ABSTRACT
Leucippos came from Miletos or Elea, studied in the school of Parmenides, and founded a school at Abdera; he is another example, almost in the time of Melissos, of the intellectual exchanges which went on between Great Greece and Ionia. He seems to have been a contemporary of Empedocles and Anaxagoras, but wrote earlier than Anaxagoras, if it is true that the latter plagiarized from him, as Democritos says (Frag. 5). The development given to the school by Democritos of Abdera, the scientific activity of that thinker, and the formation of a school library (whose catalogue, compiled in tetralogies by Thrasyllos at the beginning of our era, proves that Leucippos’s works, the Great System of the World and the treatise On the Mind, were not distinguished from those of his successor), all helped to efface the personality of the master. No doubt, we can presume that all that bears on the interests of a later period, the theory of conduct and the theory of knowledge, belongs rather to Democritos. But there are so few instances in which we can say what is Leucippos’s share that it is, perhaps, wisest 1 to follow Aristotle’s example, and not to separate the two. But if we do this we must not forget that Democritos, who was probably at least ten years younger than Protagoras, was a contemporary of the Sophists and Socrates; that he died at an advanced age, surviving Socrates twenty years, if not more; and that Anaxagoras was not yet dead when Democritos, still a young man, published his Little System of the World. The encyclopaedic and didactic character of his work, in which medicine, agriculture, and other arts have their place, makes it like that of Aristotle, and is typical of the times in which he lived. It is strange that, of all that vast work, so little, in proportion, has survived. It seems to have been lost after the Ilnd century of our era, though the name of Democritos continued to enjoy an extraordinary prestige, earned by his alleged journeys in the East and all the romantic tales of his magical exploits.
