Pausanias and Anchites

Use in the book

B 1 makes teaching a personal address. The imperative to hear is directed to someone named, with a family connection, rather than to an anonymous reader. This miniature scene gives particular force to the recurrent “you” of the didactic fragments: the listener must attend, distinguish, learn, and retain what is taught. The singular address also matters beside B 112, whose opening greets a plural body of friends in Acragas. The fragments preserve more than one way of constructing an audience.

It is reasonable to connect the singular recipient in B 1112 with Pausanias within the presentation of this edition; the introduction does so. The verse itself, however, does not repeat his name. Its promise that the speaker will accomplish the instruction for “you alone” therefore strengthens the intimacy of instruction without independently proving the order or original adjacency of the passages. Nor does B 1 establish that Pausanias was a physician, a ritual initiate, an historical collaborator, or the addressee of every fragment now printed under On Nature. Such identifications need evidence beyond this line.

The small amount of surviving text is itself significant: a poem that may have had an extensive introduction is represented at its opening by a single vocative and command. The edition's location of the line at the head of the proem is a useful reading arrangement, not a recovered continuous opening.

Places to read

1. B 1Direct address names the hearer and his father.
2. B 111.1–2The unnamed singular hearer is promised exceptional instruction.
3. B 112.1–3The plural civic greeting provides a different audience scene.

Translation in this edition

The translation retains both names and interprets the paternal epithet without adding a biography. B 1 is quoted by Diogenes Laertius VIII 60; the quotation does not preserve the surrounding original verses.

Use in the book

The musical anecdote makes Anchitos a public judge who condemned a young man’s father to death. The youth consequently attacks him as a murderer, until Empedocles intervenes with the lyre. The named host gives the story a concrete social setting, but also creates the textual difficulty noticed by Diels. The dedication names Pausanias as son of Anchitos; if the saved youth is Pausanias, a name or role has been transferred. Diels accordingly proposes that the youth is Pausanias and the host’s name is mistaken. That is an attempt to reconcile two traditions, not a fact plainly stated by Iamblichus. The lexicon must leave the surface narrative legible before offering its proposed repair. Otherwise an editorial conjecture becomes an apparently certain account of how philosopher and pupil first met.

Places to read

1. A 15 (legend)Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras. Names Anchitos as host, judge, and target of revenge.
2. A 15 (apparatus)Edition’s apparatus, referring to the dedication in fragment B 1. Proposes a name-transfer and identifies the youth with Pausanias.

Translation in this edition

The edition’s confident reconstructed meeting should be marked as Diels’ inference. It depends on an external fragment invoked in this volume, rather than an explicit name for the youth in the displayed Greek.

Use in the book

Diogenes identifies him as the recipient of On Nature and reports that Empedocles instructed him about the breathless woman. The same notice, through Aristippus and Satyrus, calls him Empedocles’ beloved. Galen includes Pausanias beside Empedocles and Philistion among Italian physicians. These different functions should be retained rather than reduced to an undifferentiated “pupil.” In Heraclides’ disappearance narrative, Pausanias first organizes a search and then tells the company to sacrifice to the missing man as a god. His denial of the crater story likewise comes through the literary tradition, not an independently preserved affidavit. Timaeus invokes the absence of a memorial that a wealthy friend could have erected as an objection to the deification story. Finally, the musical anecdote’s unidentified young man is identified as Pausanias by Diels on the basis of Anchitos’ name. That reconstruction may explain a confused narrative, but is not explicit in Iamblichus’ displayed wording.

Places to read

1. A 1 §§ 59–60 (biography)Diogenes Laertius VIII 60. Connects dedication, medical instruction, and beloved status.
2. A 1 §§ 61–63 (biography)Diogenes Laertius VIII 61. Introduces the epigram upon Pausanias and prints its abbreviated opening Παυσανίην.
3. A 3 (testimony)Galen, On the Method of Healing. Names Pausanias among Italian medical figures.
4. A 1 §§ 67–68 (legend)2Diogenes Laertius VIII 68, reporting Heraclides. Gives him an active role in the search and proposed divine honors.
5. A 15 (apparatus)Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras, with the edition’s apparatus. The proposed identification of the youth as Pausanias is editorial.

Translation in this edition

The statement “Pausanias denied this story” at VIII 69 is mediated by Heraclides’ dialogue, as the apparatus warns. It should not be presented as surviving independent eyewitness testimony or a direct confirmation that he witnessed the historical death.