled
with the fishermen about it, they went to Cos; and not being able to get
the matter settled there, they laid it before the Milesians, as Miletus
was their metropolis; and they sent ambassadors, who were treated with
neglect, on which account they made war on the Coans; and after each side
had met with many revolutions of fortune, an oracle directed that the
tripod should be given to the wisest; and then both parties agreed that
it belonged to Thales: and he, after it had gone the circuit of all the
wise men, presented it to the Didymæan Apollo. Now, the assignation of
the oracle was given to the Coans in the following words:—
The war between the brave Ionian race
And the proud Meropes will never cease,
Till the rich golden tripod which the God,
Its maker, cast beneath the briny waves,
Is from your city sent, and justly given
To that wise being who knows all present things,
And all that’s past, and all that is to come.
And the reply given to the Milesians was—
You ask about the tripod:
and so on, as I have related it before. And now we have said enough on
this subject.
But Hermippus, in his Lives, refers to Thales what has been by some
people reported of Socrates; for he recites that he used to say that he
thanked fortune for three things:—first of all, that he had been born a
man and not a beast; secondly, that he was a man and not a woman; and
thirdly, that he was a Greek and not a barbarian.
VIII. It is said that once he was led out of his house by an old woman
for the purpose of observing the stars, and he fell into a ditch and
bewailed himself, on which the old woman said to him—“Do you, O Thales,
who cannot see what is under your feet, think that you shall understand
what is in heaven?” Timon also knew that he was an astronomer, and in his
Silli he praises him, saying:—
Like Thales, wisest of the seven sages,
That great astronomer.
And Lobon of Argos, says, that which was written by him extends to about
two hundred verses; and that the following inscription is engraved upon
his statue:—
Miletus, fairest of Ionian cities,
Gave birth to Thales, great astronomer,
Wisest of mortals in all kinds of knowledge.
IX. And these are quoted as some of his lines:—
It is not many words that real wisdom proves;
Breathe rather one wise thought,