Ocellus Lucanus, Firmicus Maternus, Select Theorems of Proclus (Thomas Taylor)

said to be "shadows falling upon a shadowmeaning: falling onto matter, which acts as the general receptacle for all physical forms. See my translation of Plotinus's work, On the Impassivity of Incorporeal Natures.," like images in water, in a mirror, or in a dream.

Regarding Ocellus Lucanus, the author of the first of these tracts: although the precise period in which he lived is unknown, Archytas says in his epistle to Plato (according to Diogenes Laertius, book 8, section 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 Universeoriginal: Περι νομου, περι βασιλειας και ὁσιοτητος, και της του παντος γενεσεως.." As my worthy and very intelligent friend Mr. J. J. Welsh observed in a letter to me, we cannot be far from the truth if we say he lived around the time Pythagoras first opened his school in Italy (500 B.C.). This would make him a contemporary in the political world to Phalaris, Pisistratus, Croesus, Polycrates, and Tarquin the Proud; and in the philosophical world to the seven sages of Greece, Heraclitus of Ephesus, Democritus of Abdera, and so on.

The only part of his work that survives is the treatise On the UniverseFabricius rightly observes that this work by Ocellus was originally written in the Doric dialect but was later translated by a grammarian into the common dialect to make it more easily understood by the reader. See Bibliotheca Graeca, volume 1, page 510. and a fragment preserved by Stobaeus from his treatise On Laws.