![]() ANAXAGORAS, the son of Hegesibulus, or Eubulus, was a citizen of Clazomenae. How then can Anaximenes apply his mind to the contemplation of the skies, while he is in perpetual fear of death or slavery? But you are beloved by the people of Crotona, and by all the rest of the Italians and pupils flock to you, even from Sicily. For if we remain quiet there is no longer any hope of safety for us. But the Ionians are on the point of engaging in war with the Medes in the cause of universal freedom. The king of the Medes too is formidable to us: unless, indeed, we choose to become tributary to him. For the descendants of Aeacus commit unheard-of crimes, and tyrants never cease to oppress the Milesians. You are more prudent than we, in that you have migrated from Samos to Crotona, and live there in peace. At all events, the beginning of all wisdom ought to be attributed to Thales. ![]() But we who were his pupils cherish the recollection of the man, and so do our children and our own pupils: and we will lecture on his principles. So now the astronomer of Miletus has met with this end. In the evening, as he was accustomed to do, he went forth out of the vestibule of his house with his maid-servant, to observe the stars: and (for he had forgotten the existence of the place) while he was looking up towards the skies, he fell down a precipitous place. Thales, the son of Euxamias, has died in his old age, by an unfortunate accident. And this philosopher wrote the following letters : There were also two other persons of the name of Anaximenes, both citizens of Lampsacus one an orator and the other a historian, who was the son of the sister of the orator, and who wrote an account of the exploits of Alexander. And he lived, according to the statements of Apollodorus, in the sixty-third Olympiad, and died about the time of the taking of Sardis. ![]() He wrote in the pure unmixed Ionian dialect. He said that the principles of everything were the air, and the Infinite and that the stars moved not under the earth, but around the earth. ANAXIMENES, the son of Eurystratus, a Milesian, was a pupil of Anaximander but some say that he was also a pupil of Parmenides. There was also another Anaximander, a historian and he too was a Milesian, and wrote in the Ionic dialect. They say that when he sang, the children laughed and that he, hearing of this, said, “We must then sing better for the sake of the children.” And soon after he died, having flourished much about the same time as Polycrates, the tyrant, of Samos. And Apollodorus, in his Chronicles, states, that in the second year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad, he was sixty-four years old. He was the first person, too, who drew a map of the earth and sea, and he also made a globe and he published a concise statement of whatever opinions he embraced or entertained and this treatise was met with by Apollodorus the Athenian. He also was the first discoverer of the gnomon and he placed some in Lacedaemon on the sun-dials there, as Favorinus says in his Universal History, and they showed the solstices and the equinoxes he also made clocks. The moon, he said, had a borrowed light, and borrowed it from the sun and the sun he affirmed to be not less than the earth, and the purest possible fire. And he said that the parts were susceptible of change, but that the whole was unchangeable and that the earth lay in the middle, being placed there as a sort of centre, of a spherical shape. ![]() He used to assert that the principle and primary element of all things was the Infinity, giving no exact definition as to whether he meant air or water, or anything else. ANAXIMANDER, the son of Praxiadas, was a citizen of Miletus.
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