Democritus Junior to the Reader

Gentle reader, I imagine you will be very curious to know who this comic or masked actor is, who so insolently intrudes upon this public stage before the eyes of the world, claiming another man's name; where he comes from, why he does it, and what he has to say. Although, as that writer said, “First, if I choose not to, I shall not answer; who will compel me?” I am a freeborn man and may choose whether to tell; who can compel me?

If pressed, I will answer as readily as the Egyptian in Plutarch, when an inquisitive fellow insisted on knowing what was in his basket: “Since you see that it is covered, why inquire into what is concealed?” It was covered precisely so that he should not know what was in it. Do not pry into what is hidden. If the contents please you and serve your purpose, suppose the author to be the Man in the Moon, or whoever you like; I would prefer to remain unknown. Still, to satisfy you to some degree, which is more than I need do, I will explain my assumed name, my title, and my subject.

First, the name Democritus: I would not have it mislead anyone into expecting a lampoon, a satire, some absurd treatise—as I myself would have expected—or some extraordinary doctrine or paradox about the earth's motion, about infinite worlds “in an infinite void, arising from the chance collision of atoms”: worlds in an endless emptiness, formed by the accidental collision of specks like those visible in a sunbeam. All these opinions Democritus held, Epicurus and their master Leucippus maintained in ancient times, and Copernicus, Bruno, and others have recently revived.

Besides, as Gellius observes, later writers and impostors have commonly put forward absurd and outrageous inventions under the name of so distinguished a philosopher as Democritus, to gain credit and thereby greater respect. Craftsmen do much the same, “inscribing the name of Praxiteles on their own newly carved marble.” That is not my purpose.

Here you will find no Centaurs, Gorgons, or Harpies; my page has the flavour of human life. Look here for no Centaurs or Gorgons; my subject is humanity. You yourself are the subject of my discourse. Whatever people do—their desires, fear, anger, pleasure, joys, restless pursuits—is the mixture in my little book. Whatever people do, their vows and fears, in anger or in play, their joys and wanderings: these make up my account.

I intend to use his name just as Mercurius Gallobelgicus and Mercurius Britannicus use the name of Mercury, or as Democritus Christianus uses that of Democritus, and so on. There are, however, other circumstances that have led me to conceal myself behind this mask, and particular reasons that I cannot explain so well until I have sketched this Democritus of ours: what sort of man he was, with a brief account of his life.

Democritus, as Hippocrates and Diogenes Laertius describe him, was a small, withered old man, very melancholy by temperament, averse to company in his later days and much inclined to solitude. A famous philosopher in his time and a contemporary of Socrates, he devoted himself entirely, towards the end, to his studies and a private life. He wrote many excellent works. He was a great theologian, according to the theology of those times, an expert physician, a student of politics, and an excellent mathematician, as his Diacosmus and other works testify.

He took great pleasure in the study of agriculture, Columella says; and I often find him quoted by Constantinus and other writers on that subject. He knew the natures and differences of all animals, plants, fish, and birds; some say he could understand their songs and cries. In a word, he was “learned in every field”, a scholar of wide learning and a devoted student. Some relate that, to contemplate more effectively, he put out his eyes and chose blindness in old age; yet he saw more than all the rest of Greece, and wrote on every subject: “There was nothing in the whole fabric of nature about which he did not write.”

He was a man of outstanding intelligence and deep thought. To improve his knowledge when young, he travelled to Egypt and Athens to converse with learned men, admired by some and despised by others. After a wandering life, he settled at Abdera, a town in Thrace. Some say he was summoned there to be its lawgiver, recorder, or town clerk; others say that he was born and brought up there. Whatever the truth, he eventually lived in a garden outside the town, devoting himself entirely to his studies and a private life, except that he sometimes walked down to the harbour and laughed heartily at the variety of ridiculous sights he saw there. Such was Democritus.

But meanwhile, how does this concern me? What connection gives me the right to assume his costume? I admit that, on the strength of what I have said so far, comparing myself with him would be both impudent and arrogant. I do not presume to set myself beside him: “He surpasses me three hundred thousandfold”; “I am small, I am nothing; I neither aspire to heights nor hope for them.” Yet I will say this much about myself, hopefully without any suspicion of pride or conceit: I have lived a quiet, sedentary, solitary, private life, “for myself and the Muses,” at the university almost as long as Xenocrates in Athens, “nearly to old age,” seeking wisdom as he did and shut up in my study most of the time.