It is said that once, when he demanded of Evathlus his pupil payment for his lessons, Evathlus said to him: “But I have never been victorious in an argument;” and he rejoined: “But if I gain my cause, then I should naturally receive the fruits of my victory, and so would you obtain the fruits of yours.”
There was also another Protagoras, an astronomer, on whom Euphorion wrote an elegy; and a third also, who was a philosopher of the Stoic sect.
Diogenes was a native of Apollonia, and the son of Apollothemis, a natural philosopher of high reputation; and he was, as Antisthenes reports, a pupil of Anaximenes. He was also a contemporary of Anaxagoras, and Demetrius Phalereus says in his Defense of Socrates that he was very unpopular at Athens, and even in some danger of his life.
The following were his principal doctrines: that the air was an element; that the worlds were infinite, and that the vacuum also was infinite; that the air, as it was condensed, and as it was rarified, was the productive cause of the worlds; that nothing can be produced out of nothing; and that nothing can be destroyed so as to become nothing; that the earth is round, firmly planted in the middle of the universe, having acquired its situation from the circumvolutions of the hot principle around it, and its consistency from the cold.
The first words of his treatise are:
It appears to me that he who begins any treatise ought to lay down principles about which there can be no dispute, and that his exposition of them ought to be simple and dignified.
Anaxarchus was a native of Abdera. He was a pupil of Diogenes of Smyrna; but, as some say, of Metrodorus of Chios; who said that he was not even sure that he knew nothing; and Metrodorus was a pupil of Nessus, of Chios; though others assert that he was a disciple of Democritus.
Anaxarchus too enjoyed the intimacy of Alexander, and flourished about the hundred and tenth olympiad. He had for an enemy Nicocreon, the tyrant of Cyprus. And on one occasion, when Alexander, at a banquet, asked him what he thought of the entertainment, he is said to have replied: “O king, everything is provided very sumptuously; and the only thing wanting is to have the head of some satrap served up,” hinting at Nicocreon. And Nicocreon did not forget his grudge against him for this; but after the death of the king, when Anaxarchus, who was making a voyage, was driven against his will into Cyprus, he took him and put him in a mortar, and commanded him to be pounded to death with iron pestles. And then they say that he, disregarding this punishment, uttered that celebrated saying: “Beat the bag of Anaxarchus, but you will not beat Anaxarchus himself.” And then, when Nicocreon commanded that his tongue should be cut out, it is said that he bit it off, and spit it at him. And we have written an epigram upon him in the following terms:
Beat more and more; you’re beating but a bag; Beat, Anaxarchus is in heav’n with Jove. Hereafter Proserpine will rack your bones, And say, Thus perish, you accursed beater.
Anaxarchus, on account of the evenness of his temper and the tranquillity of his life, was called the Happy. And he was a man to whom it was very easy to reprove men and bring them to temperance. Accordingly, he produced an alteration in Alexander who thought himself a God, for when he saw the blood flowing from some wound that he had received, he pointed to him with his finger, and said: “This is blood, and not:
“Such stream as issues from a wounded God; Pure emanation, uncorrupted flood, Unlike our gross, diseas’d, terrestrial blood.”
But Plutarch says that it was Alexander himself who quoted these lines to his friends.
They also tell a story that Anaxarchus once drank to him, and then showed the goblet, and said:
Shall any mortal hand dare wound a God?
Pyrrho was a citizen of Elis, and the son of Pleistarchus, as Diocles informs us, and, as Apollodorus in his Chronicles asserts, he was originally a painter.
And he was a pupil of Bryson, the son of Stilpon, as we are told by Alexander in his Chronicles. After that he attached himself to Anaxarchus, and attended him everywhere; so that he even went as far as the Gymnosophists, in India, and the Magi.
Owing to which circumstance, he seems to have taken a noble line in philosophy, introducing the doctrine of incomprehensibility, and of the necessity of suspending one’s judgment, as we learn from Ascanius of Abdera. For he used to say that nothing was honorable, or disgraceful, or just, or unjust. And on the same principle he asserted that there was no such thing as downright truth; but that men did everything in consequence of custom and law. For that nothing was any more this than that. And his life corresponded to his principles; for he never shunned anything, and never guarded against anything; encountering everything, even wagons for instance, and precipices, and dogs, and everything of that sort; committing nothing whatever to his senses. So that he used to be saved, as Antigonus the Carystian tells us, by his friends who accompanied him. And Aenesidemus says that he studied philosophy on the principle of suspending his judgment on all points, without however, on any occasion acting in an imprudent manner, or doing anything without due consideration. And he lived to nearly ninety years of age.
And Antigonus of Carystus, in his account of Pyrrho, mentions the following circumstances respecting him: that he was originally a person of no reputation, but a poor man, and a painter; and that a picture of some camp-bearers, of very moderate execution, was preserved in the Gymnasium at Elis, which was his work; and that he used to walk out into the fields and seek solitary places, very rarely appearing to his family at home; and that he did this in consequence of having heard some Indian reproaching Anaxarchus for never teaching anyone else any good, but for devoting all his time to paying court to princes in palaces. He relates of him too that he always maintained the same demeanour, so that if anyone left him in the middle of his delivery of a discourse, he remained and continued what he was saying; although, when a young man, he was of a very excitable temperament. Often too, says Antigonus, he would go away for a time without telling anyone beforehand, and taking any chance persons whom he chose for his companions. And once, when Anaxarchus had fallen into a pond, he passed by without assisting him; and when someone blamed him for this, Anaxarchus himself praised his indifference and absence of all emotion.
On one occasion he was detected talking to himself, and when he was asked the reason, he said that he was studying how to be good. In his investigations he was never despised by anyone, because he always spoke explicitly and straight to the question that had been put to him. On which account Nausiphanes was charmed by him even when he was quite young. And he used to say that he should like to be endowed with the disposition of Pyrrho, without losing his own power of eloquence. And he said too that Epicurus, who admired the conversation and manners of Pyrrho, was frequently asking him about him.
He was so greatly honored by his country that he was appointed a priest; and on his account all the philosophers were exempted from taxation. He had a great many imitators of his impassiveness; in reference to which Timon speaks thus of him in his Python, and in his Silloi:
Now, you old man, you Pyrrho, how could you Find an escape from all the slavish doctrines And vain imaginations of the Sophists? How did you free yourself from all the bonds Of sly chicane, and artful deep persuasion? How came you to neglect what sort of breeze Blows round your Greece, and what’s the origin And end of everything?
And again, in his Images, he says:
These things, my heart, O Pyrrho, longs to hear, How you enjoy such ease of life and quiet, The only man as happy as a God.
And the Athenians presented him with the freedom of their city, as Diocles tells us, because he had slain Cotys the Thracian.
He also lived in a most blameless manner with his sister, who was a midwife, as Eratosthenes relates in his treatise on Riches and Poverty; so that he himself used to carry poultry, and pigs too if he could get any, into the marketplace and sell them. And he used to clean all the furniture of the house without expressing any annoyance. And it is said that he carried his indifference so far that he even washed a pig. And once, when he was very angry about something connected with his sister (and her name was Philista), and someone took him up, he said: “The display of my indifference does not depend on a woman.” On another occasion, when he was driven back by a dog which was attacking him, he said to someone who blamed him for being discomposed: “That it was a difficult thing entirely to put off humanity; but that a man ought to strive with all his power to counteract circumstances with his actions if possible, and at all events with his reason.” They also tell a story that once, when some medicines of a consuming tendency, and some cutting and cautery was applied to him for some wound, that he never even contracted his brow. And Timon intimates his disposition plainly enough in the letters which he wrote to Python. Moreover, Philo the Athenian, who was a friend of his, said that he was especially fond of Democritus; and next to him of Homer; whom he admired greatly, and was continually saying: