Democritus

while certain others, exalting themselves, force themselves to find slanders against the words, devising contentious inquiries — hunters of little phrases, zealots of paltry arts, "wranglers and twisters of thongs," as that man of Abdera says:

Hearers of Democritus were Protagoras of Abdera and Metrodorus of Chios, whose pupil was Diogenes of Smyrna, whose pupil Anaxarchus, and of him Pyrrho, of whom Nausiphanes.

" For Democritus made the "Babylonian discourses" his own ethical writings;

For Democritus — a great man indeed, but one who makes the soul out of smooth and round little bodies by a kind of chance concourse — let us pass him over;

But let us cast out altogether that chance concourse of smooth and round indivisible bodies, which Democritus nonetheless will have to be warmed and breathing, that is, animate.

No one says that — though Epicurus charges it upon Democritus, the Democriteans deny it.

He repeats the doctrines of Democritus, changing very little, but in such a way that what he means to correct he seems to me rather to spoil.

Now Epicurus does not greatly err in the points where he follows Democritus.

Thus what he alters he spoils, and what he keeps is wholly Democritus's:

Accuse Nature, who, as Democritus says, has hidden the truth deep in the abyss.

But neither did Saturninus — to name an enemy of our own by preference — have anything like those men of old, nor is the slander of Arcesilas to be compared with the modesty of Democritus.

"For why," you will say, "out of those atoms, from which Democritus affirms all things are produced, in the other worlds — and those indeed innumerable — there can be and even are innumerable Quintus Lutatius Catuluses, while in this so great world another Catulus cannot be made?

As for Democritus, who at one time reckons images and their revolutions among the gods, at another the nature that pours forth and sends out those images, at another our own thought and understanding — does he not move in the greatest error?

As for Phaedrus, nothing was more elegant, nothing more humane, yet the old man was vexed if I said anything too harsh — while Epicurus assailed Aristotle most insultingly, spoke most foully of Phaedo the disciple of Socrates, cut to pieces in whole volumes Timocrates, the brother of his comrade Metrodorus, because he disagreed on some point of philosophy, was ungrateful to Democritus himself, who …

What is there in Epicurus's natural philosophy that is not from Democritus?

What honoured sage, Democritus, lays down-

That proposition, that primordials

Of body and mind, each super-posed on each,

But that I may not have learned today for myself alone, I will share with you three sayings that have come my way, finely uttered upon about the same theme;

How long did Democritus seem to rave!

"Democritus," he says, "is said to have invented the arch, so that the curve of stones, gradually inclined, might be bound together by the keystone in the middle.

Hence not unreasonably did Democritus say that "few of the men of reason, stretching out their hands to this place which we Greeks now call air, said that all this was Zeus;

and Democritus of Abdera, taking these two, added the images.

"For swine," it says, "delight in mire rather than in pure water," and "rave over filth," according to Democritus.

For we are instructed by Democritus to believe, that our bodies are preserved in the earth under the promise of a restoration to life.

For Democritus supposed that power naturally belonged to superior merit, and Aristotle was of opinion that both in the productions of nature and art the inferior were provided for the use of the superior parts.

Democritus has said, there would have been no occasion for laws to prevent every man from living according to his own humour, if one had not done injury to another.

Democritus, on the contrary, they say was never in public without laughing;

It will profit us, that saving precept of Democritus, by which tranquillity is shown—if we undertake not many things, either privately or publicly, nor things greater than our strength.

This steadfast seat of the mind the Greeks call euthymia—on which there is an excellent treatise by Democritus;

that all the vices of the crowd seem to us not hateful but laughable, and that we imitate Democritus rather than Heraclitus.

'Whoever would live tranquilly should not be too busy either in private or in public affairs'—meaning, of course, with reference to needless ones.

But more, both philosophers — against Dicaearchus, Plato, Strato, Epicurus, Democritus, Empedocles, Socrates, Aristotle — and physicians against Andreas and Asclepiades, Herophilus, Erasistratus, Diocles, Hippocrates, and Soranus himself;

Accordingly the mind also — or the intellect, which the Greeks call ‘nous’ — we understand to be nothing other than a faculty of the soul, inborn and implanted and proper to it from its birth, by which it acts, by which it knows, which, having it with itself, out of itself it moves itself within itself, and so seems to be moved by it as if by another substance;

To this end too Democritus notes the growths of nails and hair in the graves for some space of time.

As for natural philosophy, if I approved of Epicurus, that is, of Democritus, I could write as plainly as Amafinius does.

"It was with Zeno, as we have received it, that Arcesilas set up his whole contest—not from obstinacy or zeal for victory, as it seems to me at least, but because of the obscurity of those matters which had brought Socrates, and, even before Socrates, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and almost all the ancients, to the confession of ignorance.

Democritus, the author of the atoms, preferred to accept this, that all things come to pass by necessity, rather than to wrench from the individual bodies their natural motions.

And to me, indeed, it seems that, since there had been two opinions among the philosophers of old—one of those who held that all things come to pass by fate in such a way that this fate brings the force of necessity (in which opinion were Democritus, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Aristotle), the other of those to whom it seemed that the voluntary motions of the mind are without any fate—Chrysippus, …

For they had a certain other force of motion derived from Democritus—that of impact, which he calls a ‘blow’—and from you, Epicurus, the force of weight and heaviness.

Nor is it anything new to renounce wealth and bestow it on the poor or on one's country, which many did before the Saviour's coming, some for the sake of leisure for letters and a dead wisdom, others for the sake of empty fame and vainglory—men like Anaxagoras and Democritus and Crates.

—Your ambassadors, Cephisophon and Democritus and Polycritus, visited me and discussed the release of the vessels commanded by Leodamas.

"Homer, having been allotted a divinely-inspired nature, fashioned an array of verses of every kind" — as though it were not possible, without a divine and superhuman nature, to work out verses so fine and wise.

Hence too, in the case of those theorems the proof of which was first discovered by Eudoxus, namely those relating to the cone and the pyramid, that the cone is one third part of the cylinder, and the pyramid one third part of the prism, having the same base and equal height, no small part of the credit will naturally be assigned to Democritus, who was the first to make the statement (of the fact) …

If then one may hazard a conjecture as to Democritus' argument with regard to a pyramid, it seems probable that he would notice that, if two pyramids of the same height and equal triangular bases are respectively cut by planes parallel to the base and dividing the heights in the same ratio, the corresponding sections of the two pyramids are equal, whence he would infer that the pyramids are equal …

They had been sent by their fellow citizens to the Persians, like the rest of the islanders, but they disregarded their orders and came to the Hellenes at the urging of Democritus, an esteemed man among the townsmen and at that time captain of a trireme.

Vermin destroyed Democritus, and other vermin Socrates.

And among them is Democritus (3), the famous natural philosopher, whose doctrine is that the minute particles in matter are dispersed, simple, indivisible, eternal, exceeding all reckoning, and imperceptible because of their smallness;

And they allege that Democritus lived 109 years, and that he died by his own choosing, out of a loathing for remaining, by cutting himself off from food.

As for the living thing, for Democritus and Epicurus it is generated only from a living thing (2).

Thinkers in whom this aesthetic reverence is weaker than the analytic impulse--especially Democritus--seem half modern rather than Greek.

Democritus cast away his riches, accounting them a burden to a good mind.

Cast it in Plato's teeth that he sought money, in Aristotle's that he took it, in Democritus's that he neglected it, in Epicurus's that he spent it;