en the Timaeus and the fragments of
Philolaus, which by some has been thought to be so great as to create a
suspicion that they are derived from it. Philolaus is known to us from
the Phaedo of Plato as a Pythagorean philosopher residing at Thebes in
the latter half of the fifth century B.C., after the dispersion of the
original Pythagorean society. He was the teacher of Simmias and Cebes,
who became disciples of Socrates. We have hardly any other information
about him. The story that Plato had purchased three books of his
writings from a relation is not worth repeating; it is only a fanciful
way in which an ancient biographer dresses up the fact that there was
supposed to be a resemblance between the two writers. Similar gossiping
stories are told about the sources of the Republic and the Phaedo.
That there really existed in antiquity a work passing under the name of
Philolaus there can be no doubt. Fragments of this work are preserved
to us, chiefly in Stobaeus, a few in Boethius and other writers. They
remind us of the Timaeus, as well as of the Phaedrus and Philebus.
When the writer says (Stob. Eclog.) that all things are either finite
(definite) or infinite (indefinite), or a union of the two, and that
this antithesis and synthesis pervades all art and nature, we are
reminded of the Philebus. When he calls the centre of the world (Greek),
we have a parallel to the Phaedrus. His distinction between the world of
order, to which the sun and moon and the stars belong, and the world
of disorder, which lies in the region between the moon and the earth,
approximates to Plato's sphere of the Same and of the Other. Like Plato
(Tim.), he denied the above and below in space, and said that all things
were the same in relation to a centre. He speaks also of the world as
one and indestructible: 'for neither from within nor from without
does it admit of destruction' (Tim). He mentions ten heavenly bodies,
including the sun and moon, the earth and the counter-earth (Greek), and
in the midst of them all he places the central fire, around which they
are moving--this is hidden from the earth by the counter-earth. Of
neither is there any trace in Plato, who makes the earth the centre
of his system. Philolaus magnifies the virtues of particular numbers,
especially of the number 10 (Stob. Eclog.), and descants upon odd and
even numbers, after the manner of the later Pythagoreans. It is worthy
of remark that these mystical fancies are nowhe