jests and vulgar tales. He would punish neither slave nor free man in anger. Admonition he used to call "setting right." He used to practise divination by sounds or voices and by auguries, never by burnt-offerings, beyond frankincense. The offerings he made were always inanimate; though some say that he would offer cocks, sucking goats and porkers, as they are called, but lambs never. However, Aristoxenus has it that he consented to the eating of all other animals, and only abstained from ploughing oxen and rams.
The same authority, as we have seen, asserts that Pythagoras took his doctrines from the Delphic priestess Themistoclea. Hieronymus, however, says that, when he had descended into Hades, he saw the soul of Hesiod bound fast to a brazen pillar and gibbering, and the soul of Homer hung on a tree with serpents writhing about it, this being their punishment for what they had said about the gods; he also saw under torture those who would not remain faithful to their wives. This, says our authority, is why he was honoured by the people of Croton. Aristippus of Cyrene affirms in his work On the Physicists that he was named Pythagoras because he uttered the truth as infallibly as did the Pythian oracle. The word *puqago/ ras being taken to be a compound from *pu/qios and a)goreu/ ein.
He is said to have advised his disciples as follows: Always to say on entering their own doors : Where did I trespass? What did I achieve?
And unfulfilled what duties did I leave?
Not to let victims be brought for sacrifice to the gods, and to worship only at the altar unstained with blood. Not to call the gods to witness, man's duty being rather to strive to make his own word carry conviction. To honour their elders, on the principle that precedence in time gives a greater title to respect; for as in the world sunrise comes before sunset, so in human life the beginning before the end, and in all organic life birth precedes death.
And he further bade them to honour gods before demi-gods, heroes before men, and first among men their parents; and so to behave one to another as not to make friends into enemies, but to turn enemies into friends. To deem nothing their own. To support the law, to wage war on lawlessness. Never to kill or injure trees that are not wild, nor even any animal that does not injure man. That it is seemly and advisable neither to give way to unbridled laughter nor to wear sullen looks. To avoid excess of flesh, on a journey to let exertion and slackening alternate, to train the memory, in wrath to restrain hand and tongue, to respect all divination, to sing to the lyre and by hymns to show due gratitude to gods and to good men. To abstain from beans because they are flatulent and partake most of the breath of life; and besides, it is better for the stomach if they are not taken, and this again will make our dreams in sleep smooth and untroubled.
Alexander in his Successions of Philosophers says that he found in the Pythagorean memoirs the following tenets as well. For the doctrines of Pythagoras(§§ 25-35) Alexander is taken as D. L.'s authority (see Introd. pp. xxvi, xxvii) This indefatigable pedant is known to have written a special work on the Pythagorean system. Our author may not have possessed this work by Alexander, but he probably had access to a public library containing it. In any case he deserves praise for the selection. Between Alexander Polyhistor in the first century b.c. and the threshold of the third century a.d. there had been an enormous increase in neoPythagorean literature, mostly dealing with mystical properties of numbers and with ethics based upon theology. All this D. L. ignores, going back to a Hellenistic document long forgotten.
The principle of all things is the monad or unit; arising from this monad the undefined dyad or two serves as material substratum to the monad, which is cause; from the monad and the undefined dyad spring numbers; from numbers, points; from points, lines; from lines, plane figures; from plane figures, solid figures; from solid figures, sensible bodies, the elements of which are four, fire, water, earth and air; these elements interchange and turn into one another completely, and combine to produce a universe animate, intelligent, spherical, with the earth at its centre, the earth itself too being spherical and inhabited round about.
There are also antipodes, and our "down" is their "up." Light and darkness have equal part Cf. Soph. El. 87 gh=s i)so/moi r' a)h/r. in the universe, so have hot and cold, and dry and moist; and of these, if hot preponderates, we have summer; if cold, winter; if dry, spring; if moist, late autumn. If all are in equilibrium, we have the best periods of the year, of which the freshness of spring constitutes the healthy season, and the decay of late autumn the unhealthy. So too, in the day, freshness belongs to the morning, and decay to the evening, which is therefore more unhealthy. The air about the earth is stagnant and unwholesome, and all within it is mortal; but the uppermost air is ever-moved and pure and healthy, and all within it is immortal and consequently divine.
The sun, the moon, and the other stars are gods; for, in them, there is a preponderance of heat, and heat is the cause of life. The moon is illumined by the sun. Gods and men are akin, inasmuch as man partakes of heat; therefore God takes thought for man. Fate is the cause of things being thus ordered both as a whole and separately. The sun's ray penetrates through the aether, whether cold or dense--the air they call cold aether, and the sea and moisture dense aether --and this ray descends even to the depths and for this reason quickens all things.
All things live which partake of heat--this is why plants are living things --but all have not soul, which is a detached part of aether, partly the hot and partly the cold, for it partakes of cold aether too. Soul is distinct from life; it is immortal, since that from which it is detached is immortal. Living creatures are reproduced from one another by germination; there is no such thing as spontaneous generation from earth. The germ is a clot of brain containing hot vapour within it; and this, when brought to the womb, throws out, from the brain, ichor, fluid and blood, whence are formed flesh, sinews, bones, hairs, and the whole of the body, while soul and sense come from the vapour within.
First congealing in about forty days, it receives form and, according to the ratios of "harmony," in seven, nine, or at the most ten, months, the mature child is brought forth. It has in it all the relations constituting life, and these, forming a continuous series, keep it together according to the ratios of harmony, each appearing at regulated intervals. Sense generally, and sight in particular, is a certain unusually hot vapour. This is why it is said to see through air and water, because the hot aether is resisted by the cold; for, if the vapour in the eyes had been cold, it would have been dissipated on meeting the air, its like. As it is, in certain [lines] he calls the eyes the portals of the sun. His conclusion is the same with regard to hearing and the other senses.
The soul of man, he says, is divided into three parts, intelligence, reason, and passion. Intelligence and passion are possessed by other animals as well, but reason by man alone. The seat of the soul extends from the heart to the brain; the part of it which is in the heart is passion, while the parts located in the brain are reason and intelligence. The senses are distillations from these. Reason is immortal, all else mortal. The soul draws nourishment from the blood; the faculties The word lo/gous is translated above by "ratios," i.e. proportionalities. With a)ne/mou s compare the Stoic air-currents. of the soul are winds, for they as well as the soul are invisible, just as the aether is invisible.
The veins, arteries, and sinews are the bonds of the soul. But when it is strong and settled down into itself, reasonings and deeds become its bonds. When cast out upon the earth, it wanders in the air like the body. Hermes is the steward of souls, and for that reason is called Hermes the Escorter, Hermes the Keeper of the Gate, and Hermes of the Underworld, since it is he who brings in the souls from their bodies both by land and sea; and the pure are taken into the uppermost region, but the impure are not permitted to approach the pure or each other, but are bound by the Furies in bonds unbreakable.
The whole air is full of souls which are called genii The Greek daemons ( dai/mon es ) are, according to Hesiod, W. and D. 121-126, superhuman beings, guardians and benefactors of mankind, watching over the earth whereon once they lived. or heroes; these are they who send men dreams and signs of future disease and health, and not to men alone, but to sheep also and cattle as well; and it is to them that purifications and lustrations, all divination, omens and the like, have reference. The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or to evil. Blest are the men who acquire a good soul; [if it be bad] they can never be at rest, nor ever keep the same course two days together.
Right has the force of an oath, and that is why Zeus is called the God of Oaths.
Virtue is harmony, and so are health and all good and God himself; this is why they say that all things are constructed according to the laws of harmony. The love of friends is just concord and equality. We should not pay equal worship to gods and heroes, but to the gods always, with reverent silence, in white robes, and after purification, to the heroes only from midday onwards. Purification is by cleansing, baptism and lustration, and by keeping clean from all deaths and births and all pollution, and abstaining from meat and flesh of animals that have died, mullets, gurnards, eggs and egg-sprung animals, beans, and the other abstinences prescribed by those who perform mystic rites in the temples.
According to Aristotle in his work On the Pythagoreans, Pythagoras counselled abstinence from beans either because they are like the genitals, or because they are like the gates of Hades...as being alone unjointed, or because they are injurious, or because they are like the form of the universe, or because they belong to oligarchy, since they are used in election by lot. He bade his disciples not to pick up fallen crumbs, either in order to accustom them not to eat immoderately, or because connected with a person's death; nay, even, according to Aristophanes, crumbs belong to the heroes, for in his Heroes he says Meineke, C.G.F. ii.
1070.: Nor taste ye of what falls beneath the board!
Another of his precepts was not to eat white cocks, as being sacred to the Month and wearing suppliant garb--now supplication ranked with things good-- sacred to the Month because they announce the time of day; and again white represents the nature of the good, black the nature of evil. Not to touch such fish as were sacred; for it is not right that gods and men should be allotted the same things, any more than free men and slaves. Not to break bread; for once friends used to meet over one loaf, as the barbarians do even to this day; and you should not divide bread which brings them together; some give as the explanation of this that it has reference to the judgement of the dead in Hades, others that bread makes cowards in war, others again that it is from it that the whole world begins. This may have some hidden sense: but it is tempting to adopt to/pou for tou/tou with the Borbonicus.
He held that the most beautiful figure is the sphere among solids, and the circle among plane figures. Old age may be compared to everything that is decreasing, while youth is one with increase. Health means retention of the form, disease its destruction. Of salt he said it should be brought to table to remind us of what is right; for salt preserves whatever it finds, and it arises from the purest sources, sun and sea.
This is what Alexander says that he found in the Pythagorean memoirs. Alexander is cited above (§ 24).
eu(rhke/ nai comes in both sections.
This means that, in the Lives of Pythagoras which D. L. consulted, the extract from Alexander has displaced a passage which came from a spurious Aristotelian treatise *peri\ *puqago rei/wn. What follows is Aristotle's.
But Pythagoras's great dignity not even Timon overlooked, who, although he digs at him in his Silli, Fr. 58 D.
speaks of Pythagoras, inclined to witching works and ways, Man-snarer, fond of noble periphrase.
Xenophanes Fr. 7 D. confirms the statement about his having been different people at different times in the elegiacs beginning: Now other thoughts, another path, I show.
What he says of him is as follows : They say that, passing a belaboured whelp, He, full of pity, spake these words of dole: "Stay, smite not! 'Tis a friend, a human soul; I knew him straight whenas I heard him yelp!"
Thus Xenophanes. But Cratinus also lampooned him both in the Pythagorizing Woman and also in The Tarentines, where we read Cratin.
minor, Meineke, C.G.F. iii. 376.: They are wont, If haply they a foreigner do find, To hold a cross-examination Of doctrines' worth, to trouble and confound him With terms, equations, and antitheses Brain-bung'd with magnitudes and periphrases.
Again, Mnesimachus in the Alcmaeon Meineke, C.G.F. iii. 567.: To Loxias we sacrifice: Pythagoras his rite, Of nothing that is animate we ever take a bite.
And Aristophon in the Pythagorist Meineke, C.G.F. iii. 362.: a. He told how he travelled in Hades and looked on the dwellers below, How each of them lives, but how different by far from the lives of the dead Were the lives of the Pythagoreans, for these alone, so he said, Were suffered to dine with King Pluto, which was for their piety's sake.
b. What an ill-tempered god for whom such swine, such creatures good company make; and in the same later: Their food is just greens, and to wet it pure water is all that they drink; And the want of a bath, and the vermin, and their old threadbare coats so do stink That none of the rest will come near them.
Pythagoras met his death in this wise. In the account which follows two passages should be distinguished: (1) sunedr similar combination of Neanthes and Dicaearchus is found in Porphyry, Vit. Pyth 55 sqq., Neanthes apparently insisting on the absence, and Dicaearchus on the presence, of the master at the time when the brotherhood were attacked and scattered. Iamblichus, Vit. Pyth. 251 sq., cites Nicomachus, whose version agrees with that of Neanthes. As he sat one day among his acquaintances at the house of Milo, it chanced that the house was set ablaze out of jealousy by one of the people who were not accounted worthy of admittance to his presence, though some say it was the work of the inhabitants of Croton anxious to safeguard themselves against the setting-up of a tyranny. Pythagoras was caught as he tried to escape; he got as far as a certain field of beans, where he stopped, saying he would be captured rather than cross it, and be killed rather than prate about his doctrines; and so his pursuers cut his throat. This passage, partly in direct ( geno/me nos, e)/sth, ei)pw/n ) and partly in reported speech ( katalh fqh=nai. a)posfag h=nai ), receives some light from the story of Myllias and his wife Timycha as given by Iamblichus, Vit.
Pyth. 189-194, on the authority of Hippobotus and Neanthes ( cf. also Porphyry, Vit.
Pyth. § 61, where the story of Damon and Phintias is said to have been transferred by Hippobotus and Neanthes to the same trusty pair, Myllias and Timycha). The story in Iamblichus represents a band of Pythagoreans pursued by a tyrant's myrmidons and caught in a plain where beans were growing, all of them preferring to die where they stood rather than trample on the beans; but this story might be located anywhere. It has nothing inherently to do with the end of Pythagoras. What remains, to\n de\ *p. katalhfqh=n ai diecio/ nta, may be compared with Porphyry, Vit. Pyth. § 57, where we are told that the disciples made a bridge of their own bodies over the fire and thus the master escaped from the burning house but, in despair at the extinction of his school, chose a voluntary dealth. The words ou(/tw de/ which follow come in awkwardly, as they are separated from the sentence about the fire. So also were murdered more than half of his disciples, to the number of forty or thereabouts; but a very few escaped, including Archippus of Tarentum and Lysis, already mentioned.
Dicaearchus, however, says that Pythagoras died a fugitive in the temple of the Muses at Metapontum after forty days' starvation.
Heraclides, in his Epitome of the Lives of Satyrus, says that, after burying Pherecydes at Delos, he returned to Italy and, when he found Cylon of Croton giving a luxurious banquet to all and sundry, retired to Metapontum to end his days there by starvation, having no wish to live longer. On the other hand, Hermippus relates that, when the men of Agrigentum and Syracuse were at war, Pythagoras and his disciples went out and fought in the van of the army of the Agrigentines, and, their line being turned, he was killed by the Syracusans as he was trying to avoid the beanfield; the rest, about thirty-five in number, were burned at the stake in Tarentum for trying to set up a government in opposition to those in power.
Hermippus gives another anecdote. Pythagoras, on coming to Italy, made a subterranean dwelling and enjoined on his mother to mark and record all that passed, and at what hour, and to send her notes down to him until he should ascend. She did so. Pythagoras some time afterwards came up withered and looking like a skeleton, then went into the assembly and declared he had been down to Hades, and even read out his experiences to them. They were so affected that they wept and wailed and looked upon him as divine, going so far as to send their wives to him in hopes that they would learn some of his doctrines; and so they were called Pythagorean women. Thus far Hermippus.
Pythagoras had a wife, Theano by name, daughter of Brontinus of Croton, though some call her Brontinus's wife and Pythagoras's pupil. He had a daughter Damo, according to the letter of Lysis to Hippasus, which says of him, "I am told by many that you discourse publicly, a thing which Pythagoras deemed unworthy, for certain it is that, when he entrusted his daughter Damo with the custody of his memoirs, he solemnly charged her never to give them to anyone outside his house. And, although she could have sold the writings for a large sum of money, she would not, but reckoned poverty and her father's solemn injunctions more precious than gold, for all that she was a woman."
They also had a son Telauges, who succeeded his father and, according to some, was Empedocles' instructor. At all events Hippobotus makes Empedocles say Fr. 155 D.: Telauges, famed Son of Theano and Pythagoras.
Telauges wrote nothing, so far as we know, but his mother Theano wrote a few things. Further, a story is told that being asked how many days it was before a woman becomes pure after intercourse, she replied, "With her own husband at once, with another man never." And she advised a woman going in to her own husband to put off her shame with her clothes, and on leaving him to put it on again along with them. Asked "Put on what?" she replied, "What makes me to be called a woman."
To return to Pythagoras. According to Heraclides, the son of Serapion, he was eighty years old when he died, and this agrees with his own description of the life of man, though most authorities say he was ninety. And there are jesting lines of my own upon him as follows Anth. Pal. vii.
121.: Not thou alone from all things animate Didst keep, Pythagoras. All food is dead When boil'd and bak'd and salt-besprinkle-èd; For then it surely is inanimate.
Again Anth. Plan. v.
34.: So wise was wise Pythagoras that he Would touch no meats, but called it impious, Bade others eat. Good wisdom: not for us To do the wrong; let others impious be.
And again Anth. Plan. v. 35.: If thou wouldst know the mind of old Pythagoras, Look on Euphorbus' buckler and its boss.
He says "I've lived before."
If, when he says he was, He was not, he was no-one when he was.
And again, of the manner of his death Anth. Pal. vii. 122.: Woe! Woe!
Whence, Pythagoras, this deep reverence for beans? Why did he fall in the midst of his disciples? A bean-field there was he durst not cross; sooner than trample on it, he endured to be slain at the cross-roads by the men of Acragas.
He flourished in the 60th Olympiad 540-536 b.c. Cf. Clem.
Alex. Strom. i 65 "in the 62nd Olympiad" [532-528 b.c.], eight years later, and contemporary with Polycrates of Samos. and his school lasted until the ninth or tenth generation.
For the last of the Pythagoreans, whom Aristoxenus in his time saw, were Xenophilus from the Thracian Chalcidice, Phanton of Phlius, and Echecrates, Diocles and Polymnastus, also of Phlius, who were pupils of Philolaus and Eurytus of Tarentum.
There were four men of the name of Pythagoras living about the same time and at no great distance from one another: (1) of Croton, a man with tyrannical leanings; (2) of Phlius, an athlete, some say a trainer; (3) of Zacynthus; (4) our subject, who discovered the secrets of philosophy [and taught them], and to whom was applied the phrase, "The Master said" ( Ipse dixit ), which passed into a proverb of ordinary life.
Some say there was also another Pythagoras, a sculptor of Rhegium, who is thought to have been the first to aim at rhythm and symmetry; another a sculptor of Samos; another a bad orator; another a doctor who wrote on hernia and also compiled some things about Homer; and yet another who, so we are told by Dionysius, wrote a history of the Dorian race. Eratosthenes says, according to what we learn from Favorinus in the eighth book of his Miscellaneous History, that the last-named was the first to box scientifically, in the 48th Olympiad, 588-584 b.c. keeping his hair long and wearing a purple robe; and that when he was excluded with ridicule from the boys' contest, he went at once to the men's and won that; this is declared by Theaetetus's epigram Anth.
Plan. iii. 35.: Know'st one Pythagoras, long-haired Pythagoras, The far-fam'd boxer of the Samians?
I am Pythagoras; ask the Elians What were my feats, thou'lt not believe the tale.
Favorinus says that our philosopher used definitions throughout the subject matter of mathematics; their use was extended by Socrates and his disciples, and afterwards by Aristotle and the Stoics.
Further, we are told that he was the first to call the heaven the universe and the earth spherical, As Favorinus seems to have paid special attention to discoveries and the invention of 34), it seems likely that he is our author's authority here; so probably a different book of Favorinus is cited. though Theophrastus says it was Parmenides, and Zeno that it was Hesiod.
It is said that Cylon was a rival of Pythagoras, as Antilochus Apelt suggests Antiphon, comparing Xen. Mem. i. 6. was of Socrates.
Pythagoras the athlete was also the subject of another epigram as follows Anth. Plan. iii.
16.: Gone to box with other lads Is the lad Pythagoras, Gone to the games Olympian Crates' son the Samian.
The philosopher also wrote the following letter: Pythagoras to Anaximenes.
"Even you, O most excellent of men, were you no better born and famed than Pythagoras, would have risen and departed from Miletus. But now your ancestral glory has detained you as it had detained me were I Anaximenes's peer. But if you, the best men, abandon your cities, then will their good order perish, and the peril from the Medes will increase.
For always to scan the heavens is not well, but more seemly is it to be provident for one's mother country. For I too am not altogether in my discourses but am found no less in the wars which the Italians wage with one another."
Having now finished our account of Pythagoras, we have next to speak of the noteworthy Pythagoreans; after them will come the philosophers whom some denominate "sporadic" [ i.e. belonging to no particular school]; and then, in the next place, we will append the succession of all those worthy of notice as far as Epicurus, in the way that we promised. We have already treated of Theano and Telauges : so now we have first to speak of Empedocles, for some say he was a pupil of Pythagoras.
Empedocles was, according to Hippobotus, the son of Meton and grandson of Empedocles, and was a native of Agrigentum. This is confirmed by Timaeus in the fifteenth book of his Histories, and he adds that Empedocles, the poet's grandfather, had been a man of distinction. Hermippus also agrees with Timaeus. So, too, Heraclides, in his treatise On Diseases, v. 67. says that he was of an illustrious family, his grandfather having kept racehorses. Eratosthenes also in his Olympic Victories records, on the authority of Aristotle, that the father of Meton was a victor in the 71st Olympiad. 496 b.c.
The grammarian Apollodorus in his Chronology tells us that He was the son of Meton, and Glaucus says he went to Thurii, just then founded. 445-444 b.c.
Then farther on he adds: Those who relate that, being exiled from his home, he went to Syracuse and fought in their ranks against the Athenians seem, in my judgement at least, to be completely mistaken. For by that time either he was no longer living or in extreme old age, which is inconsistent with the story.
For Aristotle and Heraclides both affirm that he died at the age of sixty. The victor with the ridinghorse in the 71st Olympiad was This man's namesake and grandfather, so that Apollodorus in one and the same passage indicates the date as well as the fact.
But Satyrus in his Lives states that Empedocles was the son of Exaenetus and himself left a son named Exaenetus, and that in the same Olympiad Empedocles himself was victorious in the horse-race and his son in wrestling, or, as Heraclides i.e. Heraclides Lembus. in his Epitome has it, in the foot-race. I found Cf. Introd. p. xiv. in the Memorabilia of Favorinus a statement that Empedocles feasted the sacred envoys on a sacrificial ox made of honey and barley-meal, and that he had a brother named Callicratides. Telauges, the son of Pythagoras, in his letter to Philolaus calls Empedocles the son of Archinomus.
That he belonged to Agrigentum in Sicily he himself testifies at the beginning of his Purifications Fr.
112 D.: My friends, who dwell in the great city sloping down to yellow Acragas, hard by the citadel.
So much for his family.
Timaeus in the ninth book of his Histories says he was a pupil of Pythagoras, adding that, having been convicted at that time of stealing his discourses, he was, like Plato, excluded from taking part in the discussions of the school; and further, that Empedocles himself mentions Pythagoras in the lines Fr. 129 D.: And there lived among them a man of superhuman knowledge, who verily possessed the greatest wealth of wisdom.
Others say that it is to Parmenides that he is here referring.
Neanthes states that down to the time of Philolaus and Empedocles all Pythagoreans were admitted to the discussions.
But when Empedocles himself made them public property by his poem, they made a law that they should not be imparted to any poet. He says the same thing also happened to Plato, for he too was excommunicated. But which of the Pythagoreans it was who had Empedocles for a pupil he did not say. For the epistle commonly attributed to Telauges and the statement that Empedocles was the pupil of both Hippasus and Brontinus he held to be unworthy of credence.
Theophrastus affirms that he was an admirer of Parmenides and imitated him in his verses, for Parmenides too had published his treatise On Nature in verse.
But Hermippus's account is that he was an admirer not so much of Parmenides as of Xenophanes, with whom in fact he lived and whose writing of poetry he imitated, and that his meeting with the Pythagoreans was subsequent. Alcidamas tells us in his treatise on Physics that Zeno and Empedocles were pupils of Parmenides about the same time, that afterwards they left him, and that, while Zeno framed his own system, Empedocles became the pupil of Anaxagoras and Pythagoras, emulating the latter in dignity of life and bearing, and the former in his physical investigations.
Aristotle in his Sophist calls Empedocles the inventor of rhetoric as Zeno of dialectic. In his treatise On Poets he says that Empedocles was of Homer's school and powerful in diction, being great in metaphors and in the use of all other poetical devices. He also says that he wrote other poems, in particular the invasion of Xerxes and a hymn to Apollo, which a sister of his (or, according to Hieronymus, his daughter) afterwards burnt. The hymn she destroyed unintentionally, but the poem on the Persian war deliberately, because it was unfinished.
And in general terms he says he wrote both tragedies and political discourses. But Heraclides, the son of Sarapion, attributes the tragedies to a different author. Hieronymus declares that he had come across forty-three of these plays, while Neanthes tells us that Empedocles wrote these tragedies in his youth, and that he, Neanthes, was acquainted with seven of them.
Satyrus in his Lives says that he was also a physician and an excellent orator: at all events Gorgias of Leontini, a man pre-eminent in oratory and the author of a treatise on the art, had been his pupil. Of Gorgias Apollodorus says in his Chronology that he lived to be one hundred and nine.
Satyrus quotes this same Gorgias as saying that he himself was present when Empedocles performed magical feats. Nay more: he contends that Empedocles in his poems lays claim to this power and to much besides when he says Fr. 111 D.: And thou shalt learn all the drugs that are a defence to ward off ills and old age, since for thee alone shall I accomplish all this. Thou shalt arrest the violence of the unwearied winds that arise and sweep the earth, laying waste the cornfields with their blasts; and again, if thou so will, thou shalt call back winds in requital. Thou shalt make after the dark rain a seasonable drought for men, and again after the summer drought thou shalt cause tree-nourishing streams to pour from the sky. Thou shalt bring back from Hades a dead man's strength.
Timaeus also in the eighteenth According to Beloch this should be the twelfth book; cf. inf. § 66. book of his Histories remarks that Empedocles has been admired on many grounds. For instance, when the etesian winds once began to blow violently and to damage the crops, he ordered asses to be flayed and bags to be made of their skin. These he stretched out here and there on the hills and headlands to catch the wind and, because this checked the wind, he was called the "wind-stayer."
Heraclides in his book On Diseases v. 67. says that he furnished Pausanias with the facts about the woman in a trance. This Pausanias, according to Aristippus and Satyrus, was his bosom-friend, to whom he dedicated his poem On Nature thus Fr. 1 D.: Give ear, Pausanias, thou son of Anchitus the wise!
Moreover he wrote an epigram upon him Fr. 156 D.: The physician Pausanias, rightly so named, son of Anchitus, descendant of Asclepius, was born and bred at Gela. Many a wight pining in fell torments did he bring back from Persephone's inmost shrine.
At all events Heraclides testifies that the case of the woman in a trance was such that for thirty days he kept her body without pulsation though she never breathed; and for that reason Heraclides called him not merely a physician but a diviner as well, deriving the titles from the following lines also Fr. 112 D.: My friends, who dwell in the grcat city sloping down to yellow Acragas, hard by the citadel, busied with goodly works, all hail! I go about among you an immortal god, no more a mortal, so honoured of all, as is meet, crowned with fillets and flowery garlands. Straightway as soon as I enter with these, men and women, into flourishing towns, I am reverenced and tens of thousands follow, to learn where is the path which leads to welfare, some desirous of oracles, others suffering from all kinds of diseases, desiring to hear a message of healing.
Timaeus explains that he called Agrigentum great, inasmuch as it had 800,000 inhabitants. According to the vulgate, an unknown writer Potamilla is the authority cited by Diogenes. Diels, however ( Frag der Vorsokr. ii. 3 p.
196), prefers the reading of two mss. potamo\n a)/lla (sc. u(pomnh/m ata or a)nti/gr afa le/gei ), regarding this as derived from a marginal note which was afterwards put in the text. In the Palatine ms. the gloss is potamo\n a)/lloi. Apelt, however, suggests pot' a)me/lei, not as a scholium, but as part of the text. Hence Empedocles, he continues, speaking of their luxury, said, "The Agrigentines live delicately as if tomorrow they would die, but they build their houses well as if they thought they would live for ever."
It is said that Cleomenes the rhapsode recited this very poem, the Purifications, at Olympia Cf. Athenaeus xiv. 620 d, whence it appears that the ultimate authority is Dicaearchus; e)n tw=| Here again a citation from Favorinus seems to disturb the context.: so Favorinus in his Memorabilia. Aristotle too declares him to have been a champion of freedom and averse to rule of every kind, seeing that, as Xanthus relates in his account of him, he declined the kingship when it was offered to him, obviously because he preferred a frugal life.
With this Timaeus agrees, at the same time giving the reason why Empedocles favoured democracy, namely, that, having been invited to dine with one of the magistrates, when the dinner had gone on some time and no wine was put on the table, though the other guests kept quiet, he, becoming indignant, ordered wine to be brought. Then the host confessed that he was waiting for the servant of the senate to appear. When he came he was made master of the revels, clearly by the arrangement of the host, whose design of making himself tyrant was but thinly veiled, for he ordered the guests either to drink wine or have it poured over their heads. For the time being Empedocles was reduced to silence; the next day he impeached both of them, the host and the master of the revels, and secured their condemnation and execution.
This, then, was the beginning of his political career.
Again, when Acron the physician asked the council for a site on which to build a monument to his father, who had been eminent among physicians, Empedocles came forward and forbade it in a speech where he enlarged upon equality and in particular put the following question: "But what inscription shall we put upon it? Shall it be this?
Acron the eminent physician of Agrigentum, son of Acros, is buried beneath the steep eminence of his most eminent native city?" Anth. Plan. v.
4.
Others give as the second line: Is laid in