The Last of the Line

Diogenes of Apollonia was no great original. He was a medical man whose views appear to have had some considerable influence on his contemporaries and successors; and Aristotle has preserved for us his detailed account of the human blood vessels (64 B 6; cf. B 9). Like earlier doctors, he engaged in natural philosophy, writing, by his own account, a work Concerning Nature, a Meteorology, a treatise On the Nature of Man, and a book, Against the Sophists (Simplicius, A 4). ¹ The philosophy he expounded was conceived on the old Ionian pattern; and Theophrastus held him to be the last of the phusiologoi (Simplicius, A 5). By common scholarly consent, he was least as well as last: he worked eclectically rather than creatively, and ‘does not seem to have attempted original thought’; indeed, he represents a positive regression, for his ‘general level of philosophical awareness suggests the age of Anaximenes, not that of Anaxagoras and the sophists’. ²