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Xuthus: Testimonia

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These Testimonia consist of a single report about Xuthus, an early Greek thinker described by Simplicius as a Pythagorean. Aristotle, discussing in his Physics the argument that void must exist because bodies can be rarefied and condensed, says that Xuthus held that without such compression the whole universe would swell up like waves; Simplicius adds a comment on the passage.

Nothing else is known of Xuthus, but the report preserves an early argument in the long ancient debate over the existence of void, a question central to atomism and to Aristotle's physics. If Simplicius is right to call him a Pythagorean, it shows that the problem of how bodies expand and contract was already being discussed in Pythagorean circles.

About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: DK 33). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).

Ancient Greek · Philosophy
Testimonia
Xuthus · every word parsed
1
ARISTOT. Phys. Δ 9. 216b 22 εἰσὶ δέ τινες οἳ διὰ τοῦ μανοῦ καὶ πυκνοῦ οἴονται φανερὸν εἶναι ὅτι ἔστι κενόν. εἰ μὲν γὰρ μὴ ἔστι μανὸν καὶ πυκνόν, οὐδὲ συνιέναι καὶ πιλεῖσθαι οἷόν τε. εἰ δὲ τοῦτο μὴ εἴη, ἢ ὅλως κίνησις οὐκ ἔσται ἢ κυμανεῖ τὸ ὅλο ν, ὥσπερ ἔφη Ξοῦθος. SIMPL. C. d. St. 683, 24 Ξ. ὁ Πυθαγορικός, καὶ ὑπερχυθήσεται καὶ ἐπὶ πλέον ἐκταθήσεται, ὡς ἡ θάλασσα διὰ τῶν κυμάτων εἰς τοὺς αἰγιαλοὺς ὑπερχεῖται.
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Text: Perseus Digital Library, licensed CC BY-SA. Dictionary: Liddell, Scott & Jones (Perseus, CC BY-SA). Morphology: odyCy — machine parsing, corrected against the AGDT & PROIEL treebanks and Morpheus.
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