From the Beginning to Plato

THE IONIANS 49
Against the testimony of Aristotle and Hippolytus there is some actual
counter-evidence. It consists in a claim apparently deriving from the Aristotelian
commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias which implies that Anaximander did
indeed subscribe to flat-earthist dynamics:
But Anaximander was of the opinion that the earth stays put both because
of the air that holds it up and because of equal balance and likeness.
(Simplicius On the Heavens 532.13–14)
This comment, at the end of Simplicius’ discussion of Aristotle’s introduction of
the indifference theory, is usually taken as representing his own account of
Anaximander. But the context suggests rather a tendentious bit of argumentation
by Alexander in support of his view that Plato is Aristotle’s main target in this
passage of the Physics. There is no reason to think that Alexander’s claim has
any real authority. 18
None the less from his representation of Anaximander an ingenious account of
why the earth stays put could be constructed. An Alexandrian Anaximander
shares the view natural to flat-earthers that the earth must rest on something. He
conceives reasons for thinking that it must also be positioned mid-air. And he
infers that so positioned it must be in equilibrium. The difficulty is then to
explain how a heavy body, the earth, can be supported by a light body, the air.
The idea of the fulcrum of a balance gives an elegant solution to the problem.
For a fulcrum can support a body many times heavier than itself. 19
How are we to choose between Aristotle’s more radical indifference theorist,
who abandons the idea of a support for the earth in favour of the mathematics of
symmetry, and the mainstream Ionian physicist I have just reconstructed on the
basis of Alexander via Plato’s equilibrium theory?
A single sentence in Hippolytus is little enough to help decide the issue of
whether it was Anaximander’s flat-earthism or his fascination with symmetry
and a priori thinking which determined his view on what kept the earth stable.
But follow Hippolytus we should. Of course, Anaximander ought on this story to
have seen that a spherical, not a cylindrical, earth was what suited his position.
This does not however constitute much of an objection to the truth of the story.
We have simply to concede that Anaximander is a revolutionary who carries some
old-fashioned baggage with him. That is the general way with revolutions.
ANAXIMANDER
Anaximander wrote a book in prose—one of the first books in prose ever
composed—which contained an ambitious narrative of the origins of the world,
beginning with the earth and the heavens, and ending with the emergence of
animal and particularly human life. It was evidently conceived as a sort of
naturalistic version of Hesiod’s Theogony. His act of committing his thoughts to
papyrus was enormously influential. It effectively defined the shape and contents