Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Anaxagoras, the son of Hegesibulus or of Eubulus, was of Clazomenae. He was a pupil of Anaximenes, and was the first who set mind over matter, beginning his treatise—which is composed in a pleasant and lofty style—in this way: “All things were together; then mind came and ordered them.” Wherefore he was also surnamed Mind; and Timon speaks of him in his Silli as follows: “And they say, I ween, that Anaxagoras was a valiant hero, named Mind, because indeed he had a mind, which, suddenly awaking, bound together all things that were previously confused.” He was distinguished for noble birth and wealth, but still more for magnanimity, seeing that he surrendered his patrimony to his kinsmen.

​For when he was accused by them of neglect, “Why then,” he said, “do you not look after it yourselves?” And in the end he withdrew, devoting himself to the contemplation of nature and caring nothing for politics. On this account, when someone said to him, “Have you no care for your fatherland?” “Hush!” he said, “for I care exceedingly for my fatherland,” pointing to the sky. He is said to have been twenty years old at the crossing of Xerxes, and to have lived seventy-two years. Apollodorus in his Chronology says that he was born in the seventieth Olympiad, and died in the first year of the eighty-eighth. He began to philosophize at Athens in the archonship of Callias, being twenty years of age, as Demetrius of Phalerum says in his Register of Archons, where they also say he spent thirty years.

​He declared that the sun is a mass of incandescent metal and larger than the Peloponnese (though some say he called it Tantalus); and that the moon has dwellings, as well as hills and ravines. He held that the principles are the homoeomeries; for just as gold is composed of what are called filings, so the universe is compounded of minute, like-parted bodies. And mind is the origin of motion; of the bodies, the heavy ones occupied the lower region, like the earth, and the light ones the upper, like fire, while water and air took the middle region. For thus, since the earth was flat, the sea settled upon it when the moist elements were evaporated by the sun.

​In the beginning the stars moved in a dome-like manner, so that the ever-visible pole was directly overhead at the summit of the earth, but later acquired its tilt. The Milky Way is the reflection of the light of the stars that are not illuminated by the sun. Comets are a conjunction of planets emitting flames; shooting stars are flung off from the air like sparks. Winds arise when the air is rarefied by the sun. Thunder is a collision of clouds, lightning the friction of clouds, and an earthquake the retreat of air into the earth. Animals were generated from moisture, heat, and earthy matter, and afterwards from one another; males from the right side, and females from the left.

​They say he foretold the fall of the meteorite that occurred at Aegospotami, which he said would fall from the sun. Hence Euripides too, being his disciple, called the sun a golden clod in his Phaethon. Furthermore, having gone to Olympia, he sat down in a leather cloak as though it were going to rain; and so it happened. When someone asked him whether the mountains in Lampsacus would ever become sea, they say he replied: “If only time does not fail.” When asked on what account he had been born, he said: “To contemplate the sun, the moon, and the heaven.” To the one who said, “You have lost the Athenians,” he replied: “Nay, rather, they have lost me.” On seeing the tomb of Mausolus, he said: “A costly tomb is the image of an estate turned into stone.”