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 lhfqh=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 an exalted tomb on a most exalted peak. Some attribute this couplet to Simonides.
Subsequently Empedocles broke up the assembly of the Thousand three years after it had been set up, which proves not only that he was wealthy but that he favoured the popular cause. At all events Timaeus in his eleventh and twelfth books (for he mentions him more than once) states that he seems to have held opposite views when in public life and when writing poetry. This emphasis on the political leanings of Empedocles, backed by the authority of Timaeus, looks strange after the anecdote, also from Timaeus, of §§ 64, 65, nor is it clear that the attack on the close oligarchical corporation of the Thousand really took place at a later date ( u(/stero n ). That D. L. is working in two passages of Timaeus, in the second of which the first is not pre-supposed, is an obvious suggestion. In some passages one may see that he is boastful and selfish. At any rate these are his words: Fr. 112. 4 D.
All hail! I go about among you an immortal god, no more a mortal, etc.
At the time when he visited Olympia he demanded an excessive deference, so that never was anyone so talked about in gatherings of friends as Empedocles.
Subsequently, however, when Agrigentum came to regret him, the descendants of his personal enemies opposed his return home ; and this was why he went to Peloponnesus, where he died. Nor did Timon let even him alone, but fastens upon him in these words: Fr. 42 D.
Empedocles, too, mouthing tawdry verses; to all that had independent force, he gave a separate existence; and the principles he chose need others to explain them.
As to his death different accounts are given.
Thus Heraclides, In the list of the writings of Heraclides of Pontus (see v. 86 sqq. ) occurs similar subject, if not actually identical, with *peri\ th=s a)/pnou. In the latter Pausanias was one of the characters; see next note. after telling the story of the woman in a trance, how that Empedocles became famous because he had sent away the dead woman alive, goes on to say that he was offering a sacrifice close to the field of Peisianax. Some of his friends had been invited to the sacrifice, including Pausanias.
Then, after the feast, the remainder of the company dispersed and retired to rest, some under the trees in the adjoining field, others wherever they chose, while Empedocles himself remained on the spot where he had reclined at table. At daybreak all got up, and he was the only one missing. A search was made, and they questioned the servants, who said they did not know where he was. Thereupon someone said that in the middle of the night he heard an exceedingly loud voice calling Empedocles. Then he got up and beheld a light in the heavens and a glitter of lamps, but nothing else. His hearers were amazed at what had occurred, and Pausanias came down and sent people to search for him. But later he bade them take no further trouble, for things beyond expectation had happened to him, and it was their duty to sacrifice to him since he was now a god.
Hermippus tells us that Empedocles cured Panthea, a woman of Agrigentum, who had been given up by the physicians, and this was why he was offering sacrifice, and that those invited were about eighty in number. Hippobotus, again, asserts that, when he got up, he set out on his way to Etna; then, when he had reached it, he plunged into the fiery craters and disappeared, his intention being to confirm the report that he had become a god. Afterwards the truth was known, because one of his slippers was thrown up in the flames; it had been his custom to wear slippers of bronze. To this story Pausanias is made (by Heraclides) to take exception. a)nte/le ge. The imperfect tense is convincing proof that D. L. (or his source) is drawing upon the dialogue, and not narrating facts as a historian; D. L. must be giving a large extract from the dialogue *peri\ th=s a)/pnou, beginning in the second paragraph of § 67. Only D. L. has inserted, in § 69, (1) a note from Hermippus and (2) a résumé from Hippobotus of the very passage in the dialogue *peri\ th=s a)/pnou with which D. L. has been dealing in §§ 67-69.
Diodorus of Ephesus, when writing of Anaximander, declares that Empedocles emulated him, displaying theatrical arrogance and wearing stately robes. We are told that the people of Selinus suffered from pestilence owing to the noisome smells from the river hard by, so that the citizens themselves perished and their women died in childbirth, that Empedocles conceived the plan of bringing two neighbouring rivers to the place at his own expense, and that by this admixture he sweetened the waters. When in this way the pestilence had been stayed and the Selinuntines were feasting on the river bank, Empedocles appeared; and the company rose up and worshipped and prayed to him as to a god. It was then to confirm this belief of theirs that he leapt into the fire.
These stories are contradicted by Timaeus, who expressly says that he left Sicily for Peloponnesus and never returned at all ; and this is the reason Timaeus gives for the fact that the manner of his death is unknown. He replies to Heraclides, whom he mentions by name, in his fourteenth book. Pisianax, he says, was a citizen of Syracuse and possessed no land at Agrigentum. Further, if such a story had been in circulation, Pausanias would have set up a monument to his friend, as to a god, in the form of a statue or shrine, for he was a wealthy man. "How came he," adds Timaeus, "to leap into the craters, which he had never once mentioned though they were not far off? He must then have died in Peloponnesus.
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. For portrait-statues with inscriptions are extant even now. Neanthes of Cyzicus, who tells about the Pythagoreans, relates that, after the death of Meton, the germs of a tyranny began to show themselves, that then it was Empedocles who persuaded the Agrigentines to put an end to their factions and cultivate equality in politics.
Moreover, from his abundant means he bestowed dowries upon many of the maidens of the city who had no dowry. No doubt it was the same means that enabled him to don a purple robe and over it a golden girdle, as Favorinus relates in his Memorabilia, and again slippers of bronze and a Delphic laurel-wreath. He had thick hair, and a train of boy attendants. He himself was always grave, and kept this gravity of demeanour unshaken. In such sort would he appear in public; when the citizens met him, they recognized in this demeanour the stamp, as it were, of royalty. But afterwards, as he was going in a carriage to Messene to attend some festival, he fell and broke his thigh; this brought an illness which caused his death at the age of seventy-seven. Moreover, his tomb is in Megara.
As to his age, Aristotle's account is different, for he makes him to have been sixty when he died; while others make him one hundred and nine. He flourished in the 84th Olympiad. 444-441 b.c. Demetrius of Troezen in his pamphlet Against the Sophists said of him, adapting the words of Homer Od. xi. 278.
: He tied a noose that hung aloft from a tall cornel-tree and thrust his neck into it, and his soul went down to Hades.
In the short letter of Telauges which was mentioned above viii. 35. it is stated that by reason of his age he slipped into the sea and was drowned. Thus and thus much of his death.
There is an epigram of my own on him in my Pammetros in a satirical vein, as follows Anth. Pal. vii. 123.: Thou, Empedocles, didst cleanse thy body with nimble flame, fire didst thou drink from everlasting bowls. i.e. the craters of Etna. I will not say that of thine own will thou didst hurl thyself into the stream of