Vitae philosophorum

These stories are contradicted by Timaeus, who expressly says that he left Sicily for Peloponnesus and never returned at all; and this is the reason Timaeus gives for the fact that the manner of his death is unknown. He replies to Heraclides, whom he mentions by name, in his fourteenth book. Pisianax, he says, was a citizen of Syracuse and possessed no land at Agrigentum. Further, if such a story had been in circulation, Pausanias would have set up a monument to his friend, as to a god, in the form of a statue or shrine, for he was a wealthy man. How came he, adds Timaeus, to leap into the craters, which he had

It is not at all surprising that his tomb is not found; the same is true of many other men. After urging some such arguments Timaeus goes on to say, But Heraclides is everywhere just such a collector of absurdities, telling us, for instance, that a man dropped down to earth from the moon.

Hippobotus assures us that formerly there was in Agrigentum a statue of Empedocles with his head covered, and afterwards another with the head uncovered in front of the Senate House at Rome, which plainly the Romans had removed to that site. For portrait-statues with inscriptions are extant even now. Neanthes of Cyzicus, who tells about the Pythagoreans, relates that, after the death of Meton, the germs of a tyranny began to show themselves, that then it was Empedocles who persuaded the Agrigentines to put an end to their factions and cultivate equality in politics.

Moreover, from his abundant means he bestowed dowries upon many of the maidens of the city who had no dowry. No doubt it was the same means that enabled him to don a purple robe and over it a golden girdle, as Favorinus relates in his Memorabilia, and again slippers of bronze and a Delphic laurel-wreath. He had thick hair, and a train of boy attendants. He himself was always grave, and kept this gravity of demeanour unshaken. In such sort would he appear in public; when the citizens met him, they recognized in this demeanour the stamp, as it were, of royalty. But afterwards, as he was going in a carriage to Messene to attend some festival, he fell and broke his thigh; this

As to his age, Aristotle’s account is different, for he makes him to have been sixty when he died; while others make him one hundred and nine. He flourished in the 84th Olympiad.[*](444-441 b.c.) Demetrius of Troezen in his pamphlet Against the Sophists said of him, adapting the words of Homer[*](Od. xi. 278.):

He tied a noose that hung aloft from a tall cornel-tree and thrust his neck into it, and his soul went down to Hades.

In the short letter of Telauges which was mentioned above[*](viii. 35.) it is stated that by reason of his age he slipped into the sea and was drowned. Thus and thus much of his death.

There is an epigram of my own on him in my Pammetros in a satirical vein, as follows[*](Anth. Pal. vii. 123.):

Thou, Empedocles, didst cleanse thy body with nimble flame, fire didst thou drink from everlasting bowls.[*](i.e. the craters of Etna.) I will not say that of thine own will thou didst hurl thyself into the stream of Etna; thou didst fall in against thy will when thou wouldst fain not have been found out.

Verily there is a tale about the death of Empedocles, how that once he fell from a carriage and broke his right thigh. But if he leapt into the bowls of fire and so took a draught of life, how was it that his tomb was shown still in Megara?

His doctrines were as follows, that there are four elements, fire, water, earth and air, besides friendship by which these are united, and strife by which they are separated. These are his words[*](Fr. 6 D.):

Shining Zeus and life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis, who lets flow from her tears the source of mortal life,

And their continuous change, he says, never ceases,[*](Fr. 17. 6 D.) as if this ordering of things were eternal. At all events he goes on[*](Fr. 17. 7 D.):

At one time all things uniting in one through Love, at another each carried in a different direction through the hatred born of strife.

The sun he calls a vast collection of fire and larger than the moon; the moon, he says, is of the shape of a quoit, and the heaven itself crystalline. The soul, again, assumes all the various forms of animals and plants. At any rate he says[*](Fr. 117 D.):

Before now I was born a boy and a maid, a bush and a bird, and a dumb fish leaping out of the sea.

His poems On Nature and Purifications run to 5000 lines, his Discourse on Medicine to 600. Of the tragedies we have spoken above.

Epicharmus of Cos, son of Helothales, was another pupil of Pythagoras. When three months old he was sent to Megara in Sicily and thence to Syracuse, as he tells us in his own writings. On his statue this epigram is written[*](Anth. Pal. vii. 78.):

If the great sun outshines the other stars,
1. If the great sea is mightier than the streams,
2. So Epicharmus’ wisdom all excelled,
3. Whom Syracuse his fatherland thus crowned.

Archytas of Tarentum, son of Mnesagoras or, if we may believe Aristoxenus, of Hestiaeus, was another of the Pythagoreans. He it was whose letter saved Plato when he was about to be put to death by Dionysius. He was generally admired for his excellence in all fields; thus he was generalissimo of his city seven times, while the law excluded all others even from a second year of command. We have two letters written to him by Plato, he having first written to Plato in these terms:

Archytas wishes Plato good health.

You have done well to get rid of your ailment, as we learn both from your own message and through Lamiscus that you have: we attended to the matter of the memoirs and went up to Lucania where we found the true progeny of Ocellus [to wit, his writings]. We did get the works On Law, On Kingship, Of Piety, and On the Origin of the Universe, all of which we have sent on to you; but the rest are, at present, nowhere to be found; if they should turn up, you shall have them.

This is Archytas’s letter; and Plato’s answer is as follows:

Plato to Archytas greeting.

I was overjoyed to get the memoirs which you sent, and I am very greatly pleased with the writer of them; he seems to be a right worthy descendant of his distant forbears. They came, so it is said, from Myra, and were among those who emigrated from Troy in Laomedon’s time, really good men, as the traditional story shows. Those memoirs of mine about which you wrote are not yet in a fit state; but such as they are I have sent them on to you. We both agree about their custody, so I need not give any advice on that head. Farewell.

These then are the letters which passed between them.

Four men have borne the name of Archytas: (1) our subject; (2) a musician, of Mytilene; (3) the compiler of a work On Agriculture; (4) a writer of epigrams. Some speak of a fifth, an architect, to whom is attributed a book On Mechanism which begins like this: These things I learnt from Teucer of Carthage. A tale is told of the musician that, when it was cast in his teeth that he could not be heard, he replied, Well, my instrument shall speak for me and win the day.

Aristoxenus says that our Pythagorean was never defeated during his whole generalship, though he once resigned it owing to bad feeling against him, whereupon the army at once fell into the hands of the enemy.

He was the first to bring mechanics to a system by applying mathematical principles; he also first

Alcmaeon of Croton, another disciple of Pythagoras, wrote chiefly on medicine, but now and again he touches on natural philosophy, as when he says, Most human affairs go in pairs. He is thought to have been the first to compile a physical treatise, so we learn from Favorinus in his Miscellaneous History; and he said that the moon [and] generally [the heavenly bodies] are in their nature eternal.

He was the son of Pirithous, as he himself tells us at the beginning of his treatise[*](Fr. 1 Diels): These are the words of Alcmaeon of Croton, son of Pirithous, which he spake to Brotinus, Leon and Bathyllus: Of things invisible, as of mortal things, only the gods have certain knowledge; but to us, as men, only inference from evidence is possible, and so on. He held also that the soul is immortal and that it is continuously in motion like the sun.

Hippasus of Metapontum was another Pythagorean, who held that there is a definite time which the

According to Demetrius in his work on Men of the Same Name, he left nothing in writing. There were two men named Hippasus, one being our subject, and the other a man who wrote The Laconian Constitution in five books; and he himself was a Lacedaemonian.

Philolaus of Croton was a Pythagorean, and it was from him that Plato requests Dion to buy the Pythagorean treatises.[*](Cf. iii. 9.) He (Dion) was put to death because he was thought to be aiming at a tyranny.[*](The subject of ἐτελεύτα would naturally be Philolaus, and so D. L. understood it; but the original reference was clearly to Dion.) This is what we have written upon him[*](Anth. Pal. vii. 126.):

Fancies of all things are most flattering;
1. If you intend, but do not, you are lost.
2. So Croton taught Philolaus to his cost,
3. Who fancied he would like to be their king.[*](Or in prose: My chief advice to all men is: to lull suspicion to rest. For even if you don’t do something, and people fancy you do, it is ill for you. So Croton, his native land, once put Philolaus to death, fancying he wished to have a tyrant’s house.)

His doctrine is that all things are brought about by necessity and in harmonious inter-relation. He was the first to declare that the earth moves in a circle,[*](i.e. round the central fire. See T. L. Heath, Aristarchus. 187 sqq.) though some say that it was Hicetas of Syracuse.

He wrote one book, and it was this work which, according to Hermippus, some writer said that Plato the philosopher, when he went to Sicily to Dionysius’s court, bought from Philolaus’s relatives

According to Demetrius in his work on Men of the Same Name, Philolaus was the first to publish the Pythagorean treatises, to which he gave the title On Nature, beginning as follows: Nature in the ordered universe was composed of unlimited and limiting elements, and so was the whole universe and all that is therein.

Eudoxus of Cnidos, the son of Aeschines, was an astronomer, a geometer, a physician and a legislator. He learned geometry from Archytas and medicine from Philistion the Sicilian, as Callimachus tells us in his Tables. Sotion in his Successions of Philosophers says that he was also a pupil of Plato. When he was about twenty-three years old and in straitened circumstances, he was attracted by the reputation of the Socratics and set sail for Athens with Theomedon the physician, who provided for his wants. Some even say that he was Theomedon’s favourite. Having disembarked at Piraeus he went up every day to Athens and, when he had attended the Sophists’ lectures, returned again to the port.

After spending two months there, he went home and, aided by the liberality of his friends, he proceeded to Egypt with Chrysippus the physician, bearing with him letters of introduction from Agesilaus

Some say that, when Plato gave a banquet, Eudoxus, owing to the numbers present, introduced the fashion of arranging couches in a semicircle. Nicomachus, the son of Aristotle, states that he declared pleasure to be the good.[*](The reference is to the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle (i. 12, 1101 b 27; x. 2, 1172 b 9 sq.). That Nicomachus wrote the treatise called after him was a common error into which Cicero also fell (De fin. v. § 12).)He was received in his native city with great honour, proof of this being the decree concerning him. But he also became famous throughout Greece, as legislator for his fellow-citizens, so we learn from Hermippus in his fourth book On the Seven Sages, and as the author of astronomical and geometrical treatises and other important works.

He had three daughters, Actis, Philtis and Delphis.