The Academic Questions, Treatise De Finibus, and Tusculan Disputations, of M.T. Cicero, With a Sketch of the Greek Philosophers Mentioned by Cicero

The earliest of them was Thales, who was born at Miletus, about 640 B.C. He was a man of great political sagacity and influence; but we have to consider him here as the earliest philosopher who appears to have been convinced of the necessity of scientific proof of whatever was put forward to be believed, and as the originator of mathematics and geometry. He was also a great astronomer; for we read in Herodotus (i. 74) that he predicted the eclipse of the sun which happened in the reign of Alyattes, king of Lydia, B.C. 609. He asserted that water is the origin of all things; that everything is produced out of it, and everything is resolved into it. He also asserted that it is the soul which originates all motion, so much so, that he attributes a soul to the magnet. Aristotle also represents him as saying that everything is full of Gods. He does not appear to have left any written treatises behind him: we are uncertain when or where he died, but he is said to have lived to a great age—to 78, or, according to some writers, to 90 years of age.

Anaximander, a countryman of Thales, was also born at Miletus, about 30 years later; he is said to have been a pupil of the former, and deserves especial mention as the oldest philosophical writer among the Greeks. He did not devote himself to the mathematical studies of Thales, but rather to speculations concerning the generation and origin of the world; as to which his opinions are involved in some obscurity. He appears, however, to have considered that all things were formed of a sort of matter, which he called τὸ ἄπειρον, or The Infinite; which was something everlasting and divine, though not invested with any spiritual or intelligent nature. His own works have not come down to us; but, according to Aristotle, he considered this “Infinite” as consisting of a mixture of simple, unchangeable elements, from which all things were produced by the concurrence of homogeneous particles already existing in it,—a process which he attributed to the constant conflict between heat and cold, and to affinities of the particles: in this he was opposed to the doctrine of Thales, Anaximenes, and Diogenes of Apollonia, who agreed in deriving all things from a single, not changeable, principle.

Anaximander further held that the earth was of a cylindrical form, suspended in the middle of the universe, and surrounded by water, air, and fire, like the coats of an onion; but that the interior stratum of fire was broken up and collected into masses, from which originated the sun, moon, and stars; which he thought were carried round by the three spheres in which they were respectively fixed. He believed that the moon had a light of her own, not a borrowed light; that she was nineteen times as large as the earth, and the sun twenty-eight. He thought that all animals, including man, were originally produced in water, and proceeded gradually to become land animals. According to Diogenes Laertius, he was the inventor of the gnomon, and of geographical maps; at all events, he was the first person who introduced the use of the gnomon into Greece. He died about 547 B.C.

Anaximenes was also a Milesian, and a contemporary of Thales and Anaximander. We do not exactly know when he was born, or when he died; but he must have lived to a very great age, for he was in high repute as early as B.C. 544, and he was the tutor of Anaxagoras, B.C. 480. His theory was, that air was the first cause of all things, and that the other elements of the universe were resolvable into it. From this infinite air, he imagined that all finite things were formed by compression and rarefaction, produced by motion, which had existed from all eternity; so that the earth was generated out of condensed air, and the sun and other heavenly bodies from the earth. He thought also that heat and cold were produced by different degrees of density of this primal element, air; that the clouds were formed by the condensing of the air; and that it was the air which supported the earth, and kept it in its place. Even the human soul he believed to be, like the body, formed of air. He believed in the eternity of matter, and denied the existence of anything immaterial.

Anaxagoras, who, as has been already stated, was a pupil of Anaximenes, was born at Clazomenæ, in Ionia, about B.C. 499. He removed to Athens at the time of the Persian war, where he became intimate with Pericles, who defended him, though unsuccessfully, when he was prosecuted for impiety: he was fined five talents, and banished from the city; on which he retired to Lampsacus, where he died at the age of 72. He differed from his predecessors of the Ionic School, and sought for a higher cause of all things than matter: this cause he considered to be νοῦς, intelligence, or mind. Not that he thought this νοῦς to be the creator of the world, but only that principle which arranged it, and gave it motion; for his idea was, that matter had existed from all eternity, but that, before the νοῦς arranged it, it was all in a state of chaotic confusion, and full of an infinite number of homogeneous and heterogeneous parts; then the νοῦς separated the homogeneous parts from the heterogeneous, and in this manner the world was produced. This separation, however, he taught, was made in such a manner that everything contains in itself parts of other things, or heterogeneous elements; and is what it is only on account of certain homogeneous parts which constitute its predominant and real character.

Pythagoras was earlier than Anaxagoras, though this latter has been mentioned before him to avoid breaking the continuity of the Ionic School. His father’s name was Mnesarchus, and he was born at Samos about 570 B.C., though some accounts make him earlier. He is said by some writers to have been a pupil of Thales, by others of Anaximander, or of Pherecydes of Scyros. He was a man of great learning, as a geometrician, mathematician, astronomer, and musician; a great traveller, having visited Egypt and Babylon, and, according to some accounts, penetrated as far as India.

Many of his peculiar tenets are believed to have been derived from the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians, with whom he is said to have been connected. His contemporaries at Crotona in South Italy, where he lived, looked upon him as a man peculiarly connected with the gods; and some of them even identified him with the Hyperborean Apollo. He himself is said to have laid claim to the gifts of divination and prophecy. The religious element was clearly predominant in his character. Grote says of him, “In his prominent vocation, analogous to that of Epimenides, Orpheus, or Melampus, he appears as the revealer of a mode of life calculated to raise his disciples above the level of mankind, and to recommend them to the favour of the gods.” (Hist. of Greece, iv. p. 529.)

On his arrival at Crotona, he formed a school, consisting at first of three hundred of the richest of the citizens, who bound themselves by a sort of vow to himself and to each other, for the purpose of cultivating the ascetic observances which he enjoined, and of studying his religious and philosophical theories. All that took place in this school was kept a profound secret; and there were gradations among the pupils themselves, who were not all admitted, or at all events not at first, to a full acquaintance with their master’s doctrines. They were also required to submit to a period of probation. The statement of his forbidding his pupils the use of animal food is denied by many of the best authorities, and that of his insisting on their maintaining an unbroken silence for five years, rests on no sufficient authority, and is incredible. It is beyond our purpose at present to enter into the question of how far the views of Pythagoras in founding his school or club of three hundred, tended towards uniting in this body the idea of “at once a philosophical school, a religious brotherhood, and a political association,” all which characters the Bishop of St. David’s (Hist. of Greece, vol. ii. p. 148) thinks were inseparably united in his mind; while Mr. Grote’s view of his object (Hist. of Greece, vol. iv. p. 544) is very different. In a political riot at Crotona, a temple, in which many of his disciples were assembled, was burnt, and they perished, and some say that Pythagoras himself was among them; though according to other accounts he fled to Tarentum, and afterwards to Metapontum, where he starved himself to death. His tomb (see Cic. de Fin. v. 2) was shown at Metapontum down to Cicero’s time. Soon after his death his school was suppressed, and did not revive, though the Pythagoreans continued to exist as a sect, the members of which kept up the religious and scientific pursuits of their founder.

Pythagoras is said to have been the first who assumed the title of φιλόσοφος; but there is great uncertainty as to the most material of his philosophical and religious opinions. It is believed that he wrote nothing himself, and that the earliest Pythagorean treatises were the work of Philolaus, a contemporary of Socrates. It appears, however, that he undertook to solve by reference to one single primary principle the problem of the origin and constitution of the universe. His predilection for mathematics led him to trace the origin of all things to number; for “in numbers he thought that they perceived many analogies of things that exist and are produced, more than in fire, earth, or water: as, for instance, they thought that a certain condition of numbers was justice; another, soul and intellect, ... And moreover, seeing the conditions and ratios of what pertains to harmony to consist in numbers, since other things seemed in their entire nature to be formed in the likeness of numbers, and in all nature numbers are the first, they supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things.” (Arist. Met. i. 5.)

Music and harmony too, played almost as important a part in the Pythagorean system as mathematics, or numbers. His idea appears to be, that order or harmony of relation is the regulating principle of the whole universe. He drew out a list of ten pairs of antagonistic elements, and in the octave and its different harmonic relations, he believed that he found the ground of the connexion between them. In his system of the universe fire was the important element, occupying both the centre and the remotest point of it; and being the vivifying principle of the whole. Round the central fire the heavenly bodies he believed to move in a regular circle; furthest off were the fixed stars; and then, in order, the planets, the moon, the sun, the earth, and what he called ἀντίχθων, a sort of other half of the earth, which was a distinct body from it, but moving parallel to it.

The most distant region he called Olympus; the space between the fixed stars and the moon he called κόσμος; the space between the moon and the earth οὐρανός. He, or at least his disciples, taught that the earth revolved on its axis, (though Philolaus taught that its revolutions were not round its axis but round the central fire). The universe itself they considered as a large sphere, and the intervals between the heavenly bodies they thought were determined according to the laws and relations of musical harmony. And from this theory arose the doctrine of the Music of the Spheres; as the heavenly bodies in their motion occasioned a sort of sound depending on their distances and velocities; and as these were determined by the laws of harmonic intervals, the sounds, or notes, formed a regular musical scale.