From the Beginning to Plato

THE IONIANS 61
It is hard from our perspective to understand how anyone should have found
the compression theory or its many particular applications credible. Yet it is
taken for granted as the standard physical account by Melissus a century later,
when he says, ‘We think that earth and stone are made out of water’ (fragment
[KRS 557]), probably recalling Anaxagoras’s restatement in his fragment 16
[KRS 490]. Slightly later in the fifth century Diogenes of Apollonia would give
an even more thoroughgoing re-endorsement of Anaximenes’ original version of
the idea. What attracted cosmologists to it was doubtless the core thought that the
transformations different forms of matter undergo are intelligible only if those
transformations are really just variants of one and the same pair of contrary
processes, and if what is transformed is ultimately just a single matter. This is a
profound thought. It seems to be Anaximenes’ achievement, not that of the
shadowy Thales nor of Anaximander. For Anaximander the apeiron is the source
of things, not what they are made of. Anaximenes appears to have been the first
to have had the simplifying and unifying notion that their source is what they are
made of. 42
XENOPHANES
Xenophanes presents us with a new phenomenon: lots of actual extracts of pre-
Socratic writing. We know the sound of Xenophanes’ voice. 43
Interpretation is not therefore plain sailing. In fact Xenophanes is the subject of
more disagreement than Anaximander or Anaximenes. The disputes are not just
over what specific positions he took nor what his key problems were, but on
whether he should count as a substantial thinker at all, or merely as an intellectual
gadfly without a systematic set of ideas of his own. One of the difficulties is that
the scraps of Xenophanes which are preserved are mostly just that: isolated lines
or pairs of lines or quatrains torn from their original context by a quoting
authority. Another is that he was to become the focus of different kinds of
interest by a variety of later writers. Thus while Heraclitus speaks of him as a
typical practitioner of fruitless Ionian curiosity, Plato and Aristotle (followed by
the faithful Theophrastus) see him as an obscure precursor of Parmenides, and
Timon of Phlius as more than half anticipating the scepticism he attributed to
Pyrrho. In subsequent periods the story gets still more complicated, with
Xenophanes portrayed, for example, as an exponent of an elaborate Eleatic
negative theology. Excavating the real Xenophanes from the mélange of
different versions of his thought preserved in the sources is accordingly a good
deal trickier than reconstructing Milesian cosmology, which never enjoyed
comparable resurrection. 44
Xenophanes wrote verse, not prose, and that too made him more durable.
Diogenes Laertius sums up his output in these words:
He wrote in epic metre, also elegiacs and iambics, against Hesiod and
Homer, reproving them for what they said about the gods. But he himself