Themistius, a 4th-century Byzantine rhetorician, stated that he was the “first of the known Greeks to publish a written document on nature.” Anaximander’s cosmology.
He was such a brilliant thinker that he was included in Raphael’s “School of Athens” painting, being depicted as taking notes from something the philosopher Pythagoras is telling him.Īccording to Apollodorus of Athens, the Greek grammarian who lived in the 2nd century BC, he was sixty-four years old during the second year of the 58th Olympiad, in 547–546 BC, and he died shortly afterwards. The variation in the tip’s position at noon indicates the solar time and the seasons the shadow is longest on the winter solstice and shortest on the summer solstice.Īs the Byzantine-era encyclopedia the Suda seems to suggest, it is very likely that with his knowledge of geometry, Anaximander became the first Greek to accurately determine the equinoxes. Credit: Bibi Saint-Pol/ Public DomainĪs it moves through its apparent course, the Sun draws a curve with the tip of the projected shadow, which is shortest at noon, when pointing due south. The map created by Anaximander, the first person to create a likeness of the entire world. The position of its shadow on the plane indicated the time of day. In his time, the gnomon used in the center of a sundial was simply a vertical pillar or rod mounted on a horizontal plane. In Lacedaemon, he participated in the construction, or at least in the adjustment, of sundials to indicate solstices and equinoxes. It is very likely that leaders of Miletus sent him there as a legislator to create a constitution or simply to maintain the colony’s allegiance. Although only one fragment of his work remains, testimonies found in other documents after his death provide a portrait of the great man, who used rational thought to find his way through problems. He succeeded Thales to become the second master of that school where he counted Anaximenes and possibly the great mathematician Pythagoras amongst his pupils.Īlthough little of his life and work is known today, the effect of it is very far-reaching since he is the first philosopher known to have recorded his studies. He lived in Miletus, a city in Ionia, and belonged to the Milesian school, learning from his master, Thales of Miletus. The ancient Greek thinker Anaximander, who was born in the third year of the 42nd Olympiad, or 610 BC, and who lived until c. 546 BC, was a polymath, lending his prodigious talents to the realms of pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, geography, geometry, cosmology, and politics. The Ancient Greek philosopher and geographer Anaximander, who was responsible for creating the very first map of the world.
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