conviction. To honour their elders, on the principle that precedence in time gives a greater title to respect ; for as in the world sunrise comes before sunset, so in human life the beginiung before the end, and in all organic life birth precedes death. And he further bade them to honour gods before demi-gods, heroes before men, and first among men their parents ; and so to behave one to another as not to make friends into enemies, but to turn enemies into friends. To deem nothing their own. To support the law, to wage war on lawlessness. Never to kill or injure trees that are not wild, nor even any animal that does not injure man. That it is seemly and advisable neither to give way to unbridled laughter nor to wear sullen looks. To avoid excess of flesh, on a journey to let exertion and slackening alternate, to train the memory, in wrath to restrain hand and tongue, to respect all divination, to sing to the lyre and by hymns to show due gratitude to gods and to good men. To abstain from beans because they are flatulent and partake most of the breath of life ; and besides, it is better for the stomach if they are not taken, and this again will make our dreams in sleep smooth and untroubled. Alexander in his Successions of Philosophers says that he found in the Pythagorean memoirs the following tenets as well* The principle of all things is the monad or unit ; arising from this monad the deserves praise for the selection. Between Alexander Polyhistor in the first century b.c. and the threshold of the third century a.d. there had been an enormous increase in neo- Pythagorean literature, mostly dealing with mystical properties of numbers and with ethics based upon theology. All this D. L. ignores, going back to a Hellenistic document long forgotten.
The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.
Alexander — a candidate entry
Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume II (Books VI-X), Diogenes Laertius — translated by R. D. Hicks, 1925
Apparatus shelf — Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II (R. D. Hicks translation, Loeb L185) · R. D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library, London: William Heinemann / New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, MCMXXV (1925)
license: public-domain (US: published 1925, pre-1930 — the MCMXXV title page verified from the scan itself; only the English rectos are served, Hicks's translation)