Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography/Volume 3/Xenocrates
XENOCRATES, an eminent Platonic philosopher, succeeded Speusippus (Plato's immediate follower) as head of the academy about 340 b.c. He was born in 396 at Chalcedon, a city on the shores of the Bosphorus, nearly opposite Byzantium. Like Speusippus, Xenocrates accompanied Plato on at least one of his visits to the court of Dionysius of Syracuse. After Plato's death in 347, he withdrew, in company with Aristotle, to the court of Hermias, the ruler of Atarneus in Mysia, a province of Asia Minor. He cannot have remained very long in this retreat, for we are told that he was frequently sent by the Athenians on embassies to Philip of Macedon, with whom they were at this time embroiled, and by whom, in the year 338, they were finally subjugated. When the failing health of Speusippus compelled him to resign the presidency of the academy, Xenocrates was summoned to the vacant post; and this office he occupied from about 340 b.c. until his death in 314, when he was in the eighty-third year of his age. The temperament and morals of Xenocrates were grave, not to say austere, in the extreme. His name was quoted in antiquity as almost a synonym for modesty and temperance. His powers of persuasion must also have been very great, if we may judge from the conversion of Polemon, which was effected by means of his eloquence. Polemon was notorious for his profligacy and dissipation. But happening one day to enter the academy with a crowd of riotous companions, he was so much struck by the discourse of Xenocrates, who was lecturing on the advantages of temperance, that he tore the chaplet of flowers from his head, and resolved, then and for ever, to renounce his former way of life. Acting up to his resolution, he became the most temperate of the temperate, and, moreover, studied philosophy so assiduously that he was judged worthy to succeed Xenocrates in the presidency of the academy. Xenocrates was a voluminous writer; but none of his works have come down to us. But from their titles we may learn that he prosecuted diligently the researches in which his great master had led the way. He wrote on logic, on ideas, on the opposite, on the indefinite, on the soul, on the passions, on happiness and virtue, on the state; and he seems, like Plato, to have dwelt principally on the distinction between sense and reason as the cardinal distinction in philosophy —J. F. F.