Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

DIOG. LAERT. ON THE LIFE

...out of the imprudence of the Greeks, they attribute to the barbarians things rightly done and invented. For from them, not only philosophy, but the very race of men itself flowed in the beginning. For Athens became famous through Musaeus, and Thebes through Linus. They assert that the former, the son of Eumolpus, was the first to hand down the generation of the gods, and discovered the sphere, and said that all things are made from one and are resolved into the same. They say he died at Phalerum, and was buried there, and this epigram was inscribed on his tomb:

Phalerum, and the Phalerians, the naval [base] of the Athenians.

The Phalerian soil holds the dear son of Eumolpus,
Musaeus, dead; and upon this tomb [it holds him]. that is,
The earth of Phalerum closes within this tomb
The breathless Musaeus, dear pledge of his father.

Furthermore, the father of Musaeus gave the name of the Eumolpidae to those among the Athenians. But they affirm that Linus was born of Mercury and the Muse Urania, and that he wrote of the generation of the world. Likewise of the courses of the sun and moon, and the generations of animals and fruits. This, moreover, he made the beginning of his work:

There was once a time in which all things were grown together.
that is,
There was a time when all things were once established together.

Anaxagoras followed him, and he himself asserted that all things were made together, and that they were composed by the approach of Mind. Linus, however, is said to have perished in Euboea, struck by an arrow from Apollo, upon whom this epitaph stands:

Others think he fell while acting as a teacher for Hercules.

Thus the earth received the Theban Linus, having died,
The fair-crowned son of the Uranian Muse. that is,
The urn contains the Theban Linus,
His white brows wreathed with purple garlands.

Therefore, philosophy did not have its beginning from the barbarians, but from the Greeks; and its very name utterly abhors a barbarian designation.