From the Beginning to Plato

52 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
of the heavens to the simplest scheme of geometrical and arithmetical
relationships: circles and multiples of the number 9. Once again the idea of one
stuff (air) enclosing another (fire) is fundamental to explanation of the
transformations Hippolytus mentions, namely eclipses and the phases of the
moon. Making the sun and moon functions of circles of air and fire is, of course,
designed primarily to account for their diurnal revolutions and the alternation of
day and night. Making them circles of air and fire, not bodies, enables
Anaximander to avoid the puzzle of why they do not fall, which Anaximenes and
his successors were obliged to address. All in all it is a beautifully economical
theory. As with his account of origins, Anaximander recommends it by vivid
analogy, taken in this case from the familiar contexts of forge and stadium: a
bellows and its nozzle, the wheel and its rim.
The physical if not the mathematical patterns Anaximander has so far invoked
are specified also in his accounts of wind, rain (deficiently preserved), thunder
and lightning:
Winds come about when the finest vapours of the air are separated off, and
move when massed together; rains from the vapour sent up from the earth,
as a result of [?] their being [?] [melted] by the sun; lightnings when wind
breaks out and divides the clouds.
(Hippolytus Refutation I.6.7 [KRS 129])
Anaximander says wind is a flow of air, when the finest and the wettest
parts of it are set in motion or melted [producing rain] by the sun.
(Aetius III.7.1)
On thunder, lightning, thunderbolts, whirlwinds and typhoons:
Anaximander says these all occur as a result of the wind. When it is
enclosed in thick cloud and bursts out forcibly because of its fineness and
lightness, then the tearing makes the noise and the rift the flash, in contrast
to the blackness of the cloud.
(Aetius III.1.2 [KRS 130])
Fundamental to this explanatory scheme is once again the interaction of fire
(here in particular the sun) and air (conceived of as moist vapour). The process
of separation off had earlier been identified as the cause of the formation from
the apeiron of an air-enclosing ball of fire, which then in turn separated off to be
enclosed in rings of air. Now it is made responsible for the production of winds.
They are themselves taken to be the root cause of a further range of
meteorological phenomena, involving further enveloping and subsequent
rupturing of envelopes. If as we would expect analogies were introduced to
reinforce the persuasiveness of the explanations, these are now lost to us. The
action of wind, conceived of as fine dry air bursting through the wet dark air of
cloud to generate the bright flash of lightning, has understandably provoked the