805 



XENOCRATES. 



XENOPHANES. 



866 



(Alban Butler, Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and the other principal 

 Saints, vol. xii. p. 29-40, Derby, 1846 : in this biography there is an 

 error in the dato both of his beatification and canonisation ; Biographic 

 Universelle, tome 1L ; the article ' Xavier ' in this work is by Leguy ; 

 Fabre, Continuation de I'Hiatoire Eccl&siastique de Fleury, livres cxxxv., 

 cxxxix.-cxli., cxliv.-cxlviii. ; Lettrcs e"difiantes et curieuses, 6crites par 

 des Missionnaircs de la Compagnie de Jesus, 40 vols., Paris, 1832, vol. 

 xxvii., a work of great curiosity and interest, and not sufficiently 

 known in England. The Life of St. Francis Xavier has also been 

 written in Latin, by Turselinus, Rome, 1594 ; in Italian, by Orlandino, 

 Bartoli, and Mafiei ; and in French, by Bouhours, a work which was 

 translated into English by Drydeii in 1688.) 



XENOCRATES (Hei'o/cpoTijs), a native of Chalcedon, was born B.C. 

 39G. He was originally a pupil of ^Eschines, the Socratic philosopher, 

 and then of Plato. The few facts of his life are chiefly known from 

 the loose account of Diogenes Laertius. According to Diogenes he 

 accompanied Plato to Sicily. Xenocrates was naturally of a slow 

 understanding, which led Plato to say that Xenocrates required the 

 spur, but Aristotle the bit. His temperance was proof againat all 

 temptation, and there are stories of his successfully resisting all the 

 solicitations of Lais and Phryne. A story is also told of the Athenians 

 allowing him to give his testimony without oath, though it was the 

 universal practice to require a witness to take an oath. It does not 

 seem very consistent with this story that he should have been once 

 sold for a slave by the Athenians, because he could not pay the tax 

 which was imposed on the metoicoi, or resident aliens. Demetrius 

 Phalereus, it is said, paid the money and released him : this laudable 

 act is also attributed to the orator Lycurgus. Other accounts of his 

 having been sent by the Athenians as ambassador to King Philip, and 

 to Antipater after the Lamian war, are hardly more credible. He suc- 

 ceeded Speusippus B.C. 339 in the Academy, of which he was at the 

 head for twenty-five years. He died B.C. 314. A long list of his 

 writings is given by Laertius. 



We know little of the doctrines of Xenocrates, but it may be inferred 

 that he exhibited his opinions in a systematic form, and not in dia- 

 logues like his master Plato. To him is attributed the division of 

 philosophy into Logic, Ethic, and Physic (Physics). He principally 

 occupied himself with attempting to reduce the ideal doctrines of 

 Plato to mathematical elements. He assumed three forms of Being 

 (ovffia) the sensuous, that which is perceived by the intellect, and 

 that which is compounded and consists in opinion. In his doctrines 

 we see the tendency of the Academy towards the Pythagorean doctrines 

 of number. Unity and duality he considers as the gods which rule 

 the world, and the soul as a self-moving number. Other like conceits 

 are attributed to him. Xeuocrates considered that the notion of the 

 Deity pervades all things, and is even in the animals which we call 

 irrational. He also admitted an order of daemons, or something inter- 

 mediate between the divine and the mortal, which he made to consist 

 in the conditions of the soul. In his ethical teaching he made happi- 

 ness consist not in the possession of a virtuous mind only, but also of 

 all the powers that minister to it and enable it to effect its purposes. 



The dialogue ' Axiochus ' (On Death), which is usually assigned to 

 yEschines, has been sometimes attributed to Xenocrates. 



It seems almost impossible to form out of the scattered notices of 

 Xenocrates anything like a connected view of his system ; and what 

 we can learn of it is not calculated to make us regret the loss of his 

 works. An anecdote in Laertius is pertinent, as showing that he did 

 not expect a person to come to the study of philosophy without the 

 necessary preparation. A man who was unacquainted with music, 

 geometry, and astronomy, wished to become his pupil, but Xenocrates 

 told him to be gone, for he had not yet got hold of the handles of 

 philosophy. 



(Diogenes Laertius, iv., Xenocrates, and the Notes of Menage ; Ritter, 

 Geschichte der Philosophic, vol. ii.) 



XENOCRATES of Aphrodisias, a Greek physician, who is com- 

 monly supposed to have lived in the reign of the emperor Tiberius 

 (A.D. 14-37), though some critics are inclined to place him about B.C. 

 40, but the only authority on this point is a passage in Galen (torn, iii., 

 p. 130) which strongly supports the common opinion. Respecting the 

 life and literary activity of Xenocrates we know nothing except that 

 he wrote a work, Tlepl rrjs o.irb riav fyatav wtyeXeias or rpo<pr\s (On the 

 Advantages or the Nutriment derived from Animals) ; Galen, torn, ii., 

 p. 132 ; Clemens Alexand., ' Stromat.,' i., p. 717. This work, which is 

 often referred to, and must have consisted of several books, as the first 

 is quoted by Galen, is now lost, but a considerable fragment of it, 

 which treats of the nutriment which we derive from aquatic animals 

 (Ilepl TTJS cbrb run evvSpeov rpo^Tjs), is still extant, and contains many 

 sound observations on this branch of natural history. A Latin version 

 of this fragment is contained in Oribasius (' Collectanea Medica,' ii. 58) ; 

 the Greek original, though not quite complete, was first published by 

 Conr. Gesner, with a Latin translation by J. B. Rasarius, and Scholia, 

 8vo, Zurich, 1559. More complete manuscripts exist at Hamburg, in 

 the Vatican library, and at Paris, and from them the subsequent 

 editors have completed the text of the treatise. The next edition 

 after that of Gesner is that of J. A. Fabricius, in his ' Bibliotheca 

 Graeca ' (ix., p. 433, &c. of the old edition), which was followed by that 

 of J. G. F. Franz (8vo, Frankfort and Leipzig, 1774, with various read- 

 ings, notes, and a glossary ; a second and improved edition appeared at 



BIOG. DIV. VOL. VI. 



Leipzig, 8vo, 1779), and that of Naples (8vo, 1794, with new various 

 readings and notes by the editor Caietanus de Ancora). The best 

 critical edition of the Greek text is that of A. Coray (8vo, Paris, 1814), 

 which also contains Galen's work on the same subject. It in Coray'd 

 opinion that the author of the work ' On the Nutriment derived from 

 Animals ' is not the physician Xenocrates, but the philosopher 

 Xenocrates. 



XENO'PHANES (Hewc^i^s), a native of Colophon in Ionia. His 

 period is uncertain. Diogenes says that he flourished in the 60th 

 Olympiad (538 B.C.), which will bring him somewhat about the period 

 of Anaximander. Cicero says that he was a little before Anaxagoras. 

 Apollodorus fixes his birth in the 40th Olympiad, or about 620 B.C. 

 Though it is not said that he ever resided at Elea (Velia) in Italy, yet 

 this must be assumed to be so, as he is always considered the father 

 of the Eleatic school. Elea was founded by the Phocaeans of Ionia, 

 after they had left their country, which was invaded by the Persians 

 under Cyrus (546 B.C.) The date of the foundation of Elea is fixed 

 about 536 B.C.; but there is no direct evidence to the fact that Xeno- 

 phanes was one of the colonists of Elea. The statement of Diogenes 

 Laertius is, that, being driven from his country, he lived at Zancle and 

 Catana in Sicily, which is rather vague. According to Timseus, Xeno- 

 phanes was still living in the time of the first Hiero and Epicharmus, 

 or about 477 B.C., which is entirely inconsistent with the statement of 

 Apollodorus. His verses quoted by Diogenes Laertius make him 

 ninety-two years of age at the time when they were written, and, 

 according to the chronology of Apollodorus, this would be his age in 

 the year 527 B.C. But according to Apollodorus he lived even till the 

 time of Darius and Cyrus ; and the first year of the first Darius is 521 

 B.C. In all this uncertainty perhaps it is safest to adopt the opinion 

 that he lived between the time of Pythagoras and Heraclitus, for he 

 mentions Pythagoras and is mentioned by Heraclitus. 



Xenophanes was a poet and a philosopher. He was one of the 

 elegiac poets of Greece, and his elegies are of the symposiac character. 

 A pleasing fragment of one of his symposiac poems is preserved in 

 Athenseus (xi., p. 462, ed. Casaub.), who has also preserved some of his 

 elegiac verses (x. p. 413), in which Xenophanes exalts wisdom above 

 strength, and six verses on the luxury of the Lydians (xii. 527). He 

 also wrote an epic of two thousand verses on the foundation of Elea ; 

 and a poem on the foundation of his native city, Colophon. The 

 philosophical doctrines of Xenophanes were expressed in a poetic form, 

 and from the few fragments of his poetry which remain, and the brief 

 notices of him by other writers, we collect what we know of his 

 doctrines. He attacked Hesiod and Homer, both in hexameter verses, 

 elegiacs, and iambic verses (as Diogenes states), for their representa- 

 tions of the deities, to whom those poets attribute all the weakness 

 and vices of mortals. He taught that God was One, unlike men either 

 in form or mind. He said that men thought that the gods were pro- 

 duced, and had bodies and feelings like their own ; and to show the 

 absurdity of likening the divine to the human, he added, that if 

 animals could make representations of the deities, they would make the 

 representations like themselves. Assuming that the deity is the most 

 powerful of beings, he proves that he must of necessity be One, all 

 alike, all endued with equal powers of seeing, comprehending, and 

 hearing; he is the comprehensive unity in which all things are, or, as 

 Cicero expresses it, " all things are One, and this One is unchangeable, 

 and it is God, unproduced and eternal." He is eternal, because he 

 could not proceed from anything else ; pure intellect and reason. His 

 notions of the deity were obscurely expressed and not very logically 

 maintained in his assertion that the deity is of a spherical form, neither 

 limited nor unlimited, neither moving nor at rest. God rules and 

 directs all, and things as they appear to us are the imperfect mani- 

 festations of the One eternal. We cannot through them attain to a 

 perfect knowledge of what he is, and all our inquiries into the true 

 nature of things are vain. 



" No man has seen the truth, and man shall never 

 Know -what is truth of God and of the Universe. 

 For should one chance to say what's near to truth, 

 Still he knows nought, and doubt is over all." 



Thus God's true nature cannot be known. Man must contemplate 

 individual things as they appear, which have no real existence of 

 themselves, and while he strives to reach the knowledge of God, he is 

 distracted between this vain effort and the appearances to which he 

 cannot assign truth. Something like this seems to be the meaning of 

 his doctrines, the striking feature of which is the recognition of the 

 opposition between the pure truth and the sensuous appearances. His 

 physical doctrines are hardly known, except by a few vague statements, 

 and it is difficult to reconstruct this part of his system. It is not 

 easy to see from the extant fragments what is the connection between 

 his physical and theological system, but the right conception of his 

 physical system is connected with the right understanding of his 

 theology. It is worth mentioning, as an isolated fact, that, according 

 to Cicero, he said that the moon is inhabited, and that it contained 

 many cities and mountains. Cicero remarks that his verses were not 

 so good as those of Empedocles. 



It has been a matter of dispute whether the system of Xenophanes 

 was Pantheistic. A modern writer (Cousin) has taken some pains to 

 clear him from what he calls this accusation of Pantheism, or the 

 conception of everything as the one God, The notion of an absolute 



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