101. Aristotle said that Empedokles was the inventor of Rhetoric;[522] and Galen made him the founder of the Italian school of Medicine, which he puts on a level with those of Kos and Knidos.[523] Both these statements must be considered in connexion with his political and scientific activity. It seems to be certain that Gorgias was his disciple in physics and medicine, and some of the peculiarities which marked his style are to be found in the poems of Empedokles.[524] It is not to be supposed, of course, that Empedokles wrote a formal treatise on Rhetoric; but it is in every way probable, and in accordance with his character, that the speeches, of which he must have made many, were marked by that euphuism which Gorgias introduced to Athens at a later date, and which gave rise to the idea of an artistic prose. The influence of Empedokles on the development of medicine was, however, far more important, as it affected not only medicine itself, but through it, the whole tendency of scientific and philosophical thinking. It has been said that Empedokles had no successors,[525] and the remark is true if we confine ourselves strictly to philosophy. On the other hand, the medical school which he founded was still living in the days of Plato, and it had considerable influence on him, and still more on Aristotle.[526] Its fundamental doctrine was the identification of the four elements with the hot and the cold, the moist and the dry. It also held that we breathe through all the pores of the body, and that the act of respiration is closely connected with the motion of the blood. The heart, not the brain, was regarded as the organ of consciousness.[527] A more external characteristic of the medicine taught by the followers of Empedokles is that they still clung to ideas of a magical nature. A protest against this by a member of the Koan school has been preserved. He refers to them as “magicians and purifiers and charlatans and quacks, who profess to be very religious.”[528] Though there is some truth in this, it hardly does justice to the great advances in physiology that were due to the Sicilian school. Footnote 522: Diog. viii. 57 (R. P. 162 g). Footnote 523: Galen, x. 5, ἤριζον δ’ αὐτοῖς (the schools of Kos and Knidos) ... καὶ οἱ ἐκ τῆς Ἰταλίας ἰατροί, Φιλιστίων τε καὶ Ἐμπεδοκλῆς καὶ Παυσανίας καὶ οἱ τούτων ἑταῖροι κ.τ.λ. Philistion was the contemporary and friend of Plato; Pausanias is the disciple to whom Empedokles addressed his poem. Footnote 524: See Diels, “Empedokles und Gorgias” (_Berl. Sitzb._, 1884, pp. 343 sqq.). The oldest authority for saying that Gorgias was a disciple of Empedokles is Satyros _ap._ Diog. viii. 58 (R. P. 162); but he seems to have derived his information from Alkidamas, who was the disciple of Gorgias himself. In Plato’s _Meno_ (76 c 4-8) the Empedoklean theory of effluvia and pores is ascribed to Gorgias. Footnote 525: Diels (_Berl. Sitzb._, 1884, p. 343). Footnote 526: