Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Some say that the work of philosophy began among the barbarians. For they state that the Magi arose among the Persians, the Chaldaeans among the Babylonians or Assyrians, the Gymnosophists among the Indians, and those called Druids and Semnotheoi among the Celts and Galatians, as Aristotle says in his Magicus and Sotion in the twenty-third book of his Succession. They also say that Mochus was a Phoenician, Zalmoxis a Thracian, and Atlas a Libyan. For the Egyptians say that Hephaestus was born son of the Nile, that he began philosophy, and that its presiding leaders were priests and prophets.

​From him down to Alexander the Macedonian there were forty-eight thousand eight hundred and sixty-three years; in which time there occurred three hundred and seventy-three eclipses of the sun and eight hundred and thirty-two of the moon. From the Magi, whom Zoroaster the Persian began, Hermodorus the Platonist in his On Mathematics says that five thousand years elapsed down to the fall of Troy; but Xanthus the Lydian says there were six thousand years from Zoroaster down to the crossing of Xerxes, and that after him many Magi arose in succession—Ostanes, Astrampsychus, Gobryas, and Pazatas—down to the destruction of the Persians by Alexander.

​Yet they unwittingly deceive themselves, attributing to barbarians the achievements of the Greeks, from whom not only philosophy but even the human race began. Behold, at any rate, Musaeus was born among the Athenians, and Linus among the Thebans. And Musaeus, they say, was the son of Eumolpus, and the first to compose a Theogony and a Sphere; and he declared that all things come to be from one and are resolved into the same. He died at Phalerum, and on his tomb this elegiac epigram was inscribed: “The soil of Phalerum holds the dear son of Eumolpus, Musaeus, his fallen body, beneath this tomb.” And from the father of Musaeus the Eumolpidae among the Athenians also derive their name.

​As for Linus, they say he was the son of Hermes and the Muse Urania; and that he composed a Cosmogony, the course of the sun and moon, and the generations of animals and fruits. The beginning of his poems is as follows: “Once there was indeed a time when all things were grown together at once.” Deriving from this, Anaxagoras said that all things were together, and that Mind arrived and set them in order. Linus died in Euboea, shot by Apollo, and this was inscribed upon him: “This earth received Theban Linus when he died, the son of fair-crowned Muse Urania.” And in this way philosophy began from the Greeks, whose very name turns away from barbarian designation.

​Those who assign the discovery to those barbarians also introduce Orpheus the Thracian, saying that he was a philosopher and the most ancient. But as for me, I do not know whether one ought to call a philosopher a man who uttered such things about the gods, nor what one ought to call someone who without restraint imputed every human passion to the gods, and even things shameful to speak of that are rarely perpetrated by the vocal organ of certain men. Concerning him, the myth says he perished at the hands of women; but the epigram in Dium of Macedonia says that he was struck by lightning, reading thus: “Here the Muses buried Thracian Orpheus of the golden lyre, whom Zeus ruling on high slew with a smoking bolt.”