[535] See the description which Cicero gives, of his own laborious oratorical training:—
“Ego hoc tempore omni, noctes et dies, in omnium doctrinarum meditatione versabar. Eram cum Stoico Diodoto, qui cum habitavisset apud me mecumque vixisset, nuper est domi meæ mortuus. A quo quum in aliis rebus, tum studiosissime in dialecticâ versabar; quæ quasi contracta et astricta eloquentia putanda est; sine quâ etiam tu, Brute, judicavisti, te illam justam eloquentiam, quam dialecticam dilatatam esse putant, consequi non posse. Huic ego doctori, et ejus artibus variis et multis, ita eram tamen deditus, ut ab exercitationibus oratoriis nullus dies vacaret.” (Cicero, Brutus, 90, 309.)
[536] Aristotel. ap. Diog. Laërt. viii, 57.
[537] See my preceding vol. iv, ch. xxxvii.
[538] Diogen. Laërt. viii, 58, 59, who gives a remarkable extract from the poem of Empedoklês, attesting these large pretensions.
See Brandis, Handbuch der Gr. Röm. Philos. part i. sects. 47, 48, p. 192; Sturz. ad Empedoclis Frag. p. 36.
[539] De Rerum Naturâ, i, 719.
[540] Some striking lines of Empedoklês are preserved by Sextus Empiricus, adv. Mathemat. vii, 115; to the effect that every individual man gets through his short life, with no more knowledge than is comprised in his own slender fraction of observation and experience: he struggles in vain to find out and explain the totality; but neither eye, nor ear, nor reason can assist him:—
Παῦρον δὲ ζωῆς ἀβίον μέρος ἀθρήσαντες,
Ὠκύμοροι, καπνοῖο δίκην ἀρθέντες, ἀπέπταν