Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Such were the facts concerning Plato that it was possible for us to collect, having painstakingly reviewed what is said about the man. He was succeeded by Speusippus, the son of Eurymedon, an Athenian of the deme Myrrhinus, and son of Plato's sister Potone. He presided over the School for eight years, beginning from the hundred and eighth Olympiad; and he dedicated statues of the Graces in the shrine of the Muses that had been established by Plato in the Academy. Moreover, he remained faithful to the same doctrines as Plato; yet in character he did not remain like him. For he was both prone to anger and a slave to pleasures. At any rate, they say that in a fit of rage he threw his puppy into a well, and that through love of pleasure he went off to Macedonia for the wedding of Cassander.

​It was also said that Plato's female disciples, Lastheneia of Mantinea and Axiothea of Phlius, attended his lectures. At that time Dionysius, writing to him in a mocking tone, said: "One can learn your wisdom even from your Arcadian female pupil. And whereas Plato made those who came to him exempt from fees, you levy tribute and collect it from both willing and unwilling alike." This man was the first, as Diodorus says in the first book of his Memorabilia, to observe what was common in the branches of study and to bring them into mutual accord as far as possible; and he was the first to make public what were called the esoteric teachings from Isocrates,

​as Caeneus says. And he was the first to invent the means by which they make the bundles of firewood easily portable. By this time his body had been shattered by paralysis, and he sent word to Xenocrates, urging him to come and take over the School. They say that while he was being carried in a small cart to the Academy, he met Diogenes and said, "Hail (Rejoice)"; and Diogenes replied: "Nay, not you, who endure to live while being in such a state." And in the end, out of dejection, he willingly departed this life in old age. And we have an epigram upon him: "Nay, if I had not learned that Speusippus died in this way, no one could have persuaded me to say this: that he was not related to Plato by blood; for he would not have died in despair over some exceedingly petty matter."

​Plutarch, however, says in his lives of Lysander and Sulla that he wasted away from lice. His body was also flabby, as Timotheus says in his work On Lives. This man, he says, said to a rich man who was in love with an ugly person: "Why do you need this one? For I will find you a more shapely woman for ten talents." He has left behind a vast number of treatises and several dialogues, among which are: Aristippus of Cyrene. On Wealth, one book. On Pleasure, one book. On Justice, one book. On Philosophy, one book. On Friendship, one book. On the Gods, one book. The Philosopher, one book. To Cephalus, one book. Cephalus, one book. Clinomachus or Lysias, one book. The Citizen, one book. On the Soul, one book. To Gryllus, one book.

​Aristippus, one book. Refutation of the Arts, one book. Dialogues of the Nature of Commentaries. On Art, one book. Dialogues on Similarities in Subject Matter, books 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Divisions and Hypotheses concerning Similar Things. On the Genera and Species of Paradigms. To the Witnessless Man. Encomium of Plato. Letters to Dion, Dionysius, and Philip. On Legislation. The Mathematician. Mandrobolus. Lysias. Definitions. Arrangement of Commentaries. Lines: 43,475. To this man Timonides also addressed his histories, in which he arranged the deeds of Dion and Bion. Favorinus too says, in the second book of his Memorabilia, that Aristotle bought his books for three talents. There was also another Speusippus, an Alexandrian physician of the school of Herophilus.