Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/105

 greater use of their reasoning powers than they had hitherto done, and at the same time, through the creation of a group of rival physicians, it supplied them with the required stimulus. Another important school of philosophy was that known as the Eleatic School, which flourished at Elea, in Lower Italy, its leaders being natives of that city. The most prominent men connected with this school were Parmenides (born about 540 B. C.) and Xenophanes of Colophon, in Asia Minor, whose contributions to mental science formed the basis of Plato's metaphysics.

The period roughly embraced between the years 500 and 300 B. C. represents the most brilliant age of Greek intellectual and artistic activity. During this time there came into prominence such philosophers, historians, poets, physicians, artists and generals of armies as had never before been marshaled in historic array in so rapid succession. Even at this late day the names of these great men are almost household words—such names, for example, as Pythagoras, Alcmaeon, Anaxagoras, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Pindar, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Democedes, Hippocrates the Great, Phidias, Praxiteles, Zeuxis, Apelles, Darius I., Alexander the Great, and many others of almost equal celebrity. During the centuries immediately preceding this golden age of Greek history, there seem to have been very few men of great merit in any of the branches of learning or in the fields of war or art, but this impression is certainly false. It is doubtless to be explained by the fact that large quantities of documentary evidence relating to these years have been entirely lost. Daniel Le Clerc, for instance, states that, of the separate histories of the descendants of Aesculapius which were written by Eratosthenes, Pherecydes, Apollodorus, Arius of Tarsus and Polyanthus of Cyrene, not one has come down to our time. If, then, in the single department of medicine, the destruction of documentary evidence was as great as is here represented, how enormous must have been the loss of precious historical materials in all the departments