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Updated: May 26, 2025
"Any citizen above fifty years old may speak any citizen not disqualified may speak." Then I rise: a great murmur of curiosity while I am mounting the stand. CALLIDEMUS. Of curiosity! yes, and of something else too. SPEUSIPPUS. Never fear. CALLIDEMUS. I shall choke with rage.
The objection of Speusippus, that irrational creatures are not to be admitted as witnesses, Aristotle disallows, seeing that rational and irrational agree on the point; and the thing that seems to all, must be true. The arguments of the Platonists, to prove that pleasure is not good, are next examined.
I therefore do not easily agree with my friend Brutus, nor with our common masters, nor those ancient ones, Aristotle, Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemon, who reckon all that I have mentioned above as evils, and yet they say that a wise man is always happy; nor can I allow them, because they are charmed with this beautiful and illustrious title, which would very well become Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato, to persuade my mind that strength, health, beauty, riches, honors, power, with the beauty of which they are ravished, are contemptible, and that all those things which are the opposites of these are not to be regarded.
How much more decent were it to see their school-houses and formes strewed with greene boughs and flowers, than with bloudy burchen-twigs? If it lay in me, I would doe as the Philosopher Speusippus did, who caused the pictures of Gladness and Joy, of Flora and of the Graces, to be set up round about his school-house. Where their profit lieth, there should also be their recreation.
In the first part is the famous Fabius Maximus, seated and in armour; and on the other side is Speusippus, Prince of the Tegeatæ, who, being exhorted by a friend that he should rid himself of his rival and adversary, answered that he did not wish, at the bidding of his own private interest, to deprive his country of such a citizen.
"Coelus begat Saturn and Briareus Cottus and Creius and Iapetus, Gyges and Hyperion, Phoebe, Tethys, Thea and Rhea and Mnemosyne. Then Saturn wedded Rhea, and begat Pluto and Neptune, Jupiter and Juno." CALLIDEMUS. Very beautiful, and very natural; and, as you say, very like Euripides. SPEUSIPPUS. You are sneering. Really, father, you do not understand these things.
For when Plato was staying at Syracuse, Speusippus, being oftener than he in company with the citizens, had more thoroughly made out how they were inclined; and though at first they had been on their guard, suspecting his bold language, as though he had been set on by the tyrant to trepan them, yet at length they trusted him.
That he, undoubtedly a far greater man than Speusippus or Xenocrates, should not have been nominated to the succession has been variously explained; he is said to have been lacking in respect and gratitude to the master; Plato is said to have remarked of him that he needed the curb as much as Xenocrates needed the spur. The facts really need no explanation.
But Timonides, who was with Dion from the very first, and was present at all the events as they occurred, writing to Speusippus the philosopher, relates the story thus: that Philistus's galley running aground, he was taken prisoner alive, and first disarmed, then stripped of his corslet, and exposed naked, being now an old man, to every kind of contumely; after which they cut off his head, and gave his body to the boys of the town, bidding them drag it through the Achradina, and then throw it into the Quarries.
The attempted answer of Speusippus, "that Pleasure may be opposed and yet not contrary to Pain, just as the greater portion of any magnitude is contrary to the less but only opposed to the exact half," will not hold: for he cannot say that Pleasure is identical with evil of any kind. Again.
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