The Stromata, or Miscellanies

“Those who the healing art would practice well,
Must study people's modes of life, and note
The soil, and the diseases so consider.”

Homer again, having written:—

“I say no mortal man can doom escape,”—

Archinus says, “All men are bound to die either sooner or later;” and Demosthenes, “To all men death is the end of life, though one should keep himself shut up in a coop.”

And Herodotus, again, having said, in his discourse about Glaucus the Spartan, that the Pythian said, “In the case of the Deity, to say and to do are equivalent,” Aristophanes said:—

“For to think and to do are equivalent.”

And before him, Parmenides of Elea said:—

“For thinking and being are the same.”

And Plato having said, “And we shall show, not absurdly perhaps, that the beginning of love is sight; and hope diminishes the passion, memory nourishes it, and intercourse preserves it;” does not Philemon the comic poet write:—

“First all see, then admire;
Then gaze, then come to hope;
And thus arises love?”

Further, Demosthenes having said, “For to all of us death is a debt,” and so forth, Phanocles writes in Loves, or The Beautiful:—

“But from the Fates' unbroken thread escape
Is none for those that feed on earth.”

You will also find that Plato having said, “For the first sprout of each plant, having got a fair start, according to the virtue of its own nature, is most powerful in inducing the appropriate end;” the historian writes, “Further, it is not natural for one of the wild plants to become cultivated, after they have passed the earlier period of growth;” and the following of Empedocles:—

“For I already have been boy and girl,
And bush, and bird, and mute fish in the sea,”—

Euripides transcribes in Chrysippus:—

“But nothing dies
Of things that are; but being dissolved,
One from the other,
Shows another form.”

And Plato having said, in the Republic, that women were common, Euripides writes in the Protesilaus:—

“For common, then, is woman's bed.”

Further, Euripides having written:—

“For to the temperate enough sufficient is”—

Epicurus expressly says, “Sufficiency is the greatest riches of all.”

Again, Aristophanes having written:—

“Life you securely shall enjoy, being just
And free from turmoil, and from fear live well,”—

Epicurus says, “The greatest fruit of righteousness is tranquillity.”

Let these species, then, of Greek plagiarism of sentiments, being such, stand as sufficient for a clear specimen to him who is capable of perceiving.

And not only have they been detected pirating and paraphrasing thoughts and expressions, as will be shown; but they will also be convicted of the possession of what is entirely stolen. For stealing entirely what is the production of others, they have published it as their own; as Eugamon of Cyrene did the entire book on the Thesprotians from Musæus, and Pisander of Camirus the Heraclea of Pisinus of Lindus, and Panyasis of Halicarnassus, the capture of Œchalia from Cleophilus of Samos.

You will also find that Homer, the great poet, took from Orpheus, from the Disappearance of Dionysus, those words and what follows verbatim:—

“As a man trains a luxuriant shoot of olive.”

And in the Theogony, it is said by Orpheus of Kronos:—

“He lay, his thick neck bent aside; and him
All-conquering Sleep had seized.”

These Homer transferrred to the Cyclops. And Hesiod writes of Melampous:—

“Gladly to hear, what the immortals have assigned
To men, the brave from cowards clearly marks;”

and so forth, taking it word for word from the poet Musæus.

And Aristophanes the comic poet has, in the first of the Thesmophoriazusæ, transferred the words from the Empiprameni of Cratinus. And Plato the comic poet, and Aristophanes in Dædalus, steal from one another. Cocalus, composed by Araros, the son of Aristophanes, was by the comic poet Philemon altered, and made into the comedy called Hypobolimœns.

Eumelus and Acusilaus the historiographers changed the contents of Hesiod into prose, and published them as their own. Gorgias of Leontium and Eudemus of Naxus, the historians, stole from Melesagoras. And, besides, there is Bion of Proconnesus, who epitomized and transcribed the writings of the ancient Cadmus, and Archilochus, and Aristotle, and Leandrus, and Hellanicus, and Hecatæus, and Androtion, and Philochorus. Dieuchidas of Megara transferred the beginning of his treatise from the Deucalion of Hellanicus. I pass over in silence Heraclitus of Ephesus, who took a very great deal from Orpheus.

From Pythagoras Plato derived the immortality of the soul; and he from the Egyptians. And many of the Platonists composed books, in which they show that the Stoics, as we said in the beginning, and Aristotle, took the most and principal of their dogmas from Plato. Epicurus also pilfered his leading dogmas from Democritus. Let these things then be so. For life would fail me, were I to undertake to go over the subject in detail, to expose the selfish plagiarism of the Greeks, and how they claim the discovery of the best of their doctrines, which they have received from us.