The IoniansMalcolm SchofieldTHALES AND OTHERSThe Greeks agreed that philosophy had begun with Thales. However they did notknow much about his views.1What survives is mostly a potent legend. Herodotus tells stories of hispractical ingenuity, political vision and most famously the skill and learningwhich enabled him to predict a solar eclipse datable to 585 BC. This feat hasbeen doubted by some modern scholars, but it was not an impossible one forsomeone familiar with the use of eclipse cycles and fondness for predictionamong Babylonian astronomers, as an inhabitant of Miletus on the coast of AsiaMinor might have become. In Aristophanes the astronomer and inventor Meton—introduced as a character in the drama—dreams up a hare-brained scheme foremploying mathematical instruments to measure the air which inspires thecomment, ‘the man’s a Thales’ (Birds1009).2The use of instruments in determining the behaviour of heavenly bodiesconstitutes in fact Thales’ best-documented claim to a place in the history ofrational enquiry about the natural world. He was believed to have worked out thevariable period of the solstices, and to have calculated the height of the pyramidsfrom their shadows and the distance of ships out at sea. Callimachus credits himwith ‘measuring’ the Little Bear, as a navigational aid. The name of his associateAnaximander is likewise associated with the ‘discovery’ of the equinox andsolstices, or more plausibly with the use of agnomonor stable vertical rod tomark them, as also with that of ‘hour-markers’. Anaximander is also said to havepublished the first map of the earth. Some of the accounts supplying thisinformation may embellish or distort. For example, Eudemus’ attempts toattribute knowledge of particular geometrical theorems to Thales on the strengthof his efforts at mensuration probably represent (under the guise of Aristotelianhistory) nothing more than a determination to furnish the geometry of his ownday with a suitably ancient and distinguished intellectual pedigree.But thereports on Thales’ and Anaximander’s endeavours in this field are numerous andvarious enough in date and provenance, and in their gist sufficiently unfanciful,for it to be unreasonable to press doubts about the truth of the picture theyconvey. These two thinkers were evidently fascinated with measurement, andwith the idea of putting to nature— and more especially the heavens—questionswhich instruments could be employed to answer.3One other scientific puzzle (as we might now term it) which Thales is reportedto have tried to solve is the behaviour of the magnet. Here his style of enquirywas very different. He claimed that magnets have soul: they have the power ofmoving other bodies without themselves being moved by anything—but that is acharacteristic only of things that have soul, i.e. are alive. Heady speculation, notingenious observation, is now the order of the day. Perhaps the phenomenon ofmagnetism was presented as one piece of evidence for the more general thesis,‘All things are full of gods’, which Aristotle at any rate is inclined to interpret interms of the proposition that there is soul in the universe (i.e. not just inanimals).4In cosmological speculation Thales is presented by Aristotle as a champion ofthe primacy of water as an explanatory principle. Aristotle writes as thoughThales meant by this that water was the material substrate of everything thatexists. But the authority on whom he relies for his information, the sophistHippias of Elis, seems to have mentioned Thales’ view in the context of a surveyof opinions about theoriginof things. With one exception, to be discussed atlength shortly, Aristotle knows nothing else about the water principle. Hecontents himself with the guess that Thales opted for it because warmth, sperm,nutriment and the life they foster or represent are all functions of moisture.5The most definite claim Aristotle makes in this connection appears inOn theHeavens(II. 13, 294a28–32 [KRS 84]).Others say that the earth rests on water. For this is the most ancientaccount we have received, which they say was given by Thales theMilesian, that it stays put through floating like a log or some other suchthing.To come to terms with this unappealing version of flat-earthism we need toconsider two pieces of information relating to Thales’ intellectual grandchildAnaximenes, pupil of Anaximander, both also of Miletus:Anaximenes and Anaxagoras and Democritus say that its [the earth’s]flatness is responsible for it staying put: for it does not cut the air beneathbut covers it like a lid, which is evidently what those bodies characterizedby flatness do.(AristotleOn the HeavensII.13, 294b13ff. [KRS 150])The earth is flat, riding upon air; and similarly also sun, moon and theother stars, although they are all fiery, ride upon air on account of theirflatness.(HippolytusRefutationI.7.4 [KRS 151])Anaximenes is usually reckoned one of the least interesting of the pre-Socratics.What we are told of his cosmological system indicates a theorist deaf to theimaginative a priori reasonings which appear to have motivated many of theideas of his mentor Anaximander; and Anaximander’s own mentor, Thales, was—as we have been seeing— the pioneer who initiated the whole Ionian traditionof physical speculation, so far as we can tell from the inadequate survivingevidence of his views. Yet in some respects at least Anaximenes was a moreinfluential figure than either of his two predecessors. And this is of crucialimportance for our evaluation of the evidence relating to them. Hence thedecision to start our enquiry into Thales’ flat-earthism with what we are toldabout Anaximenes.Anaximenes’ influence is apparent from Aristotle’s testimony about hisaccount of the earth. The two great Ionian cosmologies of the fifth century werepropounded by Anaxagoras and the atomists Leucippus and Democritus. Thereare radical and systematic differences in the explanatory foundations of the twotheories. But despite their sophistication in responding to metaphysical andepistemological challenges posed by Parmenides and (at least in the atomists’case) Zeno, both endeavour to account for a world conceived in terms defined byAnaximenes, as Aristotle’s report (KRS 150, quoted above) makes clear. It is aworld in which (a) the earth is taken to be a flat body surrounded by air aboveand below, (b) bodies fall through the air unless there is some special cause oftheir not doing so, and (c) flatness is just such a cause. This is a picture of the worldfar removed from our own heliocentric model, where the earth is (roughlyspeaking) a spherical object spinning in an elliptical orbit round the sun. InAnaximenes’ version it is not even a geocentric model, because while heimagines the earth as occupying a position between above and below, there is noimplication that it is at the centre of a system: the heavenly bodies do not revolveabout it, but turn in a circle above it.6There can be little doubt of the importance Anaximenes attached to theses (a)to (c). As Hippolytus’ evidence in KRS 151 suggests, he applied the same kindof reasoning to account for the appearance of the sun and moon in the heavens.Just as the earth does not fall downwards, so they too are supported by air andhence stay aloft— even when they are not apparent:He says that the stars do not move under the earth, as others have supposed,but round it, just as if a felt cap is being turned round our head; and that thesun is hidden not by passing under the earth, but through being covered bythe higher parts of the earth and through its increased distance from us.(HippolytusRefutationI.7.6 [KRS 156])Probably the sun and moon at least are conceived of by Anaximenesasbodies.7That is, though fiery they are forms of earth, just as in Anaxagoras: Anaxagorasnotoriously claimed that sun, moon and stars were themselves bodies made ofcompressed earth, fiery stones (HippolytusRefutation1.8.6 [KRS 502]), whilethe atomists make them ignited complexes of atoms and void (Diogenes LaertiusIX. 3 2 [KRS 563]). However these later thinkers agreed in finding in the vortexa mechanism to explain projected revolutions of these bodies, and so withoutabandoning Anaximenes’ assumption (b) about downward motion could unlikehim account for their passing below the earth.8Another piece of information about Anaximenes’ views on the sun indicateshow he supported his thesis (c) that their flatness keeps flat things from falling:9‘Anaximenes says that the sun is flat like a leaf (Aetius II.22.1 [KRS 155]).Floating leaves, of course, move about, just as Anaximenes’ sun does. Theirflatness prevents not lateral but downward movement. Why the sun, moon andstars rotate but the earth does not is not discussed in the surviving evidence.Now back to Thales: his reported view on the stability of the earth has to beseen within the context of the general theoretical framework we have beendescribing. Two features of the state of the evidence dictate this conclusion.First, Aristotle’s citation of Thales’ idea comes in a chapter which represents him,Anaximenes, Anaxagoras and Democritus as all upholding one side of theargument in a pre-Socratic debate about the subject (Anaximenes’ ultimateachievement is to have persuaded Aristotle that itwasa key subject for the pre-Socratics and his stance the standard one taken by them). Second, Thales himselfseems not to have written a book. So the likeliest way for his opinion to havesurvived will be via a reference to it in the writings of someone close to him intime: presumably either a member of his own circle such as Anaximander orAnaximenes, or—as I shall be suggesting later—a critic such as Xenophanes.10To put the point a bit more sharply, we can perceive how Thales’ view about theearth was received, both around his own time and in the pages of Aristotle, a lotbetter than we can form reliable conjectures as to how it fitted into whateverintellectual schemes he himself elaborated. In large part this is a function of theelusiveness in history of the merely oral.One guess might be that Thales had already anticipated Anaximenes inconceiving of the earth and the sun, moon and stars as comparable phenomenarequiring to have their differing patterns of motion and stability explained by thesame sorts of physical mechanisms. At the other extreme he might be interpretedas a figure much closer to the myth-tellers of the ancient Near East, preoccupiedas they were with the origin of the earth and its physical relationship withprimeval water, but not seeing a need to ask analogous physical questions aboutthe heavenly bodies, despite his intense interest in determining and measuringtheir behaviour.11The psalmist believes that Jahweh ‘stretched out the earthabove the waters’ (136:6), ‘founded it upon the seas, and established it upon thefloods’ (24:2). Similarly, in the epic of Gilgamesh Marduk builds a raft on thesurface of the original waters, and on it in turn a hut of reeds, which is what theearth is. Perhaps Thales’ originality consisted only in introducing an opinionborrowed from sources such as these into Greece, Homer having had the earthsurrounded by the river Oceanos but stretching down into murky Tartarus, andHesiod being certain that its creation as ‘firm seat of all things for ever’(Theogony117 [KRS 31]) precedes that of heaven and sea.It is not clear on this second construction of Thales’ view how much relativeimportance he himself need have attached to the issue of the stability of theearth. His main concern might well have been the general primacy of water inthe explanation of things, with the suggestion that it is what supports the earthsimply one among several consequential proposals, and conceivably accorded nospecial significance. Certainly the broad idea of water as first principle is whatAristotle focuses on in his more fundamental presentation of pre-Socraticphysical theories inMetaphysicsA, following a tradition of interpretation alreadyvisible in Plato and apparently established by the sophist Hippias.12The evidence is rather stronger that Anaximander took the question of thestability of the earth to be a major problem. It consists principally of anextraordinarily interesting but frustratingly controversial passage of Aristotlefrom the same chapter ofOn the Heavensthat we have been exploiting already.Aristotle takes Anaximander to be a proponent of an entirely different kind ofposition from that represented in different ways by Thales and Anaximenes:There are some who say, like Anaximander among the ancients, that it [theearth] stays put because of likeness. For it is appropriate for that which isestablished in the middle and is related all alike to the extremities not tomove up rather than down or sideways; but it is impossible for it to make amotion in opposite directions; so of necessity it stays put.(AristotleOn the HeavensII.13, 295b10ff. [KRS 123])The theory Aristotle ascribes to Anaximander has been described as ‘a brilliantleap into the realms of the mathematical and thea priori’ [KRS p. 134]. It isoften taken to constitute the first recorded appeal to a Principle of SufficientReason. There is apparently no preoccupation with the propensity of bodies tofall, or with the conditions—flatness, buoyancy of the medium—under whichthat propensity can be counter-acted. It looks instead as though Anaximandersubscribes to a fully-fledged geocentric conception of the universe, and inappealing to a sophisticated indifference principle makes the explicit and equallysophisticated assumption that any body at the centre of a sphere will have nopropensity to move from it in any particular direction. The result—if we cantrust what Aristotle says—was a highly ingenious and original solution to whatmust presumably have been perceived as an important puzzle.13But doubt has been cast on Aristotle’s reliability on this occasion.14There aretwo principal reasons for the doubt. First is that Anaximander was, like Thalesand Anaximenes, a flat-earther. Although he abandoned Thales’ log analogy, hecompared the shape of the earth to the drum of a column, much wider than it isdeep, emphasizing—presumably against the Homeric picture—that it has both anupper and a lower surface.15But the hypothesis of asphericalearth is whatwould fit much more comfortably with the theory Aristotle is reporting.16Flatearthismmore naturally presupposes the flat earth dynamics expressed inAnaximenes’ theses (a) to (c). Second, Aristotle makes it clear that it was notjust Anaximander who subscribed to the indifference theory. On one guess onlythe initial claim that the earth stays put because of ‘likeness’ reflectsAnaximander’s own formulation. Attention is often drawn to the probability thatAristotle also has in mind a much later and no doubt more readily accessibletext, namely the account of the earth put in Socrates’ mouth at the end of Plato’sPhaedo. Socrates is there made to claim that he has been convinced by ‘someone’:presumably a tacit acknowledgement of a pre-Socratic source, although scholarshave never been able to agree on the likeliest candidate. The key sentences arethese:Well, I have been persuaded first that, if it is in the middle of the heavens,being round in shape, then it has no need of air to prevent it from falling,nor of any other similar necessity. The likeness of the heaven itself to itselfeverywhere and the equal balance of the earth itself are sufficient to hold itfast. For something equally balanced, set in the middle of something allalike, will be unable to tilt any more or any less in any direction, but beingall alike it will stay put untilted.(PlatoPhaedo108e–109a)Should we accept that Aristotle is mostly drawing on Plato, not Anaximander?These arguments against ascribing the indifference theory—and with itrejection of the dynamics of flat-earthism—to Anaximander are to be resisted. Iconsider first the idea that Aristotle’s formulation of the theory derives largelyfrom thePhaedotext.There are clearly similarities in language and thought between it andAristotle’s account of the indifference theory, notably the stress on ‘likeness’ asa cause. There is equally a striking divergence. Plato makes the stability of theearth a function of two things, its position at the centre of a spherical heaven andits equilibrium in that position. Aristotle by contrast speaks only of the earth’sposition relative to the extremities, but makes what in Plato functions as anindifference inference from equilibrium serve as the argument that it cannotmove position.At first sight it may look as though the lack of fit between the twoformulations has no effect on the character or cogency of the reasoning, withAristotle simply extracting its essentials in economical fashion. There is in fact avery significant difference.Consider first the Platonic argument from equilibrium. This makes crucialappeal to theweightof the earth. It supposes that a rigid body which is ‘like’—inthe sense that its weight is equally distributed throughout its mass—will stay putin balance under certain conditions, namely if poised about a central fulcrum.Then its weight on one side of the fulcrum will give it the same reason to tilt inthat direction as its weight on the other side to tilt in the other direction. It cannottilt in both directions at once. So it cannot tilt at all. Plato’s claim is that the earthis just such a body, and that because it occupies a position at the centre of asymmetrical cosmos, it is indeed poised about a central fulcrum. He infers that itwill not tilt.So Plato is clearly presenting aphysicalargument. Aristotle’s version of theindifference theory, by contrast, is abstractly conceived, and makes no specificphysical assumptions. It assumes only something equidistant from itsextremities; and then claims that such a thing could have no sufficient reason totravel in one plane towards the extremities that was not a sufficient reason for itto travel there in the same plane in the opposite direction. Nothing is said aboutwhat sort of reason might count as a sufficient reason. We might think ofphysical reasons, e.g. gravitational attraction of the heavens; but nothingprecludes the possibility that something purely mathematical, e.g. asymmetry, isenvisaged. Perhaps this possibility is positively favoured by the mathematicallanguage in which the assumption underpinning this version of the theory iscouched and by the absence of reference to physical considerations.IfAristotle is basing himself principally on thePhaedopassage, he can onlybe offering a vague and general summary of Plato’s reasoning. It is moreplausible to supposed that he is actually relying more on a quite differentformulation of the indifference theory—in Anaximander’s book. At this point itis appropriate to mention an important further piece of evidence aboutAnaximander’s view of why the earth stays put:The earth is in mid-air [lit. ‘aloft’,meteo_ron] not controlled byanything,17but staying put because of its like distance from all things.(HippolytusRefutationI.6.3 [KRS 124])Scholars are in agreement that Hippolytus in this part of his work is followingTheophrastus’ account of early Greek physics, and that Theophrastus’ treatmentof the subject follows Aristotle in general approach. Theophrastus was oftenmore accurate, however, when it came to details. In the present instance it isclear that Hippolytus’ testimony broadly supports Aristotle’s interpretation. Itsuggests that Anaximander spoke not just of ‘likeness’ in general terms, whichmight be compatible witheitheran argument from symmetryoran equilibriumargument. The more specific expression ‘like distance from all things’ definitelyfavours the Aristotelian account. Its similarity to Aristotle’s phrase ‘related allalike to the extremities’ suggests that at this point Aristotle was recallingsomething in Anaximander rather than in Plato. And while it does not precludethe possibility that Anaximander appealed to equilibrium, it gives it no support.(Equally Hippolytus does not attest explicit use of indifference reasoning on hispart; perhaps this was one element in Aristotle’s report derived from Plato alone,even if it was reasonable to think it implicit in what Anaximander said.)Against the testimony of Aristotle and Hippolytus there is some actualcounter-evidence. It consists in a claim apparently deriving from the Aristoteliancommentator Alexander of Aphrodisias which implies that Anaximander didindeed subscribe to flat-earthist dynamics:But Anaximander was of the opinion that the earth stays put both becauseof the air that holds it up and because of equal balance and likeness.(SimpliciusOn the Heavens532.13–14)This comment, at the end of Simplicius’ discussion of Aristotle’s introduction ofthe indifference theory, is usually taken as representing his own account ofAnaximander. But the context suggests rather a tendentious bit of argumentationby Alexander in support of his view that Plato is Aristotle’s main target in thispassage of thePhysics. There is no reason to think that Alexander’s claim hasany real authority.18None the less from his representation of Anaximander an ingenious account ofwhy the earth stays put could be constructed. An Alexandrian Anaximandershares the view natural to flat-earthers that the earth must rest on something. Heconceives reasons for thinking that it must also be positioned mid-air. And heinfers that so positioned it must be in equilibrium. The difficulty is then toexplain how a heavy body, the earth,canbe supported by a light body, the air.The idea of the fulcrum of a balance gives an elegant solution to the problem.For a fulcrum can support a body many times heavier than itself.19How are we to choose between Aristotle’s more radical indifference theorist,who abandons the idea of a support for the earth in favour of the mathematics ofsymmetry, and the mainstream Ionian physicist I have just reconstructed on thebasis of Alexander via Plato’s equilibrium theory?A single sentence in Hippolytus is little enough to help decide the issue ofwhether it was Anaximander’s flat-earthism or his fascination with symmetryand a priori thinking which determined his view on what kept the earth stable.But follow Hippolytus we should. Of course, Anaximander ought on this story tohave seen that a spherical, not a cylindrical, earth was what suited his position.This does not however constitute much of an objection to the truth of the story.We have simply to concede that Anaximander is a revolutionary who carries someold-fashioned baggage with him. That is the general way with revolutions.ANAXIMANDERAnaximander wrote a book in prose—one of the first books in prose evercomposed—which contained an ambitious narrative of the origins of the world,beginning with the earth and the heavens, and ending with the emergence ofanimal and particularly human life. It was evidently conceived as a sort ofnaturalistic version of Hesiod’sTheogony. His act of committing his thoughts topapyrus was enormously influential. It effectively defined the shape and contentsof Greek philosophical cosmology for centuries to come, establishing a traditionwhich might be regarded as culminating in Plato’sTimaeusor—translated toRome —in Lucretius’On the Nature of Things.20Anaximander made the originating principle of things something he called theapeiron,the boundless or (as some would prefer to translate) the indefinite. Hispossible reasons for selecting theapeironfor this role were the oneAnaximandrian topic which really interested Aristotle.21Aristotle’s influence onTheophrastus and through him on subsequent ancient accounts of Anaximander’sviews was, as on so many other topics, enormous; so the issue dominatesimportant parts of the doxography also.22Much modern scholarship in its turnhas responded by making theapeironthe principal focus of its own struggles tounderstand Anaximander and the one surviving fragment of his work. What hasbeen amassed is largely a tapestry of unrewarding and controversial guesswork—unsurprisingly, when as likely as not Aristotle himself was just guessing.There is accordingly a lot to be said for beginning (or rather continuing) anaccount of Anaximander’s thought by looking at evidence which offers a moredirect insight into his characteristic intellectual style. Two reports that payparticular dividends in this regard are the following:He says that something capable of generating hot and cold from the eternalwas separated off at the genesis of this world, and that a sphere of flamegrew round the air surrounding the earth, like bark round a tree. When thiswas torn off and closed off into certain circles, the sun and the moon andthe stars were constituted.(Eusebius’ extract 2 from [Plutarch]Miscellanies[KRS 121])Anaximander says the first animals were born in moisture, enclosed inthorny barks; but as their age increased they came out on the drier part, andwhen the bark had broken all round they lived a different kind of life for ashort time.(Aetius V.19.4 [KRS 133])These texts, by different late authors, are thought to depend ultimately onTheophrastus. They contain much that is obscure, but exhibit a patent similarity,which must be due to Anaximander himself.23Although one concernshappenings at the beginning of his story, the other a process near its end, bothexploit a common analogy: the formation of bark round a tree. Moreover theproduction of two significant but utterly different features of the world—sun,moon and stars in the heavens, and animal life on earth—is explained byessentially the same mechanism. First one kind of stuff encloses another in themanner of bark, then the bark-like material breaks off or around and new formsdevelop or appear. Despite the biological character of the analogy, theexplanatory pattern itself appears to be conceived in terms of the interplay ofelementalphysicalforces.24At the origins of the world the hot (in the form offlame) encases the cold (air), and the breaking of the casing is presumably to beunderstood as due to the pressure caused by the expansion of a gas increasing intemperature. Whether the actual designation of the forces in question in abstractlanguage as hot and cold derives from Anaximander himself or (more probably)is the work of Peripatetic commentary does not much affect the diagnosis. It isnot so clear from the Aetius passage that the emergence of animals in theirmature forms is the outcome of a similar process. But fortunately another text(HippolytusRefutation,I.6.6 [KRS 136]) informs us that the sun’s activity inevaporating moisture is what brings animals into being. If as seems likely thisrelates to the phenomenon described by Aetius, we are perhaps to think of thedrying out of the casing in which animals are first enclosed. The claim will bethat this physical effect of heat then makes it break up all around.From the evidence of KRS 121 and 133 we can already infer that Anaximandersees the world as a systematic unity sustained by dynamic transformations thatare thoroughly intelligible to the human mind. This must be why he assumes thatmomentous events, veiled in obscurity, such as the origins of the cosmos itselfand of life within it, can be reconstructed as versions of the more local physicalprocesses with which we are familiar from our own experience. This too must bewhy he expects two such different sorts of originating event to exhibit similarpatterns; and why he believes not just that the transformations involved will beaptly illustrated by analogy, but that one and the same analogy, albeit differentlytreated in the two cases, will provide that illumination.Consideration of further evidence confirms the picture of Anaximander’sWeltanschauungthat is beginning to emerge. Here are two texts which give moredetails of the circles that account for the sun, moon and stars:The stars come into being as a circle of fire separated off from the fire inthe world, and enclosed by air. There are breathing-holes, certain pipe-likepassages, at which the stars show themselves. So when the breathing-holesare blocked off eclipses occur; and the moon appears now to be waxing,now waning, according to the blocking or opening of the passages. Thecircle of the sun is 27 times the earth, that of the moon 18 times. The sun ishighest, the circles of the fixed stars lowest.(HippolytusRefutationI.6.4–5 [KRS 125])Anaximander says there is a circle 28 times the earth, like a chariot wheel,with its rim hollow and full of fire. It lets the fire appear through an orificeat one point, as through the nozzle of a bellows; and this is the sun.(Aetius II.20.1 [KRS 126])Again there is much that is opaque and puzzling in these reports, as well as anumber of features that by now will not be unexpected.The search for system is immediately evident in the ingenious hypothesis of anested sequence of concentric circles, which reduces the apparently chaotic varietyof the heavens to the simplest scheme of geometrical and arithmeticalrelationships: circles and multiples of the number 9. Once again the idea of onestuff (air) enclosing another (fire) is fundamental to explanation of thetransformations Hippolytus mentions, namely eclipses and the phases of themoon. Making the sun and moon functions ofcirclesof air and fire is, of course,designed primarily to account for their diurnal revolutions and the alternation ofday and night. Making them circles ofair and fire,not bodies, enablesAnaximander to avoid the puzzle of why they do not fall, which Anaximenes andhis successors were obliged to address. All in all it is a beautifully economicaltheory. As with his account of origins, Anaximander recommends it by vividanalogy, taken in this case from the familiar contexts of forge and stadium: abellows and its nozzle, the wheel and its rim.The physical if not the mathematical patterns Anaximander has so far invokedare specified also in his accounts of wind, rain (deficiently preserved), thunderand lightning:Winds come about when the finest vapours of the air are separated off, andmove when massed together; rains from the vapour sent up from the earth,as a result of [?] their being [?] [melted] by the sun; lightnings when windbreaks out and divides the clouds.(HippolytusRefutationI.6.7 [KRS 129])Anaximander says wind is a flow of air, when the finest and the wettestparts of it are set in motion or melted [producing rain] by the sun.(Aetius III.7.1)On thunder, lightning, thunderbolts, whirlwinds and typhoons:Anaximander says these all occur as a result of the wind. When it isenclosed in thick cloud and bursts out forcibly because of its fineness andlightness, then the tearing makes the noise and the rift the flash, in contrastto the blackness of the cloud.(Aetius III.1.2 [KRS 130])Fundamental to this explanatory scheme is once again the interaction of fire(here in particular the sun) and air (conceived of as moist vapour). The processof separation off had earlier been identified as the cause of the formation fromtheapeironof an air-enclosing ball of fire, which then in turn separated off to beenclosed in rings of air. Now it is made responsible for the production of winds.They are themselves taken to be the root cause of a further range ofmeteorological phenomena, involving further enveloping and subsequentrupturing of envelopes. If as we would expect analogies were introduced toreinforce the persuasiveness of the explanations, these are now lost to us. Theaction of wind, conceived of as fine dry air bursting through the wet dark air ofcloud to generate the bright flash of lightning, has understandably provoked thecomment that, in Anaximander’s system, the sun and moon resemble a lightningflash of indefinite duration.25More generally, Anaximander’s ideas tend to prompt in Whiggish readers areaction compounded of admiration and incredulity. For example, his conjecturesabout the origins of life (on which more later) are regularly felt to be ‘brilliant’or ‘remarkable’.26By contrast his meteorology now seems merely quaint, whileit is his astronomical system which strikes the modern mind as more grandly andperversely inadequate.Some of the gaps or implausibilities in Anaximander’s explanations in thisarea are no doubt due to the deficiencies of the surviving evidence. Thus giventhe efforts he and Thales seem to have made to measure the solstices, it isimprobable that he had nothing to say about the annual movement of the sun inthe ecliptic (to use a later vocabulary).27We do in fact have a report going backto Theophrastus, but queried by some scholars, which suggests that he attributedthe solstices to the sun-circle’s need for replenishment from rising vapours: whenthese become now too dense in the north, now too depleted in the south, then—we may imagine—periodic changes of direction occur in the motion of thecircle.28Anaximander’s views on the ‘stars’ other than the sun and moon areincompletely and inconsistently recorded. For example, one text talksimplausibly, in terms reminiscent of Aristotelian astronomy, ofspherescarryingstars, not just of circles; another suggests that the circles nearest the earthaccounted for the planets as well as the fixed stars. It is obscure whatAnaximander had in mind by talking of circles in the plural with regard to thefixed stars. One attractive interpretation proposes, for example, three celestialbelts or zones dividing up the night sky, as in Baylonian astronomy. There isdifficulty, however, in understanding how he could accommodate thecircumpolar stars—which do not set—in his scheme, where all circles are to beconstrued as revolving round the earth. This may be one of the reasons whyAnaximenes preferred his ‘felt cap’ model of the heavens.29It is a feature of Anaximander’s system itself, not lacunae in the doxography,which inflicts the most dramatic damage to his standing as even a primitiveastronomer. This is his decision to put the fixed stars closer to earth than themoon and the sun. It is not an unintelligible position. The sequence sun-moonstars-earth is found in Persian religious texts perhaps roughly contemporaneousin origin. In the Avesta the soul of an infant comes down from the ‘beginninglesslights’ through a series of lights decreasing in size and intensity to be born onearth.30This corresponds with the implications of Anaximander’s own view ofphysical process as a constant interaction between fire and cold moisture: if theearth is the principal location of one of these forces, it makes sense that the sun,as the main concentration of the other, should be positioned further from theearth than the lesser fires of the stars. Yet how can Anaximander account for thefact that the moon hides any constellation it passes across? Charitable answershave been attempted by scholars on his behalf, but perhaps it is better just to recallthat speculation’s negotiations with experience have always been a tricky andoften an embarrassing matter for science.The biggest disputed and unanswered questions in Anaximander’s system arethose to do with his identification of theapeironas first principle and itsrelationship with the world. His silences here do him rather more credit. Cautionabout the big bang and what preceded it seems a thoroughly rational stance. Iguess that Anaximander conceives theapeironas the beyond: what necessarilylies outside our experience of space and time, pictured as stretching awayboundlessly outside the limits of the cosmos which it encloses.31If that cosmoscame into being, the natural supposition would be that it did sofromtheapeiron.How and why are another matter, on which—as also on the essential nature oftheapeironitself—it would inevitably be more difficult to find reasonable thingsto say.None the less it is clear that Anaximander did say something on these issues.On one of the rare occasions when Aristotle mentions Anaximander by name heattributes to him the thesis that theapeironis immortal and indestructible. Thesewere traditionally the attributes of divinity, and in fact the same passage stronglyimplies that theapeironnot only encloses but also governs (literally ‘steers’) allthings:The infinite is thought to be principle of the rest, and to enclose all thingsand steer all, as all those say who do not postulate other causes over andabove the infinite, such as mind or love. This is the divine. For it isimmortal and indestructible, as Anaximander says and most of the physicists.(AristotlePhysics203b7ff. [KRS 108])Presumably Anaximander relies on the inference: no cosmic order without anordering intelligence. Onhowit exercises its directive role he seems to havemade no guesses.From Theophrastan sources we learn further that there is eternal motion in orof theapeiron,which is what causes the separation from it of opposite physicalforces (namely those forces that are invoked in the astronomy, meteorology,etc.). Again we may detect an inference to the best explanation: no creationwithout activity before creation. Aristotle finds here a clue to the nature of theapeiron. If opposites are separated from it, then it must itself be somethingintermediate in character, and indeed on that account a suitable choice of firstprinciple. This is a conclusion dictated by Aristotle’s enthusiasm for pigeonholinghis predecessors’ opinions. It is not attested as Anaximander’s view bythe more careful Theophrastus.32The thesis about eternal motion is sometimes formulated in the sources as theproposition that it causes the separation off of the world, or rather of worlds inthe plural; in Theophrastus’ words, probably reproducing Anaximander’s ownlanguage: ‘the worlds(ouranoi)and the orderings(kosmoi)within them’. Thedoxographers assimilate his view to the atomist theory of an infinity of worldsall subject to destruction as well as creation. This is probably anachronistic, but—contrary to what some interpreters have argued—right in general thrust.33Weshould suppose that the hypothesis of eternal motion generates in its turn afurther bold conjecture, exploiting indifference reasoning of just the kind theatomists were to make their own speciality:1 Eternal motion in theapeironis necessary to generate a universe.2 But its activity provides no more reason for a universe to be generated hereand now than for one to be generated there and then.3 So if it generates a universe here and now, it also generates a universe thereand then.4 Therefore it generates a plurality of universes.One strain in the doxography suggests that Anaximander did not merely say thatthe first principleisthe infinite, but that itmustbe the infinite—otherwisecoming into being would give out. This carries conviction: Aetius introduces thereport as hisevidencefor the more far-reaching and dubious claim thatAnaximander posited (like the atomists) the birth and death of an infinite numberof worlds. Without mentioning Anaximander, Aristotle too cites the need for aninfinite supply as one of the reasons people give for introducing the infinite as aprinciple. He objects:Nor, in order that coming into being may not give out, is it necessary forperceptible body to beactuallyinfinite. It is possible for the destruction ofone thing to be the generation of another, the sum of things being limited.(AristotlePhysics208a8ff. [KRS 107])This excellent point ought to tellagainstthe idea, parroted by the doxographers,that Anaximander envisaged thedestructionof worlds as well as their generation,at any rate if he did endorse the infinite supply argument. Only if worlds arenotrecycled is there a requirement for theapeironto meet an infinite need.It looks in fact as if Theophrastus, in assimilating Anaximander to theatomists, specifically searched for evidence that he like them believed in theultimate destruction of all worlds, and found it hard to discover any. His citationof the famous surviving fragment of Anaximander’s book is best interpreted as amisguided attempt to produce such evidence. The relevant passage ofSimplicius, reproducing his account, runs as follows:He says that the principle is neither water nor any other of the so-calledelements, but some different boundless nature, from which all the worldscome to be and the orderings within them. And out of those things fromwhich the generation is for existing things, into these again theirdestruction comes about ‘according to what is right and due, for they paypenalty and retribution to each other for their injustice, according to theordinance of time’—using these rather poetical terms to speak of them.(SimpliciusPhysics24–16ff. [KRS 101, 110])A great deal of scholarly ink has been spilled over this text, and there is little toshow by way of definitive results. The one important thing the best critical workhas established is that the fragment (indicated above by the quotation marks)refers to a stablereciprocalrelationship between oppositeswithina developed ordeveloping cosmos, not to the cataclysmic reabsorption of a world or itsconstituents back into theapeiron.34Most interpreters also believe thatTheophrastus, however, vainly attempts tomakethe fragment serve just such acataclysmic function, so as to be applicable to the relationship between a worldand theapeiron. Quite how he hoped to work the trick is less clear. Thediagnosis I am suggesting notes that whereas Simplicius’ first sentence concernsgeneration of worlds from theapeiron,the second is introduced by a remarkfocused ondestruction,which despite its plurals (‘out of those…into these’)looks designed to furnish a balancing comment on the death of worlds. Yet theplurals give the game away: the only evidence Theophrastus can actually offer tosupport the implication of cosmic destruction is a statement of Anaximanderabout the effect of opposites oneach other.35No one who has worked their way through Anaximander’s astronomy,meteorology and biology will have any difficulty in identifying the forces which‘pay retribution to each other for their injustice’. Simplicius takes it that these arethe four elements. This Aristotelian analysis is, as often, anachronistic and overschematic.What Anaximander must principally have in mind is the alternatingdomination of moisture over fire and fire over moisture which he makes the keyto his account of origins, and which he probably thought exemplified above allby the regular pattern of the seasons in the world as it has now developed. Thisessentially stable pattern, while giving no basis for expectation of cosmicdestruction, can accommodate the possibility of further fundamental changes, asit has admitted of them in the past. The clearest example is supplied byAnaximander’s less than satisfactorily documented views on the changingrelationship of land and sea.In hisMeteorologyAristotle sketches a theory of the gradual evaporation ofthe moisture on the earth’s surface by the sun (353b6ff. [KRS 132]). Originallythe whole surface of the earth was wet. Then the drying action of the sunproduced the present state of things: part of the surface remains wet andconstitutes sea, but the moisture elsewhere is subject to evaporation into theatmosphere. In future the same process will cause the sea to shrink in extent andeventually to dry up completely. Alexander’s commentary on theMeteorologytells us (67.11) that Theophrastus attributed this theory to Anaximander (andsubsequently Diogenes of Apollonia), so making him look to a Whiggish eyelike a precursor of modern geology. It is tempting to connect the account of theoriginal state of the earth with Anaximander’s conjectures about the beginningsof animal life in general and human life in particular:Anaximander of Miletus gave it as his view that, when water and earth hadbeen heated, there arose from them fish or animals very like fish. In thesemen were formed and kept within as embryos until puberty. Then at lastthe creatures burst open, and out came men and women who were alreadyable to feed themselves.(CensorinusOn the Day of Birth4.7 [KRS 135])As in the science of our day, the hypotheses of geology and evolutionary biologyseem to reinforce each other. Indeed like Xenophanes after him, Anaximandermay have based his geological inferences in part on the fossil record. Whatmatters for present purposes, however, is that the whole geological processenvisaged by Anaximander constitutes an ‘injustice’ committed by oneelemental force upon another, and as such will presumably, ‘according to theordinance of time’, win compensation by ‘retribution’ in the form of a newinundation of the earth, again as explicitly attested for Xenophanes(unfortunately no similar prediction by Anaximander survives). We can onlyspeculate on whether the language of justice the fragment uses to describe thiskind of process is trying to capture the directive operation of theapeiron,orwhether it is a metaphor for an entirely physical self-regulatory process, orwhether Anaximander would have thought that a false dichotomy.Anaximander’s all-embracing vision of the natural world is the first and formany readers the most unforgettable of the pre-Socratic physical systems.Despite its individuality, it established the framework of a common worldpicture, shared (although sometimes transformed) by them all. This is above alldue to its very invention of the idea of a cosmos, a world ordered by law, whichwas then worked out along lines that guided both the substance and the method offuture enquiry. The cosmos and its major features, including life on earth, areconceived as the outcome of evolving interactions between two fundamental butopposed physical forces. It emerges somehow from something infinite andeternal which surrounds and controls it. Despite the welter of specific detail aboutthis world supplied by Anaximander, he sets a high premium on generalexplanatory patterns, which he couches exclusively in mathematical andnaturalistic terms—except for the overarching conception of cosmic justice.Subsequent pre-Socratics will vary or challenge the recipe in one way or another.But his is the theme, theirs the variations.ANAXIMENESAnaximander’s theoretical silences evidently grated on Anaximenes’ ear.36Hisinability to say what sort of thing theapeironis, and his failure to explain how orwhy opposite forces emerge from it, contrast with Anaximenes’ explicitness onboth issues, and may be supposed to be what prompted the junior thinker toengage with them. In any event the result is a cosmology resemblingAnaximander’s in many respects, but at these key points advancing substantivetheses. It is succinctly summed up by Simplicius in a passage deriving fromTheophrastus:Anaximenes son of Eurystratus, of Miletus, a companion of Anaximander,also says, like him, that the underlying nature is one and infinite, yet notindefinite as Anaximander said, but determinate—for he identifies it as air.It differs in thinness and thickness according to the substances which itconstitutes, and if thinned becomes fire, if thickened wind, then cloud, then(thickened further) water, then earth, then stones. Other things come fromthese. He, too, makes motion eternal, and says that change, as well, comesabout because of it.(SimpliciusPhysics24.26ff. [KRS 140])The hypothesis that the first principle is air in eternal motion enablesAnaximenes to fill both the principal lacunae in Anaximander’s theory. Itventures a definite characterization of theapeiron;and in so doing it facilitatesan explanation of the emergence of the chief phenomena studied by naturalphilosophy: the opposite processes of thinning and thickening to which air issubject are what produce fire, on the one hand, and a series—to becomecanonical in subsequent Ionian thought —of more and more condensed forms ofmatter, on the other.It has often been thought that a text of Aetius reports an analogical argumentpresented by Anaximenes for the claim that air is the first principle. The passagein question begins with the information that this was his principle, and then, onthe traditional interpretation, continues with the words:As(hoion)our soul, he says, being air controls us, so(kai) pneumaand airenclose the whole world. (Air andpneumaare synonymous here.)(Aetius I.3.4 [KRS 160])This statement has usually been given prominence in reconstructions ofAnaximenes’ philosophy. It has even been taken as an actual fragment of hisbook. Its precise logic and overall point have been much discussed, but(assuming always that the translation given above is correct) the context wouldfavour an interpretation which finds some kind of inference from microcosm tomacrocosm: as air is the principle of human life, so it is the principle of the cosmosat large.On further examination Aetius’ sentence proves unable to bear such a weightof interpretation. To begin with, it cannot be an actual quotation fromAnaximenes. His book was written ‘in simple and economical Ionic’. Aetius’sentence is not in Ionic. It also includes at least one word coined much later thanthe sixth century BC. The Greek is very likely corrupt, too. It looks as if‘pneuma’,as ‘breath’, should be substituted for ‘air’ in the first clause andomitted in the second. Most important of all, a more probable translation of thesentence (so emended) would run:For example(hoion),it is as breath, he says, that our soul controls us, and(kai)air encloses the whole world.The only expressions here which can be inferred to beauthentically Anaximenes’ are the two Aetius specifically mentions: ‘air’ and‘breath’, although there is no reason to doubt that he talked of ‘soul’ in thiscontext.37What on this alternative reading was Aetius’ point in making the remark? Itwill have been to furnish two independent grounds for believing thatAnaximenes did indeed, as he has just contended, make air the principle. Theclause about the cosmos will then not express the conclusion of any inference,but simply express a version of that fundamental Anaximenian thesis: theapeiron(as what encloses the world) is air. The first clause is more interesting.Even though it no longer launches an argument from analogy, it may stillsuggest that Anaximenes himself appealed to the physiological role ofpneumaasevidencethat air is the principle. Certainly the claim about human physiologywould then parallel some evidence, again from the phenomenon of breath, whichhe is said to have adduced for the connected idea that thinnings and thickeningsof air are what cause the appearance ofotherproperties or things:He says that matter which is compressed and condensed is cold, while thatwhich is thin and ‘relaxed’ (he used this very word) is hot. This is why it isnot unreasonable to say that a person releases both hot and cold from themouth. The breath is chilled when it is pressed and condensed by the lips,but when the mouth is loosened it escapes and becomes hot because of itsthinness. This opinion Aristotle puts down to the man’s ignorance.(PlutarchThe Primary Cold947F [KRS 143])38What is most interesting in these texts is the attempt to use familiar features ofhuman existence to think about the cosmos at large. Anaximander had had apenchant for analogy and discussed the origins of man, but there is no sign thathis theorizing accorded any similar primacy to consideration of things human forthis purpose. It seems unlikely, however, that Anaximenes got close toformulating a conception of man as microcosm. It is just as doubtful how far hiscosmology was vitalist. There is some evidence, unfortunately rather vague andof doubtful authority, that Anaximenes laid more stress on the divinity of theapeironthan Anaximander did. Hippolytus, for instance, says that from air weregeneratedinter alia‘gods and things divine’ (RefutationI.7.1 [KRS 141]). Is thisa recrudescence of Thales’ notion that ‘all things are full of gods’? Or is it aninsistence that everything popularly recognized as divine is in one way oranother a form of the one true divinity, the infinite air?If we continue the comparison of Anaximenes with Anaximander, we findmuch less evidence of an interest on his part in speculative evolutionaryhypotheses, whether cosmological or biological, than there is for Anaximander,although he too propounded a cosmogony. We catch little sense of the world as atheatre occupied by opposing powers acting reciprocally on one another, despitethe importance accorded to the contrary processes of compression andexpansion. Nor does indifference reasoning or mathematical schematism seem tobelong in Anaximenes’ explanatory repertoire. What the doxography mostlyrecords is firstly the detail of his astronomical system, which was at once closerto the primitive Homeric picture of the heavens and also more influential onsubsequent Ionian thinkers like Anaxagoras, the atomists, and Diogenes ofApollonia; and then information about his explanations of meteorologicalphenomena, where he seems largely to have followed Anaximander. There aresome apparently new topics, such as the rainbow, but even here Anaximenes’view is reminiscent of Anaximander’s explanation of lightning (to which he toosubscribes): the rays of the sun strike against thick, dark cloud, and being unableto penetrate it are reflected off it, the different colours consequences of differentinteractions between light and cloud.39The major general idea which the surviving reports make their focus,however, is Anaximenes’ proposal that progressive stages of thickening orcompression account for the formation of different sorts of bodies and otherstuffs. There are traces of an alternative interpretation (as with Anaximander)which tries to make hot and cold the primary explanatory categories forAnaximenes, more as they are in Aristotle.40Plutarch’s passage on breath suggeststhat Anaximenes was certainly interested in this pair of opposites; but at thesame time it clearly indicates the primacy of thick and thin. A basic statement ofthe theory has already been quoted [KRS 140]. Some further applications occurin the following passage, where incidentally it is noteworthy how there is noreference to cold in the analyses of hail and snow; compression is evidentlyresponsible for their coldness:Anaximenes says that clouds occur when the air is further thickened [moreso than it is in wind]. When it is compressed further rain is squeezed out. Hailoccurs when the descending water coalesces, snow when something windyis caught up with the moisture.(Aetius II.4.1 [KRS 158])At some points air is treated as occurring in a relatively dense form while stillremaining just air. This is referred to in some sources as ‘felting’, a word whichconceivably goes back to Anaximenes himself. One instance is the air thatsupports the flat earth, another that forcing the sun to change direction at thesolstice.41It is hard from our perspective to understand how anyone should have foundthe compression theory or its many particular applications credible. Yet it istaken for granted as the standard physical account by Melissus a century later,when he says, ‘We think that earth and stone are made out of water’ (fragment[KRS 557]), probably recalling Anaxagoras’s restatement in his fragment 16[KRS 490]. Slightly later in the fifth century Diogenes of Apollonia would givean even more thoroughgoing re-endorsement of Anaximenes’ original version ofthe idea. What attracted cosmologists to it was doubtless the core thought that thetransformations different forms of matter undergo are intelligible only if thosetransformations are really just variants of one and the same pair of contraryprocesses, and if what is transformed is ultimately just a single matter. This is aprofound thought. It seems to be Anaximenes’ achievement, not that of theshadowy Thales nor of Anaximander. For Anaximander theapeironis the sourceof things, not what they are made of. Anaximenes appears to have been the firstto have had the simplifying and unifying notion that their sourceiswhat they aremade of.42XENOPHANESXenophanes presents us with a new phenomenon: lots of actual extracts of pre-Socratic writing. We know the sound of Xenophanes’ voice.43Interpretation is not therefore plain sailing. In fact Xenophanes is the subject ofmore disagreement than Anaximander or Anaximenes. The disputes are not justover what specific positions he took nor what his key problems were, but onwhether he should count as a substantial thinker at all, or merely as an intellectualgadfly without a systematic set of ideas of his own. One of the difficulties is thatthe scraps of Xenophanes which are preserved are mostly just that: isolated linesor pairs of lines or quatrains torn from their original context by a quotingauthority. Another is that he was to become the focus of different kinds ofinterest by a variety of later writers. Thus while Heraclitus speaks of him as atypical practitioner of fruitless Ionian curiosity, Plato and Aristotle (followed bythe faithful Theophrastus) see him as an obscure precursor of Parmenides, andTimon of Phlius as more than half anticipating the scepticism he attributed toPyrrho. In subsequent periods the story gets still more complicated, withXenophanes portrayed, for example, as an exponent of an elaborate Eleaticnegative theology. Excavating the real Xenophanes from themélangeofdifferent versions of his thought preserved in the sources is accordingly a gooddeal trickier than reconstructing Milesian cosmology, which never enjoyedcomparable resurrection.44Xenophanes wrote verse, not prose, and that too made him more durable.Diogenes Laertius sums up his output in these words:He wrote in epic metre, also elegiacs and iambics, against Hesiod andHomer, reproving them for what they said about the gods. But he himselfalso recited his own poems. He is said to have held contrary opinions toThales and Pythagoras, and to have rebuked Epimenides too.(Diogenes Laertius IX.18 [KRS 161])This account corresponds pretty much with the surviving fragments. Many ofthem are indeed clearly satirical, and the poems from which these are taken—inall three metres mentioned by Diogenes—were known in antiquity assilloi:‘squints’ or lampoons. It has been conjectured that even fragments dealing withphysical phenomena belonged not to a philosophical poem on nature likeEmpedocles’ (as is implied in some unconvincing very late sources), but to hiscritique of the traditional theology of Homer and Hesiod, which is wellrepresented among the fragments in any case.45Among the other butts of his witPythagoras is the certain target of some surviving verses:On the subject of reincarnation Xenophanes bears witness in an elegywhich begins: ‘Now I will turn to another tale and show the way.’ What hesays about Pythagoras runs thus: ‘Once they say that he was passing by whena puppy was being whipped, and he took pity and said: “Stop, do not beatit; for it is the soul of a friend that I recognised when I heard it givingtongue.”’(Diogenes Laertius VIII.36: fr. 7 [KRS 260])But it may also be that Xenophanes’ attack on Thales was the original home ofthe following snippet:Of the earth this is the upper limit, seen by our feet neighbouring the air.But its underneath reaches on indefinitely.(AchillesIntroduction4: fr. 28 [KRS 180])Aristotle refers to this passage in his chapter on the different explanations theoristshave given for the stability of the earth. He accuses Xenophanes of not tryinghard enough. We may think his revulsion from speculation on this question giveshim the better of the argument with Thales.46Diogenes seems to suggest that the lampoons, in the fashion of lampoons,mostly had their effect by being circulated and repeated by others. By contrastXenophanes himself performed his own non-satirical poems, evidently as atravelling entertainer at festivals and other aristocratic gatherings. We are toldthat after exile from his native city of Colophon he emigrated to Sicily. The‘exile’ is generally associated by scholars with the capture of the city by thePersians in 546/5 BC, an event to which he himself refers in some verses wherehe speaks of the coming of the Mede (fr. 22). This probably occurred when hewas 25 years of age, if we may so interpret some further verses which boast of anextraordinarily long life, and which incidentally indicate a career pursued allover Greece:Already there are seven and sixty years tossing my thought up and downthe land of Greece. And from my birth there were another twenty five toadd to these, if I know how to speak truly about these things.(Diogenes Laertius IX.18: fr. 8 [KRS 161])47We possess two substantial elegiac poems, each a little over twenty lines long,representing Xenophanes’ activity as performer at dinner parties and the like.Both contain a critical strain. One (fr. 2) begins with a famous assault on theOlympic games and the conventional view that victory in any of its athleticevents brings a benefit to the victor’s city which rightly entitles him to greathonours from it. No, says Xenophanes: such a person ‘is not my equal in worth—better than the strength of men and horses is my wisdom’. For athletic prowessdoes not contribute to the good government of the city, nor does it fill the city’scoffers. Xenophanes implies that his own moral teaching, on virtue and piety (fr.1) and against luxury (fr. 3), is by contrast oriented towards the public good. Theother poem (fr. 1) is about the proper conduct of a symposium. Its main focus ison the nature of true piety. The first half stresses physical preparations:everything must be clean and pure, fragrant with flowers and incense, with purewater to hand. The wine is to be served with the simplest of foods: bread,cheeses, honey. Then Xenophanes gives instructions about what is to be said.‘Reverent words and pure speech’ hymning the god is to precede talk of virtue, ofright and noble deeds—not tales of giants, Titans and centaurs, nor of conflictsbetween men in which there is no profit: nothing, presumably, at all like theTheogonyor theIliad.48Xenophanes’ explicit attacks on Homer and Hesiod in his lampoons are notmerely critical but—in a sense I shall explain—self-critical. The Milesians hadimplicitly questioned traditional assumptions about the natural world. Insubjecting what the great poets say about the gods to overt scrutiny andcondemnation Xenophanes’ focus is not reality but how we conceive of it.Philosophy, one might say, now for the first time takes a reflexive turn.This is immediately apparent from the key fragments on anthropomorphictheology, which constitute Xenophanes’ principal claim to a significant niche inthe history of philosophy:Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is a shameand reproach among men, stealing and committing adultery and deceivingone another.(Sextus EmpiricusAdversus MathematicosIX.193: fr. 11 [KRS 166])But mortals consider that the gods are born, and that they have clothes andspeech and bodies like their own.(ClementMiscellaniesV.109.2: fr. 14 [KRS 167])The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black, the Thraciansthat theirs have light blue eyes and red hair.(ClementMiscellaniesVII.22.1: fr. 16 [KRS 168])But if horses or cattle or lions had hands, or were able to draw with theirhands and do the works that men can do, horses would draw the forms ofthe gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make theirbodies such as they had themselves.(ClementMiscellaniesV.109.3: fr. 15 [KRS 169])We could already have guessed from fragment 1 that Xenophanes would havefound the picture of the gods in Homer and Hesiod unacceptable becauseinconsistent with ‘reverent words and pure speech’, i.e. with the requirements ofproper worship. The passages quoted above indicate two separate grounds forsuch a view. First, in fragment 11, Xenophanes objects that they make the godsimmoral, or more particularly liars and cheats, a line of objection borrowed byPlato inhiscritique of Homer inRepublicII. Second and more fundamentally,fragment 14 implies that the poets are just like men in general in casting the godsin their own image: self-projection is the basis for their conceptions of divinity.This charge is then brilliantly substantiated in fragments 15 and 16. Fragment 16reflects the Ionian fascination with ethnography which reaches its fullestexpression in Herodotus and fuels the cultural relativism developed by thesophists with the help of the famous nature/ culture(nomos/phusis)polarity. Onits own fragment 16 would not get Xenophanes far enough towards his eventualdestination. From the premiss that whatparticularhuman features we ascribe tothe gods is a function of what features different ones among us happen to possessourselves, it is still some way to the conclusion that the very idea of god’spossessing human features ofanykind is nothing but a projection by humans oftheir own characteristics on to the divine. This conclusion is mediated by thethought-experiment of fragment 15, which is simply a counter-factual extensionof the argument of fragment 16: if the conception of god varies among menaccording to race, it is reasonable to conjecture that, ifotheranimals couldconceive of god, their conceptions would vary according to species. So our ideaof what god is like is nothing but a similarly speciesist exercise in self-projection.The account of Xenophanes’ thought presented so far has discussed thoseparts of the remains of his oeuvre whose interpretation is not controversial. Whenwe move beyond them fierce disagreement breaks out. On each of the three mainareas covered by the rest of the fragments—god as heshouldbe conceived, thenatural world, the prospects for knowledge—the evidence is evaluated verydifferently by scholars of different casts of mind.A small group of fragments explains what god is really like. Xenophanes doesnot argue the case. He simply declares the truth as he sees it:One god is greatest among gods and men, in no way similar to mortalseither in body or thought.(ClementMiscellaniesV.109.1: fr. 23 [KRS 170])All of him sees, all thinks, all hears.(Sextus EmpiricusAdversus MathematicosIX. 144: fr. 24 [KRS 172])Always he remains in the same place, moving not at all; nor is it fitting forhim to go to different places at different times, but without toil he shakesall things with the thought of his mind.(SimpliciusPhysics23. 11 and 20: frs 26 and 25 [KRS 171])Is fragment 23 an enunciation of monotheism, the first in Western thought?Views are divided.49The best comparison with Xenophanes’ couplet is a line ofHomer:One omen is best, to defend the fatherland.(HomerIliadXII.243)Here Hector is rejecting a warning against fighting from his adviser Polydamas,who has inferred a bad omen from the appearance of an eagle to the left, flying witha snake in its beak which it then savaged and dropped into the midst of theTrojan host. Hector’s memorably sceptical reply does two things. Itsaysthatthere is only one good omen, much better than all the rest, namely patrioticaction. But in suggesting that the other sorts of omens, on which the likes ofPolydamas rely, are worthless as a basis for decision and action, itimpliesaradical reinterpretation of the very idea of an omen, removing from it anyconnotation of divine revelation, and reducing—or elevating—it to a humanmoral imperative. So Hector’s assertion is in effect much stronger: not just thatthere is only onegoodomen, but that there is only onerealomen, which isobeying the appropriate human imperative. Xenophanes’ thesis works in exactlythe same way. Itsaysthere is only one supreme god. Itimpliesthere is only onerealgod. For the very idea of god has to be reconceived. Fragments 23–6 showwhat this theoretical revolution is to consist in. We must rid ourselves of thenotion that a god needs limbs and sense organs like a human being (cf. fragments14–16). He can cause things to happen by thought alone, without moving amuscle; all of him sees, hears, thinks. Is he then a pure bodiless mind?Xenophanes writes as though the issue is not whether buthowto think of god’sbody. So while it is tempting to diagnose a further radical implication,questioning whether god needs a body at all, interpretation is probably notjustified in going that far. This is to find some measure of agreement withAristotle (Metaphysics986b22–3) that Xenophanes made nothing clear about‘the one’ (i.e. the Eleatic one, which is what Aristotle took his god to be).Did fragments 23–6 belong to the satirical attack on the views of Homer andHesiod which constituted the context of fragments 11 and 14–16? Or were theyextracted from a quite different poem devoted to philosophy of nature, as Dielssupposed? Diels’ conjecture seems an improbable one. Leaving aside the vexedissue of whether therewasa separate poem about nature, we should note: (a)Clement quotes fragments 23, 14 and 15 consecutively in that order, as thoughthey were all part of the same piece of writing. Certainly it is more plausible andeconomical to postulate reliance on an excerptor plunderingoneoriginal source,not two. (b) The idea that gods make journeys, rejected at fragment 26, exactlymatches the conception of the gods in Homer, (c) Fragments 23–6 are interestedin exactly the same general question about the divine as fragments 11 and 14–16:how should it be conceived? They say nothing on the other hand about thecosmic role of god. Theophrastus, who thought with Aristotle that Xenophanesmight be meaning to identify god with the universe, none the less observed thatmention of Xenophanes’ view is not appropriate in an enquiry into nature, but isa subject for another branch of philosophy, presumably ‘first philosophy’ ormetaphysics. No doubt he made this comment because he could find inXenophanes no actualdiscussionof god’s relation to the universe. Thisassessment is pretty well irresistible given his professed inability to decidewhether Xenophanes held that the sum of things is one or alternatively that thereis a single principle of things.50I infer that Xenophanes said all that he said about god in his lampoon againstHomer and Hesiod, and that not unexpectedly his instructions there on how weshouldthink of god did not extend very much beyond the few lines whichsurvive as fragments 23–6. Later doxographical reports are confident thatXenophanes claimed much more: notably that god is spherical in shape. Weknow the ultimate source of these reports. It is a remarkable reconstruction ofXenophanes as an Eleatic monist, employing metaphysical argumentation in thestyle of Melissus and Gorgias, and known to us in a version preserved in thepseudo-Aristotelian treatiseOn Melissus, Xenophanes and Gorgias. Theimportant thing about this presentation of Xenophanes for our present concernsis precisely that itisa reconstruction, in a later idiom involving techniques andassumptions unthinkable before Parmenides.51The basis of the proposition that Xenophanes made god a sphere is clearenough. It derives its main inspiration from Parmenides’ lines arguing that whatis is ‘perfected, like the bulk of a ball(sphaire_)wellrounded on every side,equally balanced in every direction from the centre’ (fr. 8. 42–4). The actualpiece of argument ascribed to Xenophanes goes as follows:Being one, it is like all over, seeing and hearing and having the othersenses all over. Otherwise if there were parts of god they would controland be controlled by each other, which is impossible. But being like allover, it is spherical: for it is not such here but not there, but all over.([Aristotle]On Melissus, Xenophanes and Gorgias977a36–b2)This extract gives a good impression of how the writer works. It looks very unlikelythat he has any more to go on in his construction of Xenophanes’ reasoning thanfragments 23 and 24. He gets the unity of god from fragment 23 (cf. 977a23–4).That Xenophanes believes god is like all over is inferred from fragment 24, andthen made the consequence of his unity, in line with a similar inference attributedto Melissus by this same author (974a12–14). The key move to the conclusionthat god is therefore spherical is finally worked out by application of reasoningborrowed from fragment 8.22–4, 42–5 of Parmenides.52Despite the preoccupation of many of our sources for Xenophanes with histheology, there is little doubt that his discussions of questions about the heavenlybodies and meteorological phenomena were in fact more extensive. As well as anumber of fragments on these topics, a considerable amount of informationabout his views relating to them is preserved in the doxography. What ismissing, however, is evidence of a cosmogony, or of the associated drivetowards a comprehensive narrative characteristic for example of Anaximander.Thus the general survey of his thought in theMiscellaniesattributed to Plutarchsticks mostly to a summary of the pseudo-Aristotelian Xenophanes, interruptedand then completed by a disjointed sequence of reports about specific theses ofXenophanes’ physics or epistemology. Hippolytus’ overview is better organized,but on physical questions very brief and selective until a final section on largescalechanges in the relation of earth and sea.53We should therefore conclude that there probably never was a single poemdevoted to natural philosophy. It is less easy to conjecture what formXenophanes’ writing on the various natural questions which interested himwould have taken. Indeed we are in a position of total ignorance on the issue.One thing clear from the few surviving fragments, however, is that many of hisverses echoed lines of Homer and Hesiod, invariably to subvert the picture of thenatural world they conveyed.Consider for example the following pair of lines attributed to Xenophanes:All things that come to be and grow are earth and water.(SimpliciusPhysics189.1: fr. 29 [KRS 181])For we have all come to be from earth and water.(Sextus EmpiricusAdversus MathematicoIX.34:fr.33 [KRS 182])These verses recall Menelaus’ words in theIliad,cursing the Achaeans:May you all become earth and water.(HomerIliadVII.99)Perhaps Xenophanes’ point against Homer would have been that everything alivealreadyisearth and water. Whether or not that is how he began his presentationof the idea, his further development of it probably included his remarkableargument for the cyclical process of alternate domination of the earth’s surfaceby earth and sea:Xenophanes thinks that a mixture of the earth with the sea is going on, andthat in time the earth is dissolved by the moist. He says that he hasdemonstrations of the following kind: shells are found inland and in themountains, and in the quarries in Syracuse he says that an imprint of a fishand seals were found; and in Paros an imprint of coral in the depth of therock, and in Malta slabs of rock containing all sorts of sea creatures.These, he says, were produced when everything was long ago covered withmud, and the imprint was dried in the mud. All mankind is destroyedwhenever the earth is carried down into the sea and becomes mud; then thereis another beginning of coming into being, and this is the foundation for allworlds.(HippolytusRefutationI.14.5 [KRS 184])The idea of a cycle of this kind had probably been anticipated by Anaximander,who certainly held that the earth was once much wetter than it is now. ButXenophanes thought the world was at a different phase of the cycle: the earth isnot drying out, but reverting to sea. And although Anaximander may haveappealed to the evidence of fossils, this is actually attested only for Xenophanes.Whether Xenophanes collected the evidence himself or relied on the reports ofothers, his assemblage of examples and conception of their significanceconstitute one of the high points of Ionianhistoriē(enquiry).The longest physical fragment is also about the sea:Sea is the source of water, and source of wind. For neither <would there bethe force of wind blowing forth from> inside clouds without the greatocean, nor streams of rivers nor shower water from the air above: but thegreat ocean is begetter of clouds and winds and rivers.(Geneva scholium on theIliadXXI.196: fr.30 [KRS 183])These lines may have belonged to the same poem as did the verses about earthand water. On the other hand there is reason to conjecture a separate poemdirected explicitly or implicitly against traditional conceptions of the heavenlybodies as divinities with marvellous properties.54The striking description of the ocean(pontos)as ‘begetter’ already recalls, yetsimultaneously rationalizes, Hesiod’s account of how it ‘begat’ Nereus, the oldman of the sea, and other mythical figures (Theogony233–9). But the mention ofclouds among the offspring of ocean is particularly significant, for thedoxographical evidence makes it clear that Xenophanes explained virtually allastronomical and meteorological phenomena in terms of cloud. On these subjectshis thinking was both relentlessly systematic and at the same time satirical: theobject was to reduce mystery and grandeur to something familiar and homely.55Thus the moon is a compressed (‘felted’) cloud that is on fire. But it ‘does nowork in the boat’, i.e. unlike the sun it does not sustain life.56Comets, shootingstars and meteors are groups or movements of burning clouds. St Elmo’s fireoccurs when cloudlets glimmer owing to a particular sort of movement, andlightning is very similar. A fragment survives which explains that,What they call Iris, this too is cloud: purple and red and yellow to behold.(Scholium bT on theIliadXI.27: fr. 32 [KRS 178])Here Xenophanes is undoubtedly attempting to demystify and demythologize therainbow. Iris is no goddess, nor is it a ‘marvel to behold’ (thauma idesthai,inHomeric language), merely a variety of colours ‘to behold’(idesthai).The most intriguing of Xenophanes’ astronomical explanations are those hegives for the stars and the sun. Here the basic identification as burning cloud isreiterated. But much more detail is given by the doxography. The stars arequenched each morning but flicker again at night like coals. The sun is generatedanew each day by the collection of widely scattered flaming particles. Thisextraordinary idea was probably supported with the claim that the phenomenoncan actually be observed at dawn from the heights of Mount Ida above Homer’sTroy, when rays originally separate are seen to coalesce into a single ball.57Itwould seem to follow that the process of coalescence must happen again andagain every day at different longitudes. Xenophanes was not afraid to draw thelogical and undignified conclusion:Xenophanes says that there are many suns and moons according toregions, sections and zones of the earth, and that at a particular moment thedisc is banished into some section of the earth not inhabited by us—and so,tumbling into a hole, as it were, produces the phenomenon of an eclipse.He also says that the sun goes onward indefinitely, but is thought to movein a circle because of the distance.(Aetius II.24.9 [KRS 179])We have specific reason to think that Xenophanes’ account of the sun occurredin the same poem as fragment 30: it is quoted by a doxographer who explains thatthe vapour from the sea which turns eventually into clouds, showers and winds isdrawn up by the action of the sun (Aetius III.4.4 [DK 21 A 46]).What epistemological status did Xenophanes accord to these speculations? Afamous and much discussed quatrain gives us his answer, which sounds asthough it might have served as a prologue to one of the physical poems:No man knows, or ever will know, the clear truth about the gods and aboutall the things I speak of. For even if someone happened to say somethingexactly so, he himself none the less does not know it, but opinion is what isthe outcome [lit. ‘is constructed’] in all cases.(Sextus EmpiricusAdvenus MathematicalVII.49 and 110: fr. 34 [KRS186])These are the lines which later writers fastened upon in their determination tofind ancient antecedents for a radically sceptical stance on the prospects forhuman knowledge.58Certainly Xenophanes is claiming that there issomethingthat man does not nor ever will know. But the claim is qualified in two ways.First, the subject-matter is restricted to truths about the gods and ‘all the things Ispeak of: presumably astronomical and meteorological phenomena. Second,when Xeno-phanes says that no human will ever know thecleartruth about them,he appears to allow that a person might attain thetruthon these matters. Thisidea is amplified in the final clause of the fragment, where translation isunfortunately disputed. On the version given here, Xenophanes states thatopinionis what is the outcome for everyone. Opinion must therefore be preciselya state of belief (true or false) that doesnotput a person in the position ofknowing the truth. The claim is then that no human can be in any other conditionso far as concerns the nature of gods and of the heavens.Xenophanes does not saywhythis is so. There are a number of differentingredients in his concept of knowledge which may indicate the explanation heenvisages. First, what the gods or the heavens are like is something inaccessibleto direct human experience. Second, when he suggests that someone might‘happen’ to say what is true on this subject, he implies that humans have nounfailingly reliable means of establishing the truth—as would be required ifknowledge were to be achieved. Finally, the introduction of the notion of claritysuggests that Xenophanes thinks knowledge would be transparent: a knowerwould know that he knows.59So interpreted Xenophanes’ scepticism is limited to a denial that in theology,astronomy and meteorology there can ever be a direct, unfailingly reliable ortransparent grasp of the truth even on the part of a person who is in fact inpossession of it. On this reading (indeed on most readings) fragment 34constitutes another instance of the relexive, self-critical turn philosophy takes inhis hands. Its point is doubtless to indicate that the claims he is advancing aboutnature and the divine are modest so far as regards their epistemological status.Other evidence tends to confirm that the object is not to imply any actualdoubtthat those claims are true. The other principal surviving remark on knowledgeattributed to Xenophanes says:Yet the gods have not revealed all things to mortals from the beginning; butby seeking they find out better with time.(Stobaeus I.8.2: fr. 18 [KRS 188])This fragment is optimistic about the prospects for discovering the truth. Takethe question: is the sea gradually inundating the earth? The gods have notrevealed to us the answer just like that—but fragment 18 indicates that byobserving for example the fossil record we can find out what it is reasonable toregard as the truth of the matter.60The first words of an injunction ofXenophanes (unfortunately truncated) ran:Let these be accepted, certainly, as like the realities…(PlutarchSymposium746B: fr. 35 [KRS 187])This might be interpreted as saying: you are justified in your belief that this iswhat reality is like (…even if you cannot know it).For Heraclitus Xenophanes was one of those thinkers whose farflung learninghad not brought them understanding. Yet Heraclitus’ own ideas about god andknowledge and the heavenly bodies seem to owe much to Xenophanes’. Norwere Plato and Aristotle wrong to perceive his influence on Parmenides, even ifhe was no Eleatic monist. Without our evidence relating to Xenophanes it wouldin fact be difficult to understand how philosophy made the transition fromMilesian cosmology to the metaphysical and epistemological orientation sharedby Heraclitus and Parmenides. Some of his speculations look naïve beyondbelief. But he had witty and subtle things to say on all manner of topics. Hecherished a healthy regard for evidence: the naïveté is in good part theconsequence of his rigour in refusing to go much beyond it. And so far aswestern thought is concerned, he invented both monotheism and critical theology.NOTES1 A good general account of Thales: KRS ch. 2. For a more ambitious view of whatwe may reasonably conjecture about his cosmology see West [2.59].2 Cf. Herodotus I.74–5, 170 [KRS 74, 66, 65]. Solar eclipse: best discussion still Heath[2.33], ch. 3; also e.g. Panchenko [2.53]. That any eclipse Thales predicted wasvisible in Asia Minor must have been due to luck. Probably it is largely on accountof this feat that he came to be credited with views on the causes of eclipses, thenature of the heavenly bodies, and the zones of the heavens [DK 11 A 13c, 17, 17aand b].3 Texts and discussion: KRS, pp. 81–6, 100–5. On the map see Kahn [2.49], 82–4;on early Greek astronomical knowledge Dicks [2.47]; Kahn [2.50]; Burkert [2.25],ch. 4, sect. 1.4 See AristotleOn the Soul405a19–21, 411a7–8, Diogenes Laertius I.24, withdiscussion in KRS pp. 95–8.5 See AristotleMetaphysics983b6–984a3. Discussion in KRS, pp. 89–95 OnHippias: Snell [2.57]; Mansfeld [2.40], chs 3, 5.6 On the physics of flat-earthism see Furley [2.32], chs 1, 2, 18.7 The doxographical evidence is confused. One source ([Plutarch]Miscellanies3[KRS 148]) states explicitly that the sun is earth; and Hippolytus’ evidence that it isflat and rides on air makes sense only on that assumption (KRS 150, quotedabove). However the doxography seems generally to have understood ‘fiery’ as‘composedof fire’ (cf. Runia [2.67]); and one suspect passage (HippolytusRefutationI.7.5 [KRS 149]) is explicit on the point. Perhaps the ambiguity of‘stars’ as heavenly bodies in general or the fixed stars in particular added to theconfusion.8 Anaximenes also posited earthy bodies in the region of the ‘stars’, envisaged asbeing carried round with them (HippolytusRefutationI.7.5; Aetius II.13.10 [KRS152]). These were presumably introduced to account for eclipses: (cf. HippolytusRefutation1.8.6, 9 on Anaxagoras [KRS 502]).9 Aristotle’s comparison with a lid probably derives not from Anaximenes but fromAnaxagoras’ version of flat-earthism. Note the reference in the sequel to theclepsydra(294b18–21), elsewhere associated by him with Anaxagoras (Physics213a22–7 [KRS 470]).10 Pre-Socratics seem not to have mentioned predecessors or contemporaries by nameexcept to attack them. An explicit critique of Thales is not attested nor likely forAnaximander or Anaximenes, but is attributed to Xenophanes (Diogenes LaertiusIX. 18 [KRS 161]). No book: various writings are ascribed to Thales, notably a‘Nautical star-guide’ (SimpliciusPhysics23.25–9, Diogenes Laertius I.23 [KRS81–2]). But already in antiquity their authenticity was doubted: for a cautiouslysceptical review of the evidence see KRS, pp. 86–8.11 The few mentions in the doxography of physical theses about the constitution andbehaviour of the heavenly bodies which Thales is supposed to have advanced (textsat DK 11 A 17a and b) are either inconsistent with better evidence or merelyisolated assertions. E.g. the claim that Thales knew the moon derived its light fromthe sun is at odds with the strong evidence that Anaximander and Anaximenes didnot. Such knowledge is first credibly associated with Parmenides (fr. 14, KRS 308)or Anaxagoras (PlatoCratylus409a–b; HippolytusRefutation1.8.8 [KRS 502])among philosophers.12 See Mansfeld [2.40], ch. 5.13 Geocentric conception: Anaximander famously located the earth in the middle of asymmetrical cosmos, with the sun, moon and stars conceived as circling round it ina sequence of concentric rings. For a treatment of Anaximander’s logic asrepresented by Aristotle see Barnes [2.8], 23–9; also Makin [2.52].14 So Robinson [2.55]; Furley [2.32], ch. 2. Their views are very effectively criticizedby Panchenko [2.54].15 Texts on the shape of the earth and the celestial rings are collected and discussed inKRS, pp. 133–7.16 Interestingly, a claim that Anaximander’s earth ‘moves round the middle of thecosmos’ is ascribed to Eudemus (Theon of Smyrna p. 198H [DK 12 A 26]). Itstruth and provenance are generally doubted: Kahn [2.49], 54–5. But it mayoriginate from an attempt to work out what would be the behaviour of acylinderinunstable equilibrium at the centre of the universe: this would be rotation about itsown axis.17 ‘Not controlled by anything’ is unclear. Perhaps a contrast with the sun, moon andstars is intended: their behaviouriscontrolled by the misty rings which envelopethe fire which constitutes them.18 The sentence about Anaximander seems unmotivated in context, unless seen ascompleting Alexander’s argument that he is not the primary focus of theAristotelian passage which names him (SimpliciusOn the Heavens532.7–12). Soconstrued its point will be to suggest that because the theory Aristotle mentionsdoes not really represent Anaximander’s position, he must actually have anotherproponent of it in mind.19 Simplicius complains that Alexander’s presentation of the indifference theorysubstitutes considerations about equilibrium (derived from Plato) for an argumentfrom likeness (which is what Aristotle’s text actually gives us):On the Heavens535.4–8.20 The major study of Anaximander: Kahn [2.49]. On Anaximander’s book and itssignificance: Kahn [2.49], 6–8, 199–208; Burkert [2.25], 239–40. Although he is saidto have been the first to write ‘on nature’ (see KRS, pp. 102–3), the claim of thestrange Pherecydes of Syros to be the first prose author is stronger if notoverwhelming: evidence in KRS, pp. 51–2; discussion e.g. in Kahn [2.49], 240;Schibli [2.56], 4.21 See especiallyPhysicsIII.4, 5. Modern discussions of theapeiron: KRS, pp. 105–17, Kahn [2.49], App. II; Guthrie [2.13] I: 83–9.22 See in general Diels [2.1]; for Anaximander in particular Kahn [2.49], 11–71. Abrief statement in KRS, pp. 1–6.23 Often observed by readers, but particularly well discussed by Kahn [2.49], 112 n.1.24 For a contrary view see e.g. Guthrie [2.13] I ch. 3 (esp. pp. 89–91), who holds thatAnaximander conceived of the emergence of the world as the development of acosmic organism; see also West [2.59]. On Anaximander’s analagies : Lloyd [1.37].25 Tannery [2.58], 92 (quoted by Kahn [2.49], 102).26 So e.g. KRS, pp. 141–2; Kahn [2.49], 112–13.27 One text attests Anaximander’s recognition of the ecliptic: the circles of the sunand moon ‘lie aslant’ (Aetius II.25.1 [DK 12 A 22]).28 See AristotleMeteorology353b5–11 [KRS 132], with AlexanderMeteorology67.3–12 [DK 12 A 27]. Well discussed by Kahn [2.49], 66–7.29 Spheres: Aetius II.16.5; planet circle: Aetius II.15.6 [DK 12 A 18]. Zones: Kahn [2.49], 88–9.30 See West [1.21], 89–91.31 So Kahn [2.49], App. II.32 Eternal motion: HippolytusRefutationI.6.2 [KRS 101, 115]; intermediatecharacter: AristotleOn the Heavens303b10–13 [KRS 109],On Generation andCorruption332a19–25 [KRS 103], with discussion in KRS, pp. 111–13; Kahn [2.49], 44–6.33 Theophrastus’ words: SimpliciusPhysics24.17–18 [KRS 101]. Assimilation toatomist theory: SimpliciusPhysics1121.5–9, [Plutarch]Miscellanies2 [KRS 101],Aetius 1.3.3 [DK 12 A 14]. Right in general thrust: so Conche [2.46], ch.5 (cf. alsoGuthrie [2.13] I: 106–15), against, e.g. KRS, pp. 122–6; Kahn [2.49], 46–53.34 See above all Kahn [2.49], ch. 3 (but his suggestion that the fragment may extendback to ‘And out of those things…’ is idiosyncratic and unpersuasive).35 For this interpretation see Barnes [2.8], 33–4.36 Good general accounts of Anaximenes in KRS and Guthrie [2.13] I.37 For the later coinage(sunkratein)and substitution ofpneumasee KRS, pp. 158–62. Forhoionas ‘for example’ see Longrigg [2.51]. Barnes notes the absence of aconnecting particle, common with this use ofhoion([2.8], 55).38 Cf. Barnes [2.8], 46–7, 55.39 A selection of relevant texts (with discussion) at KRS, pp. 154–8. Anaximenesseems to have suggested a fresh simile to recommend the Anaximandrian accountof thunder and lightning: the flashing of oars cleaving the water (Aetius III.3.2[KRS 158]).40 Cf. HippolytusRefutationI.7.2–3 [KRS 141]; for Anaximander cf. [Plutarch]Miscellanies2 [KRS 121].41 [Plutarch]Miscellanies3 [KRS 148]; Aetius II.23.1 [KRS 153].42 Attribution of the notion to Anaximenes is generally accepted, but denied byStokes [2.42], 43–8. For an elegant logical articulation of it and defence of itsAnaximenian credentials see Barnes [2.8], 38–44.43 A sound and useful edition with translation—of the doxography as well as thefragments—and commentary: Lesher [2.60].44 Heraclitus: fr.40 [KRS 255]; Plato:Sophist242c–d [KRS 163]; Aristotle:Metaphysics986b18–12 [KRS 164, 174]; Theophrastus: SimpliciusPhysics22.26–31 [KRS 165]; Timon: Sextus EmpiricusOutlines of PyrrhonismI.223–4 [DK 21 A35]. According to Diogenes Laertius (IX.111), he had a function in Timon’sSilloianalogous to Virgil’s in Dante’sDivine Comedy. For the later episodes of the storysee e.g. Mansfeld [2.40], chs 6–8.45 So Burnet [2.11], 115–16, in what remains a sparkling treatment of Xenophanes’work. A more recent statement of the same view: Steinmetz [2.69], 54–73.46 A good discussion of Xenophanes’ attitude to Thales in Lesher [2.60], 120–4.47 On Xenophanes’ chronology: Steinmetz [2.69], 13–34.48 For further discussion see Lesher [2.60], 47–77.49 Monotheist: e.g. Barnes [2.8], 82–99; polytheist: e.g. Stokes [2.42], ch. 3.50 For Aristotle’s view seeMetaphysics986b24–5 [KRS 174] (but his meaning isdisputed); Theophrastus’ view is preserved at SimpliciusPhysics22.26–31 [KRS165].51 The key modern study of the Xenophanes doxography and its relation toTheophrastus andOn Melissus, Xenophanes and Gorgias (MXG)is Mansfeld [2.40], ch. 6. It has often been supposed that because Hippolytus (RefutationI.14.2)says that Xenophanes’ god is spherical, it can be inferred that this wasTheophrastus’ view too (e.g. Burnet [2.11], 125, n.1). But the supposition isincompatible with evidence that Xenophanes did not in his opinion make godlimited or unlimited (SimpliciusPhysics22.26–9 [KRS 165]) unless it is supposedthat he is reflecting contradictory remarks by Xenophanes made presumably indifferent places (so Steinmetz [2.69], 48–54). The date ofMXGitself is uncertain,although the presentation of Xenophanes it contains—on which see the excellentbrief discussion by Lesher [2.60], 192–4—may go back to the early third centuryBC. Some scholars continue to defend the credibility of theMXGversion ofXenophanes: e.g. Barnes [2.8], 84–94; Finkelberg [2.62]. See also Cassin [2.61].52 It is sometimes suggested (e.g. Steinmetz [2.69], 35–40) that e.g.homoie_n,‘like’,is an authentically Xenophanean divine attribute, on the strength of Timon, fr.59(preserved in Sextus EmpiricusOutlines of PyrrhonismI. 223 [DK 21 A 35]). ButTimon already reads Xenophanes in the fashion of Aristotle and Theophrastus as anEleatic monist. It seems likelier that he is in fact drawing on a version of theMXGaccount of Xenophanes’ theology.53 See [Plutarch]Miscellanies4 [DK 21 A 32]; HippolytusRefutationI.14 [DK 21 A33]. No cosmogony: one fragment reads ‘All things are from earth and to earth allthings come in the end’ (fr. 27). In the doxography where this line is quoted it istaken as committing Xenophanes to a cosmogony (Theodoretus,Therapy for GreekMalaisesIV. 5 [DK 21 A 36]). But this conflicts with Xenophanes’ stresselsewhere on sea as a source of things, and with Aristotle’s denial that any pre-Socratic monist made earth the first principle (Metaphysics989a5–6). ProbablyXenophanes meant only that the earth was the origin of all living things: so Guthrie[2.13] I: 383–7; Lesher [2.60], 124–8. The intricacies of the doxography areindicated in Mansfeld [2.40], 150–5.54 This is the standard interpretation: cf. e.g. Guthrie [2.13] I: 386–7. That popularbeliefs are the target of the whole body of Xenophanes’ physical fragments is wellargued by Lesher [2.60], 124–48. For texts and discussion see also KRS, pp. 172–8.55 The main modern disagreement about Xenophanes’ handling of physical topics iswhether he treats them as intrinsically ludicrous, deserving only opportunisticflights of fancy or brief debunking, or works out a serious systematic andcomprehensive theory, albeit mocking popular misconceptions at the same time.The first view: Burnet [2.11], 121–5; Guthrie [2.13] I: 387–94; Steinmetz [2.69].54–68. The second: Fränkel [2.63], 119–21; [2.30], 334 (which complains howeverof ‘poverty-stricken’ empiricism); Hussey [2.35], 26 (who credits Xenophanes witha more admirable ontological and methodological ‘parsimony’); Lesher [2.60], 145–8.56 On the moon see Runia [2.67].57 So Keyser [2.64]. The doxographical evidence about Xenophanes’ sun is complexand confusing; for discussion see Runia [2.68].58 On ancient interpretations of Xenophanes’ epistemology, see Mansfeld [2.40], 156–9; on modern see Lesher [2.60], 159–69 (summarizing Lesher [2.65]). A goodrecent treatment: Hussey [2.35].59 For knowledge as direct (not a matter of sign-inference), cf. Alcmaeon, fr.1 [KRS439]; as transparent, cf. HippocratesOn Ancient Medicine1. Not everyone wouldagree that Xenophanes incorporates all three notions in his concept of knowledge.60 So Lesher [2.66]. But this may be a text relating rather to the origins of civilizationand discovery of the arts: so e.g. Guthrie [2.13] I: 399–401. Note also that fr.35 is‘fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty’: Lesher [2.60], 171. The limitations ofhuman understanding are probably the focus of another famous Xenophaneanremark: ‘If god had not made yellow honey, they would think figs were muchsweeter’ (fr.38 [KRS 189]).GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR CHAPTERS 2–6TextsOriginal language editions2.1 Diels, H.Doxographi Graeci,Berlin, G.Reimer, 1879 (repr. de Gruyter 1965).Original texts of the main doxographers, with Latin prolegomena.2.2 Diels, H. rev. W.KranzDie Fragmente der Vorsokratiker,3 vols, 6th edn, Berlin,Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1951. Original texts of fragments andtestimonia, with German translation of fragments. This standard work is cited as DK.References are by chapter, each of which is divided into testimonia (A) andfragments (B). Numbered fragments mentioned in the text are found under thatnumber in DK.2.3 KRS [1.6]. Original texts with English translation and commentary.2.4 Mansfeld, J.Die Vorsokratiker,Stuttgart, Philipp Reclam, 1987. Original texts withGerman translation and notes.2.5 Wright, M.R.The Presocratics,Bristol, Bristol Classical Press, 1985. Original textswith notes for readers with elementary Greek.Collections of texts in translation2.6 Barnes, J.Early Greek Philosophy,Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1987.2.7 McKirahan, R.D., Jr.Philosophy Before Socrates,Indianapolis, Ind. and Cambridge,Hackett, 1994. Contains substantial commentary.General Surveys of Pre-Socratic Philosophy2.8 Barnes, J.The Presocratic Philosophers,rev. edn, London, Routledge, 1982.2.9 Brun, J.Les Présocratiques,2nd edn, (Que sais-je? no. 1319) Paris, PressesUniversitaires de France, 1973.2.10 Burnet, J.Greek Philosophy: Thales to Plato,London, Macmillan, 1914 (numerousreprints).2.11—Early Greek Philosophy,4th edn, London, A. & C. Black, 1930.2.12 Cornford, F.M.From Religion to Philosophy,London, Edward Arnold, 1957, repr.New York, Harper, 1957.2.13 Guthrie, W.K.C.A History of Greek Philosophy,vols I–III, Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1962–9.2.14 Hussey, E.The Presocratics,London, Duckworth, 1972.Collections of articles2.15 Allen, R.E. and Furley, D.J. (eds)Studies in Presocratic Philosophy,2 vols, London,Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970 and 1975.2.16 Anton, J.P. and Kustas, G.L. (eds)Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy,Albany, NY,SUNY Press, 1971.2.17 Anton, J.P. and Preus, A. (eds)Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy,vol. II, Albany,NY, SUNY Press, 1983.2.18 Boudouris, K. (ed.)Ionian Philosophy,Athens, International Association for GreekPhilosophy, 1989.2.19 Mourelatos, A.P.D. (ed.)The Pre-Socratics,New York, Anchor Press/ Doubleday,1974; rev. edn., Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1993.2.20 Robb, K. (ed.)Language and Thought in Early Greek Philosophy,La Salle, Ill.,Hegeler Institute, 1983.2.21 Shiner, R.A. and King-Farlow, J. (eds)New Essays on Plato and the Pre-Socratics,Canadian Journal of Philosophy,suppl. vol. 2, 1976.BibliographyMourelatos [2.19] contains a bibliography.2.22 Navia, L.E.The Presocratk Philosophers: An Annotated Bibliography,New Yorkand London, Garland Publishing, 1993.2.23 Paquet, L., Roussel, M. and Lanfrance, Y.Les Présocratiques: Bibliographieanalytique (1879–1980),2 vols, Montreal, Bellarmin, 1988–9.General studies2.24 Beare, J.I.Greek Theories of Elementary Cognition,Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1906.2.25 Burkert, W.Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism,Cambridge, Mass.Harvard University Press, 1972 (German original Nuremberg, Verlag Hans Carl,1962).2.26 Cherniss, H.Aristotle’s Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy,Baltimore, Md., JohnsHopkins University Press, 1935; repr. New York, Octagon Books, 1964, 1971.2.27 Dicks, D.R.Early Greek Astronomy to Aristotle,Ithaca, NY, Cornell UniversityPress, 1970.2.28 Dodds, E.R.The Greeks and the Irrational,Berkeley, Calif., University of CaliforniaPress, 1951.2.29 Fränkel, H.Wege und Formen frügriechischen Denkens,Munich, C.H.Beck, 1968.2.30—Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy,New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973(German original Munich, C.H.Beck, 1969).2.31 Furley, D.J.The Greek Cosmologists,vol. I, Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress, 1987.2.32—Cosmic Problems,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989.2.33 Heath, T.L.Aristarchus of Samos,Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1913, repr. 1959.2.34—History of Greek Mathematics,2 vols, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1921.2.35 Hussey, E. ‘The beginnings of epistemology: from Homer to Philolaus’, in S.Everson (ed.)Companions to Ancient Thought I: Epistemology,Cambridge,Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 11–38.2.36—‘Ionian inquiries: on understanding the Presocratic beginnings of science’, inA.Powell (ed.)The Greek World,London and New York, Routledge, 1995,pp. 530–49.2.37 Lloyd, G.E.R.Polarity and Analogy,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1966.2.38—Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle,London, Chatto and Windus, 1970.2.39—[1.7].2.40 Mansfeld, J.Studies in the Historiography of Greek Philosophy,Assen andMaastricht, Van Gorcum, 1990.2.41 Sambursky, S.The Physical World of the Greeks,London, Routledge and Kegan Paul,1956.2.42 Stokes, M.C.One and Many in Presocratic Philosophy,Cambridge, Mass., HarvardUniversity Press, 1971.2.43 Stratton, G.M.Theophrastus and the Greek Physiological Psychology beforeAristotle,London, Allen and Unwin, and New York, Macmillan, 1917.2.44 Thomson, G.The First Philosophers,2nd edn, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1961.2.45 West [1.21].Texts and studies of individual philosophers are listed in the bibliographies to therespective chapters.BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR CHAPTER 2MilesiansText2.46 Conche, M.Anaximandre, fragments et témoignages: Texte grec, traduction,introduction et commentaire,Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1991.Studies2.47 Dicks, D.R. ‘Solstices, equinoxes and the Presocratics’,Journal of Hellenic Studies86 (1966): 26–40.2.48 Furley [2.32], esp. ch. 2, ‘The dynamics of the earth: Anaximander, Plato and thecentrifocal theory’.2.49 Kahn, C.H.Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology,New York,Columbia University Press, 1960; repr. Indianapolis, Ind., and Cambridge, Hackett,1994.2.50—‘On early Greek astronomy’,Journal of Hellenic Studies90 (1970): 99–116.2.51 Longrigg, J. ‘A note on Anaximenes fragment 2’,Phronesis9 (1964): 1–5.2.52 Makin, S.Indifference Arguments,Oxford, Blackwell, 1994.2.53 Panchenko, D. ‘Thales’ prediction of a solar eclipse’,Journal for the History ofAstronomy25 (1994): 275–88.2.54—‘ and in Anaximander and Thales’,Hyperboreus1 (1994):28–55.2.55 Robinson, J.M. ‘Anaximander and the problem of the earth’s immobility’, in Antonand Kustas [2.16].2.56 Schibli, H.S.Pherekydes of Syros,Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990.2.57 Snell, B. ‘Die Nachrichten über die Lehren des Thales’,Philologus96 (1944):170–82, repr with additions in Snell,Gesammelte Schriften,Göttingen, Vandenhoeckand Rupprecht, 1966, pp. 119–28.2.58 Tannery, P.,Pour l’histoire de la science Hellène,2nd edn, Paris, Gauthier-Villars,1930.2.59 West, M.L. ‘Ab ovo’,Classical QuarterlyNS 44 (1994): 289–307.XenophanesText2.60 Lesher, J.H.Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments: a text and translation withcommentary (Phoenixsuppl vol 32), Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1992.Includes substantial bibliography.Studies2.61 Cassin, B.Si Parménide: le traité anonyme De Melisso Xenophane Gorgia,Lille andParis, Presses Universitaires de France, 1980.2.62 Finkelberg, A. ‘Studies in Xenophanes’,Harvard Studies in Classical Philology93(1990):103–67.2.63 Fränkel, H. ‘Xenophanes’ empiricism and his critique of knowledge’, in Mourelatos[2.19], pp. 118–31.2.64 Keyser, P. ‘Xenophanes’ sun on Trojan Ida’,Mnemosyne45 (1992): 299–311.2.65 Lesher, J.H. ‘Xenophanes’ scepticism’,Phronesis23 (1978): 1–21; repr in Antonand Preus [2.17].2.66—‘Xenophanes on enquiry and discovery’,Ancient Philosophy11 (1991): 229–48.2.67 Runia, D. ‘Xenophanes on the moon: adoxographicumin Aetius’,Phronesis34(1989):245–69.2.68—‘Xenophanes or Theophrastus? An Aëtiandoxographicumon the sun’, inW.W.Fortenbaugh and D.Gutas (eds)Theophrastus: His Psychological,Doxographical and Scientific Writings,New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers UniversityPress, 1992: pp. 112–40.2.69 Steinmetz, P. ‘Xenophanesstudien’,Rheinisches Museum109 (1966): 13–73.