Athamas the Pythagorean of Posidonia survives in one Doric sentence. Clement, Stromateis 6.17.3, quotes him: the beginning of everything is ungenerated, and there are four roots — fire, water, air, earth — from which generated things come. Clement then sets Empedocles’s four-roots hexameters beside him.
Thesleff, Pythagorean Texts of the Hellenistic Period (Åbo, 1965), p. 54. Canon: 〈ATHAMAS〉 Phil. (3 B.C.?). Iamblichus, VP 267, lists Athamas among the Poseidonians with Simus.
The slot is that four-roots fragment in Clement, a Hellenistic Pythagorean echo of Empedocles.
Available Works
On the Four Roots of All Things
Ἀπόσπασμα
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