Lives of Eminent Philosophers (2.3.14-2.5.18)

Hieronymus in the second book of his Scattered Notes states that Pericles brought him into court so weak and wasted from illness that he owed his

acquittal not so much to the merits of his case as to the sympathy of the judges. So much then on the subject of his trial.

He was supposed to have borne Democritus a grudge because he had failed to get into communication with him.[*] At length he retired to Lampsacus and there died. And when the magistrates of the city asked if there was anything he would like done for him, he replied that he would like them to grant an annual holiday to the boys in the month in which he died; and the custom is kept up to this day.

So, when he died, the people of Lampsacus gave him honourable burial and placed over his grave the following inscription[*]:

Here Anaxagoras, who in his quest

Of truth scaled heaven itself, is laid to rest.

I also have written an epigram upon him[*]:

The sun’s a molten mass,

Quoth Anaxagoras;

This is his crime, his life must pay the price.

Pericles from that fate

Rescued his friend too late;

His spirit crushed, by his own hand he dies.

There have been three other men who bore the name of Anaxagoras [of whom no other writer gives a complete list]. The first was a rhetorician of the school of Isocrates; the second a sculptor, mentioned by Antigonus; the third a grammarian, pupil of Zenodotus.

Archelaus, the son of Apollodorus, or as some say

of Midon, was a citizen of Athens or of Miletus; he was a pupil of Anaxagoras, who[*] first brought natural philosophy from Ionia to Athens. Archelaus was the teacher of Socrates. He was called the physicist inasmuch as with him natural philosophy came to an end, as soon as Socrates had introduced ethics. It would seem that Archelaus himself also treated of ethics, for he has discussed laws and goodness and justice; Socrates took the subject from him and, having improved it to the utmost, was regarded as its inventor. Archelaus laid down that there were two causes of growth or becoming, heat and cold; that living things were produced from slime; and that what is just and what is base depends not upon nature but upon convention.

His theory is to this effect. Water is melted by heat and produces on the one hand earth in so far as by the action of fire it sinks and coheres, while on the other hand it generates air in so far as it overflows on all sides. Hence the earth is confined by the air, and the air by the circumambient fire. Living things, he holds, are generated from the earth when it is heated and throws off slime of the consistency of milk to serve as a sort of nourishment, and in this same way the earth produced man. He was the first who explained the production of sound as being the concussion of the air, and the formation of the sea in hollow places as due to its filtering through the earth. He declared the sun to be the largest of the heavenly bodies and the universe to be unlimited.

There have been three other men who bore the name of Archelaus: the topographer who described the countries traversed by Alexander; the author

of a treatise on Natural Curiosities; and lastly a rhetorician who wrote a handbook on his art.

Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus, a sculptor, and of Phaenarete, a midwife, as we read in the Theaetetus of Plato; he was a citizen of Athens and belonged to the deme Alopece. It was thought that he helped Euripides to make his plays; hence Mnesimachus[*] writes:

This new play of Euripides is The Phrygians; and Socrates provides the wood for frying.[*]

And again he calls Euripides an engine riveted by Socrates. And Callias in The Captives[*]:

A. Pray why so solemn, why this lofty air?

B. I’ve every right; I’m helped by Socrates.

Aristophanes[*] in The Clouds:

’Tis he composes for Euripides

Those clever plays, much sound and little sense.