From the Beginning to Plato

56 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice, according to the
ordinance of time’—using these rather poetical terms to speak of them.
(Simplicius Physics 24–16ff. [KRS 101, 110])
A great deal of scholarly ink has been spilled over this text, and there is little to
show by way of definitive results. The one important thing the best critical work
has established is that the fragment (indicated above by the quotation marks)
refers to a stable reciprocal relationship between opposites within a developed or
developing cosmos, not to the cataclysmic reabsorption of a world or its
constituents back into the apeiron. 34 Most interpreters also believe that
Theophrastus, however, vainly attempts to make the fragment serve just such a
cataclysmic function, so as to be applicable to the relationship between a world
and the apeiron. Quite how he hoped to work the trick is less clear. The
diagnosis I am suggesting notes that whereas Simplicius’ first sentence concerns
generation of worlds from the apeiron, the second is introduced by a remark
focused on destruction, which despite its plurals (‘out of those…into these’)
looks designed to furnish a balancing comment on the death of worlds. Yet the
plurals give the game away: the only evidence Theophrastus can actually offer to
support the implication of cosmic destruction is a statement of Anaximander
about the effect of opposites on each other. 35
No one who has worked their way through Anaximander’s astronomy,
meteorology and biology will have any difficulty in identifying the forces which
‘pay retribution to each other for their injustice’. Simplicius takes it that these are
the four elements. This Aristotelian analysis is, as often, anachronistic and overschematic.
What Anaximander must principally have in mind is the alternating
domination of moisture over fire and fire over moisture which he makes the key
to his account of origins, and which he probably thought exemplified above all
by the regular pattern of the seasons in the world as it has now developed. This
essentially stable pattern, while giving no basis for expectation of cosmic
destruction, can accommodate the possibility of further fundamental changes, as
it has admitted of them in the past. The clearest example is supplied by
Anaximander’s less than satisfactorily documented views on the changing
relationship of land and sea.
In his Meteorology Aristotle sketches a theory of the gradual evaporation of
the moisture on the earth’s surface by the sun (353b6ff. [KRS 132]). Originally
the whole surface of the earth was wet. Then the drying action of the sun
produced the present state of things: part of the surface remains wet and
constitutes sea, but the moisture elsewhere is subject to evaporation into the
atmosphere. In future the same process will cause the sea to shrink in extent and
eventually to dry up completely. Alexander’s commentary on the Meteorology
tells us (67.11) that Theophrastus attributed this theory to Anaximander (and
subsequently Diogenes of Apollonia), so making him look to a Whiggish eye
like a precursor of modern geology. It is tempting to connect the account of the