-CTESIAS.—THEOPOMPUS.

XENOPHON.-CTESIAS.

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monians with a house and piece of land in E'lis. Here, amid lovely meadows and woodlands, he built a temple to the goddess Diana in fulfilment of a vow he had made when encircled by dangers in Asia. Here, free from the cares of public life, he passed many years, happy in the society of his wife, children, and friends, dividing his time among his farm, his hunting-parks, and his study. He died at the age of ninety.-Of his two sons, one fell on the field of Mantinea, after dealing the great Epaminondas his death-blow.

Besides the "Anabasis" and "Hellenica," Xenophon wrote the "Cy'ropædi'a" (education of Cyrus-the elder Cyrus, king of Persia), a semi-didactic, semi-historical fiction, illustrating a model system of education and setting forth his ideal of government—a perfect monarchy. He is also the author of several works written in defence of Socrates or as expositions. of his philosophy, of which the "Memorabilia” (memoirs) is particularly interesting, teeming as it does with sayings and anecdotes of the sage.

In addition to his merits as an historian, Xenophon may justly claim the distinction of having been the first essayist: we have from his pen essays on the Policy of Lacedæmon, on the Chase, Horsemanship, and Cavalry Tactics, not to mention several political treatises ascribed to him. A creditable representative of elegant Attic prose, Xenophon has been called the Attic Muse.

Ctesias, a Greek physician attached to the Persian court, who dressed the wounds of Artaxerxes after the battle of Cunaxa, compiled a history of Persia in twenty-three books, a description of India, and a variety of other works. Of his writings, which were in the Ionic dialect, little has survived.

Theopompus (probably 378-304 B.C.) is also worthy of mention as an historian. He wrote a History of Greece from 411 to 394 B.C., and "Philippica," in fifty-eight books, in which he sketched the character of Philip of Macedon. Of the latter

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work numerous fragments remain. Ancient critics give him credit for general accuracy, though he took rather too rosecolored views of his hero Philip as the promoter of Grecian civilization.

PHILOSOPHY.

The earliest philosophical investigations were made by Ionians, and THALES of Miletus is recognized as the founder of Greek philosophy. To him and to Pythagoras the various systems may all be traced.

The Ionic School of Thales, devoted to physical science, rapidly developed, theory after theory being brought forward to explain the universe and the nature of Deity. One philosopher made the Supreme Being an all-pervading, divine air; another, Heracli'tus "the Obscure," represented God as a subtile flame, and reduced the universe to an eternal fire.

A notable step in advance was taken by ANAXAGORAS (500– 428 B.C.), who succeeded to the leadership of this school. The first to make the study of philosophy fashionable at Athens, he became the instructor of some of her great men, Socrates among the number. He represented God as a divine mind, acting on the material world with intelligence and design. Well did Aristotle say that Anaxagoras was like a sober man among stammering drunkards, when compared with earlier philosophers. As an astronomer, he anticipated some of the discoveries of more recent times; he correctly explained eclipses, taught that the sun was a molten ball, that from it the moon borrowed her light, that the lunar surface was diversified with mountains and valleys, and that the earth itself had been the scene of terrible convulsions.

The Italic School had meanwhile been founded by PYTHAG'oras, of Samos, born about 540 B.C. He settled in Croto'na, a Greek town of southern Italy, and there imparted to his disciples the philosophical principles which he had gathered in other lands, particularly Egypt.

Pythagoras modestly styled himself a lover of wisdom philosopher), not a wise man (sophist). Among his doctrines were the mysterious theory that number is the first principle of all things, the transmigration of souls, and a system of future rewards and punishments. He forestalled Copernicus in his discovery of the true theory of the solar system—that the sun, and not the earth, as was then believed, is its centre; he taught that the moon was inhabited; and described the heavenly bodies as producing harmonious tones in their passage through ether, from which his followers were accustomed to say that to him the gods had revealed "the music of the spheres."

With such perfect confidence did his disciples regard their master, who usually gave his instructions from behind a thick curtain, that when any one called their doctrines in question they deemed it sufficient to reply, "He said so" (ipse dixit). Indeed, they invested him with supernatural powers, nor, according to his early biographers, did he deny the soft impeachment. On one occasion, we are told, to convince his pupils that he was a god, he showed them his thigh, which was of gold, and declared that he had assumed the form of humanity only the more readily to impart his lessons to mankind.

Pythagoras was the inventor of the monochord, a onestringed instrument designed to measure musical intervals,and also of the more useful, if humbler, Multiplication Table. He is the first who practised mesmerism; at least so we may account for his subduing a fierce Daunian bear, and taming beasts and birds by gently passing his hands over their bodies.

There are no genuine remnants of this author. The celebrated Golden Verses," long attributed to him, there is reason for supposing to have been inspired by his teachings, but written by one of his pupils :

FROM THE GOLDEN VERSES.

"Ne'er suffer sleep thine eyes to close
Before thy mind hath run

O'er every act, and thought, and word,
From dawn to set of sun;

For wrong take shame, but grateful feel,
If just thy course hath been ;
Such effort, day by day renewed,
Will ward thy soul from sin."

As the Ionics made physics everything, so the Pythagoreans regarded mathematical science as the summum bonum. In their master's eyes the world was "a living arithmetic,” and virtue a proportion of all the faculties of the soul. A mystical relation between mathematical and moral truths was a principle of his philosophy.

Prominent among the followers of Pythagoras was EMPEDOCLES, of Agrigentum in Sicily (450 B.C.), who combined the previous theories of nature in his own, viz., that four elements-earth, air, fire, and water-enter into the constitution of the universe, and that these are constantly animated by the two opposing forces of Love and Strife. A peculiar doctrine of his was that like is perceived only by like; thus our knowledge of other bodies is due to minute emanations from their substance which enter the pores and impress corresponding elements in our own frames.

Empedocles is said to have arrogated to himself the importance of a god, going about in a purple robe confined with a belt of gold, performing wonderful cures. According to an old legend, he sought to create the belief that he had been translated to heaven, by secretly throwing himself into the crater of Mt. Etna; but the volcano, in a subsequent eruption, cast forth one of his brazen sandals and so exposed the fraud. He probably lost his life by accident while examining the crater.

From the Italic School sprung the sects known as Eleatic,

THE ELEATIC PHILOSOPHY.

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Epicurean, and Skeptic. The Eleatic School was founded by XENOPH'ANES (600-500 B.C.), a contemporary of Pythagoras, and derived its name from the town of E'lea in southern Italy.

Xenophanes asserted the unity of the Deity. "There is one god," he said, "among gods and men the greatest: unlike to mortals in outward shape, unlike in mind and thoughts." This was truly a sublime stand to take in an age of polytheism; he who feared not to face a superstitious people with such a doctrine, and ridicule even their divine Homer for his degrading pictures of the deities, deserves to be ranked among the greatest philosophers of Greece.

FRAGMENTS FROM XENOPHANES.

"If sheep, and swine, and lions strong, and all the bovine crew,
Could paint with cunning hands, and do what clever mortals do,
Depend upon it, every pig with snout so broad and blunt,
Would make a Jove that like himself would thunder with a grunt;
And every lion's god would roar, and every bull's would bellow,
And every sheep's would baa, and every beast his worshipped fellow
Would find in some immortal form, and naught exist divine
But had the gait of lion, sheep, or ox, or grunting swine."

"Homer and Hesiod, whom we own great doctors of theology,
Said many things of blissful gods that cry for large apology-
That they may cheat, and rail, and lie, and give the rein to passion,
Which were a crime in men who tread the dust in mortal fashion."·

"All eyes, all ears, all thought, is God, the omnipresent soul; And free from toil, by force of mind, he moves the mighty whole." BLACKIE.

The noble conception of Deity entertained by Xenophanes was soon perverted. We find his pupil PARMEN'IDES "the Great" in the next century doing away with the personality of God, and confounding the divine nature with pure being, which he made equivalent to thought.

DEMOC'RITUS, of Abde'ra in Thrace (460-357 B.C.), known