Ocellus Lucanus: On the Nature of the Universe

It is proven that this work, On the Nature of the Universe, was written by Ocellus.

Confidence is established for the work as arguments emerge; it will not be useless, with the principle resumed from a somewhat deeper origin, and having collected the testimonies of weighty writers—which it was possible to discover either by Nogarola’s suggestion or by my own study—to show that this is the legitimate offspring of Ocellus Lucanus, a most ancient writer of the Pythagorean school, who preceded Plato and Aristotle, the two principal lights of philosophy, by means of a more forceful reasoning, yet of the kind that this type of subject matter permits. For as
Eth. 1. c. 1. Aristotle warned: it is the mark of an educated man to seek such precision in each genus as the nature of the thing admits. For it seems a similar vice to accept a mathematician using persuasion and to demand demonstrations from an orator. And the same
Met. 2. s. ult. added: one ought not to seek mathematical certainty in all things.

Testimonies of weighty authors concerning Ocellus. Lucian.

Lucian, in his booklet On a Slip in Greeting, recorded that Ocellus Lucanus was numbered among the disciples of Pythagoras, though he calls him Oikellos; for he says: The divine Pythagoras, indeed, even if he himself did not deign to leave any writing of his own to us, as far as can be inferred from Ocellus the Lucanian, and Archytas, and his other associates, etc.

Iamblichus, in his Life of Pythagoras, ch. 36, seems to have shown that this same man claimed a truly noble place for himself in that school; for when he enumerated only the most celebrated philosophers of that school, placing each under the classification of his race or country, he said...