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I, however, have drunk yet other cups at Athens the imaginative draught of poetry, the clear draught of geometry, the sweet draught of music, the austerer draught of dialectic, and the nectar of all philosophy, whereof no man may ever drink enough. For Empedocles composed verse, Plato dialogues, Socrates hymns, Epicharmus music, Xenophon histories, and Xenocrates satire.
'Tis, says Epicharmus, the understanding that sees and hears, 'tis the understanding that improves everything, that orders everything, and that acts, rules, and reigns: all other faculties are blind, and deaf, and without soul. And certainly we render it timorous and servile, in not allowing it the liberty and privilege to do anything of itself.
One of these is that the Romans enrolled Pythagoras as a citizen, as we are told by Epicharmus the comic poet, in a letter which he wrote to Antenor. He was a man who lived in old times and underwent the Pythagorean training. Another proof is that of his four sons, King Numa named one Mamercus after the son of Pythagoras; from whom sprung the ancient patrician house of the Aemilii.
And this singular and well-known effusion shows, not only how grave and reverent an example Epicharmus had for his own audacious portraiture of the infirmities of the Olympian family, but how immemorially and how deeply fixed in the popular spirit was the disposition to draw from the same source the elements of humour and of awe.
Among these were brief narrative poems relating to the legendary or contemporary history of his country; editions of the religious romance of Euhemerus, of the poems dealing with natural philosophy circulating in the name of Epicharmus, and of the gastronomies of Archestratus of Gela, a poet who treated of the higher cookery; as also a dialogue between Life and Death, fables of Aesop, a collection of moral maxims, parodies and epigrammatic trifles small matters, but indicative of the versatile powers as well as the neological didactic tendencies of the poet, who evidently allowed himself the freest range in this field, which the censorship did not reach.
It is a remarkable indication of the expressed and conscious antagonism between religion and the new philosophy that Ennius already translated into Latin those notoriously destructive writings of Epicharmus and Euhemerus.
Epicharmus, apud Cicero, Tusc. 'tis a degree of constancy to which I have experimented, that I can arrive, like those who plunge into dangers, as into the sea, with their eyes shut.
"The gods for labor sell us all good things." Epicharmus. Perhaps you have some doubt as to exactly what is meant by music-thinking. Being somewhat acquainted with composers and with music, the thought may here come to you that all the music we hear in the world must have been made by somebody by many somebodies, in fact.
The dispute concerning increase is indeed ancient; for the question, as Chrysippus says, was put by Epicharmus.
It is a remarkable indication of the expressed and conscious antagonism between religion and the new philosophy that Ennius already translated into Latin those notoriously destructive writings of Epicharmus and Euhemerus.
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