settled in Rome in the time of Cicero. He was a friend of Calpurnius Piso, and was implicated in his profligacy by Cicero (in Pisonem, 29), who, however, praises him warmly for his philosophic views and for the elegans lascivia of his poems (cf. Horace, Satires, 1.2. 120). The Greek anthology contains thirty-four of his epigrams. From the excavations of the villa at Herculaneum (q.v.) there have been recovered thirty-six treatises attributed to Philodemus, and it has been suggested that the villa was actually owned by him; but this is generally denied. These works deal with music, rhetoric, ethics, signs, virtues and vices, and defend the Epicurean standpoint against the Stoics and the Peripatetics.
The Rhetoric has been edited by Sudhaus (1892–1895); the De Ira and the De Pietate by Gomperz (1864 to 1865); the De Musica by Kempke (1884); De Vitiis by Ussing (1868); De Morte by Mekler (1886). See Hercul. Volum. (Oxford, 1824 and 1861); Mayor on Cicero’s De Natura deorum (1871).
PHILOLAUS (b. c. 480), Greek philosopher of the Pythagorean school, was born at Tarentum or at Crotona[1] (so Diog. Laert. viii. 84). He was said to have been intimate with Democritus, and was probably one of his teachers. After the death of Pythagoras great dissensions prevailed in the cities of lower Italy. According to some accounts, Philolaus, obliged to flee, took refuge first in Lucania and then at Thebes, where he had as pupils Simmias and Cebes, who subsequently, being still young men (νεανίσκοι), were present at the death of Socrates. Before this Philolaus had returned to Italy, where he was the teacher of Archytas. He entered deeply into the distinctively Pythagorean number theory, particularly dwelling on the properties inherent in the decad-the sum of the first four numbers, consequently the fourth triangular number, the tetractys (see Vit. Pythag. ap. Phot. Bibl. p. 712)-which he called great, all-powerful, and all-producing. The great Pythagorean oath was taken by the sacred tetractys. The discovery of the regular solids is attributed to Pythagoras by Eudemus, and Empedocles is stated to have been the first who maintained that there are four elements. Philolaus, connecting these ideas, held that the elementary nature of bodies depends on their form, and assigned the tetrahedron to fire, the octahedron to air, the icosahedron to water, and the cube to earth; the dodecahedron he assigned to a fifth element, aether, or, as some think, to the universe (see Plut. de Pl. Ph. ii. 6, ἐκ δὲ τοῦ δωδεκαέδρου τὴν τοῦ παντὸς σφαῖραν and Stob. Ecl. Phys. i. 10, ὁ τᾶς σφαίρας ὁλκός). This theory, however superficial from the standpoint of observation, indicates considerable knowledge of geometry and gave a great impulse to the study of the science. Following Parmenides, Philolaus regarded the soul as a “mixture and harmony” of the bodily parts; he also assumed a substantial soul, whose existence in the body is an exile on account of sin.
Philolaus was the first to propound the doctrine of the motion of the earth; some attribute this doctrine to Pythagoras, but there is no evidence in support of their view. Philolaus supposed that the sphere of the fixed stars, the five planets, the sun, moon and earth, all moved round the central fire, which he called the hearth of the universe, the house of Zeus, and the mother of the gods (see Stob. Ecl. Phys. i. 488); but as these made up only nine revolving bodies he conceived, in accordance with his number theory, a tenth, which he called counter-earth, ἀντίχθων. He supposed the sun to be a disk of glass which reflects the light of the universe. He made the lunar month consist of 2912 days, the lunar year of 354, and the solar year of 36512 days. He was the first who published a book on the Pythagorean doctrines, a treatise of which Plato made use in the composition of his Timaeus. This work of the Pythagorean, to which the mystical name Βάκχαι is sometimes given, seems to have consisted of three books: (1) Περὶ κόσμον, containing a general account of the origin and arrangement of the universe; (2) Περὶ φύσεως, an exposition of the nature of numbers; (3) Περὶ ψυχῆς, on the nature of the soul.
See Boeckh, Philolaus des Pythagoreers Lehren nebst den Bruchstucken seines Werkes (Berlin, 1819); Schaarschmidt, Die angebliche Schriftstellerei des Philolaus (1864); also Fabricius, Bibliotheca graeca; Zeller, History of Greek Philosophy; Chaignet, Pythagore et la philosophie pythagoricienne, contenant les fragments de Philolaus et d’Architas (1873); Th. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers (Eng. trans. (1901), i. 123 sqq., 543 sqq. and authorities there quoted; also art. Pythagoras. For fragments see Ritter and Preller, Hist. Philosoph. ch. ii.
PHILOLOGY, the generally accepted comprehensive name for the study of the word (Gr. λόγος), or languages; it designates that branch of knowledge which deals with human speech, and with all that speech discloses as to the nature and history of man. Philology has two principal divisions, corresponding to the two uses of “word” or “speech,” as signifying either what is said or the language in which it is said, as either the thought expressed—which, when recorded, takes the form of literature—or the instrumentality of its expression: these divisions are the literary and the linguistic. Not all study of literature, indeed, is philological: as when, for example, the records of the ancient Chinese are ransacked for notices of astronomical or meteorological phenomena, or the principles of geometry are learned from the textbook of a Greek sage; while, on the other hand, to study Ptolemy and Euclid for the history of the sciences represented by them is philological more than scientific. Again, the study of language itself has its literary side: as when the vocabulary of a community (say of the ancient Indo-Europeans or Aryans) is taken as a document from which to infer the range and grade of knowledge of its speakers, their circumstances and their institutions: The two divisions thus do not admit of absolute distinction and separation, though for some time past tending toward greater independence. The literary is the older of the two; it even occupied until recently the whole field, since the scientific study of language itself has arisen only within the 19th century. Till then, literary philology included linguistic, as a merely subordinate and auxiliary part, the knowledge of a language being the necessary key to a knowledge of the literature written in that language. When, therefore, instead of studying each language by itself for the sake of its own literature men began to compare one language with another, in order to bring to light their relationships, their structures, their histories, the name “comparative philology” naturally enough suggested itself and came into use for the new method; and this name, awkward and trivial though it may be, has become so firmly fixed in English usage that it can be only slowly, if at all, displaced. European usage (especially German) tends more strongly than English to restrict the name philology to its older office, and to employ for the recent branch of knowledge a specific term, like those that have gained more or less currency with us also; as glottic, glossology, linguistics, linguistic science, science of language, and the like. It is not a question of absolute propriety or correctness, since the word philology is in its nature wide enough to imply all language-study of whatever kind; it is one, rather, of the convenient distinction of methods that have grown too independent and important to be any longer well included under a common name.
I —The Science of Language in general.
Philology, in all its departments, began and grew up as classical; the history of our civilization made the study of Greek and Latin long the exclusive, still longer the predominant and regulating, occupation of secular scholarship. The Hebrew and its literature were held Nature of
the Science.apart, as something of a different order, as sacred. It was not imagined that any tongue to which culture and literature did not lend importance was worthy of serious attention from scholars. The first essays in comparison, likewise, were made upon the classical tongues, and were as erroneous in method and fertile in false conclusions as was to be expected, considering the narrowness of view and the controlling prejudices of those who made them; and the admission of Hebrew to the comparison only added to the confusion. The change which the past century has seen has been a part of the general scientific movement of the age, which has brought about the establishment
- ↑ Boeckh places his life between the 70th and 95th Olympiads (496–396 B.C.). He was a contemporary of Socrates and Democritus, but senior to them, and was probably somewhat junior to Empedocles, so that his birth may be placed at about 480.
