Book VIII

Abstract

Thales of Miletus, one of the seven sages, said that water was the principle of all things; Heraclites, fire; the priests of the Magi, water and fire; Euripides, auditor of Anaxagoras, which philosopher the Athenians named Scaenicus, said air and earth, and that the earth, having been impregnated by the celestial rains, generated in the world the kinds of the peoples and of all the animals, and those things that are produced by it, when compelled by the force of time to dissolve, return again to it. Those that are born of air, still in the parts of the sky are transformed in receiving some defect, but mutated, in their dissolution they fall back into the same property in which they were before. But Pythagoras, Empedocles, Epicharmus and the other physicists and philosophers proposed to us that there are these four principles, air, fire, water and earth, and the qualities of these operate among themselves with natural form conjoined, according to the differences of the things.