Ocellus Lucanus On the Nature of the Universe (Taylor 1831)

said to be "shadows falling upon shadow original: falling on matter, or the general receptacle of all sensible forms. See my Translation of the admirable treatise of Plotinus "On the Impassivity of Incorporeal Natures.", like images in water, or in a mirror, or a dream."

Regarding Ocellus Lucanus, the author of the first of these tracts: although it is unknown at what precise period he lived, Archytas says in his epistle to Plato (see Diogenes Laertius viii. 80) that he "conversed with the descendants of Ocellus, and received from them the treatises of this philosopher On Laws, On Government, Piety, and the Generation of the Universe original: Περι νομου, περι βασιλειας και ὁσιοτητος, και της του παντος γενεσεως.." As my worthy and very intelligent friend Mr. J. J. Welsh observes in a letter to me, "we cannot be far from the truth if we say that he lived about the time Pythagoras first opened his school in Italy, 500 B.C." This would make him a contemporary of Phalaris, Pisistratus, Croesus, Polycrates, and Tarquin the Proud in the political world, and of the Seven Sages of Greece, Heraclitus of Ephesus, Democritus of Abdera, and others in the philosophical world.

All that is extant of his works is the treatise On the Universe and a fragment preserved by Stobaeus of his treatise On Laws. It is rightly observed by Fabricius that this work of Ocellus was originally written in the Doric dialect, but was afterwards translated by some grammarian into the common dialect, in order that it might be more easily understood by the reader. (See Bibliotheca Graeca, Vol. 1, p. 510.)