Straton (1) of *Lampsacus, philosopher, head of the *Peripatetic school after *Theophrastus until his death (c.287–269
He rejected Aristotle's theory of place and contradicted him in asserting the existence of void in the cosmos. This has been taken as a concession to the atomists (see
The Latin word suicidium, from which the English derives, is not classical Latin: pronouns were not used as prefixes in compounds, and the word could only have meant ‘the killing of a pig’. The first uses of suicidium found so far are by Gauthier de Saint-Victor in 1177/8 and, in English, by Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici published in 1643, who probably invented it afresh. The nearest to a technical term in antiquity was mors voluntaria (voluntary death) and the Greek equivalent, verbal phrases being used for the most part. Some ancient terminology reveals that suicide was often subsumed in categories regarded as more fundamental: thus a βιαιοθάνατος (Latin biothanatos) was any victim of premature, violent death, and an αὐτόχειρ was someone who kills his kin.
The limited and unsystematic nature of our evidence for Greek and Roman suicide does not allow for quantitative studies. Reliant as we are for the most part on literary accounts (some fictional, even mythical, all artistically shaped), we can only draw conclusions about attitudes and values. If a sociological approach is difficult, so is a psychiatric one, for in antiquity suicide was described on the assumption that it was a conscious intentional act: mental imbalance, though occasionally given as a cause of suicide, was not the central case it has become in the modern world. The ancients, including hard-headed Roman jurists who needed to distinguish suicides motivated by fear of condemnation from others that brought exemption from confiscation, felt confident that they could distinguish individual motives. They were not troubled by notions of unconscious motivation. This fact, in combination with the lack of reversible methods, may explain why the suicide attempts reported in the ancient sources are relatively few when compared with the modern ratio of attempted to accomplished suicides.
Theages, pupil of *Socrates(1). *Plato(1) refers in the Republic (496b) to ‘the bridle of Theages’, the bad health which kept him out of politics and saved him for philosophy. On the basis of this reference an imitator of Plato wrote a Theages dealing with the relation between philosophy and politics, and this is included in the corpus of Plato's works.
Thrasymachus of Chalcedon (fl. c. 430–400
Compiled an extant brief lexicon of difficult words in *Plato(1).
A philosopher who accompanied *Brutus in his campaign against the triumvirs (see
Xenarchus taught at Alexandria, Athens, and Rome, and his acquaintances included the geographer Strabo and the emperor Augustus. He is best known for his critique of Aristotle’s fifth element, which constitutes the material of the heavenly bodies according to the De caelo. Xenarchus targeted in particular Aristotle’s reliance on direct correspondences between simple bodies and simple motions and suggested that the ontologically privileged fire “in its natural place” could perform circular motion and was thus a plausible candidate for the material constituent of the heavens. He made further contributions in physics, psychology, and ethics, but he does not seem to have shown the same interest in the Categories as his Peripatetic contemporaries.
We are able to date Xenarchus’ activity to the 1st century
