northern portion of the western town wall, which in one section served at the same time as an embankment against floods (it was apparently more conspicuous in the time of P. Cluver, Sicilia, p. 133), of an extensive necropolis, about 1000 tombs of which have been explored, and of a deposit of votive objects from a temple. The harbour lay to the north of the town.
See P. Orsi in Monumenti dei Lincei (1891), i. 689–950; and Atti del congresso delle scienze storiche, v. 181 (Rome, 1904). (T. As.)
MEGARIAN SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. This school was
founded by Euclides of Megara, one of
the pupils of Socrates. Two main
elements went to make up the Megarian
doctrine. Like the Cynics and the
Cyrenaics, Euclides started from the
Socratic principle that virtue is
knowledge. But into combination with this
he brought the Eleatic doctrine of Unity.
Perceiving the difficulty of the Socratic
dictum he endeavoured to give to the
word “knowledge” a definite content by
divorcing it absolutely from the sphere
of sense and experience, and confining it
to a sort of transcendental dialectic or
logic. The Eleatic unity is Goodness,
and is beyond the sphere of sensible
apprehension. This goodness, therefore,
alone exists; matter, motion, growth
and decay are figments of the senses;
they have no existence for Reason.
“Whatever is, is!” Knowledge is of
ideas and is in conformity with the
necessary laws of thought. Hence Plato
in the Sophist describes the Megarians
as “the friends of ideas.” Yet the
Megarians were by no means in agreement with the Platonic
idealism. For they held that ideas, though eternal and
immovable, have neither life nor action nor movement.
This dialectic, initiated by Euclides, became more and more opposed to the testimony of experience; in the hands of Eubulides and Alexinus it degenerated into hairsplitting, mainly in the form of the reductio ad absurdum. The strength of these men lay in destructive criticism rather than in construction: as dialecticians they were successful, but they contributed little to ethical speculation. They spent their energy in attacking Plato and Aristotle, and hence earned the opprobrious epithet of Eristic. They used their dialectic subtlety to disprove the possibility of motion and decay; unity is the negation of change, increase and decrease, birth and death. None the less, in ancient times they received great respect owing to their intellectual pre-eminence. Cicero (Academics, ii. 42) describes their doctrine as a “nobilis disciplina,” and identifies them closely with Parmenides and Zeno. But their most immediate influence was upon the Stoics (q.v.), whose founder, Zeno, studied under Stilpo. This philosopher, a man of striking and attractive personality, succeeded in fusing the Megarian dialectic with Cynic naturalism. The result of the combination was in fact a juxtaposition rather than a compound; it is manifestly impossible to find an organic connexion between a practical code like Cynicism and the transcendental logic of the Megarians. But it served as a powerful stimulus to Zeno, who by descent was imbued with oriental mysticism.
For bibliographical information about the Megarians, see Euclides; Eubulides; Diodorus Cronus; Stilpo. See also Eleatic School; Cynics; Stoics; and, for the connexion between the Megarians and the Eretrians, Menedemus and Phaedo. Also Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools; Dyeck, De Megaricorum doctrina (Bonn, 1827); Mallet, Histoire de l’école de Mégare (Paris, 1845); Ritter, Über die Philosophie der meg. Schule; Prantl, Geschichte der Logik, i. 32; Henne, L’école de Mégare (Paris, 1843); Gomperz, Greek Thinkers (Eng. trans. 1905), ii. 170 seq.
MEGARON, the principal hall of the ancient Greek palace, situated in the andron or men’s quarter. Examples have been found at Tiryns and Mycenae, and references are made to it in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
MEGATHERIUM (properly Megalotherium), a huge extinct edentate mammal from the Pleistocene deposits of Buenos Aires, typifying the family Megatheriidae (or Megalotheriidae), and by far the largest representative of the Edentata. Except, indeed, for its relatively shorter limbs Megatherium americanum rivalled an elephant in bulk, the total length of the skeleton being 18 feet, five of which are taken up by the tail. The Megatheriidae, which include a number of genera, are collectively known as ground-sloths, and occupy a position intermediate between the sloths and the ant-eater: their skulls being of the type of the former, while their limbs and vertebrae conform in structure to those of the latter. As in the other typical South American edentates, there are no teeth in the front of the jaws, while those of the cheek-series usually comprise five pairs in the upper and four in the lower. In nearly all the other Pleistocene forms these teeth were subcylindrical in shape, with the summit of the crown (except sometimes in the first pair) forming a cup-like depression; enamel being in all cases absent. From all these Megatherium differs in the form and structure of the teeth.
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Fig. 1.—Skeleton of the Megatherium, from the specimen in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. |
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Fig. 2.—Lower Jaw and Teeth of Megatherium. |
In form, as shown in fig. 2, the teeth are quadrangular prisms, each of which is surmounted by a pair of transverse ridges. They grew apparently throughout life, and were implanted to a great depth in the jaws, being 7 or 8 in. in length, with a cross-section of at least an inch and a half. The ridges on the crown are due to the arrangement of the vertical layers of hard dentine (fig. 3, d), softer vasodentine (v) and cement (c). The skull is relatively small, with the lower jaw very deep in its central portion, and produced in part into a long snout-like symphysis for the reception, doubtless, of a large and fleshy tongue (fig. 2). Unlike sloths, the megatherium has seven cervical vertebrae; and the spines of all the trunk-vertebrae incline backwards. The pelvis and hind-limbs are much more powerful than the fore-quarters; thereby enabling these animals, in all probability, to rear themselves on their hind-quarters, and thus pull down the branches of trees: if not, indeed, in some cases to bodily uproot the trees themselves. Large chevron-bones are suspended to the vertebrae of the tail, which was massive, and probably afforded a support when the monster was sitting up. The humerus has no foramen, and the
