Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Anaximander, son of Praxiades, of Miletus. He used to say that the Boundless was the principle and element, not specifying it as air or water or anything else. And he held that the parts change, but the whole is unchangeable; and that the earth lies in the middle, occupying the place of the center and being spherical in shape; and that the moon shines with a false light and is illuminated by the sun, but also that the sun is not smaller than the earth and is the purest fire. He was also the first to discover the gnomon and set it up on the shadow-trackers in Lacedaemon, as Favorinus says in his Miscellaneous History, to indicate the solstices and equinoxes; and he constructed sundials.

​He was also the first to draw an outline of land and sea, and he further constructed a celestial globe. He also made a summary exposition of his doctrines, which Apollodorus of Athens presumably came upon; and Apollodorus says in his Chronology that in the second year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad he was sixty-four years old and died shortly afterward, having flourished somewhere roughly around the time of Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos. It is said that when he was singing, the little children laughed at him, and upon learning this he said: “We must therefore sing better on account of the children.” There was also another Anaximander, a historian, who was likewise a Milesian and wrote in the Ionic dialect.