Noctes Atticae

Why and how the philosopher Democritus deprived himself of his eye-sight; and the very fine and elegant verses of Laberius on that subject.

IT is written in the records of Grecian story that the philosopher Democritus, a man worthy of

reverence beyond all others and of the highest authority, of his own accord deprived himself of eyesight, because he believed that the thoughts and meditations of his mind in examining nature's laws would be more vivid and exact, if he should free them from the allurements of sight and the distractions offered by the eyes. This act of his, and the manner too in which he easily blinded himself by a most ingenious device, the poet Laberius has described, in a farce called The Ropemaker, in very elegant and finished verses; but he has imagined another reason for voluntary blindness and applied it with no little neatness to his own subject. For the character who speaks these lines in Laberius is a rich and stingy miser, lamenting in vigorous terms the excessive extravagance and dissipation of his young son. These are the verses of Laberius: [*](ii, 72, Ribbeck3.)

1. Democritus, Abdera's scientist,
2. Set up a shield to face Hyperion's rise,
3. That sight he might destroy by blaze of brass,
4. Thus by the sun's rays he destroyed his eyes,
5. Lest he should see bad citizens' good luck;
6. So I with blaze and splendour of my gold,
7. Would render sightless my concluding years,
8. Lest I should see my spendthrift son's good luck.

The story of Artemisia; and of the contest at the tomb of Mausolus in which celebrated writers took part.

ARTEMISIA is said to have loved her husband Mausolus with a love surpassing all the tales of passion and beyond one's conception of human

affection. Now Mausolus, as Marcus Tullius tells us, [*](Tusc. Disp. iii. 75.) was king of the land of Caria; according to some Greek historians he was governor of a province, the official whom the Greeks term a satrap. When this Mausolus had met his end amid the lamentations and in the arms of his wife, [*](In 353 B.C.) and had been buried with a magnificent funeral, Artemisia, inflamed with grief and with longing for her spouse, mingled his bones and ashes with spices, ground them into the form of a powder, put them in water, and drank them; and she is said to have given many other proofs of the violence of her passion. For perpetuating the memory of her husband, she also erected, with great expenditure of labour, that highly celebrated tomb, [*](The famous Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, adorned by Scopas, Bryaxis, Timotheus and Leochares with sculptures, the remains of which are now in the British Museum. It was a square building, 140 feet high, surrounded by Ionic columns. It stood upon a lofty base and was surmounted by a pyramid of steps ending in a platform, on which was a four-horse chariot. The term mausoleum was applied by the Romans to large and magnificent tombs such as the mausoleum of Augustus and that of Hadrian.) which has been deemed worthy of being numbered among the seven wonders of the world. [*](The other six wonders were: The walls and hanging gardens of Babylon; the temple of Diana at Ephesus; the statue of Olympian Zeus by Phidias; the Pyramids; and the Pharos, or lighthouse, at Alexandria.) When Artemisia dedicated this monument, consecrated to the deified shades of Mausolus, she instituted an agon, that is to say, a contest in celebrating his praises, offering magnificent prizes of money and other valuables. Three men distinguished for their eminent talent and eloquence are said to have come to contend in this eulogy, Theopompus, Theodectes [*](The more approved spelling is Theodectas; see C.I.G. ii. 977.) and Naucrates; some have even written that Isocrates himself entered the lists with them. But Theopompus was adjudged the victor in that contest. He was a pupil of Isocrates.

The tragedy of Theodectes, entitled Mausolus, is still extant to-day; and that in it Theodectes was more pleasing than in his prose writings is the opinion of Hyginus in his Examples. [*](Fr. 1, Peter.)