Eudoxus

Indeed it seems that Eudoxus took a good line in advocating the claims of pleasure to the prize of highest excellence, when he held that the fact that pleasure, though a good, is not praised, is an indication that it is superior to the things we praise, as God and the Good are, because they are the standards to which everything else is referred.

That pleasure is the Good was held by Eudoxus, on the following grounds.

He also held that the goodness of pleasure was equally manifest from the converse:

Etiam Arabibus, si verum est, quod Cornelius Nepos testatus est, Eudoxum quendam sua aetate cum Lathyrum Regem Alexandriae fugeret, Arabico sinu egressum Gades usque pervectum.

Also the Arabians knew those seas, if the testimony of Cornelius Nepos is to be believed, because he says that in his own day a certain Eudoxus, fleeing from Lathyrus, king of Alexandria, sailed from the Arabian gulf and finally reached Cadiz.

that afterward Eudoxus of Cnidus, a disciple, as he reported, of Plato, had marked out upon that same globe the stars and constellations fixed in the heaven;

Just as, of course, the warlike Ares is named from "lifting up" (arsis) and "destruction" (anairesis), by which it seems to me that many, especially those who simply fix a sword and sacrifice to it as to Ares — and this is a Scythian custom, as Eudoxus says in the second book of his Circuit of the Earth;

and Eudoxus of Cnidos of Conuphis, who was also an Egyptian.

So, when it is possible for all to behold object-lessons of such a kind and on such a scale, from which everyone would conclude that it does not pay to espouse the cause of the people, I begin to fear that some day you may become destitute of men who will speak on your behalf, especially when of the friends of the people some are being taken away by man’s natural destiny, by accident, and by the l …

We are not, however, to suppose that none of the results obtained by the method of exhaustion had been discovered before the time of Eudoxus (fl.

We conclude therefore that for the content of this Book Euclid was greatly indebted to Eudoxus, to whom the discovery of the method of exhaustion is attributed.

(b) As regards the two theorems about the volume of a pyramid and of a cone respectively, which Eudoxus was the first to prove, we now have authentic evidence in the short treatise by Archimedes discovered by Heiberg in a MS.

and besides these Eudoxus, Hipparchus, Archimedes, and other keen, high-minded, laborious, cunning, and self-willed natures, mockers of the very mortal and fleeting life of men, such as Menippus and the like.