Theophrastus

Him Theophrastus succeeds, him Strato, him Lyco, then Critolaus, then Diodorus.

And Theophrastus says that perception is the beginning of faith;

Theophrastus, at any rate, in the fifth book of his Causes of Plants, records that the husks of beans, placed about the roots of newly planted trees, dry up what is growing;

Again — does Theophrastus give us only middling pleasure when he treats topics treated before him by Aristotle?

But I suppose that you, like our Triarius, take less pleasure in him because he neglected those ornaments of style proper to Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus.

'I think, then, Cato,' said I, 'that those old hearers of Plato — Speusippus, Aristotle, Xenocrates, and then their successors, Polemo, Theophrastus — had a doctrine sufficiently and copiously and elegantly established, so that there was no cause for Zeno, when he had heard Polemo, why he should differ both from that very man and from his predecessors.

For this beauty, even on earth, stirred up that philosophy, "ancestral and inherited from our forefathers," as Theophrastus says, kindled by the desire of knowledge.

For he who grieves at another's adversities grieves also at another's prosperities, as Theophrastus, deploring the death of his companion Callisthenes, is vexed at the prosperous affairs of Alexander, and so says that Callisthenes fell in with a man of the highest power and the highest fortune, but ignorant of how it befitted him to use prosperity.

And Theophrastus, dying, is said to have accused Nature, because she had given to stags and crows a long life — to whom it was of no concern — but to men, to whom it was of the greatest concern, so scanty a life;

For your shrewdness has surely perceived this, that even among the philosophers outside the faith, those who composed dialogues — Aristotle and Theophrastus — laid hold at once of the matters themselves, because they were conscious of their own lack of Platonic graces.

and that I might not publish my purpose by letter, I have explained the matter in detail to our brother Theophrastus, to report each particular to your perfection.

The blessed deacon Theophrastus received our letter, as I was of necessity setting out on a certain visitation;

'There answers me not Aristotle or Theophrastus, not even Xenocrates or Polemo, but these lesser men, that a truth is of such a kind as a falsehood could not be.

Hicetas of Syracuse, as Theophrastus says, thinks that the sky, sun, moon, stars, and in fine all the things above stand still, and that nothing in the world is moved except the earth;

But I fear both that the former assigns more to virtue than nature allows — especially as Theophrastus says many things eloquently and copiously — and I am afraid that the latter is scarcely consistent with himself, who, while he says that there are certain evils both of body and of fortune, yet judges that he who is in all these will be happy if he is wise:

for now he gives the divine sovereignty to mind, now to the sky, now to the signs and heavenly bodies.

Trusting in these dreams, not only Epicurus, Metrodorus, and Hermarchus spoke against Pythagoras, Plato, and Empedocles, but even the little courtesan Leontium dared to write against Theophrastus — in choice and Attic style, to be sure, but yet she did:

But what is not done with a deliberate mind, we are inclined to believe does not come under the class of perfect obligations;

Indeed some legislators have made the seller answerable for all accidents and damages, till the actual delivery of possession is made, as Theophrastus has observed in a passage in Stobaeus, under the title of laws, where the reader will find many customs, relating to the formalities of sale, to earnest, to repentance of a bargain, very different from the rules of the Roman law.

It was in the archonship of Theophrastus;

Theophrastus, however, a man pleasant in speech and so well-mannered that he bears before him a certain uprightness and nobility, broke yet more vehemently, in a way, the authority of the old discipline;

" "Zeno, then, was by no means a man who, like Theophrastus, cut the sinews of virtue, but on the contrary one who placed all the things that pertain to the happy life in virtue alone, and reckoned nothing else among goods, and called that the honourable which was a certain simple and sole and single good.

Or is it because Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius, and many others give delight, men who expressed not the words but the force of the Greek poets—how much more will the philosophers delight us, if, as those poets imitated Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, so these were to imitate Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus!

Yet that thin air will not bring it about that a man should listen to Zeno, or to Arcesilaus, or to Theophrastus, nor will the thick air make him seek victory at Nemea rather than at the Isthmus.

And that Eresian, Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle, sometimes suspects heaven, sometimes spirit, to be God.

My father, gentlemen, planted the paternal estate of Astyphilus and continued to cultivate it and doubled its value.

My father took Astyphilus with him when he was a child, as also he took me, to the religious ceremonies on every occasion;

After this my father gave Astyphilus's sister in marriage to a man of his choice and managed everything else to Astyphilus's complete satisfaction;

Theophrastus speaks like a philosopher when, in comparing offences — as one might compare such things on the common view — he says that the faults committed through desire are graver than those committed through anger.

Those men confound their duties in the wrong order who, against the precepts of Theophrastus, judge after they have come to love, and do not love after they have judged.

"It cannot be," says Theophrastus, "that a good man should not grow angry at the wicked.

When you say this, Theophrastus, you seek to bring odium upon the braver precepts, and, leaving the judge, you appeal to the crowd.

We may rightly say that those linger upon true duties who choose to have Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus, and the other high priests of good learning, and Aristotle and Theophrastus, as their closest intimates day by day.