Speusippus

“ Had I not learnt that Speusippus would die thus, no one would have persuaded me to say that he was surely not of Plato's blood; for else he would never have died in despair for a trivial cause.
4. Plutarch in the Lives of Lysander and Sulla makes his malady to have been "morbus pedicularis." [5] That his body wasted away is affirmed by Timotheus in his book On Lives. Speusippus, he says, meeting a rich man who was in love with one who was no beauty, said to him, "Why, pray, are you in such sore need of him? For ten talents I will find you a more handsome bride." ”

“ And Speusippus, in his treatise on Similarities, calls the πέπων by the name of σικύα. But Diocles having named the πέπων, does not any longer call it σικύα: and Speusippus after having named the σικύα never names the πέπων. Diphilus says, the πέπων is more full of wholesome juice, and moderates the humours of the body, but it is not very nutritious; it is easily digested, and promotes the secretions. ”

“ XENOCRATES, an eminent Platonic philosopher, succeeded Speusippus (Plato's immediate follower) as head of the academy about 340 b.c. He was born in 396 at Chalcedon, a city on the shores of the Bosphorus, nearly opposite Byzantium. Like Speusippus, Xenocrates accompanied Plato on at least one of his visits to the court of Dionysius of Syracuse. After Plato's death in 347, he withdrew, in company with Aristotle, to the court of Hermias, the ruler of Atarneus in Mysia, a province of Asia Minor. ”

“ HERACLIDES PONTICUS, Greek philosopher and miscellaneous writer, born at Heraclea in Pontus, flourished in the 4th century B.C. He studied philosophy at Athens under Speusippus, Plato and Aristotle. According to Suidas, Plato, on his departure for Sicily, left his pupils in charge of Heraclides. ”

“ For flight is likeness to God as far as possible. And likeness is to become holy and just with wisdom.” Speusippus, the nephew of Plato, says that happiness is a perfect state in those who conduct themselves in accordance with nature, or the state of the good: for which condition all men have a desire, but the good only attained to quietude; consequently the virtues are the authors of happiness. And Xenocrates the Chalcedonian defines happiness to be the possession of virtue, strictly so called, and of the power subservient to it. ”

“ For Antiphanes says:—
For why should any man wealth desire,
And seek to pile his treasures higher,
If it were not to aid his friends in their need,
And to gain for himself love's and gratitude's meed?
For all can drink and all can eat,
And it is not only the richest meat,
Or the oldest wine in the well-chased bowl
Which can banish hunger and thirst from the soul.
And Xenophanes of Chalcedon, and Speusippus the Academic philosopher, and Aristotle, have all written drinking songs. ”

“ Speusippus in the work entitled Plato's Funeral Feast, Clearchus in his Encomium on Plato, and Anaxilaïdes in his second book On Philosophers, tell us that there was a story at Athens that Ariston made violent love to Perictione, then in her bloom, and failed to win her; and that, when he ceased to offer violence, Apollo appeared to him in a dream, whereupon he left her unmolested until her child was born. ”

“ But in my country Naucratis, what they call hepseti are little fish left in the drains or ditches, when the Nile ceases its overflowing.
61. The hepatus or lebias is the next fish to be noticed. Diocles affirms that this is one of those fish which stick to the rocks; but Speusippus says that the hepatus is the same as the phagrus. But it is a solitary fish, as Aristotle declares, carnivorous, and with serrated teeth; black as to its flesh, and having eyes large, out of all proportion to the rest of its size ”

“ But to returne to the Suns light which is therein more perfect, then in any other thing sensible with heat, for it is the true heavenly fire, as Speusippus said, which describeth all that appertaines to the nourishment of this great man, the Universe; as the Elementary doth the viands of the animal man. And as the heart in animals is the principall soul of life, the same is the Sunne in the heart of the world; and the primordiall spring of all light therein, which he departs to the Stars, as doth Jesus Christ to our souls. ”

“ Ephorus states that Philistus killed himself as soon as his ship was captured, but Timonides, who was present with Dion throughout the whole of these events, in a letter which he wrote to the philospher, Speusippus, informs him that Philistus was taken alive from his ship which ran ashore; and that the Syracusans first stripped him of his corslet and displayed him naked, jeering at him, he being then an old man; and that after this they cut off his head and gave up the body to the boys of the town, bidding them drag it through Achradina, and cast it into the stone quarries. ”

“ He was born, according to some, in Aegina, in the house of Phidiades, the son of Thales, as Favorinus states in his Miscellaneous History, for his father had been sent along with others to Aegina to settle in the island, but returned to Athens when the Athenians were expelled by the Lacedaemonians, who championed the Aeginetan cause. That Plato acted as choregus at Athens, the cost being defrayed by Dion, is stated by Athenodorus in the eighth book of a work entitled Walks. 4. He had two brothers, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and a sister, Potone, who was the mother of Speusippus. ”

“ When therefore we characterise the Sophist as one who builds up phantasms for realities — who presents to us what is not, as being like to what is, and as a false substitute for what is — he will ask us what we mean? ”

“ As if {takhu me orthos} were the reproachful comment of the sophist on the author's treatise. (11) i.e. "the arguments to be blameless at once and irrefutable for all time."
That is my point of view. The sophist has quite another—words with him are for the sake of deception, writing for personal gain; to benefit any other living soul at all is quite beside his mark. There never was nor is there now a sage among them to whom the title "wise" could be applied. No! the appellation "sophist" suffices for each and all, which among men of common sense (12) sounds like a stigma. ”

“ The Sophist is a hunter of walking animals: which may be divided into two classes, wild and tame. The Sophist hunts a species of tame animals — men. Hunters of tame animals are bisected into such as hunt by violent means (robbers, enslavers, despots, &c.) ”

“ Like Œdipus, they solve the riddle of the Sphinx, and are blind to the riddle of their own life. They imagine themselves to be asserting some high principle, when they are simply yielding to passionate impulse, and cloaking it with the garb of morality or religion. ”

“ And at that time the Sphinx made havoc of Thebes and all the coasts thereof so that they had no heart nor power to search into the matter of the king's death, but sought only for some one to answer the monster's riddle, [2] and save the city and its people. And a stranger came to the city, Œdipus of Corinth, son, as it was said, of Polybos and Merope, and answered the riddle aright, [3] and slew the Sphinx. ”

“ The well-known fable of the "Choice of Hercules," in which virtue and vice describe to the young hero the two paths of life which they alternately urge him to take, is preserved in the Memorabilia of Xenophon.
As these Sophists depended for their living on the power to draw large classes of young men in the various cities which they visited, they had not only to embellish their discourses with such attractive episodes, but to study to make their style and language striking, novel, or ornate. ”

“ After giving the generic deduction of the angler from the comprehensive idea of Art, distributed into two sections, constructive and acquisitive, Plato proceeds to notice 192the analogy between the Sophist and an angler: after which he deduces the Sophist also from the acquisitive section of Art. The Sophist is an angler for rich young men.15 To find his place in the preceding descending series, we must take our departure from the bisection — hunters of walking animals, hunters of swimming animals. ”

“ The Sophists, those skirmishers of a new and as yet unrecognizable philosophy, scattered and put to flight the old guard of positive and doctrinal wisdom, but to the individual, who was bidden to depend upon his own resources, they offered stimulus to reflection in abundance but no permanent foothold in the shifting sands of opinion. ”

“ JULIAN OF CAPPADOCIA, the sophist, flourished in the time of Aedesius, and was a sort of tyrant at Athens. For all the youths from all parts flocked to him, and revered the man for his eloquence and his noble disposition. For there were indeed certain other men, his contemporaries, who in some degree attained to the comprehension of true beauty and reached the heights of his renown, namely Apsines of Lacedaemon who won fame as a writer on rhetoric, and Epagathus, and a whole host of names of that sort. ”

“ But the lift man was wrong. No man had a part in her soul's exultation. If Septimus Dix crossed her mind while she was undressing, it was as a grotesque, bearing the same relation to her emotional impression of the night as a gargoyle does to a cathedral. When she went to bed, she slept the sound sleep of youth.
Septimus, after dismissing the cab, wandered in his vague way over to the Café de Paris, instinct suggesting his belated breakfast, which, like his existence, Zora had forgotten. The waiter came. ”

“ The monster began to lick its cruel lips, and stretch out one long claw toward its victim, when Œdipus answered:—
"It is man, who in childhood creeps on hands and knees, in manhood walks erect, and in old age moves with the help of a staff." The Sphinx, with a cry of rage and disappointment, spread its wings, preparing to fly away to some other place where it could find new victims; but Œdipus suddenly rushed upon it with his drawn sword, and drove it over the edge of a precipice which was so steep that the monster was instantly killed by its fall. ”

“ She would not eat, she would not run, she would not catch, she would not play with the two Charcoals and the other Spekkums. Their mother spoke to their uncle Thomas about it, and their uncle Thomas said he thought that dream would do Frisky Spekkum good.”
“And that is the end of the story, your majesty,” said the lovely Pussyanita.
“End?” exclaimed the King. “It has no end. It leaves off short. Why does it leave off short? Why does it not come to a proper end, namely, by the way a cat’s tail does?” ”

“ Shandy," he replied. "Some people are born so. They are quiescent; other people can jump about like grasshoppers. Do you know grasshoppers are very interesting?" And he began to talk irrelevantly on insects.
Their intercourse encouraged confidential autobiography. Zora learned the whole of his barren history. Fatherless, motherless, brotherless, he was alone in the world. From his father, Sir Erasmus Dix, a well-known engineer, to whose early repression much of Septimus's timidity was due, he had inherited a modest fortune. ”

“ The physician of the soul is aware that his patient will receive no nourishment unless he has been cleaned out; and the soul of the Great King himself, if he has not undergone this purification, is unclean and impure.
And who are the ministers of the purification? Sophists I may not call them. Yet they bear about the same likeness to Sophists as the dog, who is the gentlest of animals, does to the wolf, who is the fiercest. Comparisons are slippery things ”

“ Even that Sophy had once saved his life could now no longer shake Marie's doleful prepossession. Unusual and unlooked-for things take color from the mind of the spectator; the strange train of events which had brought Sophy to Praslok borrowed ominous shadows from a nervous, apprehensive temperament. ”

“ Suphy and her contemporaries were all as stout of heart as some of them were strong of arm. They had no fear of death, and, though they enjoyed life and took a deep interest in affairs around them, they had no hankering concern to ward off the inevitable. When Suphy's strength was giving way, the famous Dr. Gregory cautioned her to leave off animal food, saying she must be content with 'spoon meat' unless she wished to die. ”

“ But Sappho had been dead for two hundred years: the Athenian populace knew little of her except that she had been great and that she had been unhappy; and the descendants of the men who had thronged the theatre to see the Œdipus of Sophokles, sickening with that strange disease which makes the soul crave to batten on the fruits that are its poison, found a rare feast furnished forth in the imaginary history of the one great woman of their race. ”

“ When the later emperors offered him the very highest of all honours ----for they bade him use the honorary title of pretorian prefect----he refused, saving that the title of sophist was more distinguished. And this is indeed not a little to his credit, that though he was a man who longed most ardently for renown, he enslaved himself only to that renown which an orator can win, and held that any other sort is vulgar and sordid. He, too, when he died, had attained to a very great age, and he left in the minds of all men the profoundest admiration for his talents. ”

“ Dark figures covered the heavens. In the centre Ctesippus could discern the all-powerful son of Cronos surrounded by a halo. The sombre figures of the older gods encircled him in wrathful excitement. Like flocks of birds winging their way in the twilight, like eddies of dust driven by a hurricane, like autumn leaves lashed by Boreas, numerous minor gods hovered in long clouds and occupied the spaces.
When the clouds gradually lifted from the peak and sent down dismal horror to embrace the earth, Ctesippus fell upon his knees. ”