The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius (best free ebook reader txt) 📕

There were five people of the name of Heraclitus: The first was this philosopher of ours. The second a lyric poet, who wrote a panegyrical hymn on the Twelve Gods. The third was an Elegiac poet, of Halicarnassus, on whom Callimachus wrote the following epigram:

I heard, O Heraclitus, of your death,
And the news filled my eyes with mournful tears,
When I remembered all the happy hours
When we with talk beguiled the setting sun.
You now are dust; but still the honeyed voice
Of your sweet converse doth and will survive;
Nor can fell death, which all things else destroys,
Lay upon that his ruthless conquering grasp.

The fourth was a Lesbian, who wrote a history of Macedonia. The fifth was a man who blended jest with earnest, and who, having been a harp-player, abandoned that profession for a seriocomic style of writing.

Xenophanes was the son of Dexius, or, as Apollodorus says, of Orthomenes. He was a citizen of Colophon; and is praised by Timon. Accordingly, he says:

Xenophanes, not much a slave to vanity,
The wise reprover of the tricks of Homer.

He, having been banished from his own country, lived at Zancle in Sicily, and at Catana.

And according to the statements made by some people, he was a pupil of no one; but as others say, he was a pupil of Boton the Athenian; or as another account again affirms, of Archelaus. He was, if we may believe Sotion, a contemporary of Anaximander.

He wrote poems in hexameter and in elegiac verse; and also he wrote iambics against Hesiod and Homer, attacking the things said in their poems about the Gods. He also used to recite his own poems. It is said likewise that he argued against the opinions of Thales and Pythagoras, and that he also attacked Epimenides. He lived to an extreme old age; as he says somewhere himself:

Threescore and seven long years are fully passed,
Since first my doctrines spread abroad through Greece:
And ’twixt that time and my first view of light
Six lustres more must added be to them:
If I am right at all about my age,
Lacking but eight years of a century.

His doctrine was that there were four elements of existing things; and an infinite number of worlds, which were all unchangeable. He thought that the clouds were produced by the vapor which was borne upwards from the sun, and which lifted them up into the circumambient space. That the essence of God was of a spherical form, in no respect resembling man; that the universe could see, and that the universe could hear, but could not breathe; and that it was in all its parts intellect, and wisdom, and eternity. He was the first person who asserted that everything which is produced is perishable, and that the soul is a spirit. He used also to say that the many was inferior to unity. Also, that we ought to associate with tyrants either as little as possible, or else as pleasantly as possible.

When Empedocles said to him that the wise man was undiscoverable, he replied: “Very likely; for it takes a wise man to discover a wise man.” And Sotion says that he was the first person who asserted that everything is incomprehensible. But he is mistaken in this.

Xenophanes wrote a poem on the Founding of Colophon; and also, on the Colonisation of Elea, in Italy, consisting of two thousand verses. And he flourished about the sixtieth olympiad.

Demetrius Phalereus, in his treatise on Old Age, and Phenaetius the Stoic, in his essay on Cheerfulness, relate that he buried his sons with his own hands, as Anaxagoras had also done. And he seems to have been detested123 by the Pythagoreans, Parmeniscus, and Orestades, as Phavorinus relates in the first book of his Commentaries.

There was also another Xenophanes, a native of Lesbos, and an iambic poet.

These are the Promiscuous or unattached philosophers.

Parmenides, the son of Pyres and a citizen of Velia, was a pupil of Xenophanes. And Theophrastus, in his Abridgment, says that he was also a pupil of Anaximander. However, though he was a pupil of Xenophanes, he was not afterwards a follower of his; but he attached himself to Aminias, and Diochaetes the Pythagorean, as Sotion relates, which last was a poor but honorable and virtuous man. And he it was whose follower he became, and after he was dead he erected a shrine, or ἡρῷον, in his honor. And so Parmenides, who was of a noble family and possessed of considerable wealth, was induced, not by Xenophanes but by Aminias, to embrace the tranquil life of a philosopher.

He was the first person who asserted that the earth was of a spherical form, and that it was situated in the center of the universe. He also taught that there were two elements: fire and earth; and that one of them occupies the place of the maker, the other that of the matter. He also used to teach that man was originally made out of clay; and that they were composed of two parts, the hot and the cold; of which, in fact, everything consists. Another of his doctrines was that the mind and the soul were the same thing, as we are informed by Theophrastus in his Natural Philosophy, when he enumerates the theories of nearly all the different philosophers.

He also used to say that philosophy was of a twofold character: one kind resting on certain truth, the other on opinion. On which account he says somewhere:

And ’twill be needful for you well to know,
The fearless heart of all-convincing truth:
Also the opinions, though less sure, of men,
Which rest upon no certain evidence.

Parmenides too philosophizes in his poems; as Hesiod and Xenophanes and Empedocles used to. And he used to say that argument was the test of truth; and that the sensations were not trustworthy witnesses. Accordingly, he says:

Let not the common usages of men
Persuade your better taught experience,
To trust to men’s unsafe