Diogenes Laërtius

“ 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. ”

“ 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.
60. Timaeus also in the eighteenth [54] book of his Histories remarks that Empedocles has been admired on many grounds. ”

“ The senses are distillations from these. Reason is immortal, all else mortal. The soul draws nourishment from the blood; the faculties [21] 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 ”

“ 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; [23] they can never be at rest, nor ever keep the same course two days together. ”

“ He was the son of Pirithous, as he himself tells us at the beginning of his treatise: [80] "These are the words of Alcmaeon of Croton, son of Pirithous, which he spake to Brontinus, 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. ”

“ He divides man's life into four quarters thus: "Twenty years a boy, twenty years a youth, twenty years a young man, twenty years an old man; and these four periods correspond to the four seasons, the boy to spring, the youth to summer, the young man to autumn, and the old man to winter," meaning by youth one not yet grown up and by a young man a man of mature age. According to Timaeus, he was the first to say, "Friends have all things in common" and "Friendship is equality"; indeed, his disciples did put all their possessions into one common stock. ”

“ Don't stir the fire with a knife: don't stir the passions or the swelling pride of the great. Don't step over the beam of a balance: don't overstep the bounds of equity and justice. Don't sit down on your bushel: have the same care of to-day and the future, a bushel being the day's ration. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Light and darkness have equal part [20] 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ At all events Hippobotus makes Empedocles say: [34]
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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In geometry, too, he was the first to discover the cube, as Plato says in the Republic. [79]
Alcmaeon 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. ”

“ 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, 24. 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 ”

“ 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.
36. This is what Alexander says that he found in the Pythagorean memoirs. [26] What follows is Aristotle's. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of sexual indulgence, too, he says, "Keep to the winter for sexual pleasures, in summer abstain; they are less harmful in autumn and spring, but they are always harmful and not conducive to health." Asked once when a man should consort with a woman, he replied, "When you want to lose what strength you have." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. 35. 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. ”

“ And the rest of the Pythagoreans used to say that not all his doctrines were for all men to hear, our authority for this being Aristoxenus in the tenth book of his Rules of Pedagogy, 16. where we are also told that one of the school, Xenophilus by name, asked by some one how he could best educate his son, replied, "By making him the citizen of a well-governed state." Throughout Italy Pythagoras made many into good men and true, men too of note like the lawgivers Zaleucus and Charondas ”

“ The whole air is full of souls which are called genii [22] 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 ”

“ 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. 50. For always to scan the heavens is not well, but more seemly is it to be provident for one's mother country. ”

“ 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: [76]
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 78. Epicharmus of Cos, son of Helothales, was another pupil of Pythagoras. ”

“ The contents in general of the aforesaid three treatises of Pythagoras are as follows. He forbids us to pray for ourselves, because we do not know what will help us. Drinking he calls, in a word, a snare, and he discountenances all excess, saying that no one should go beyond due proportion either in drinking or in eating. ”

“ 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.
55. 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. ”

“ When he was in Egypt with Chonuphis of Heliopolis, the sacred bull Apis licked his cloak. From this the priests foretold that he would be famous but short-lived, so we are informed by Favorinus in his Memorabilia.
91. There is a poem of our own upon him, which runs thus: [91]
It is said that at Memphis Eudoxus learned his coming fate from the bull with beautiful horns. No words did it utter; for whence comes speech to a bull? Nature did not provide the young bull Apis with a chattering tongue. ”

“ He was the first to declare that the earth moves in a circle, [85] 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 for the sum of forty Alexandrine [86] minas of silver, from which also the Timaeus was transcribed. Others say that Plato received it as a present for having procured from Dionysius the release of a young disciple of Philolaus who had been cast into prison. ”

“ 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 86. 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. ”