ABSTRACT
With Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, for the first time in the history of Greek thought, philosophy took up its abode permanently in Athens. The date and circumstances of the arrival of that Ionian Metic, coming from the school of Anaximenes, are very obscure. He is said to have lived in Athens for thirty years, until the day when his notoriety and his friendship with Pericles exposed him, like Pheidias, to attacks which were chiefly aimed at his protector. By taking flight he escaped the dangerous consequences of a trial for impiety—a menace which was henceforward to hang over the heads of all philosophers in Athens. Retiring to Lampsacos in Asia, he is said to have died aged over seventy, about the beginning of the last third of the Vth century, amidst the unanimous veneration earned by the loftiness of his character and his indifference to personal gain. He probably started a school in Lampsacos, and was perhaps succeeded in it by Archelaos of Athens, before Metrodoros of Lampsacos, famed for his allegorical interpretations of Homer. His Physics, the only work which we can attribute to him with certainty, dealt, in its first book, with the principles, in a prose style which, as we shall see, was full of majesty. Yet absolute precision of detail was not sacrificed to style, and we are told that the work was illustrated with figures—for example, to describe the phases of the moon.
