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nydus/The Lives and Opinions of Eminent PhilosophersPublic
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Table of Contents

BOOK IX.

somewhere or other. And it was in this way that he became highly thought of by Democritus, who saw him as he was tying up some sticks.

He was also the first person who divided discourse into four parts; entreaty, interrogation, answer, and injunction: though some writers make the parts seven; narration, interrogation, answer, injunction, promise, entreaty, and invocation; and these he called the foundations of discourse: but Alcidamas says that there are four divisions of discourse; affirmation, denial, interrogation, and invocation.

V. The first of his works that he ever read in public was the treatise on the Gods, the beginning of which we have quoted above, and he read this at Athens in the house of Euripides, or, as some say, in that of Megaclides; others say that he read it in the Lyceum; his pupil, Archagoras, the son of Theodotus, giving him the aid of his voice. His accuser was Pythodorus, the son of Polyzelus, one of the four hundred; but Aristotle calls him Evathlus.

VI. The writings of his which are still extant are these: a treatise on the Art of Contention; one on Wrestling; one on Mathematics; one on a Republic; one on Ambition; one on Virtues; one on the Original Condition of Man; one on those in the Shades Below; one on the Things which are not done properly by Men; one volume of Precepts; one essay entitled Justice in Pleading for Hire; two books of Contradictions.

These are his books.

Plato also addressed a dialogue to him.

VII. Philochorus relates that, as he was sailing to Sicily his ship was wrecked, and that this circumstance is alluded to by Euripides in his Ixion; and some say that he died on his journey, being about ninety years old. But Apollodorus states his age at seventy years, and says that he was a sophist forty years, and that he flourished about the eighty-fourth Olympiad. There is an epigram upon him written by myself,

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