A. TESTIMONIES OF HIS LIFE 1. DIOGENES LAERTIUS I 34—40

[...having shared in] belief.' He says, 'The same contributions you pay to your parents, expect the same from your children.' He said that the Nile rises when its currents are obstructed by the Etesian winds, which blow against it.

Apollodorus, in his Chronicles [fr. 76, FHG I 445], says that he was born in the first year of the thirty-fifth Olympiad [640 BCE]. He died at the age of seventy-eight (or, as Sosicrates [fr. 10, FHG IV 501] says, ninety); for he died in the fifty-eighth Olympiad [548–545 BCE], having lived during the time of Croesus, to whom he promised that he would cross the Halys river without a bridge by diverting its current.

Demetrius of Magnesia, in his On Those Who Bear the Same Name, says there were five other men named Thales: a Callatian orator who wrote in a affected style; a talented Sicyonian painter; a third who was very ancient, a contemporary of Hesiod, Homer, and Lycurgus; (a fourth mentioned by Duris in his On Painting [fr. 77, FHG II 487]; and a fifth who was younger and obscure, mentioned by Dionysius in his Cretica).

The wise man, however, died while watching a gymnastic contest, from heat, thirst, and weakness, being already elderly. The following is inscribed upon his tomb [Anth. Pal. VII 84]:

We also have this epigram concerning him in the first book of our Epigrams or Panmetron [Anth. Pal. VII 85]:

To him belongs the saying "Know thyself," which Antisthenes in his Successions [FHG III 182*] claims belongs to Phemonoe, but that Chilon claimed it as his own.