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Updated: May 31, 2025
To this result also, in no small degree, the labours of Democritus of Abdera tended. He had had the advantages derived from wealth in the procurement of knowledge, for it is said that his father was rich enough to be able to entertain the Persian King Xerxes, who was so gratified thereby that he left several Magi and Chaldæans to complete the education of the youth.
SOCRATES: Of Abdera. COMPANION: And is this stranger really in your opinion a fairer love than the son of Cleinias? SOCRATES: And is not the wiser always the fairer, sweet friend? COMPANION: But have you really met, Socrates, with some wise one? SOCRATES: Say rather, with the wisest of all living men, if you are willing to accord that title to Protagoras. COMPANION: What! Is Protagoras in Athens?
But then, no one is a prophet in his own country! The people themselves were mad, of course, and Democritus was the wise man. Nevertheless the error went so far that the city of Abdera sent a messenger to the great physician Hippocrates, requesting him both by letter and by spoken word to come and restore the sage's reason.
With abstinence also, and above all with that noblest abstinence, the abstinence from vice and wrong. The laughing philosopher Atoms and void No god and no truth III. LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS. Leucippus is variously called a native of Elea, of Abdera, of Melos, of Miletus. He was a pupil of Zeno the Eleatic. Democritus was a native of Abdera.
Abdera and Philippi became the principal bases for the operations of the Pontic arms in Europe. The Pontic fleet, commanded by Mithradates' best general Archelaus, appeared in the Aegean Sea, where scarce a Roman sail was to be found.
That he actually is "an animal whose best wisdom is laughter," hath but little reason in it, Democrite, seeing there are such obvious anomalies among men as suicidal jesters and cachinating idiots; nevertheless, my punster of Abdera, thy whimsical fancy, surviving the wreck of dynasties, and too light to sink in the billows of oblivion, is now become the popular thought, the fashionable dress of heretofore moping wisdom: crow, an thou wilt, jolly old chanticleer, but remember thee thou crowest on a dunghill; man is not a mere merry-andrew.
The empire of the Odrysians extended along the seaboard from Abdera to the mouth of the Danube in the Euxine. The navigation of this coast by the shortest route takes a merchantman four days and four nights with a wind astern the whole way: by land an active man, travelling by the shortest road, can get from Abdera to the Danube in eleven days. Such was the length of its coast line.
But in saying this, sure I am commanding the passion, not myself. The town of Abdera, notwithstanding Democritus lived there, trying all the powers of irony and laughter to reclaim it, was the vilest and most profligate town in all Thrace. What for poisons, conspiracies, and assassinations, libels, pasquinades, and tumults, there was no going there by day 'twas worse by night.
The people of Abdera sent for Hippocrates to cure the supposed insanity of Democritus, "who at that time," saith Hippocrates, dryly, "was seriously engaged in philosophy." That same people of Abdera would certainly have found very alarming symptoms of madness in my poor father; for, like Democritus, "he esteemed as nothing the things, great or small, in which the rest of the world were employed."
He was surrounded by peasants, on whom the teeth of his arguments could find no purchase. To him, in that intellectual Abdera, even an unwilling youth from London offered opportunities of pleasant contest. He would declare himself ready, nay eager, for argument. With his mental sleeves turned up, he would adopt a fighting attitude, and challenge me to a round on any portion of the Scheme of Grace.
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