Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/419

364, he accompanied the philosopher on one of his visits to Syracuse. After Plato's death, Xenocrates went, in company with Aristotle, to the court of Hermias, the ruler of Atarneus, in Mysia, a province of Asia Minor. He cannot have remained very long in this retreat; for we are told that he was frequently sent by the Athenians on embassies to Philip of Macedon, with whom they were at this time embroiled, and by whom, in the year 338, they were ultimately subjugated. When the failing health of Speusippus compelled him to resign the presidency of the Academy, Xenocrates was summoned to the vacant post, and this office he occupied from about 340 B.C. until his death in 314, when he was in the eighty-third year of his age. The temperament and the morals of Xenocrates were grave, not to say austere, in the extreme. His name was quoted in antiquity as almost a synonym for unselfishness, modesty, temperance, and continence. None of his works have come down to us, so that we cannot speak very particularly in regard to his opinions. Only their titles are extant, and these are sufficiently tantalising. From them we learn that he prosecuted diligently the researches in which his great master had led the way. He wrote on dialectic, on knowledge, on ideas, on the existent and the one, on the opposite, on the indefinite, on the soul, on the passions, on happiness and virtue, on the state, and several other topics. These writings are extremely multifarious in their subject; and that the