THE PHILOSOPHICAL EPOS 75 partly as an attack on shadows, partly as mere 'bad taste.' The example of Xenophanes led his great philosophical disciple to put his abstract speculations into verse form. Parmenides' poem On Nature* was in two books, the first on the way of Truth, the second on the way of False- hood. There is a mythological setting, and the poet's ride to the daughters of the Sun, who led him through the stone gates of Night and Day to the sanctuary of Wisdom, is quite impressive in its way. But it would all have been better in prose. Empedocles of Acragas, on the other hand, is a real poet, perhaps as great as his admirer Lucretius, and working on a finer material. He was an important citizen, a champion of liberty against the tyrants Theron and Thrasydaios. His history, like that of the kindred spirits, Pythagoras and ApoUonius of Tyana, has been overlaid by the miraculous. He stopped the Etesian winds ; he drained an enormous marsh ; he recalled a dead woman to life ; he prophesied the hour that the gods would summon him, and passed away without dying. His enemies said that from sheer vanity he had thrown himself down Mount Etna that he might disappear without a trace and pass for immortal. 'How did any one know, then?' 'He had brass boots and the volcano threw one of them up ! ' Saner tradition said that he died an exile in the Peloponnese. His character profoundly influenced Greek and Arabian thought, and many works in both languages have passed under his name. His system we speak of later; but the thaumaturgy is the real life of the poem. Take the words of a banished immortal stained by sin : — " There is an utterance of Fate, an ancient decree of the
