1. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 225-247, 224 (6th cent. BCE - 5th cent. BCE)
| 224. The sacrificer of his daughter — strange! — |
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2. Herodotus, Histories, 1.44.2 (5th cent. BCE - 5th cent. BCE)
| 1.44.2. and in his great and terrible grief at this mischance he called on Zeus by three names—Zeus the Purifier, Zeus of the Hearth, Zeus of Comrades: the first, because he wanted the god to know what evil his guest had done him; the second, because he had received the guest into his house and thus unwittingly entertained the murderer of his son; and the third, because he had found his worst enemy in the man whom he had sent as a protector. |
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3. Plato, Laws, None (5th cent. BCE - 4th cent. BCE)
| 653d. in the course of men’s lives; so the gods, in pity for the human race thus born to misery, have ordained the feasts of thanksgiving as periods of respite from their troubles; and they have granted them as companions in their feasts the Muses and Apollo the master of music, and Dionysus, that they may at least set right again their modes of discipline by associating in their feasts with gods. We must consider, then, whether the account that is harped on nowadays is true to nature? What it says is that, almost without exception, every young creature is able of keeping either its body or its tongue quiet |
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4. Plato, Phaedo, None (5th cent. BCE - 4th cent. BCE)
| 64c. Let us then, said he, speak with one another, paying no further attention to them. Do we think there is such a thing as death? Certainly, replied Simmias. We believe, do we not, that death is the separation of the soul from the body, and that the state of being dead is the state in which the body is separated from the soul and exists alone by itself and the soul is separated from the body and exists alone by itself? Is death anything other than this? No, it is this, said he. Now, my friend, see if you agree with me; |
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5. Plato, Theaetetus, None (5th cent. BCE - 4th cent. BCE)
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6. Cicero, On The Nature of The Gods, 1.43-1.45, 1.49 (2nd cent. BCE - 1st cent. BCE)
| 1.43. With the errors of the poets may be classed the monstrous doctrines of the magi and the insane mythology of Egypt, and also the popular beliefs, which are a mere mass of inconsistencies sprung from ignorance. "Anyone pondering on the baseless and irrational character of these doctrines ought to regard Epicurus with reverence, and to rank him as one of the very gods about whom we are inquiring. For he alone perceived, first, that the gods exist, because nature herself has imprinted a conception of them on the minds of all mankind. For what nation or what tribe is there but possesses untaught some 'preconception' of the gods? Such notions Epicurus designates by the word prolepsis, that is, a sort of preconceived mental picture of a thing, without which nothing can be understood or investigated or discussed. The force and value of this argument we learn in that work of genius, Epicurus's Rule or Standard of Judgement. 1.44. You see therefore that the foundation (for such it is) of our inquiry has been well and truly laid. For the belief in the gods has not been established by authority, custom or law, but rests on the uimous and abiding consensus of mankind; their existence is therefore a necessary inference, since we possess an instinctive or rather an innate concept of them; but a belief which all men by nature share must necessarily be true; therefore it must be admitted that the gods exist. And since this truth is almost universally accepted not only among philosophers but also among the unlearned, we must admit it as also being an accepted truth that we possess a 'preconception,' as I called it above, or 'prior notion,' of the gods. (For we are bound to employ novel terms to denote novel ideas, just as Epicurus himself employed the word prolepsis in a sense in which no one had ever used it before.) 1.45. We have then a preconception of such a nature that we believe the gods to be blessed and immortal. For nature, which bestowed upon us an idea of the gods themselves, also engraved on our minds the belief that they are eternal and blessed. If this is so, the famous maxim of Epicurus truthfully enunciates that 'that which is blessed and eternal can neither know trouble itself nor cause trouble to another, and accordingly cannot feel either anger or favour, since all such things belong only to the weak.' "If we sought to attain nothing else beside piety in worshipping the gods and freedom from superstition, what has been said had sufficed; since the exalted nature of the gods, being both eternal and supremely blessed, would receive man's pious worship (for what is highest commands the reverence that is its due); and furthermore all fear of the divine power or divine anger would have been banished (since it is understood that anger and favour alike are excluded from the nature of a being at once blessed and immortal, and that these being eliminated we are menaced by no fears in regard to the powers above). But the mind strives to strengthen this belief by trying to discover the form of god, the mode of his activity, and the operation of his intelligence. 1.49. Yet their form is not corporeal, but only resembles bodily substance; it does not contain blood, but the semblance of blood. "These discoveries of Epicurus are so acute in themselves and so subtly expressed that not everyone would be capable of appreciating them. Still I may rely on your intelligence, and make my exposition briefer than the subject demands. Epicurus then, as he not merely discerns abstruse and recondite things with his mind's eye, but handles them as tangible realities, teaches that the substance and nature of the gods is such that, in the first place, it is perceived not by the senses but by the mind, and not materially or individually, like the solid objects which Epicurus in virtue of their substantiality entitles steremnia; but by our perceiving images owing to their similarity and succession, because an endless train of precisely similar images arises from the innumerable atoms and streams towards the gods, our minds with the keenest feelings of pleasure fixes its gaze on these images, and so attains an understanding of the nature of a being both blessed and eternal. |
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7. Philodemus, (Pars I) \ On Piety, 13, 49, 12 (2nd cent. BCE - 1st cent. BCE)
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8. Philodemus of Gadara, De Morte \ , 3.32-3.39 (2nd cent. BCE - 1st cent. BCE)
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9. Lucretius Carus, On The Nature of Things, 1.49, 1.80-1.101, 2.352-2.366, 2.651, 5.5, 5.8, 5.146-5.155, 5.1161-5.1163, 5.1194-5.1195, 5.1198-5.1202, 5.1240, 6.64-6.66 (1st cent. BCE - 1st cent. BCE)
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10. Philo of Alexandria, On The Eternity of The World, 9 (1st cent. BCE - missingth cent. CE)
| 9. And according to these men there may be one world spoken of as eternal and another as destructible, destructible in reference to its present arrangement, and eternal as to the conflagration which takes place, since it is rendered immortal by regenerations and periodical revolutions which never cease. |
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11. Plutarch, On Stoic Self-Contradictions, None (1st cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
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12. Sextus, Against The Mathematicians, 7.216 (2nd cent. CE - 3rd cent. CE)
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13. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of The Philosophers, 10.33, 10.120 (3rd cent. CE - 3rd cent. CE)
| 10.33. By preconception they mean a sort of apprehension or a right opinion or notion, or universal idea stored in the mind; that is, a recollection of an external object often presented, e.g. Such and such a thing is a man: for no sooner is the word man uttered than we think of his shape by an act of preconception, in which the senses take the lead. Thus the object primarily denoted by every term is then plain and clear. And we should never have started an investigation, unless we had known what it was that we were in search of. For example: The object standing yonder is a horse or a cow. Before making this judgement, we must at some time or other have known by preconception the shape of a horse or a cow. We should not have given anything a name, if we had not first learnt its form by way of preconception. It follows, then, that preconceptions are clear. The object of a judgement is derived from something previously clear, by reference to which we frame the proposition, e.g. How do we know that this is a man? |
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14. Epicurus, On Nature, 12
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15. Epicurus, Letter To Menoeceus, 126-135, 123
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16. Epicurus, Letter To Herodotus, 74, 76-78, 73
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17. Epicurus, Letters, 116, 97, 115
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18. Epicurus, Letters, 116, 97, 115
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19. Epicurus, Vatican Sayings, 33
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20. Stoic School, Stoicor. Veter. Fragm., 1.137
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