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Updated: May 22, 2025
At the age of eighteen, he repaired to Athens, where he is supposed to have enjoyed the teaching of Xenocrates or Theophrastus. In 306 B.C., he opened a school in a garden in Athens, whence his followers have sometimes been called the 'philosophers of the garden. His life was simple, chaste, and temperate.
And what shall I take for the principle of duty and matter of virtue, leaving Nature and that which is according to Nature? With what, O good sir, do Aristotle and Theophrastus begin? What beginnings do Xenocrates and Polemo take? Does not also Zeno follow these, who hold Nature and that which is according to Nature to be the elements of happiness?
As mankind in general have an interest in my subject, I shall endeavour to use a language suitable to all nations; or rather, forgetting the circumstances of time and place in order to think of nothing but the men I speak to, I shall suppose myself in the Lyceum of Athens, repeating the lessons of my masters before the Platos and the Xenocrates of that famous seat of philosophy as my judges, and in presence of the whole human species as my audience.
An indirect testimony to the correctness of the view here stated will be found in the way in which Plato’s faithful disciple Xenocrates developed his theology, for it shows that Xenocrates presupposed the existence of the gods of popular belief as given by Plato.
A more interesting, because more positive and constructive, personality was that of Epicurus. This philosopher was born at Samos, in the year 341 B.C., of Athenian parents. He came to Athens in his eighteenth year. Xenocrates was then teaching at the Academy, Aristotle at the Lyceum, but Epicurus heard neither the one nor the other.
Washington is not Corinth, and Lais, the beautiful daughter of Timandra, might not have been the prototype of the ravishing Laura, daughter of the plebeian house of Hawkins; but the orators add statesmen who were the purchasers of the favors of the one, may have been as incorruptible as the Republican statesmen who learned how to love and how to vote from the sweet lips of the Washington lobbyist; and perhaps the modern Lais would never have departed from the national Capital if there had been there even one republican Xenocrates who resisted her blandishments.
But it is meet I should set down his doctrine in his own words, that you may understand in what place those rank vice, and what discourses they hold of it, who accuse Xenocrates and Speusippus for not reckoning health indifferent and riches useless. "Vice," saith he, "has its limit in reference to other accidents. Is there then no good among the gods, because there is no evil?
An unruly pupil The philosopher's library The predominance of Aristotle Relation to Plato The highest philosophy Ideas and things The true realism Plato before his death bequeathed his Academy to his nephew Speusippus, who continued its president for eight years; and on his death the office passed to Xenocrates, who held it for twenty-five years.
Xenocrates found a basis for this system in Plato, who in the Symposium sets up the demons as a class of beings between gods and men, and makes them carriers of the prayers and wishes of men to the gods. But what was a passing thought with Plato serving only a poetical purpose was taken seriously and systematised by Xenocrates.
The only inconsistency which we may perhaps bring home to Xenocrates is that he retained certain of the popular names of the gods as designations for gods in his sense; but this inconsistency was, as we shall see, subsequently removed. In favour of this estimate of Xenocrates’s doctrine of demons may further be adduced that it actually was the last word of ancient philosophy on the matter.
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