Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/363

 PHYSICAL PHILOSOPHER. 341 impressive charaoter of his poevn is sufficiently attested by the admiration of Lucretius, 1 and the rhetoric ascribed to him may have consisted mainly ; - oral teaching or exposition of the same doctrines. Tisias and Korax of Syracuse, who are also men- tioned as the first teachers of rhetoric, and the first who made known any precepts about the rhetorical practice, were his con- temporaries ; and the celebrated Gorgias was his pupil. The dialectical movement emanated at the same time from the Eleatic school of philosophers, Zeno, and his contemporary the Samian Melissus, 460-440, if not from their common teacher Parmenides. Melissus also, as well as Zeno and Empedoklga, was a distinguished citizen as well as a philosopher ; having been in command of the Samian fleet at the time of the revolt from Athens, and having in that capacity gained a victory over tho Athenians. All the philosophers of the fifth century B.C., prior to Sokrates, inheriting from their earliest poetical predecessors the vast and unmeasured problems which had once been solved by the suppo- sition of divine or superhuman agents, contemplated the world, physical and moral, all in a mass, and applied their minds to find some hypothesis which would give them an explanation of this totality, 2 or at least appease curiosity by something which looked like an explanation. What were the elements out of which sen sible things were made ? What was the initial cause or princi- ple of those changes which appeared to our senses ? What, was See Brandis, Handbuch dcr Gr. Rom. Philos. part i. sects. 47, 48, p. 1 02 ; Sturz. ad Empcdoclis Frag. p. 36. 1 De Rerum Natura, i, 719. adv. Mathcmat. vii, 115; to the effect that every individual man gets through his short life, with no more knowledge than is comprised in his own slender fraction of observation and experience : he struggles in vain to find oul and explain the totality; but neither eye, nor car, nor reason can assiij hirr. : Havpov  TTtptri1TTU.
 * Some striking lines of Empedoklus are preserved by Sextns Empiricns,