CRITIQUE

OCELLUS LUCANUS

It is not clear
when he
flourished.

Among the learned, it is not yet agreed at what time this ancient philosopher flourished. He left a small book On the Nature of the Universe, which Ludovico Nogarola translated into Latin. The most learned man Thomas Gale of Cambridge edited this most correctly in his small works in the year of our Lord 1670.

Ocellus Lucanus was a pupil of Pythagoras himself. He is praised by Plato in an epistle to Archytas, and is named by Philo Judaeus and Lucian. A very learned book of his exists today On the Nature of the Universe. Justus Lipsius, Handbook to Stoic Philosophy, book 1, dissertation 6.

Furthermore, there are those who report that Aristotle was not the first author of this opinion concerning the world not being subject to destruction, but that it belonged to certain Pythagoreans. But I have been presented with a commentary inscribed in the name of Ocellus Lucanus On the Nature of the Universe, in which he not only declared that the world was unbegotten and would never perish, but also proved it by most exquisite reasons. Philo Judaeus in the book On the Incorruptibility of the World.

Diogenes Laertius inserted into his life of Plato a certain letter of Archytas of Tarentum addressed to him, in which he calls this philosopher not Ocellus but Ucellus, and reviews several of his books.

Some doubt the authenticity of his little book On the Nature of the Universe, though not with enough consideration, as I am persuaded. For both its brevity and gravity correspond to that age, to say nothing now of the subject matter and the language. Caspar Barth, Adversaria, book 42, chapter 1, page 1867.

The book of Ocellus Lucanus is quite elegant. Scaligerana 2.

Aristotle, Plato, and Philo Judaeus took very many things from this little book On the Nature of the Universe. See Nogarola's annotations on Ocellus.

Ocellus used the Attic Athenian dialect in explaining the things of nature. Nogarola.

Almost all the arguments by which Ocellus and Aristotle oppose the creation of the world rely on this supposition: that it was necessary for it to be generated in the same way we see things generated in the world. But who of sound mind ever asserted that this was so? Do they ever prove by any of their arguments that it is impossible for God, whose infinite power produced the entire globe in another way than we observe other things produced in the same, to have done so? For we affirm that there is an infinite and eternal Essence, which was the efficient cause of the world, and which by its omnipotent power produced it out of nothing and continues its existence. Stillingfleet, Sacred Origins, book 3, chapter 2, section 6. Originally in English.

---

THEOGNIS

He flourished
before Christ
in the year
538.

He was a Greek poet born in the 50th Olympiad. He was from Megara, not the one in Sicily as Plato thought, but the one in Attica, as Valerius Harpocration concludes quite clearly from Theognis himself. He lived in the times of Croesus, but survived a long time, namely until the beginning of the Persian War. Hofmann.

Theognis of Megara attained a bright fame around the seventieth Olympiad for his Gnomai maxims and elegies. He is a necessary writer for youth, and one who might correct bad...