Xenocrates

Speusippus succeeds Plato;

With reason, then, it is said in Solomon, "wisdom is in the mouth of the faithful," since Xenocrates too, in his work On Prudence, says that wisdom is the knowledge of the first causes and of the intelligible essence, holding prudence to be twofold, the one practical, the other contemplative, which last is human wisdom.

but to Plato Socrates was pleasing, and Plato to Xenocrates, and Aristotle to Theophrastus, and Zeno to Cleanthes, who persuaded their own sectaries only.

Xenocrates denied that the soul has any shape or, as it were, body, and said it is number, whose power, as had already been Pythagoras's view, is greatest in nature.

What, then, hinders either this man, or even that Xenocrates, the gravest of philosophers, exaggerating virtue so greatly, extenuating and casting away the rest, from placing in virtue not only the happy life, but even the happiest?

I do not, then, readily grant either to my Brutus, or to our common masters, or to those ancients, Aristotle, Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemo, that, since they count among evils the things which I enumerated above, they should also say the wise man is always happy.

and this end of goods, as we see written by the Stoics themselves, was established by Xenocrates and by Aristotle.

'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.

Aristotle, Xenocrates, that whole family will not give it, since they say that health, strength, riches, glory, and many other things are goods, but do not say they are praiseworthy.

'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.

but where did Xenocrates, where did Aristotle touch those things (for you wish these to be as it were the same)?

if simple, whether it is fire, or breath, or blood, or, as Xenocrates held, a number without any body — which can scarcely be understood of what kind it is;

in whose books on the nature of the gods no divine form is described.

For these things are given back by you as if dictated — things which Epicurus, yawning, babbled in a dream, though indeed he boasted, as we see in his writings, that he had no master.

Perhaps they will rather be built up to take away the corporeality of the soul — unless they have looked at others on the contrary side, and indeed more of them, who claim a body for the soul.

So you are not to think that this principal is agitated from without, according to Heraclitus, nor fanned through the whole body, according to Moschion, nor shut up in the head, according to Plato, nor that it presides rather in the crown of the head, according to Xenocrates, nor that it lies in the brain, according to Hippocrates;

But Speusippus and Xenocrates, who were the first to take up Plato's method and authority, and after them Polemo and Crates, and together with them Crantor, gathered in the Academy, diligently maintained what they had received from their predecessors.

He differed also from the same men in this, that he by no means thought anything could be produced by that which was without body—of which kind Xenocrates and even his predecessors had said the soul was—nor that either what produces something or what is produced could be without body.

For when Plato had left his sister's son Speusippus as, so to speak, the heir of his philosophy, but had also left two men of the most outstanding zeal and learning, Xenocrates of Chalcedon and Aristotle of Stagira, those who were with Aristotle were called Peripatetics, because they disputed while walking about in the Lyceum, whereas the others, because by Plato's institution they were accustomed …

Indeed they relate that Xenocrates, among the most distinguished of philosophers, when asked what his disciples gained, answered that they came of their own accord to do what they would be compelled to do by the laws.

Xenocrates (this man was a Chalcedonian) hints at seven gods, the planets, and an eighth, the world composed of all the fixed stars.

See, at all events, what Crates says of Xenocrates himself.

Give this message, Nicasippus, when you come across my trusty friend.

Having hurled the discus far, may I fling my javelin as far beyond all others, as Xenocrates obtained a sweet temper surpassing all men.

I sing the Isthmian victory with horses, not unrecognized, which Poseidon granted to Xenocrates, and sent him a garland of Dorian wild celery for his hair, to have himself crowned, thus honoring the man of the fine chariot, the light of the people of Acragas.

where, for the prosperous Emmenids and Acragas on the river, and especially for Xenocrates, a Pythian victor’s treasure-house of songs has been built and is ready in the glen of Apollo, rich in gold.

Its facade, shining in pure light, will announce your chariot victory to the speech of men and make it famous—the victory you share with your father and your race, Thrasybulus, won in the vales of Crisa.

Xenocrates and Speusippus think that a man can be made happy by virtue alone, yet that the honourable is not the one good.

Xenocrates the Academic makes it two ways: