Anaximander of Miletus

Dates: c. 610–c. 546 BCE
Period: Ancient (6000–500 BCE)

Anaximander of Miletus wrote the first Greek book on nature in prose, set up a sundial at Sparta and drew the first published map of the inhabited world. His boldest claim concerned the Earth itself: it hangs at the centre of everything, held up by nothing, because nothing draws it toward any side.¹

He named the source of all things τὸ ἄπειρον, the Boundless. Aristotle reports that the thinkers who followed this line identified it “with the Divine, for it is 'deathless and imperishable' as Anaximander says.”² Zevism reads his work as service to Zeus as Sovereign of the Cosmos and to Dike, the justice that keeps the world's order in balance.

LIFE AND CONTEXT

“Anaximander, the son of Praxiades, was a native of Miletus,” Diogenes Laertius begins. Hippolytus places his birth in the 3rd year of the 42nd Olympiad, 610/609 BCE, and calls him a hearer of Thales. Strabo, following Eratosthenes, names him Thales' pupil and fellow-citizen.³

He wrote a treatise that later readers called On Nature. Couprie describes him as “the first who dared to write a treatise in prose,” and the book was probably still in the library of Aristotle's Lyceum. It's lost now. What remains are reports by Aristotle and later writers and 1 sentence that the much later commentator Simplicius copied out.⁴

He wasn't a recluse. The tradition says he led the colonists who founded Apollonia on the Black Sea coast, and a headless statue that bears his name was found in the market-place of Miletus. He cut a public figure too: Couprie notes the report that he “displayed solemn manners and wore pompous garments.”⁵

Diogenes preserves a lighter scene. When boys laughed at his singing, Anaximander answered, “Then to please the boys I must improve my singing.”⁶

Apollodorus of Athens recorded in his Chronology that “in the second year of the 58th Olympiad Anaximander was sixty-four, and that he died not long afterwards.” That puts his death soon after 547/546 BCE. Diogenes makes him a near contemporary of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos.⁶

ATTAINMENTS

• He wrote the first Greek prose treatise on nature, traditionally titled On Nature, which was probably still in the Lyceum's library in Aristotle's day.⁵
• He set up a gnomon at Sparta “in order to mark the solstices and the equinoxes,” and “he also constructed clocks to tell the time,” according to Favorinus.⁷
• Eratosthenes credited him as “the first to publish a geographical map.” Diogenes adds that he drew “the outline of land and sea” and built a globe.⁸
• He was the first to name the Boundless (ἄπειρον) as the origin of things, which Hippolytus calls “eternal and undecaying, and comprising all the worlds.”⁹
• He held that the Earth is “poised aloft, upheld by nothing,” kept in place by its equal distance from everything around it.¹⁰
• He gave the Earth a shape and a ratio: a column drum whose diameter is 3 times its height, with people living on the upper face.¹¹
• He put numbers on the heavens. The sun's wheel was 27 or 28 times the size of the Earth and the moon's 19 times, with the stars nearest of all.¹²
• He argued that animals first arose in moisture and that “man was, originally, similar to a different animal, that is, a fish.”⁹

KEY STORIES

The Shadow Clock at Sparta

Favorinus, in his Miscellaneous History, said that Anaximander set up a gnomon “for a sundial in Lacedaemon.” The upright rod cast a shadow, and the shadow marked the solstices and the equinoxes.⁷

Sparta had good reason to want one. Plutarch says Lycurgus obtained an oracle from Delphi about the city's government, the rhetra, which told the Spartans to build “a temple to Zeus Syllanius and Athena Syllania” and then to assemble “from time to time” between Babyca and Cnacion.¹³ Philip Thibodeau reads that phrase as a seasonal rule. “Having a sundial to mark their occurrence would have made it easier for the Spartans to decide when the assembly should meet.”¹⁴

Pausanias, writing some 700 years later, describes a building on a road from the Spartan market-place, “called Scias (Canopy), where even at the present day they hold their meetings of the Assembly.”¹⁵ Thibodeau reports that Munn matched the root σκια-, “shadow,” in the name and proposed that the Skias was where Anaximander's gnomon stood.¹⁶

The Night the Spartans Slept in the Fields

Cicero tells a 2nd Spartan story in his dialogue On Divination. Anaximander, whom Cicero calls a physicus, a natural philosopher, warned the Lacedaemonians that an earthquake was coming. They were to leave the city and their houses and keep watch under arms in the open country: “ut urbem et tecta linquerent armatique in agro excubarent.”¹⁷

Then the quake struck. The whole city collapsed, and the end of Mount Taygetus broke away “quasi puppis,” like the stern torn off a ship.¹⁷

Cicero's speaker tells the story to make a point. Doctors, helmsmen and farmers foresee many things, he says, and he won't call their foresight divination. Anaximander's warning belongs in the same class, the foresight of a natural philosopher. Cicero sets beside it Pherecydes, the teacher of Pythagoras, who saw water drawn from an ever-flowing well and announced that an earthquake was near.¹⁷

The Map of Land and Sea

Strabo opens his Geography with a list he took from Eratosthenes. The 1st 2 successors of Homer in geography were Anaximander, “a pupil and fellow-citizen of Thales,” and Hecataeus of Miletus. Anaximander “was the first to publish a geographical map,” and Hecataeus left a book on geography.¹⁸

Diogenes adds that he drew “the outline of land and sea” and “constructed a globe as well.”⁶ Couprie reconstructs the map as circular, “like the top of his drum-shaped earth,” with the Mediterranean in the middle and the river Ocean running round the rim.¹⁹

Herodotus had seen maps of this kind, and he didn't think much of them. “And I laugh to see how many have before now drawn maps of the world, not one of them reasonably; for they draw the world as round as if fashioned by compasses, encircled by the Okeanos river, and Asia and Europe of a like extent.”²⁰

The Earth That Needs No Support

Thales, Aristotle says, had set the Earth on water, “as if the same account had not to be given of the water which carries the earth as of the earth itself!” Anaximander cut the chain of props.²¹ Hippolytus reports his answer that the Earth “is poised aloft, upheld by nothing, continuing (so) on account of its equal distance from all.” Its shape was “similar to a column of stone,” with 1 face under the feet of humankind and the other opposite.⁹

Aristotle took the argument seriously enough to test it 200 years later. He names Anaximander among those “who say that the earth keeps its place because of its indifference”: set at the centre and related equally to every point of the edge, it has no reason to move up, down or sideways.²²

He found it clever and wrong. “This view is ingenious but not true.” He compared it to “the hair which, it is said, however great the tension, will not break under it, if it be evenly distributed,” and to the man who is hungry and thirsty in equal measure and stands “equidistant from food and drink.” By the same proof, he objected, “Fire, then, will rest at the centre,” and fire plainly doesn't.²¹

THE ZEVIST READING

The 1 surviving sentence of Anaximander is a sentence about justice. Things perish into what they came from, and in Couprie's rendering they “execute the sentence upon one another” for their crime, “in conformity with the ordinance of Time.”²³ Hesiod had already set Justice, “the daughter of Zeus,” beside her father, where she “tells him of men's wicked heart.”²⁴ Zevism reads Anaximander's fragment as the same Dike working through nature.

Doctrine gives that reading its terms. Ma'at is the structured order of existence, held by Zeus as Sovereign of the Cosmos; Izfet is excess, disorder and collapse. In the Temple's reading, when 1 opposite overruns another, the overrun is a small Izfet, and time restores the measure. Anaximander's own words don't name an Olympian. Aristotle says only that Anaximander and most of the physicists took the Boundless for “the Divine,” the principle held “to encompass all and to steer all.”² The Temple's reading names the steersman Zeus.

His map and his numbers belong to the doctrine of Light and Darkness. Unexplored darkness isn't evil; it's what one walks into with light. Anaximander carried light into it with a map of the inhabited world and a set of numbers for the wheels of the sun and moon. Herodotus's laughter came later and belongs to the same work: explored darkness becomes light by stages, and a rough 1st map is the stage that makes the better ones possible.

Sparta adds the civic side. The gnomon stood in a city whose constitution opened with a temple to Zeus Syllanius, and on Thibodeau's reading it counted the seasons by which free citizens gathered to decide their laws. Measurement that serves lawful assembly restores Ma'at in its plainest form.