From the Beginning to Plato

THE IONIANS 53
comment that, in Anaximander’s system, the sun and moon resemble a lightning
flash of indefinite duration. 25
More generally, Anaximander’s ideas tend to prompt in Whiggish readers a
reaction compounded of admiration and incredulity. For example, his conjectures
about the origins of life (on which more later) are regularly felt to be ‘brilliant’
or ‘remarkable’. 26 By contrast his meteorology now seems merely quaint, while
it is his astronomical system which strikes the modern mind as more grandly and
perversely inadequate.
Some of the gaps or implausibilities in Anaximander’s explanations in this
area are no doubt due to the deficiencies of the surviving evidence. Thus given
the efforts he and Thales seem to have made to measure the solstices, it is
improbable that he had nothing to say about the annual movement of the sun in
the ecliptic (to use a later vocabulary). 27 We do in fact have a report going back
to Theophrastus, but queried by some scholars, which suggests that he attributed
the solstices to the sun-circle’s need for replenishment from rising vapours: when
these become now too dense in the north, now too depleted in the south, then—
we may imagine—periodic changes of direction occur in the motion of the
circle. 28 Anaximander’s views on the ‘stars’ other than the sun and moon are
incompletely and inconsistently recorded. For example, one text talks
implausibly, in terms reminiscent of Aristotelian astronomy, of spheres carrying
stars, not just of circles; another suggests that the circles nearest the earth
accounted for the planets as well as the fixed stars. It is obscure what
Anaximander had in mind by talking of circles in the plural with regard to the
fixed stars. One attractive interpretation proposes, for example, three celestial
belts or zones dividing up the night sky, as in Baylonian astronomy. There is
difficulty, however, in understanding how he could accommodate the
circumpolar stars—which do not set—in his scheme, where all circles are to be
construed as revolving round the earth. This may be one of the reasons why
Anaximenes preferred his ‘felt cap’ model of the heavens. 29
It is a feature of Anaximander’s system itself, not lacunae in the doxography,
which inflicts the most dramatic damage to his standing as even a primitive
astronomer. This is his decision to put the fixed stars closer to earth than the
moon and the sun. It is not an unintelligible position. The sequence sun-moonstars-earth
is found in Persian religious texts perhaps roughly contemporaneous
in origin. In the Avesta the soul of an infant comes down from the ‘beginningless
lights’ through a series of lights decreasing in size and intensity to be born on
earth. 30 This corresponds with the implications of Anaximander’s own view of
physical process as a constant interaction between fire and cold moisture: if the
earth is the principal location of one of these forces, it makes sense that the sun,
as the main concentration of the other, should be positioned further from the
earth than the lesser fires of the stars. Yet how can Anaximander account for the
fact that the moon hides any constellation it passes across? Charitable answers
have been attempted by scholars on his behalf, but perhaps it is better just to recall