The question is intimately bound up with that of the date of Demokritos, who said that he himself was a young man in the old age of Anaxagoras, a statement which makes it unlikely that he founded his school at Abdera much before 420 B.C., the date given by Apollodoros for his floruit.[1] Now Theophrastos stated that Diogenes of Apollonia borrowed some of his views from Anaxagoras and some from Leukippos,[2] which must mean that there were traces of the atomic theory in his work. Further, Diogenes is parodied in the Clouds of Aristophanes, which was produced in 423 B.C., from which it follows that the work of Leukippos must have become known before that date. What that work was, Theophrastos also tells us. It was the Great Diakosmos usually attributed to Demokritos.[3] This means further that what were known later as the works of Demokritos were really the writings of the school of Abdera, and included, as was natural, the works of its founder. They formed, in fact, a corpus like that which has come down to us under the name of Hippokrates, and it was no more possible to distinguish the authors of the different treatises in the one case than it is in the other.
Theophrastos found Leukippos described as an Eleate in some authorities, and, if we may trust analogy, that means he had settled at Elea.[4] It is possible that his emigration
- ↑ Diog. ix. 41 (R. P. 187). As Diels says, the statement suggests that Anaxagoras was dead when Demokritos wrote. It is probable, too, that this is what made Apollodoros fix his floruit just forty years after that of Anaxagoras (Jacoby, p. 290). We cannot make much of the statement of Demokritos that he wrote the Μικρὸς διάκοσμος 750 years after the fall of Troy; for we cannot tell what era he used (Jacoby, p. 292).
- ↑ Theophr. ap. Simpl. Phys. p. 25, 1 (R. P. 206 a).
- ↑ This was stated by Thrasylos in his list of the tetralogies in which he arranged the works of Demokritos, as he did those of Plato. He gives Tetr. iii. thus: (1) Μέγας διάκοσμος (ὃν οἱ περὶ Θεόφραστον Λευκίππου φασὶν εἶναι); (2) Μικρὸς διάκοσμος; (3) Κοσμογραφίη; (4) Περὶ τῶν πλανήτων. The two διάκοσμοι would only be distinguished as μέγας and μικρός when they came to be included in the same corpus. A quotation from the περὶ νοῦ of Leukippos is preserved in Stob. i. 160. The phrase ἐν τοῖς Λευκίππου καλουμένοις λόγοις in M.X.G. 980 a 8 seems to refer to Arist. De gen. corr. A, 8. 325 a 24, Λεύκιππος δ' ἔχειν ᾠήθη λόγους κτλ.. Cf. Chap. II. p. 126, n. 1.
- ↑ See above, p. 330, n. 1.
