The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
But there is no book extant, which is the work of Telauges, though
there are some extant, which are attributed to his mother Theano. And
they tell a story of her, that once, when she was asked how long a woman
ought to be absent from her husband to be pure, she said, the moment she
leaves her own husband, she is pure; but she is never pure at all, after
she leaves any one else. And she recommended a woman, who was going to
her husband, to put off her modesty with her clothes, and when she left
him, to resume it again with her clothes; and when she was asked, “What
clothes?” she said, “Those which cause you to be called a woman.”
XXIII. Now Pythagoras, as Heraclides, the son of Sarapion, relates, died
when he was eighty years of age; according to his own account of his age,
but according to the common account, he was more than ninety. And we have
written a sportive epigram on him, which is couched in the following
terms:—
You’re not the only man who has abstained
From living food, for so likewise have we;
And who, I’d like to know did ever taste
Food while alive, most sage Pythagoras?
When meat is boil’d, or roasted well and salted,
I don’t think it can well be called living.
Which, therefore, without scruple then we eat it,
And call it no more living flesh, but meat.
And another, which runs thus:—
Pythagoras was so wise a man, that he
Never eat meat himself, and called it sin.
And yet he gave good joints of beef to others.
So that I marvel at his principles;
Who others wronged, by teaching them to do
What he believed unholy for himself.
And another, as follows:—
Should you Pythagoras’ doctrine wish to know,
Look on the centre of Euphorbus’ shield.
For he asserts there lived a man of old,
And when he had no longer an existence,
He still could say that he had been alive,
Or else he would not still be living now.
And this one too:
Alas! alas! why did Pythagoras hold
Beans in such wondrous honour? Why, besides,
Did he thus die among his choice companions?
There was a field of beans; and so the sage,
Died in the common road of Agrigentum,
Rather than trample down his favourite beans.
XXIV. And he flourished about the sixtieth olympiad; and his system
lasted for nine or ten generations. And the last of the Pythagoreans,
whom Aristoxenus knew, were Xenophilus, the Chalcidean, from Thrace; and
Phanton, the Phliasian, and Echecrates, and Diodes, and Polymnestus, who
were also Phliasians, and they were disciples of Philolaus and Eurytus,
of Tarentum.
XXV. And there were four men of the name of Pythagoras, about the same
time, at no great distance from one another. One was a native of Crotona,
a man who attained tyrannical power; the second was a Phliasian, a
trainer of wrestlers, as some say; the third was a native of Zacynthus;
the fourth was this our philosopher, to whom they say the mysteries of
philosophy belong, in whose time that proverbial phrase, “Ipse dixit,”
was introduced into ordinary life. Some also affirm, that there was
another man of the name of Pythagoras, a statuary of Rhodes; who is
believed to have been the first discoverer of rhythm and proportion; and
another was a Samian statuary; and another an orator, of no reputation;
and another was a physician, who wrote a treatise on Squills; and also
some essays on Homer; and another was a man, who wrote a history of the
affairs of the Dorians, as we are told by Dionysius.
But Eratosthenes says, as Phavorinus quotes him, in the eighth book of
his Universal History, that this philosopher, of whom we are speaking,
was the first man who ever practised boxing in a scientific manner, in
the forty-eighth olympiad, having his hair long, and being clothed in a
purple robe; and that he was rejected from the competition among boys,
and being ridiculed for his application, he immediately entered among the
men, and came off victorious. And this statement is confirmed among other
things, by the epigram which Theætetus composed:—
Stranger, if e’er you knew Pythagoras,
Pythagoras, the man with flowing hair,
The celebrated boxer, erst of Samos;
I am Pythagoras. And if you ask
A citizen of Elis of my deeds,
You’ll surely think he is relating fables.
Phavorinus says, that he employed definitions, on account of the
mathematical subjects to which he applied himself. And that Socrates
and those who were his pupils, did so still more; and that they were
subsequently followed in this by Aristotle and the Stoics.
He too, was the first person, who ever gave the name of κόσμος to the
universe, and the first who called the earth round; though Theophrastus
attributes this to Parmenides, and Zeno to Hesiod. They say too,
that Cylon used to be a constant adversary of his, as Antidicus was
of Socrates. And this epigram also used to be repeated, concerning
Pythagoras the athlete:—
Pythagoras of Samos, son of Crates,
Came while a child to the Olympic games,
Eager to battle for the prize in boxing.
XXVI. There is a letter of this philosopher extant, which is couched in
the following terms:—
PYTHAGORAS TO ANAXIMENES.
“You too, my most excellent friend, if you were not superior to
Pythagoras, in birth and reputation, would have migrated from Miletus
and gone elsewhere. But now the reputation of your father keeps you
back, which perhaps would have restrained me too, if I had been like
Anaximenes. But if you, who are the most eminent man, abandon the cities,
all their ornaments will be taken from them, and the Median power will
be more dangerous to them. Nor is it always seasonable to be studying
astronomy, but it is more honourable to exhibit a regard for one’s
country. And I myself am not always occupied about speculations of my own
fancy, but I am busied also with the wars which the Italians are waging
against one another.”
But since we have now finished our account of Pythagoras, we must also
speak of the most eminent of the Pythagoreans. After whom, we must
mention those who are spoken of more promiscuously in connection with
no particular school; and then we will connect the whole series of
philosophers worth speaking of, till we arrive at Epicurus, as we have
already promised.
Now Telauges and Theano we have mentioned; and we must now speak of
Empedocles, in the first place, for, according to some accounts, he was a
pupil of Pythagoras.
LIFE OF EMPEDOCLES.
I. Empedocles, as Hippobotus relates, was the son of Meton, the son of
Empedocles, and a citizen of Agrigentum. And Timæus, in the fifteenth
book of his Histories, gives the same account, adding that Empedocles,
the grandfather of the poet, was also a most eminent man. And Hermippus
tells the same story as Timæus; and in the same spirit Heraclides, in
his treatise on Diseases, relates that he was of an illustrious family,
since his father bred a fine stud of horses. Erastothenes, in his List
of the Conquerors at the Olympic Games, says, that the father of Meton
gained the victory in the seventy-first olympiad, quoting Aristotle as
his authority for the assertion.
But Apollodorus, the grammarian, in his Chronicles, says that he was the
son of Meton; and Glaucus says that he came to Thurii when the city was
only just completed. And then proceeding a little further, he adds:—
And some relate that he did flee from thence,
And came to Syracuse, and on their side
Did fight in horrid war against th’ Athenians;
But those men seem to me completely wrong—
For by this time he must have been deceased,
Or very old, which is not much believed;
For Aristotle, and Heraclides too,
Say that he died at sixty years of age.
But certainly the person who got the victory with a single horse in the
seventy-first olympiad was a namesake of this man, and that it is which
deceived Apollodorus as to the age of this philosopher.
But Satyrus, in his Lives, asserts, that Empedocles was the son of
Exænetus, and that he also left a son who was named Exænetus. And
that in the same Olympiad, he himself gained the victory with the
single horse; and his son, in wrestling, or, as Heraclides says in
his Abridgment, in running. But I have found in the Commentaries of
Phavorinus, that Empedocles sacrificed, and gave as a feast to the
spectators of the games, an ox made of honey and flour, and that he had a
brother named Callicratidas.
But Telauges, the son of Pythagoras, in his letters to Philolaus, says
that Empedocles was the son of Archinomus; and that he was a citizen of
Agrigentum, he himself asserts at the beginning of his Purifications.
Friends, who the mighty citadel inhabit,
Which crowns the golden waves of Acragas.
And this is enough to say about his family.
II. Timæus, in his ninth book, relates that he was a pupil of Pythagoras,
saying that he was afterwards convicted of having divulged his doctrines,
in the same way as Plato was, and therefore that he was forbidden from
thenceforth to attend his school. And they say that Pythagoras himself
mentions him when he says:—
And in that band there was a learned man
Of wondrous wisdom; one, who of all men
Had the profoundest wealth of intellect.
But some say that when the philosopher says this, he is referring to
Parmenides.
Neanthes relates, that till the time of Philolaus and Empedocles, the
Pythagoreans used to admit all persons indiscriminately into their
school; but when Empedocles made their doctrines public by means of his
poems, then they made a law to admit no Epic poet. And they say that
the same thing happened to Plato; for that he too was excluded from the
school. But who was the teacher of the Pythagorean school that Empedocles
was a pupil of, they do not say; for, as for the letter of Telauges, in
which he is stated to have been a pupil of Hippasus and Brontinus, that
is not worthy of belief. But Theophrastus says that he was an imitator
and a rival of Parmenides, in his poems, for that he too had delivered
his opinions on natural philosophy in epic verse.
Hermippus, however, says that he was an imitator, not of Parmenides,
but of Xenophanes with whom he lived; and that he imitated his epic
style, and that it was at a later period that he fell in with the
Pythagoreans. But Alcidamas, in his Natural Philosophy, says, that Zeno
and Empedocles were pupils of Parmenides, about the same time; and that
they subsequently seceded from him; and that Zeno adopted a philosophical
system peculiar to himself; but that Empedocles became a pupil of
Anaxagoras and Pythagoras, and that he imitated the pompous demeanour,
and way of life, and gestures of the one, and the system of Natural
Philosophy of the other.
III. And Aristotle, in his Sophist, says that Empedocles was the first
person who invented rhetoric, and Zeno the first person who invented
dialectics. And in his book on Poetry, he says, that Empedocles was a
man of Homeric genius, and endowed with great power of language, and
a great master of metaphor, and a man who employed all the successful
artifices of poetry, and also that when he had written several poems, and
among them one on the passage of the Hellespont, by Xerxes, and also the
proœmium of a hymn to Apollo, his daughter subsequently burnt them, or,
as Hieronymus says, his sister, burning the proœmium unintentionally,
but the Persian poem on purpose, because it was incomplete. And speaking
generally, he says that he wrote tragedies and political treatises.
But Heraclides, the son of Sarapion, says that the tragedies were the
work of some other Empedocles; and Hieronymus says that he had met with
forty-three. Neanthes, too, affirms that when he was a young man, he