Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​It is said that, as he was being led out of his house by an old woman in order to observe the stars, he fell into a ditch, and to him as he groaned aloud the old woman said: “Dost thou, Thales, unable to see what is at thy feet, think that thou wilt comprehend the things in the sky?” Timon too knows of him as an astronomer, and praises him in the Silli, saying: “Such a one as Thales among the seven wise men, a clever astronomer.” Lobon of Argos says that the writings composed by him extend to two hundred lines. And the following was inscribed upon his statue: “This Thales did Ionian Miletus rear and show forth, as eldest in wisdom of all astronomers.”

​Among the verses sung of his are said to be these: “By no means do many words declare a sensible judgment; seek out some one wise thing, choose some one noble thing; for so wilt thou curb the endless chatter of babbling men.” The following apophthegms are also attributed to him: “Oldest of existing things is god; for he is unbegotten. Most beautiful is the cosmos; for it is the work of god. Greatest is space; for it holds all things. Swiftest is mind; for it speeds through all things. Strongest is necessity; for it masters all things. Wisest is time; for it finds out all things.” He used to say that death in no way differs from living. “Why then,” said someone, “dost thou not die?” “Because,” he said, “it makes no difference.”

​To the man who asked which came first, night or day, he replied: “Night, by one day earlier.” Someone asked him whether a man doing wrong escapes the notice of the gods; “Nay, not even in thinking it,” he said. To an adulterer who asked whether he should swear that he had not committed adultery, he said: “Perjury is no worse than adultery.” When asked what was difficult, he said: “To know oneself.” And what was easy: “To give advice to another.” What was sweetest: “To achieve success.” What the divine was: “That which has neither beginning nor end.” When asked what was the strangest thing he had seen, he said: “An aged tyrant.” How one might bear misfortune most easily: “If he should see his enemies faring worse.” How we might live best and most justly: “If we do not ourselves do the things we blame in others.”

​Who is happy: “He who is healthy in body, resourceful in soul, and well-educated in nature.” He says that one should remember friends both present and absent; that one should not adorn one’s outward appearance, but be fair in one’s pursuits. “Do not grow rich,” he says, “by evil means, and let no slander alienate thee from those who have shared thy trust.” “Whatever contributions thou hast made,” he says, “to thy parents, the very same expect from thy children in return.” He said that the Nile rises because its currents are beaten back by the Etesian winds blowing in the opposite direction. Apollodorus in his Chronology says that he was born in the first year of the thirty-fifth [or thirty-ninth?] Olympiad.

​He died at the age of seventy-eight (or, as Sosicrates says, ninety); for he died in the fifty-eighth Olympiad, having lived in the time of Croesus, to whom he also promised that he would make him cross the Halys without a bridge, by diverting the stream. There were also other men named Thales, as Demetrius of Magnesia says in his work on Homonyms, five in number: a rhetorician of Callatis, of an affected style; a painter of Sicyon, of great genius; a third very ancient, in the time of Hesiod, Homer, and Lycurgus; a fourth who is mentioned by Duris in his work On Painting; a fifth of later times, obscure, whom Dionysius mentions in his Critical Notes.

​At any rate, the sage died while watching an athletic contest, overcome by heat, thirst, and weakness, being already advanced in age. And upon his tomb this has been inscribed: “Truly small is this tomb—yet its fame reaches heaven— look upon this tomb of Thales, rich in contemplation.” There is also the following epigram of our own upon him, in the first book of the Epigrams or Pammetros: “As he was once watching an athletic contest, Zeus the sun, thou didst snatch the wise man Thales from the stadium. I praise thee that thou leddest him away close to thyself; for truly the old man was no longer able to see the stars from the earth.”