From the Beginning to Plato

THE IONIANS 51
flame) encases the cold (air), and the breaking of the casing is presumably to be
understood as due to the pressure caused by the expansion of a gas increasing in
temperature. Whether the actual designation of the forces in question in abstract
language as hot and cold derives from Anaximander himself or (more probably)
is the work of Peripatetic commentary does not much affect the diagnosis. It is
not so clear from the Aetius passage that the emergence of animals in their
mature forms is the outcome of a similar process. But fortunately another text
(Hippolytus Refutation, I.6.6 [KRS 136]) informs us that the sun’s activity in
evaporating moisture is what brings animals into being. If as seems likely this
relates to the phenomenon described by Aetius, we are perhaps to think of the
drying out of the casing in which animals are first enclosed. The claim will be
that this physical effect of heat then makes it break up all around.
From the evidence of KRS 121 and 133 we can already infer that Anaximander
sees the world as a systematic unity sustained by dynamic transformations that
are thoroughly intelligible to the human mind. This must be why he assumes that
momentous events, veiled in obscurity, such as the origins of the cosmos itself
and of life within it, can be reconstructed as versions of the more local physical
processes with which we are familiar from our own experience. This too must be
why he expects two such different sorts of originating event to exhibit similar
patterns; and why he believes not just that the transformations involved will be
aptly illustrated by analogy, but that one and the same analogy, albeit differently
treated in the two cases, will provide that illumination.
Consideration of further evidence confirms the picture of Anaximander’s
Weltanschauung that is beginning to emerge. Here are two texts which give more
details of the circles that account for the sun, moon and stars:
The stars come into being as a circle of fire separated off from the fire in
the world, and enclosed by air. There are breathing-holes, certain pipe-like
passages, at which the stars show themselves. So when the breathing-holes
are blocked off eclipses occur; and the moon appears now to be waxing,
now waning, according to the blocking or opening of the passages. The
circle of the sun is 27 times the earth, that of the moon 18 times. The sun is
highest, the circles of the fixed stars lowest.
(Hippolytus Refutation I.6.4–5 [KRS 125])
Anaximander says there is a circle 28 times the earth, like a chariot wheel,
with its rim hollow and full of fire. It lets the fire appear through an orifice
at one point, as through the nozzle of a bellows; and this is the sun.
(Aetius II.20.1 [KRS 126])
Again there is much that is opaque and puzzling in these reports, as well as a
number of features that by now will not be unexpected.
The search for system is immediately evident in the ingenious hypothesis of a
nested sequence of concentric circles, which reduces the apparently chaotic variety