Greece & Rome · c. 610–546 BCE
Anaximander
Thales’ successor, credited with the first Greek world map
Argued that the origin cannot be any one element, which would overwhelm the others, but the apeiron, the boundless and indefinite. Opposites separate out of it and “pay penalty to one another for their injustice according to the order of time”.
Life and thought
Anaximander, a younger fellow citizen of Thales in Miletus, is said to have written the first Greek prose book on nature and drawn the first map of the inhabited world; one sentence of the book survives. Ancient reports also credit him with a model of the heavens in which the Earth hangs unsupported at the centre, staying put because it is equally distant from everything.
His central argument is about balance. If the origin were water, as Thales said, water would long ago have overwhelmed its opposite, fire. So the source must have no fixed character: the apeiron, the boundless. Hot and cold, wet and dry separate out of it and, in his surviving fragment, “pay penalty and retribution to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time”. The cosmos becomes a lawful order of opposites, an idea that runs through later Greek medicine and physics.