Ocellus Lucanus: On the Nature of the Universe

...enumerated, Francesco Piccolomini, formerly the first professor of philosophy in this Academy of Padua, in [his commentary on] De Generatione, book 2, text 6, set forth thus:

Aristotle does not profess himself the inventor of the number of the primary qualities; for Ocellus the Pythagorean and Hippocrates used these frequently, yet they did not reveal why they were so many and of such a kind.

Stobaeus

Finally, who could doubt the rest of the contents in this little work? For if we look at the first chapter, its last text; if at the second chapter, the sixth text; if at the third chapter, the final part of the fourth text and the fifth and sixth texts—Stobaeus, in Eclogae Physicae, book 1, chapter 24, describes Ocellus’s dogmas exactly, using the very same words, although the dialect has been changed. If, moreover, we consider the matters handed down in the last chapter, we shall observe from Iamblichus, in the political section from text 8 to the very end, that almost every one of them proceeded from the Pythagorean school; and no one doubts that he had examined the works of Ocellus, of whom he makes mention with such noble testimony. Nor should it happen that anyone be disturbed because he sees both the fragment on law and those further texts which Stobaeus reported expressed in the very same words, yet in a different dialect—namely, the Doric; for no credit should be taken from the work on this account, because the dogmas themselves abundantly claim their author. I should certainly believe it must be asserted that Ocellus composed his work in the Doric dialect,

Whether this work was written in Attic or Doric

both because I find that whatever Pythagoreans I have read were devoted to it (if, however, the discussion concerns the ancients), and because it is suggested by the institutes of Pythagoras, who always wished to follow the Doric among the Greek idioms most of all, having always judged it both more ancient and even more excellent, as Iamblichus testifies; and from there, by a slight and easy

De vita Pyth. c. 34

change, Ocellus’s works were translated into the Attic dialect, so that those most celebrated dogmas might be expressed in the dialect which the elegance of Greece itself had made most familiar, in much the same way as works written by learned men in the Portuguese idiom [are translated] into Castilian, as a more pleasant dic-