Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and RomansPlutarch
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans
Plutarch
Greece -- Biography -- Early works to 1800; Rome -- Biography -- Early works to 1800
The master that taught him music, most authors are agreed, was Damon
(whose name, they say, ought to be pronounced with the first syllable
short). Though Aristotle tells us that he was thoroughly practiced in
all accomplishments of this kind by Pythoclides. Damon, it is not
unlikely, being a sophist, out of policy, sheltered himself under the
profession of music to conceal from people in general his skill in other
things, and under this pretense attended Pericles, the young athlete of
politics, so to say, as his training-master in these exercises. Damon's
lyre, however, did not prove altogether a successful blind; he was
banished the country by ostracism for ten years, as a dangerous
intermeddler and a favorer of arbitrary power, and, by this means, gave
the stage occasion to play upon him. As, for instance, Plato, the comic
poet, introduces a character, who questions him --
Tell me, if you please,
Since you're the Chiron who taught Pericles.
Pericles, also, was a hearer of Zeno, the Eleatic, who treated of
natural philosophy in the same manner as Parmenides did, but had also
perfected himself in an art of his own for refuting and silencing
opponents in argument; as Timon of Phlius describes it, --
Also the two-edged tongue of mighty Zeno, who,
Say what one would, could argue it untrue.
But he that saw most of Pericles, and furnished him most especially with
a weight and grandeur of sense, superior to all arts of popularity, and
in general gave him his elevation and sublimity of purpose and of
character, was Anaxagoras of Clazomenae; whom the men of those times
called by the name of Nous, that is, mind, or intelligence, whether in
admiration of the great and extraordinary gift he displayed for the
science of nature, or because that he was the first of the philosophers
who did not refer the first ordering of the world to fortune or chance,
nor to necessity or compulsion, but to a pure, unadulterated
intelligence, which in all other existing mixed and compound things acts
as a principle of discrimination, and of combination of like with like.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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