URSA MAJOR AND URSA MINOR

We are mostly done with hoi hepta sophoi, but not yet. We still have one canonical member Thales to go--- with a whole miniseries to his name, a little bit later. There are however two more lists to go through, which can be called non-canonical. These two lists are separated by me, because one includes the names of giants, whereas the other includes names so obscure that only a much learned expert on the complicated subject of hoi hepta sophoi will be able to recall them, with the help of a very thick and very specialized dictionary. I will call them Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, in honor of the words major and minor contained in the names of these two celestial constellations.

The great giants of hoi hepta sophoi (alias Ursa Major), are Orpheus, Epimenides, Pythagoras, Pherecydes, and Anaxagoras. We have talked about Orpheus already, and soon we will be talking about Pythagoras and Anaxagoras at great length, and about Epimenides and Pherecydes at some length. The cast of characters in Ursa Minor is, however, of an immediate interest to us, because without some discussion of the minor names listed in it, we shall not be able to give closure to our current general subject, which is hoi hepta sophoi.

The names on this list have been given out sporadically, to identify “hoi hepta sophoi,” thus identified by a number of less authoritative sources than the ones we were using previously. These conspicuously unfamiliar names, listed here in the alphabetical order, are: Acusilaus, Aristodemus, Aristoxenus, Epicharmus, Lasus, Leophantes, Pamphylus, Scabras, and Thaletas.

As I consulted my Webster’s Biographical Dictionary as an authoritative source of historical Who’s Who, I found only one “minor” in it, and it was Epicharmus. (The names of Aristoxenus and Pamphylus there were coincidental, belonging to different individuals who lived much later.) Here is that Webster’s entry:

“Epicharmus. Greek writer of comedies in late sixth and early fifth century BC; born on island of Cos. Only fragments of his plays are extant.”

Aside from being a writer of apparently excellent comedies (Plato’s Socrates calls him the prince of comedy and compares him to Homer, the prince of tragedy), he is identified as a bona fide pre-Socratic philosopher in the authoritative Soviet academic publication Fragments From Early Greek Philosophers (Monuments of Philosophical Thought, Nauka Publishing House, 1989). He is identified as a follower of Heraclitus, which ought to disqualify him chronologically, and for the obvious reason of much lesser importance, from the hoi hepta sophoi list. Yet from a variety of other sources, and assuming that it was he, and not any other Epicharmus, who was mentioned in them, he lived between 540 and 450 BC, and may have been an adept of Pythagoras.

Acusilaus was an obscure Dorian sage who flourished between 575 and 525 BC. Mentioned by Plato and a few others, he was the author of a historical work Genealogy, following Hesiod, but occasionally differing from him.

Thaletas (regrettably, too often confused with Thales) was a 7^th century BC sage, physician, musician, and poet from the island of Crete. There is a legendary connection between him and Lycurgus of Sparta, which says that Thaletas provided instrumental help to the Spartan in his lawmaking.

All other names of the Ursa Minor are too obscure, and often confused with other people of the same name, and the reason that they were listed at all was to afford them an honorable mention, while extending the list of hoi hepta sophoi for the fuller historical record.