Philosophical Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Vol. 1

...and he made excellent use of their treasures to enrich his own work. For since water, τὸ ὕδωρ, undoubtedly the most subtle principle and element of moisture, held the highest place among these philosophers, to which they assigned heat as secondary, it ought to appear strange to no one that they also directed their inquiry to the individual parts of nature joined with those two, even if the injury of time has begrudged us clearer testimonies of this matter. But from those things which Anaxagoras is handed down to have philosophized, as excellently set forth recently by Carus—who was snatched from us by a fate too premature and harsh, to the greatest loss of good letters and philosophy—this can be gathered sufficiently and more.

To these were added subsequently all who were then philosophizing, and those not addicted to any fixed sect, and among them, just as each was most skilled in nature, so they drew as diligently as each was able, as did all the rest of the authors or followers of philosophy, if they devoted their labor to investigating nature; others did not hesitate to follow in their footsteps in different ways. This the Socratics, and almost all the schools of philosophy that flowed from Socrates, followed to a great extent. Among these, especially Aristotle, a man most skilled in the nature of things, shone forth with a long series of disciples and successors through subsequent centuries, since it is agreed by all that he cultivated not only all parts of philosophy, but most especially Physics with the greatest study. His commentaries illustrating this part of philosophy, e.g., de Cœlo, Meteorologica, etc., were the clearest and most abundant source from which all other philosophers, except the Epicureans, after the book was openly accessible to them, irrigated their own little gardens, whether they had brought the entire field of physics defined by Aristotle or only a few small plots over to their own cultivation. To list them all would be long, and not of this place or scope.

The mention of the Stoics, however, cannot be omitted the less, as their study is all the more clear, both in their methods of leading the reasons of all philosophers into their own parts and constructing as it were a new building from them, and truly in their following Aristotle most of all in adopting his threefold division of philosophy, assigning to Physics the middle place between Logic and Ethics, although they gave it as explained in a much broader sense than the Peripatetics. Cf. Seneca, Ep. LXXXIX, 15.