SOURCE: Charles H. Kahn, "Anaximander's Fragment: The Universe Governed by Law," in The Pre-Socratics: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Anchor Books, 1974, pp. 99-117.

[In the following excerpt, Kahn contends that Anaximander 's most significant achievement was the conception of nature governed by regular and determinate laws. According to Kahn, Anaximander's Boundless was not a mystical but a scientific and philosophical idea.]

Anaximander … declared the Boundless to be principle and element of existing things, having been the first to introduce this very term of "principle"; he says that it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but some different, boundless nature, from which all the heavens arise and the kosmoi within them; "out of those things whence is the generation for existing things, into these again does their destruction take place, according to what must needs be; for they make amends and give reparation to one another for their offense, according to the ordinance of time," speaking of them thus in rather poetical terms. It is clear that, having observed the change of the four elements into one another, he did not think fit to make any one of these the material substratum, but something else besides these. (Simplicius Phys. 24.13, after Theophrastus)¹

According to Simplicius, the entities which make reparation to one another for their wrongdoing are the elements. Is there any good reason to reject this view?

The "elements" for Anaximander are the opposite powers of cold and heat, moisture and dryness, darkness and light, and also the main portions of the visible world, regarded as embodiments of these universal factors.² Now it was long ago pointed out that only such opposing forces could reasonably be said to inflict damage on one another, and to make recompense "according to the ordinance of Time."³ The opposites indeed are inevitably and continually at war with one another, and the advantage of one is the disaster (phthora) of its rival.⁴ Nothing can be more in harmony with this vivid picture of cosmic strife than to speak of the vanquished party as "offended," and of his periodic triumph as "revenge" or "compensation."

Since the old cosmological texts are lost, it is above all from the medical literature that we can illustrate such expressions. The doctors regularly refer in this way to the internal struggle of forces in the body, as well as to the action of external factors upon the microcosm. Thus the verb adikein describes the effect of a morbid agent: "One should continue to make use of the same modes of regimen, when they clearly do no harm (ouden adikeonta) to the man's body" (Nat. Horn. 9; Jones, Loeb ed. IV, 28). The excessive strength of any power is considered a wrong (hamartēmd) for which punishment is due,⁵ hence one factor is said to chastise another (kolazein), or to avenge its intemperance (timōrein).⁶ The wronged party is in this case not so much the weaker element, as the healthy state of the whole body. The aggressor may be conceived either as the hot or moist within the body, or as its cosmic "ally."⁷ Hence it is the spring which kills men in an epidemic, and the summer which "benefits" them.⁸ Plato's doctor in the Symposium is speaking the language of the medical textbooks when he refers to "the hot and cold, and dry and wet," which, when blended and harmonized with one another, bring a season of health and prosperity to men, animals, and plants, "and cause no offense" (puden ēdikēsen). But when hybris reigns among the seasons of the year, these same powers

destroy many things and are cause of harm…. For plagues generally arise from such circumstances, and many other irregular diseases for beasts and for plants as well. And indeed frosts and hailstorms and plant blights come from the excessive and unruly lust of such things for one another. (Symp. 188a-b)

The doctors are, of course, concerned with the damage inflicted by these powers upon the human body. The fragment of Anaximander speaks instead of the wrong (adikia) perpetrated by the cosmic powers upon one another. His words suggest an exchange of crimes like that which Herodotus presents as the antecedent for the Persian War, in which Greeks and Orientals are alternative offenders against one another: "this was the beginning of the wrongs done (adikē matōn) … after this the Greeks were guilty of the secondary wrongdoing (adikiēs)" (Hdt. 1.2.1). In such a context, the balance is restored when the wronged party retaliates in full ("now this was equal for equal"). The crime establishes a debt, which the guilty party must "pay"; hence the phrase for rendering compensation…. In the fragment, the conditions of payment are fixed by the arbiter Time, and his law is a periodic pendulum of give and take.

In this second, unmistakably authentic portion of our text, there is no real ambiguity. In a general way the relevance of the first part also seems clear: it is in the alternate generation and corruption of things that both wrong and retaliation must be found….

But what are the onta whose generation and destruction represent such a relentless treadmill of offense and compensation? It is here that the problems of a literal interpretation become acute. Most modern commentators assume that ta onta must be the individual things of the visible world: the men, animals, and plants whose waning occurs after a fixed period of growth, and whose death balances their birth. These may, of course, be said to return back "into those things from which they came to be," and the expression is classic in Greece from an early period. Xenophanes insists that all things arise from earth and all return there in the end (B27); he is probably thinking of the fate of mankind. That is certainly the case for Epicharmus: "Earth to earth, pneuma aloft" (B9)—a thought that finds many echoes in the fifth century.¹⁰ The author of De Natura Hominis formulates the doctrine in general terms. The genesis of things, he says, can take place only from an equitable blending of elemental opposites:

And it is necessary that they return each to its own nature when the man's body comes to an end: wet to wet, dry to dry, hot to hot, and cold to cold. Such is the nature of animals and of all other things; all come to be in the same way and end in the same way. For their nature is composed out of all the aforesaid things and ends, as was said, in the same thing whence each was composed…. (ch. 3; Jones, Loeb ed. IV, 10)

Clearly this gives us a possible sense for the "out of those … into these" of the fragment. But such an interpretation of ta onta, as individual beings such as men and animals, encounters a serious obstacle in the explanatory particle gar, "for," which follows. For the statement introduced by this word says nothing of particular, compound things, but refers instead to a reciprocal action of the elemental powers upon one another (allēlois). How can an exchange of offense and penalty between the elements explain why compound things are dissolved back into the materials of which they were composed? In this view, the apparent parallelism of the two clauses loses its raison d'être, as does the binding gar. We would have two independent propositions, and no clear logical link between them."¹¹

One may, of course, imagine various devices for bridging the gap which this view opens up. We might assume, for example, that the excerpt of Theophrastus has suppressed one or more steps of the original reasoning which is represented in our text by the particle gar: Anaximander may have argued that the formation of individual things involves the temporary supremacy of one power over another, perhaps in the form of a debt to be paid back when the compound is resolved into its elements.¹² Yet even with a great deal of ingenuity, we will hardly succeed in explaining why the payment is then made, not by compound things back to their elements, but by the latter "to one another." Furthermore, the use of a pronoun such as ᾲυτά … naturally leads us to suppose that the things which exchange wrong and reparation are the same as those whose generation and destruction has just been mentioned. Can this have been the original thought of Anaximander, distorted by the doxographical citation?¹³

Now there is another interpretation of the words ta onta which would permit us to understand the text in just this way, without any additional conjectures and without supposing the sense to have been altered by Simplicius or Theophrastus. Simplicius, we remember, thinks that the fragment refers to the transformation of elements into one another, and the idea of a seasonal (as well as of a cosmogonie) cycle of elemental change was familiar to the Milesians. It would be natural for them to speak of the formation of moisture in the rainy season as a birth of the wet out of the dry, just as the fiery element of summer is born and nourished from the moist.¹⁴ May not these very principles be the onta which, in the process of elemental change, perish again into the things from which they have arisen?

The expression ta onta is so general that it may just as well apply to natural compounds as to the elements of which they are formed. Strictly speaking, the text of the fragment is compatible with either view. On the other hand, a glance at the oldest recorded usage of the term in philosophical contexts will suggest that it refers to elemental powers rather than to unique, individual bodies…. The "things which were all together" of Anaxagoras B1 are of course not the individual bodies of men and animals, but air, aithēr, and the various powers and materials of things yet to be produced. For him also "the things in the one cosmos" are exemplified by the hot and the cold (B8). Anaxagoras is the philosopher whom we would expect Protagoras to attack, and it is probably in terms of such physical elements that we must understand the latter's opening reference to "all things, those which are and those which are not" (Bl). When Plato propounds the Protagorean thesis in the Theaetetus, his first example is precisely the difference between a hot and a cold wind. So the pretended onta which Melissus is concerned to refute, and "which men say to be true," are not individual things but "earth, water, air, fire, iron, gold, the living and the dead, dark, bright, and the rest," including hot and cold, hard and soft (B8).

It is therefore most probable that the expression ta onta in the fragment also refers to such elemental powers. It is they who are one another's source of generation, just as they are the mutual cause of death. On the grammatical level, it is these opposing principles, and these alone, which are implied by the neuter plural pronouns…. The wet is generated from the dry, the light from the darkness. But the birth of such a thing involves the death of its reciprocal, and this loss must eventually be repaired by a backward swing of the pendulum. Thus it is that "from a single necessity all things are composed and nourished by one another."¹⁵

This compensation of death for birth is absolutely necessary…. The following gar shows that this very inevitability is expressed again in the idea of didonai dikēn. The archaic view of adikia is just this, that one who is guilty will always pay the penalty. It is probably misleading to lay too much stress on the moral or eschatological aspect of "cosmic injustice" for Anaximander. If the dominion (kratein) of one party over another is described as a wrong, this need not imply a different, pre-mundane or post-mundane state of harmony such as is dreamt of by Empedocles. The victory of one element over another is adikia because the weaker party suffers, and because of the disastrous consequences which must ensue for the offender. The words and imagery of the fragment indicate above all that the exchange of birth and death is sure, remorseless, inescapable, like the justice which the gods send upon guilty men. It will come at last, when its hour is full. For Necessity enforces the ordinance which Time lays down.

According to the interpretation here proposed, the meaning of the two portions of the fragment is one and the same. The first member states the necessary return of mortal elements back into the opposite powers from which they are generated; the second clause explains this necessity as a just compensation for the damage done at birth. The elements feed one another by their own destruction, since what is life to one is death for its reciprocal. The first law of nature is a lex talionis: life for life.

Thus the fragment does not announce a last end of things, when the elemental powers will return into the Boundless from which they have arisen (despite the number of modern interpretations which presuppose this view). Neither does it contain a particular reference to the dissolution of men and animals back into the materials of which they are composed, although such an idea was frequently expressed by other Greek thinkers. This brief text of Anaximander most naturally refers simply to that continuous change of opposing forms or powers into one another which is the common theme of Heraclitus (B126, B88, etc.), Epicharmus (B2), Melissus (B8), and Plato (Phaedo 70d-72). The most significant case for a Milesian cosmologist was no doubt the interchange of the major elements. "It is death for water to become earth," says Heraclitus, "but out of earth water arises" (B36); the death of fire is birth for air, and the death of air is birth for water (B76). "These live the death of those, and die their life" (B62, B77).

Anaximander must have seen this exchange transacted daily, in the alternation of light and darkness, of the fresh morning dew and the parched heat of noon. He must have recognized essentially the same process at work in the production of the fiery thunderbolt out of wind and cloud, themselves in turn produced from evaporating moisture. The downward return of quenched fire and condensing rain cloud will counteract the upward surge of dryness and heat, and thus preserve the balance of the whole. The waxing and waning of the moon's light fulfills in turn the lawful interchange of generation and corruption. If the celestial equilibrium was conceived by Anaximander as a stable sphere, it is the turning circle which best symbolizes this rhythm of elemental change. The image is preserved in our own terminology, which is in this respect still that of early Greece: "cycle" from kyklos (originally "wheel"), "period" from periodes ("revolution"). In the Ionian view, the predominant cycle is that of the sun, since it is in step with this yearly movement that the seasons of heat and coolness, drought and rainfall succeed one another, while the dominion of daylight gives way before the long winter nights.¹⁶ In Greece, even the winds are generally "opposite according to the opposite seasons" (Arist. Meteor. 364a34). And the mortal sea-sons of youth and age, growth and decay, exemplify the same periodic law.¹⁷

It is possible that Anaximander projected this pattern upon a still more majestic screen, and spoke (like Plato and his followers) of a Magnus Annus, in which the great astronomical cycles are to be accompanied by catastrophic transformations on the earth. Like Xenophanes, Anaximander may have taught that the progressive drying-up of the sea would eventually be reversed, so that the earth will sink back into the element from which it has arisen.¹⁸ This would constitute the necessary "reparation" required by the fragment for any type of excess. The periodic destruction of mankind by fire and flood, to which Plato more than once alludes, seems to form part of the symmetrical pattern of this sixth-century world view.¹⁹

Did Anaximander envisage an even greater cycle, in which the appearance of this differentiated universe out of the Boundless would itself be periodically balanced by the return of all things, including the elements, back into their original source? This doctrine is ascribed to Anaximander by some doxographers, but there is no definite statement to this effect in our most reliable sources.²⁰ On the other hand, it seems difficult to deny such a view to the Milesians, if their belief in an "eternal motion" is to be taken seriously.²¹ A peri odic destruction of the world order might well follow from Anaximander's conception of symmetrical action and counter-action, continuing unhampered throughout endless time. But there is no place for this doctrine in the text of Anaximander's fragment, which does not mention the generation of things out of the apeiron. There is therefore no reason whatsoever to suppose that the destruction of the world is an "atonement" to be made for some kind of wrongdoing.

On the other hand, if a cycle of world formation and dissolution is not implied by this brief text, everything else we know about Anaximander's cosmology has its place here: astronomical cycles, the succession of the seasons, the phenomena of the atmosphere, the origin of dry land and living things, all coverage in the element doctrine of the fragment. There is another idea which we may expect to find here, in view of our earlier discussion of Anaximander's theories, and that is the principle of geometric proportion. In order to see how Anaximander's mathematical conceptions are related to his statement in the fragment, we must consider some Aristotelian passages in which a similar view is described. It is not difficult to recognize the Milesian doctrine in Aristotle's reference to those who declare that there is "an infinite body, one and simple … besides the elements, out of which they generate the latter."

For there are some who make the apeiron not air or water, but a thing of this sort, so that the other elements should not be destroyed by the one of them that is infinite. For they are characterized by opposition to one another; air, for instance, is cold, water is wet, fire is hot; if one of these were infinite, the others would now have perished. Hence, they say, the apeiron is something else, from which these things arise. (Phys. 204b22)

There is no reason to doubt the substantial accuracy here of Aristotle's report.²² This argument against the infinity of any single element corresponds exactly to the view expressed by the fragment: if there were no limits assigned to the supremacy of one of the participants in cosmic strife, its victory would never be compensated by the statutory defeat. It is this same idea which Aristotle has just adapted in his own proof that no element can be infinite: "The opposites must always be in a relationship of equality"; for an infinite elemental body will always exceed and destroy one that is finite (Phys. 204b13-19). Much the same principle is invoked by him in the Meteorologica against those who believe that the entire celestial region is filled with fire and air (340al ff). That cannot be, says Aristotle, for, in view of the relatively small dimensions of the earth in comparison with the whole heavens, fire and air "would then exceed by far the equality of a common proportion with regard to their fellow elements."²³ Aristotle is prepared to admit that there is more air than water in the universe, for he knows that water expands when evaporated. What he requires is therefore not a simple arithmetic correspondence, but an "equality of power"—a geometric relationship which joins different quantities in a single proportion, just as a fixed amount of water produces a corresponding amount of steam (340a16).

Aristotle feels himself entirely justified in using this principle against his predecessors, for he is conscious of having taken it from them. He discusses elsewhere (De Gen et Corr. 333a18 ff.) the statement of Empedocles that the elements are "equal in every way": Love is "equal in length and breadth" to the others, just as Strife is their "equipoise at every point" (Emped. B17.19-27). For Empedocles as for Aristotle, this geometric equality between the elements is an expression of their equal power.²⁴ Such an equilibrium between opposing principles is no less important in the view of Anaxagoras, for whom "all things are always equal" (B5; cf. B3). To preserve this necessary balance, his aēr and aithēr must each be infinite, for they are the two greatest things in bulk (Bl). The same is true of the two symmetrical forms which together fill the cosmic sphere of Parmenides. They too are opposite to one another, and "both equal" (B9.4). Although the form which this idea assumes for Anaxagoras and Empedocles may be due to the direct influence of Parmenides, the general principle is not new with him. For we also find it in the "measures" which regulate elemental transformation according to Heraclitus: when Fire in the turnings of its cycle (tropai) has become sea and then earth, once more "sea is poured out, and measured back into the same logos as before it became earth" (B31).²⁵ This logos of elemental exchange is precisely a geometric "equality of common propor tion" such as that which Aristotle postulates in the Meteorologica. It guarantees that the fundamental order of the universe will persist unchanged, despite its periodic transformations. From the modern point of view, it represents the earliest formula for the conservation of both energy and matter, since at this period bulk (megethos) and power (dynamis) are conceived as the two faces of a single coin.

The old Ionic theory of the elements is thus characterized by the same geometric symmetry which prevails in Anaximander's celestial scheme. The equilibrium of the earth at the center of a spherical world is reflected in the mathematical proportion by which the elements are bound to one another. These parts belong together in a unified whole, a community whose balance of power is maintained by periodic readjustments, in accordance with that general law of astronomical cycles which Anaximander conceived as an immutable taxis of Time.

This is, I suggest, the conception which lies at the root of the Greek view of the natural world as a kosmos, an admirably organized whole. The term kosmos is interpreted by Plato as implying "geometric equality,"²⁶ and the word is bright with the combined radiance of the moral and aesthetic ideals of early Greece. No ancient author, it is true, tells us that Anaximander spoke of the world as a kosmos. But the new philosophic sense of this term is as familiar to Heraclitus and Parmenides as it is to Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and Diogenes.²⁷ It is difficult to see where such a widespread notion could have arisen, if not in sixth-century Miletus—the mother city from which, like so many colonies, all the philosophic schools of early Greece are sprung.

Precisely considered, the kosmos is a concrete arrangement of all things, defined not only by a spatial disposition of parts, but also by the temporal taxis within which opposing powers have their turn in office. It is the spatial aspect (in which the kosmos, identified with the ouranos, appears as a body whose limbs are the elements) which tends more and more to obscure the temporal order that prevailed in the earlier conception. Both ideas, however, are inextricably linked from the beginning to the end of Greek philosophy. The cosmos has not only an extended body, but also a lifetime aiōn), whose phases are celestial cycles.²⁸

Two Hippocratic texts may serve to illustrate this conception in the minds of men penetrated by Ionian science. The authors of the De Natura Hominis and the De Victu both employ the word kosmos for the universal order, and apply this notion in detail to the structure and function of men's bodies. It was no doubt towards the end of the fifth century that Polybus, the son-in-law of Hippocrates, wrote as follows:

The body of man always possesses all of these [the four humors, characterized by the four primary opposites], but through the revolving reasons they become now greater than themselves, now lesser in turn, according to nature. For, just as every year has a share in all, in hot things as well as cold, in dry things as well as wet (for no one of these could endure for any length of time without all of the things present in this kosmos; but if any one of these were to cease, all would disappear; for from a single necessity all are composed and nourished by one another); just so, if any one of these components should cease in a man, the man would not be able to live. (Nat. Horn. 7, Jones, Loeb ed. IV, 20-22)

The year and the kosmos each constitute an organized body, from which no vital member may be removed without catastrophe. Writing perhaps a few years later²⁹ the author of the De Victu holds a similar view of the interdependence of natural factors. A good doctor, he claims, "must be familiar with the risings and settings of the stars, that he may be competent to guard against the changes and excesses of food and drink, of winds, and of the kosmos as a whole, since it is from these [changes and excesses] that diseases arise among men" (ch. 2; Jones, Loeb ed. IV, 228). Such vicissitudes of nature, he says, are due to the alternate dominion not of four principles, but of two alone: fire and water.

Each one rules and is ruled in turn, to the maximum and minimum of what is possible. For neither one is able to rule altogether…. If either were ever dominated, none of the things which now exist would be as it is now. But as things are, these [fire and water] will be the same forever, and will never cease either separately or together (ch. 3, Jones, Loeb ed. IV, 232).

For this author too the kosmos takes the form of a rhythmically repeated cycle, executed by a system in dynamic equilibrium.

Perhaps the most striking expression of this old view of cosmic order is to be found in a relatively late text. Diogenes Laertius quotes from Alexander Polyhistor a cosmology which the latter is said to have found in certain "Pythagorean notebooks" (hypomnēmata). We do not know who these Pythagoreans were, or when they lived.³⁰ But the doctrine that follows clearly reflects the same conceptions that prevail in the Hippocratic Corpus:

Light and darkness, hot and cold, dry and wet obtain equal portions in the kosmos; it is from their dominance that arises summer, from that of the hot, and winter, from that of the cold.³¹ But when their portions are equalized, the year is at its finest; its flourishing season, spring, is healthy, but its waning season, autumn, productive of disease. Indeed, the day itself has a flourishing period at dawn, but wanes at evening, which is therefore the most unhealthy hour. (D.L. VIII.26 = DK 58Bla)

The medical theory of these three texts is, as far as we know, the creation of Alcmaeon and of the founders of the Hippocratic method. But the cosmology on which it is based—and of which it is a faithful reflection—is the common heritage of all Greek philosophers after the sixth century. Its earliest expression is to be found in the fragment of Anaximander.

There are other traces of this view in the extant philosophical fragments. Anaxagoras, for example, declares that Nous "has set all things in good order" (B12). It is clear from the context that the chief instrument of this order is the cosmic revolution (perichōrēsis) performed by the heavenly bodies, the source of a differentiated universe. Further details concerning the "order" brought about by Nous have been lost, but may to some extent be supplied from the doctrine of Diogenes. Like Anaxagoras, he too praises the intelligence (noēsis) of his cosmic principle, which "arranges all things" (B5), and in his case, we have a text that states the concrete evidence of this ordering:

For it were not possible for all things to be so distributed (dedasthai) without intelligence, that there should be measures of all things, of winter and summer, of night and day, of rainfall and winds and clear weather. And if one is willing to reflect on other things, he will find them also so disposed as to be the best possible. (B3)

For this fifth-century Ionian, as for the Milesians before him, it is the seasonal regularity of celestial and meteorological processes which best exhibits the organic structure of the universe.

Here, at the starting-point of Western science and philosophy, we find the Order of Nature clearly conceived as an "ordinance of Time." This oldest formula of natural law thus emphasizes that same notion of periodicity which, in a much more elaborate form, plays such an importantrole in modern physical thought.³³ The early appearance of this idea is no cause for surprise;indeed the great periodic occurrences have never passed unnoticed. The cycle of the stars and seasons is the fundamental fact in any agricultural society, which must strive to establish some harmony between the works of man and the motions of the heavenly bodies. Such is the theme not only of Hesiod's poem, but of all ancient religions.

What is new in Anaximander's doctrine is neither the concern for seasonal repetition, nor the application of moral and legal concepts to the natural world. The idea that "man lived in a charmed circle of social law and custom, but the world around him at first seemed lawless,"³³ is based upon a total misconception. The earliest civilizations had no notion of the distinction between Nature and Society which has become habitual to us. In Homer, for example, no boundary is recognized between human usage and the order of the universe. In front of man stands not Nature, but the power of the gods, and they intervene as easily in the natural world as in the life of men. Poseidon is lord of the sea, shaker of the earth, but he stands in battle next to the Greeks before Troy. Zeus is god of the storm, and was once the personified power of the sky itself, but when he casts his thunderbolt, it is to exact punishment from perjurers.³⁴ The Horae, who are the Seasons, and will become the astronomical Hours, have for sisters the Moirae, the "fated portions" of mankind. Their common mother is Themis ("lawful establishment"), and their names are Justice, Peace, and Good Distribution (eunomiē) (Hes. Theog. 901).

These ideas are from the beginning so intimately linked that, in lands where mythic speculation is highly developed, a single term for "law" normally applies to ritual, to morality, and to the natural order. Such, for instance, is the case for the Vedic concept of rtà, literally, "what is adjusted, fitted together" (from the root *ar- also found in Greek arariskō, harmos, harmonid). The word designates not only ritual correctness—like Latin ritus, from the same root—but moral order, and the regular arrangement by which the gods produce the dawn, the movement of the sun, and the yearly sequence of the seasons. The annual cycle itself is pictured as "a twelve-spoked wheel of rtá which turns unaging round the heaven."³⁵

Such ancient conceptions show that it is not the assimilation of Nature and Society which philosophy was called upon to establish, but rather their separation from one another. These two ideas were first defined, by mutual contrast, as a result of the fifth-century controversies regarding physis and nomos.³⁶ But the concept of the world as a kosmos or well-ordered constitution of things dates from the earlier period, when the two realms were still counted as one. It was then easy and natural for Anaximander to transfer terms like dikē, tisis, and taxis from their social usage to a description of that larger community which includes not only man and living things on earth, but the heavenly bodies and the elemental powers as well. All philosophic terms have necessarily begun in this way, from a simpler, concrete usage with a human reference point. For example, the concept of a "cause," aition, is clearly a development from the idea of the "guilty one, he who is to blame," aitios. Language is older than science; and the new wine must be served in whatever bottles are on hand.

The importance of the imagery of cosmic strife in early Greek thought should make clear that the rational outlook on the world did not arise by mere negation, by the stripping away of some primitive veil of pictures in order to lay bare the facts. In the historical experience of Greece, Nature became permeable to the human intelligence only when the inscrutable personalities of mythic religion were replaced by well-defined and regular powers. The linguistic stamp of the new mentality is a preference for neuter forms, in place of the "animate" masculines and feminines which are the stuff of myth. The Olympians have given way before "the boundless, the necessary, the encompassing, the hot, the opposites," all expressed by neuter forms in Greek. The strife of elemental forces is henceforth no unpredictable quarrel between capricious agents, but an orderly scheme in which defeat must follow aggression as inevitably as the night the day.

The philosophic achievement of Ionia was no doubt made possible by the astral and mathematical science accumulated in the age-old Mesopotamian tradition. It is indeed the principles of geometry and astronomy which define the new world view. But the unity and the rational clarity of this conception are as completely Greek as is the term "cosmos" by which it continues to be known.

Notes

¹ [Diels-Kranz, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th éd., 3 vols., Berlin, 1952; hereafter DK] 12A9; from Theophr. Phys. Opin. fr. 2, Hermann Diets, [Doxographi Graeci, Berlin, 1879; hereafter Dox.Gr.], p. 476.

² See Charles H. Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960) [hereafter referred to as AOGC], ch. 2.

³ [John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 4th ed., reprint of the 3rd ed., London, 1930; hereafter EGP], pp. 53 f; W. A. Heidel, "On Anaximander," [Classical Philology; hereafter CP], 7 (1912), 233 ff. Similarly F. M. Cornford, Principium Sapientiae (Cambridge, 1952), p. 168; G. S. Kirk, "Some Problems in Anaximander," [The Classical Quarterly; hereafter CQ], N.S. 5 (1955), 33 ff. (repr. in [David J. Furley and R. E. Allen, eds., Studies in Presocratic Philosophy, vol. 1: The Beginnings of Philosophy, London, 1970; hereafter Furley and Allen, I], pp. 323-49).

⁴ See AOGC, p. 130.

⁵ [See] Hippocr. De Hebd. ch. 19.31.

⁶ Wind and water inhaled in breathing cool the body, and thus serve as retaliation … against congenital heat (Hippocr. De Cord. 3, Littré, IX, 82)…. The thickness of the heart's wall serves as protection … against the strength of this heat (ch. 6, Littré, IX, 84). The same kind of compensatory action … is provided by the brain against moisture (De Gland. 10, Littré, VIII, 564). The comparison between these passages and Anaximander's doctrine was first drawn by Heidel, "Hippocratea, I," in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 25 (1914), 188 f.

⁷ Cf. Hippocr. De Hebd. 19.21.

⁸ Cf. Hippocr. Epid. 111.15, Jones, Loeb ed. I, 254….

¹⁰ See Eur. Fr. 839.8-11, cited DK 59A112; paralleled by Suppl. 532-34 and by the famous inscription for those who fell at Potidaea…. (M. N. Tod, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions, 2d ed. [Oxford, 1946], No. 59=I.G. I².945). It is because of this return of like that, according to the "Orphic" gold plates, the dead arriving in Hades must say "I am child of Earth and of starry Heaven, but my race … is heavenly" (DK 1B17.6).

¹¹ This apparent irrelevance of the two clauses to one another is emphasized by J. B. McDiarmid, "Theophrastus on the Presocratic Causes," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 61 (1953), 97 (repr. in Furley and Allen, I, pp. 178-238).

¹² The loan of elements in the formation of the human body is alluded to by Plato Tim, 42e9 (cf. 41d3). The same metaphor seems to have been applied by Philolaus to the intake of air in breathing…. Anon. Lond. XVIII.23; W. H. S. Jones, The Medical Writings of Anonymus Londinensis (Cambridge, 1947), p. 72.

¹³ Thus Kirk suggests that the original assertion paraphrased by Theophrastus "might have been to the effect that each opposite changes into its own opposite and into no other, for example the hot is replaced by the cold and not by the wet or the soft" ("Some Problems," p. 35). I largely agree with Kirk as to what Anaximander said, but see no reason to believe that either Theophrastus or Simplicius interpreted his words in a different way.

¹⁴ See AOGC, p. 132.

¹⁵ Hippocr. Nat. Hom. 7, Jones, Loeb ed. IV….

¹⁶ In Hippocr. De Victu 5 the "divine necessity" according to which all things come to pass is just such a rhythmic oscillation between maximum and minimum, illustrated by the periods of day and night, of the moon, and of the annual solar motion. And see AOGC, pp. 104-06.

¹⁷ "Old age arises from the loss of heat" (Parm. A46a); "a man is hottest on the first of his days, coldest on the last" (Hippocr. Nat. Horn. 12, Jones, Loeb ed. IV, 36). This idea, according to which man's life is a reduced model of the cosmic year (ending at the winter solstice), is developed at length by the author of De Victu (ch. 33; Jones, Loeb ed. IV, 278), who adds the sequence wet, dry, and then wet again in increasing age (corresponding to the rains of both spring and fall).

In stating the general law of alternation between opposites, it is the seasonal changes that Plato mentions first (Rep. 563e9).

¹⁸ Xenoph. A33.5-6 (Hippolytus): "A mixture of earth with sea is taking place, and it will at length be dissolved by the moist … all men will be destroyed, when the earth collapses into the sea and becomes mud; then there will be a new beginning of generation; and this transformation occurs in all the κόσμοι. For the meaning of the last phrase, see AOGC, pp. 51 ff.

¹⁹ The alternate destructions of human societies by fire and water are mentioned by Plato at Tim. 22c; frequent destructions in the past, particularly by floods, at Laws 677a; similar cycles of human and cosmic transformations at Politicus 269a.

Democritus was author of a work entitled "Great Year or Astronomi "; very little is known of its contents….

²⁰ The destruction of the world (or worlds) appears in DK A10, A14, A17; no mention of it occurs in Hippolytus (DK All) or in the primary excerpt of Simplicius (DK A12).

²¹ An "eternal motion" should imply that some change took place before the present world order began to arise, and that something else will follow its destruc-tion (if any). The expression would not have been used if Anaximander, like Anaxagoras, had avoided any reference to events before the commencement of our cosmic order, or implied that no changes took place during this time; cf. Arist. Phys. 250b24….

²² See Simpl. Phys. 479.32 ff., where the argument is expressly assigned to Anaximander. The doubts expressed in general terms by E. Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen, Part I, 5th ed. (Leipzig, 1892), p. 215, and developed in detail by Harold Cherniss, Aristotle's Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy (Baltimore, 1935), pp. 27 f., 367, do not seem cogent. As Gregory Vlastos has pointed out ("Equality and Justice in Early Greek Cosmologies," CP, 42 [1947], 168, n. 121 [repr. in Furley and Allen, I, pp. 56-91]), the balance between the elemental powers is not a new idea with Aristotle, but everywhere presupposed in the early medical literature (see AOGC, p. 132 n. 4). Furthermore, a clear indication that the reasoning given here is not an invention of Aristotle may be seen in his reference to air as cold….

Hence it is peculiarly appropriate that Aristotle should refute Anaximander's thesis by an adaptation of his own principle: "There is no such sensible body besides the so-called elements. For all things are dissolved back into that out of which they are composed; so that this body would then appear in addition to air and fire and earth and water; but nothing of the sort is to be seen" (Phys. 204b32)….

²³Meteor. 340a4. According to the pseudo-Aristotelian De Mundo, 396b34, the universe is preserved by such an agreement and balance of opposing forces.

²⁴ See … Emped. B17.28 f., correctly interpreted by Vlastos in "Equality and Justice," p. 159, as a dynamic equilibrium.

²⁵ It is because of these equal measures, by which Fire is exchanged for all things and all for Fire (Heracl. B90) that "the starting-point and the limit of the circle [of elemental transformations] are one and the same" (B103).

²⁶ The wise, Callicles, say that both heaven and earth and gods and men are held together by community and friendship, by orderliness … and temperance and justice…, and for this reason they call this whole universe an Order … my friend, not disorder…, / … nor license…. But you have not noticed that geometric equality has great power both among men and among gods; and you think one should practice excessive greed…., for you neglect geometry" (Gorg. 508a).

²⁷ See AOGC, Appendix I, p. 219.

²⁸ This sense of … the world's lifetime occurs in Arist. De Caelo 279a22-30 and 283b28 (for the idea, cf. 285a29, 286a9; similar uses … in Bonitz, Index, 23b19,21). The meaning is probably the same in Emped. B16….

It is because Time…, as the sequence of astronomical cycles, was also conceived as the vital motion of the universe that it could be "inhaled" from outside like a breath-soul (in the Pythagorean view, DK 58B30), and be identified by some with the heavenly sphere itself, as well as with its motion (Phys. 218bl). Compare Tim. 38e4, where the stars "produce Time," and 41e5, where they are "instruments of Time."

²⁹ The date of the De Victu has been much disputed. Most authors assign it to the end of the fifth century, but Werner Jaeger has put it in the middle of the fourth (Paedeia, trans. Gilbert Highet, vol. 3 [Oxford, 1945], 33 ff., with notes), and Kirk even sees Peripatetic influence here (Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments [Cambridge, 1954], pp. 27 ff.). Their arguments are scarcely decisive. In regard to questions of cosmology, there is no trace of any influence later than Empedocles and Archelaus. The author cannot have read the Timaeus, or even the Phaedo. In view of his otherwise receptive attitude to the ideas of his predecessors, this makes it difficult to believe that he is younger than Plato…. It will hardly do to claim the author of the De Victu as a "pupil" of Herodicus (as does Jones, Medical Writings, p. 48), since this is precisely the point where the writer insists upon his originality (ch. 69; cf. ch. 2). The argument of J. Jiitner (Philostratos [Leipzig, 1909], pp. 15 ff.), that the "biting scorn" for gymnastics in De Victu 24 could not come from a former trainer is one that cuts both ways. (Since this was written, the case for the earlier dating has been reargued by R. Joly, who doubts, however, the attribution to Herodicus. See his edition of Du Régime [Paris, "Les belles Lettres," 1967] and his Recherches sur le traité pseudohippocratique Du Régime [Paris-Liège 1961].)

³⁰ Diels followed M. Wellman, Hermes, 54 (1919), 225, in assigning the doctrine to a contemporary of Plato; Festugière has argued for a late fourth-century date in Revue des études grecques, 58 (1945), 1.

³¹ The "emendation" of Cobet … (which is printed by Hicks in the Loeb Diogenes as part of the text) stands in flat contradiction to the following words: spring and fall are not subject to the domination of any power, but represent the "finest" time of the year because of their balance.

³² "The birth of modern physics depended upon the application of the abstract idea of periodicity to a variety of concrete instances" (A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, ch. 2). The achievement of the Greeks was, of course, just the reverse: to pass from the experience of concrete periods to the idea of one principle governing all transformations whatsoever.

³³ Burnet, EGP, p. 9. Similarly R. Hirzel, Themis, Dike und Verwandtes (Leipzig, 1907), pp. 386 f.

³⁴ See, e.g., Aristophanes Nub. 397.

³⁵ Rigveda 1.164.11. On the conception of rtà, see A. Bergaigne, Religion védique, III, 210 ff.; H. Oldenberg, Religion des Vedas, pp. 195 ff. Compare the Egyptian and Babylonian points of view described in The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Chicago, 1946), and the conclusion of the Frankforts, p. 26: "The life of man and the function of the state are for mythopoeic thought imbedded in nature, and the natural processes are affected by the acts of man no less than man's life depends on his harmonious integration with nature. The experiencing of this unity with the utmost intensity was the greatest good ancient oriental religion could bestow. To conceive this integration in the form of intuitive imagery was the aim of the speculative thought of the ancient Near East."

³⁶ See the study of this antithesis by F. Heinimann, Nomos und Physis (Basel, 1945).