The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

THALES.

discovered the path of the sun from one end of the ecliptic to the other; and who, as one account tells us, defined the magnitude of the sun as being seven hundred and twenty times as great as that of the moon. He was also the first person to call the last day of the month the "thirtieth," and the first to converse about natural philosophy, as some say. However, Aristotle and Hippias say that he attributed souls also to lifeless things, forming his conjecture from the nature of the magnet and of amber. Pamphile relates that, having learned geometry from the Egyptians, he was the first to describe a right-angled triangle in a circle, and that he sacrificed an ox in honor of his discovery. Others, among whom is Apollodorus the calculator, say that it was Pythagoras who made this discovery. It was Thales also who carried to their greatest point of advancement the discoveries which Callimachus in his Iambics says were first made by Euphebus the Phrygian, such as those of the scalene angle, the triangle, and other things relating to investigations about lines. He seems also to have been a man of the greatest wisdom in political matters. For when Croesus sent to the Milesians to invite them to an alliance, he prevented them from agreeing to it—a step which, as Cyrus was the victor, proved the salvation of the city. But Clytus relates, as Heraclides assures us, that he was attached to a solitary and recluse life.

IV. Some assert that he was married and that he had a son named Cibissus; others, on the contrary, say that he never had a wife but that he adopted the son of his sister. When asked why he did not himself become a father, he answered that it was because he was fond of children. They say, too, that when his mother exhorted him to marry, he said, "No, by Jove, it is not yet time." And afterwards, when he was past his youth and she was again pressing him earnestly, he said, "It is no longer time."

V. Hieronymus of Rhodes also tells us, in the second book of his Miscellaneous Memoranda, that when he was desirous to show that it was easy to get rich, he—foreseeing that there would be a great crop of olives—took some large plantations of olive trees and so made a great deal of money.

VI. He asserted water to be the principle of all things.