ABSTRACT
From the earliest documented period, it was common practice for physical philosophers to rely on their senses and resort to models and comparisons with objects from common experience in order to speculate about invisible meteorological and astronomical phenomena, physiological issues or other obscure physical processes that could not be investigated directly.1 At this preliminary stage of science, it seems that the philosophers did not look for any heuristic value in these comparisons, nor did they conduct any systematic experiments. Instead of revealing the actual nature of the unseen phenomenon in question, these explanatory models were rather deployed in order to corroborate a suggested hypothesis, often intentionally overlooking the differences between illustration and illustrandum.2 In line with this tradition Empedocles’ and Lucretius’ poems abound with such comparisons.
