Ocellus Lucanus
Encyclopedia
Ocellus Lucanus, a Pythagorean philosopher, born in Lucania
Lucania
Lucania was an ancient district of southern Italy, extending from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Gulf of Taranto. To the north it adjoined Campania, Samnium and Apulia, and to the south it was separated by a narrow isthmus from the district of Bruttium...

 in the 5th century BC, was perhaps a pupil of Pythagoras
Pythagoras
Pythagoras of Samos was an Ionian Greek philosopher, mathematician, and founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism. Most of the information about Pythagoras was written down centuries after he lived, so very little reliable information is known about him...

 himself.

Stobaeus
Stobaeus
Joannes Stobaeus , from Stobi in Macedonia, was the compiler of a valuable series of extracts from Greek authors. The work was originally divided into two volumes containing two books each...

 (Ecl. Phys. i. 13) has preserved a fragment of his Περὶ νόμου (if he was really the author) in the Doric dialect
Doric Greek
Doric or Dorian was a dialect of ancient Greek. Its variants were spoken in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, Crete, Rhodes, some islands in the southern Aegean Sea, some cities on the coasts of Asia Minor, Southern Italy, Sicily, Epirus and Macedon. Together with Northwest Greek, it forms the...

, but the only one of his alleged works which is extant is a short treatise in four chapters in the Ionic dialect generally known as On the Nature of the Universe.

Excerpts from this are given in Stobaeus
Stobaeus
Joannes Stobaeus , from Stobi in Macedonia, was the compiler of a valuable series of extracts from Greek authors. The work was originally divided into two volumes containing two books each...

 (i. 20), but in Doric. It is certainly not authentic, and cannot be dated earlier than the 1st century BC. It maintains the doctrine that the universe is uncreated and eternal; that to its three great divisions correspond the three kinds of beings—gods, men and daemons; and, finally, that the human race with all its institutions (the family, marriage and the like) must be eternal. It advocates an ascetic mode of life, with a view to the perfect reproduction of the race and its training in all that is noble and beautiful.

Editions of the Περὶ τῆς τοῦ παντὸς φύςεως, by AF Rudolph (1801, with commentary), and by FWA Mullach in Fragmenta philosophorum graecorum, i. (1860); see also Eduard Zeller
Eduard Zeller
Eduard Gottlob Zeller , was a German philosopher and theologian of the Tübingen School of theology.- Life :Eduard Zeller was born at Kleinbottwar in Württemberg, and educated at the University of Tübingen and under the influence of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel...

, History of Greek Philosophy, i. (Eng. trans.), and J de Heyden-Zielewicz in Breslauer philologische Abhandlungen, viii. 3 (1901). There is an English translation (1831) by Thomas Taylor, the Platonist.

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