32 SCIENCE IN GRECO-ROMAN ANTIQUITY 



given to the great year, containing 18,000 ordinary 

 years, at the end of which there would be a universal 

 conflagration, and afterwards a reconstitution of the 

 universe, periodically. This law of periodicity is quite 

 contrary to the central idea of incessant flux affirmed 

 by Heraclitus. 1 However this may be, Heraclitus 

 applied to anthropology his ideas of the nature of 

 being. To him, man was a mixture of fire, water and 

 earth. The soul is a dry vapour which, in the waking 

 state, is nourished by the fire spread throughout the 

 world. In sleep, the exchange is less active, there is 

 an encroachment of the moisture contained in the body, 

 and this is why we lose consciousness. The same takes 

 place in intoxication. " When a man is drunk, he is 

 led by a young beardless boy ; he stumbles, not knowing 

 where he walks, because his soul is moist." " The dry 

 soul is the wisest and the best " (Diels, Vor. I, frag. 

 117, 118, p. 78). Finally, when the soul changes into 

 water or fire through the predominance of one of these 

 elements, it leaves the body to begin once again its 

 incessant journey above and below. 2 



2. PYTHAGORAS AND HIS SCHOOL 



Amongst the thinkers who, in the sixth century B.C. 

 left Ionia in order to escape from the Persian rule, we 

 must first mention Pythagoras, who was probably 

 born in 572 and died in the year 500 B.C. It is not easy 

 to reconstitute the life and doctrine of this famous 

 man from the legends which surround them, and 

 which for the most part were the creation of Neo- 

 Pythagoreanism in the first centuries of the Christian 

 era. 3 In particular the lives of Pythagoras written by 



1 8 Burnet, Aurore, p. 180. 



2 8 Burnet, Aurore, p. 175. 



3 Pythagoras, for example, kills a venomous serpent by 

 biting it ; he was seen at the same time in Crotona and 

 Metapontum, etc. 



