From the Beginning to Plato

CHAPTER 2
The Ionians
Malcolm Schofield
THALES AND OTHERS
The Greeks agreed that philosophy had begun with Thales. However they did not
know much about his views. 1
What survives is mostly a potent legend. Herodotus tells stories of his
practical ingenuity, political vision and most famously the skill and learning
which enabled him to predict a solar eclipse datable to 585 BC. This feat has
been doubted by some modern scholars, but it was not an impossible one for
someone familiar with the use of eclipse cycles and fondness for prediction
among Babylonian astronomers, as an inhabitant of Miletus on the coast of Asia
Minor might have become. In Aristophanes the astronomer and inventor Meton—
introduced as a character in the drama—dreams up a hare-brained scheme for
employing mathematical instruments to measure the air which inspires the
comment, ‘the man’s a Thales’ (Birds 1009). 2
The use of instruments in determining the behaviour of heavenly bodies
constitutes in fact Thales’ best-documented claim to a place in the history of
rational enquiry about the natural world. He was believed to have worked out the
variable period of the solstices, and to have calculated the height of the pyramids
from their shadows and the distance of ships out at sea. Callimachus credits him
with ‘measuring’ the Little Bear, as a navigational aid. The name of his associate
Anaximander is likewise associated with the ‘discovery’ of the equinox and
solstices, or more plausibly with the use of a gnomon or stable vertical rod to
mark them, as also with that of ‘hour-markers’. Anaximander is also said to have
published the first map of the earth. Some of the accounts supplying this
information may embellish or distort. For example, Eudemus’ attempts to
attribute knowledge of particular geometrical theorems to Thales on the strength
of his efforts at mensuration probably represent (under the guise of Aristotelian
history) nothing more than a determination to furnish the geometry of his own
day with a suitably ancient and distinguished intellectual pedigree. But the
reports on Thales’ and Anaximander’s endeavours in this field are numerous and
various enough in date and provenance, and in their gist sufficiently unfanciful,