Ocellus Lucanus

Ocellus Lucanus was allegedly a Pythagorean philosopher, born in Lucania in Magna Graecia in the 6th century BC. Aristoxenus cites him along with another Lucanian by the name of Ocillo, in a work preserved by Iamblichus that lists 218 supposed Pythagoreans, which nonetheless contained some inventions, wrong attributions to non-Pythagoreans, and some names derived from earlier pseudopythagoric traditions.

Pseudo-Ocellus Lucanus A pseudepigraphic work, "On the Nature of the Universe", was attributed to him, and the citation of its author nowadays appears as Pseudo-Ocellus Lucanus. In two apocryphal letters that Archytas allegedly sent to Plato, he mentioned that he had talked with the descendants of Ocellus and sent four Ocellus' books to him.

Pseudo-Ocellus also asserts that the three great divisions of the universe correspond the three kinds of beings—gods, men and daemons; and, finally, that the human race with all its institutions (the family, marriage and the like) must be eternal. It advocates an ascetic mode of life, with a view to the perfect reproduction of the race and its training in all that is noble and beautiful.

Editions of the Περὶ τῆς τοῦ παντὸς φύσεως, by A. F. Rudolph (1801, with commentary), and by F. W. A. Mullach in Fragmenta philosophorum graecorum, i. (1860); see also Eduard Zeller, History of Greek Philosophy, i. (Eng. trans.), and J de Heyden-Zielewicz in Breslauer philologische Abhandlungen, viii. 3 (1901); and R. Harder, Ocellus Lucanus [Neue philologische Untersuchungen vol. 1. Berlin: Weidmann, 1926. There is an English translation (1831) by Thomas Taylor, the Platonist.