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

school, observing that he was trying to seduce his mistress (as Phavorinus relates in his Universal History), while he was in the middle of his lecture, he made the following parody in allusion to him:

A weak old man comes hither, like in voice,
And gait, and figure, to the prudent Mentor
I order him to be expelled this school.

And Mentor rising up, replied:

Thus did they speak, and straight the others rose.

He appears to have been beset with fears of death, as he was continually saying: “Nature, who has put this frame together, will also dissolve it.” And learning that Antipater had died after having taken poison, he felt a desire to imitate the boldness of his departure, and said: “Give me some too.” And when they asked: “What?”⁠—“Some mead,” said he. And it is said that an eclipse of the moon happened when he died, the most beautiful of all the stars, next to the sun, indicating (as anyone might say) its sympathy with the philosopher. And Apollodorus, in his Chronicles, says that he died in the fourth year of the hundred and sixty-second olympiad, being eighty-five years old.

There are some letters extant addressed by him to Ariarathes, the king of the Cappadocians. All the other writings which are attributed to him were written by his disciples, for he himself left nothing behind him. And I have written on him the following lines in logaoedical Archebulian meter.

Why now, O Muse, do you wish me Carneades to confute?
He was an ignoramus, as he did not understand
Why he should stand in fear of death: so once, when he’d a cough,
The worst of all diseases that affect the human frame,
He cared not for a remedy; but when the news did reach him,
That brave Antipater had ta’en some poison, and so died,
“Give me, said he, some stuff to drink.” “Some what?”⁠—“Some luscious mead.”
Moreover, he’d this saying at all times upon his lips:
“Nature did make me, and she does together keep me still;
But soon the time will come when she will pull me all to pieces.”
But still at last he yielded up the ghost: though long ago
He might have died, and so escaped the evils that befell him.

It is said that at night he was not aware when lights were brought in; and that once he ordered his servant to light the candles, and when he had brought them in and told him: “I have brought them.”⁠—“Well then,” said he, “read by the light of them.”

He had a great many other disciples, but the most eminent of them was Clitomachus, whom we must mention presently.

There was also another man of the name of Carneades, a very indifferent elegiac poet.

Clitomachus

Clitomachus was a Carthaginian. He was called Asdrubal, and used to lecture on philosophy in his own country in his native language.

But when he came to Athens at the age of forty years, he became a pupil of Carneades; and, as he was pleased with his industry, he caused him to be instructed in literature, and himself educated the man carefully. And he carried his diligence to such a degree, that he composed more than four hundred books.

And he succeeded Carneades in his schools; and he illustrated his principles a great deal by his writings; as he himself had studied the doctrines of their sects, the Academic, the Peripatetic, and the Stoic. Timon attacks the whole school of Academics, as a body, in these lines:

Nor the unprofitable chattering
Of all the Academics.

But now that we have gone through the philosophers of Plato’s school, let us go to the Peripatetics, who also derived their doctrines from Plato; and the founder of their sect was Aristotle.

Book V Aristotle

Aristotle was the son of Nicomachus and Phaestias, a citizen of Stagira; and Nicomachus was descended from Nicomachus, the son of Machaon, the son of Aesculapius, as Hermippus tells us in his treatise on Aristotle; and he lived with Amyntas, the king of the Macedonians, as both a physician and a friend.

He was the most eminent of all the pupils of Plato; he had a lisping voice, as is asserted by Timotheus the Athenian, in his work on Lives. He had also very thin legs, they say, and small eyes; but he used to indulge in very conspicuous dress, and rings, and used to dress his hair carefully.

He had also a son named Nicomachus, by Herpyllis his concubine, as we are told by Timotheus.

He seceded from Plato while he was still alive; so that they tell a story that he said: “Aristotle has kicked us off just as chickens do their mother after they have been hatched.” But Hermippus says in his Lives, that while he was absent on an embassy to Philip on behalf of the Athenians, Xenocrates became the president of the school in the Academy; and that when he returned and saw the school under the presidency of someone else, he selected a promenade in the Lyceum, in which he used to walk up and down with his disciples, discussing subjects of philosophy till the time for anointing themselves came; on which account he was called a Peripatetic.44 But others say that he got this name because once when Alexander was walking about after recovering from a sickness, he accompanied him and kept conversing with him. But when his pupils became numerous, he then gave them seats, saying:

It would be shame for me to hold my peace,
And for Isocrates to keep on talking.

And he used to accustom his disciples to discuss any question which might be proposed, training them just as an orator might.

After that he went to Hermias the Eunuch, the tyrant of Atarneus who, as it is said, allowed him all kinds of liberties; and some say that he formed a matrimonial connection with him, giving him either his daughter or his niece in marriage, as is recorded by Demetrius of Magnesia, in his essay on Poets and