of the stones which fell near Ægospotami, and which he said would fall from the sun: on which account Euripides, who was a disciple of his, said in his Phaethon that the sun was a golden clod of earth. He went once to Olympia wrapped in a leathern cloak as if it were going to rain; and it did rain. And they say that he once replied to a man who asked him whether the mountains at Lampsacus would ever become sea, “Yes, if time lasts long enough.”
VI. Being once asked for what end he had been born, he said, “For the contemplation of the sun, and moon, and heaven.” A man once said to him, “You have lost the Athenians;” “No,” said he, “they have lost me.” When he beheld the tomb of Mausolus, he said, “A costly tomb is an image of a petrified estate.” And he comforted a man who was grieving because he was dying in a foreign land, by telling him, “The descent to hell is the same from every place.”
VII. He appears to have been the first person (according to the account given by Phavorinus in his Universal History), who said that the Poem of Homer was composed in praise of virtue and justice: and Metrodorus, of Lampsacus, who was a friend of his, adopted this opinion, and advocated it energetically, and Metrodorus was the first who seriously studied the natural philosophy developed in the writings of the great poet.
VIII. Anaxagoras was also the first man who ever wrote a work in prose; and Silenus, in the first book of his Histories, says, that in the archonship of Lysanias a large stone fell from heaven; and that in reference to this event Anaxagoras said, that the whole heaven was composed of stones, and that by its rapid revolutions they were all held together; and when those revolutions get slower, they fall down.
IX.