Vitae philosophorum

Periander to Procles

The murder of my wife was unintentional; but yours is deliberate guilt when you set my son’s heart against me. Either therefore put an end to my son’s harsh treatment, or I will revenge myself

There is also a letter written to him by Thrasybulus, as follows:

Thrasybulus to Periander

I made no answer to your herald; but I took him into a cornfield, and with a staff smote and cut off the over-grown ears of corn, while he accompanied me. And if you ask him what he heard and what he saw, he will give his message. And this is what you must do if you want to strengthen your absolute rule: put to death those among the citizens who are pre-eminent, whether they are hostile to you or not. For to an absolute ruler even a friend is an object of suspicion.

Anacharsis the Scythian was the son of Gnurus and brother of Caduidas, king of Scythia. His mother was a Greek, and for that reason he spoke both languages. He wrote on the institutions of the Greeks and the Scythians, dealing with simplicity of life and military matters, a poem of 800 lines. So outspoken was he that he furnished occasion for a proverb, To talk like a Scythian.

Sosicrates makes him come to Athens about the 47th Olympiad[*](591-588 B.C.) in the archonship of Eucrates. Hermippus relates that on his arrival at the house of Solon he told one of the servants to announce that Anacharsis had come and was desirous of seeing him and, if possible, of becoming his guest.

The

After a while Anacharsis returned to Scythia, where, owing to his enthusiasm for everything Greek, he was supposed to be subverting the national institutions, and was killed by his brother while they were out hunting together. When struck by the arrow he exclaimed, My reputation carried me safe through Greece, but the envy it excited at home has been my ruin. In some accounts it is said that he was slain while performing Greek rites.

Here is my own epitaph upon him[*](Anth. Pal. vii. 92.):

Back from his travels Anacharsis came,
1. To hellenize the Scythians all aglow;
2. Ere half his sermon could their minds inflame,
3. A wingèd arrow laid the preacher low.

It was a saying of his that the vine bore three kinds of grapes: the first of pleasure, the next of intoxication, and the third of disgust. He said he wondered why in Greece experts contend in the games and non-experts award the prizes. Being asked how one could avoid becoming a toper, he answered, By keeping before your eyes the disgraceful exhibition made by the drunkard. Again, he expressed surprise that the Greek lawgivers should impose penalties on wanton outrage, while they honour athletes for bruising one another. After

Oil he called a drug which produced madness, because the athletes when they anoint themselves with it are maddened against each other. How is it, he asked, that the Greeks prohibit falsehood and yet obviously tell falsehoods in retail trade? Nor could he understand why at the beginning of their feasts they drink from small goblets and when they are full from large ones. The inscription on his statues is: Bridle speech, gluttony, and sensuality. Being asked if there were flutes in Scythia, he replied, No, nor yet vines. To the question what vessels were the safest his reply was, Those which have been hauled ashore. And he declared the strangest thing he had seen in Greece to be that they leave the smoke on the mountains and convey the fuel into the city.[*](i.e. in the form of charcoal. Cf. A. S. Ferguson in Class. Rev. vol. xxxi. p. 97.) When some one inquired which were more in number, the living or the dead, he rejoined, In which category, then, do you place those who are on the seas? When some Athenian reproached him with being a Scythian, he replied, Well, granted that my country is a disgrace to me, you are a disgrace to your country.

To the question, What among men is both good and bad? his answer was The tongue. He said it was better to have one friend of great worth than many friends worth nothing at all. He defined the market as a place set apart where men may deceive and overreach one another. When insulted by a boy over the wine he said, If you cannot carry your liquor when you are young, boy, you will be a water carrier when you are old.

According to some he was the inventor of the anchor and the potter’s wheel.

To him is attributed the following letter:

Anacharsis to Croesus

I have come, O King of the Lydians, to the land of the Greeks to be instructed in their manners and pursuits. And I am not even in quest of gold, but am well content to return to Scythia a better man. At all events here I am in Sardis, being greatly desirous of making your acquaintance.

Myson was the son of Strymon, according to Sosicrates, who quotes Hermippus as his authority, and a native of Chen, a village in the district of Oeta or Laconia; and he is reckoned one of the Seven Sages. They say that his father was a tyrant. We are told by some one that, when Anacharsis inquired if there were anyone wiser than himself, the Pythian priestess gave the response which has already been quoted in the Life of Thales as her reply to a question by Chilon[*](Anth. Plan. vi. 40.):

Myson of Chen in Oeta; this is he
1. Who for wiseheartedness surpasseth thee.

Others cite the first line of the oracle differently, Myson of Chen in Etis, and inquire what

Myson is mentioned by Hipponax, the words being[*](Fr. 45 Bergk.):

And Myson, whom Apollo’s self proclaimed
1. Wisest of all men.

At any rate he was seen in Lacedaemon laughing to himself in a lonely spot; and when some one suddenly appeared and asked him why he laughed when no one was near, he replied, That is just the reason. And Aristoxenus says that the reason why he remained obscure was that he belonged to no city but to a village and that an unimportant one. Hence because he was unknown, some writers, but not Plato the philosopher, attributed to Pisistratus the tyrant what properly belonged to Myson. For Plato mentions him in the Protagoras,[*](343 a.) reckoning him as one of the Seven instead of Periander.

He used to say we should not investigate facts by the light of arguments, but arguments by the light of facts; for the facts were not put together to fit the arguments, but the arguments to fit the facts.

He died at the age of ninety-seven.

Epimenides, according to Theopompus and many other writers, was the son of Phaestius; some, however, make him the son of Dosiadas, others of Agesarchus. He was a native of Cnossos in Crete, though from wearing his hair long he did not look like a Cretan. One day he was sent into the country by his father to look for a stray sheep, and at noon he turned aside out of the way, and went to sleep in a cave, where he slept for fifty-seven years. After this he got up and went in search of the sheep, thinking he had been asleep only a short time. And when he could not find it, he came to the farm, and found everything changed and another owner in possession. Then he went back to the town in utter perplexity; and there, on entering his own house, he fell in with people who wanted to know who he was. At length he found his younger brother, now an old man, and learnt the truth from him.

So he became famous throughout Greece, and was believed to be a special favourite of heaven.

Hence, when the Athenians were attacked by pestilence, and the Pythian priestess bade them purify the city, they sent a ship commanded by Nicias, son of Niceratus, to Crete to ask the help of Epimenides. And he came in the 46th Olympiad,[*](595-592 b.c.) purified their city, and stopped the pestilence in the following way. He took sheep, some black and others white, and brought them to the Areopagus; and there he let them go whither they pleased, instructing those who followed them to mark the spot where each sheep lay down and offer a sacrifice to the local divinity. And thus, it is said, the plague was stayed. Hence even to this day altars may be

The Athenians voted him a talent in money and a ship to convey him back to Crete. The money he declined, but he concluded a treaty of friendship and alliance between Cnossos and Athens.

So he returned home and soon afterwards died. According to Phlegon in his work On Longevity he lived one hundred and fifty-seven years; according to the Cretans two hundred and ninety-nine years. Xenophanes of Colophon gives his age as 154, according to hearsay.

He wrote a poem On the Birth of the Curetes and Corybantes and a Theogony,[*](These long poems may have been written by Lobon himself on the Hesiodic model; or Lobon may merely have affirmed their existence in his treatise On Poets.) 5000 lines in all; another on the building of the Argo and Jason’s voyage to Colchis in 6500 lines.

He also compiled prose works On Sacrifices and the Cretan Constitution, also On Minos and Rhadamanthus, running to about 4000 lines. At Athens again he founded the temple of the Eumenides, as Lobon of Argos tells us in his work On Poets. He is stated to have been the first who purified houses and fields, and the first who founded temples. Some are found to maintain that he did not go to sleep but withdrew himself[*](This is the meaning of ἐκπατεῖν in three other passages, iv. 19, ix. 3, 63, in the last of which it is glossed by ἐρημάζειν, as if the sage were a recluse, a lover of solitude.) for a while, engaged in gathering simples.

There is extant a letter of his to Solon the lawgiver, containing a scheme of government which Minos drew up for the Cretans. But Demetrius of Magnesia, in his work on poets and writers of the same name, endeavours to discredit the letter on the ground that it is late and not written in the Cretan dialect but in Attic, and New Attic too. However, I have found another letter by him which runs as follows:

Epimenides to Solon

Courage, my friend. For if Pisistratus had attacked the Athenians while they were still serfs and before they had good laws, he would have secured power in perpetuity by the enslavement of the citizens. But, as it is, he is reducing to subjection men who are no cowards, men who with pain and shame remember Solon’s warning and will never endure to be under a tyrant. But even should Pisistratus himself hold down the city, I do not expect that his power will be continued to his children; for it is hard to contrive that men brought up as free men under the best laws should be slaves. But, instead of going on your travels, come quietly to Crete to me; for here you will have no monarch to fear, whereas, if some of his friends should fall in with you while you are travelling about, I fear you may come to some harm.

This is the tenor of the letter. But Demetrius reports a story that he received from the Nymphs food of a special sort and kept it in a cow’s hoof; that he took small doses of this food, which was entirely absorbed into his system, and he was never seen to eat. Timaeus mentions him in his second book. Some writers say that the Cretans sacrifice to him

Theopompus relates in his Mirabilia that, as he was building a temple to the Nymphs, a voice came from heaven: Epimenides, not a temple to the Nymphs but to Zeus, and that he foretold to the Cretans the defeat of the Lacedaemonians by the Arcadians, as already stated; and in very truth they were crushed at Orchomenus.

And he became old in as many days as he had slept years; for this too is stated by Theopompus. Myronianus in his Parallels declares that the Cretans called him one of the Curetes. The Lacedaemonians guard his body in their own keeping in obedience to a certain oracle; this is stated by Sosibius the Laconian.

There have been two other men named Epimenides, namely, the genealogist and another who wrote in Doric Greek about Rhodes.

Pherecydes, the son of Babys, and a native of Syros according to Alexander in his Successions of Philosophers, was a pupil of Pittacus. Theopompus

Many wonderful stories are told about him. He was walking along the beach in Samos and saw a ship running before the wind; he exclaimed that in no long time she would go down, and, even as he watched her, down she went. And as he was drinking water which had been drawn up from a well he predicted that on the third day there would be an earthquake; which came to pass. And on his way from Olympia he advised Perilaus, his host in Messene, to move thence with all belonging to him; but Perilaus could not be persuaded, and Messene was afterwards taken.[*](These stories no doubt come from Theopompus, whose work on Marvels is cited in the next paragraph.)

He bade the Lacedaemonians set no store by gold or silver, as Theopompus says in his Mirabilia. He told them he had received this command from Heracles in a dream; and the same night Heracles enjoined upon the kings to obey Pherecydes. But some fasten this story upon Pythagoras.

Hermippus relates that on the eve of war between Ephesus and Magnesia he favoured the cause of the Ephesians, and inquired of some one passing by where he came from, and on receiving the reply From Ephesus, he said, Drag me by the legs and place me in the territory of Magnesia; and take a message to your countrymen that after their victory they must bury me there, and that this is the last injunction of Pherecydes.

The man gave the message; a day later the Ephesians attacked and defeated the Magnesians; they found Pherecydes dead and buried him on the spot with great honours. Another

He maintained that the divine name for table is θυωρός, or that which takes care of offerings.

Andron of Ephesus says that there were two natives of Syros who bore the name of Pherecydes: the one was an astronomer, the other was the son of Babys and a theologian, teacher of Pythagoras. Eratosthenes, however, says that there was only one Pherecydes of Syros, the other Pherecydes being an Athenian and a genealogist.

There is preserved a work by Pherecydes of Syros, a work which begins thus: Zeus and Time and Earth were from all eternity, and Earth was called Γῆ because Zeus gave her earth (γῆ) as guerdon (γέρας). His sun-dial is also preserved in the island of Syros.

Duris in the second book of his Horae gives the inscription on his tomb as follows[*](Anth. Pal. vii. 93.):