Anaxagoras

In the middle of the fifth century BCE, a ship from Asia Minor cuts across the Aegean, its hull packed with grain, oil, and pottery. Among the passengers stands a man in his early forties, with the face of someone used to thinking more than talking. He is leaving his home city, Clazomenae, in Ionia, heading toward Athens, which is not yet the cultural capital it will become, but already a restless, ambitious democracy. This man brings with him a different way of thinking about the world, one born on the Ionian coast but sharpened in solitude: a vision in which the cosmos is made not of a single substance but of infinitely many kinds of stuff, all present everywhere, shaped and ordered by a cosmic Mind. His name is Anaxagoras, and he will become, for a brief but intense period, the philosopher of Pericles’ Athens.

Anaxagoras was born around  ...