Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/268

246 246 HISTORY OF THE notions on religion and struck into a new path of speculation on sacred things. Similar opinions had indeed been previously entertained in the East, and, in particular, the Mosaic conceptions of the Deity and the world belong to the same class of religious views. But among the Greeks these views (which the Christian religion has made so familiar in modern times) were first introduced by Anaxagoras, and were pre- sented by him in a philosophical form ; and having been, from the beginning, much more opposed than the doctrines of former philo- sophers to the popular mythological religion, they tended powerfully, by their rapid diffusion, to undermine the principles upon which the entire worship of the ancient gods rested, and therefore prepared the way for the subsequent triumph of Christianity. § 8. Anaxagoras, though he is called a disciple of Anaximenes, fol- lowed him at some interval of time; he flourished at a period when not only the opinions of the Ionic physical philosophers, but those of the Pythagoreans and even of the Eleatics, had been diffused in Greece, and had produced some influence upon speculation. But since it is impossible to arrange together the contemporaneous advances of the different schools or series of philosophers, and since Anaxagoras re- sembled his Ionic predecessors both in the object of his researches and his mode of expounding them, we will finish the series of the Ionic philosophers before we proceed to the Eleatics and Pythagoreans, The main events of the life of Anaxagoras are known with tolerable certainty from concurrent chronological accounts. He was born at ClazomenaB, in Ionia, in Olymp. 70, 1, B.C. 500, and came to Athens in Olymp. 81, 1, b.c. 456.* There he lived for twenty-five years (which is also called thirty in round numbers), till about the beginning of the Pcloponnesian war. At this time there was a faction in the Athenian state whose object it was to shake the power of the great statesman Pericles, and to lower his credit with the people ; but before they ventured to make a direct attack upon him, they began by attacking his friends and familiars. Among these was Anaxagoras, at that time far advanced in age ; and the freedom of his inquiries into Nature had afTorded sufficient ground for accusing him of unbelief in the gods adored by the people. The discrepancy of the testimony makes it dif- ficult to ascertain the result of this accusation ; but thus much is cer- tain, that in consequence of it Anaxagoras left Athens in Olymp. 87, 2, B.C. 431. He died three years afterwards at Lampsacus, in Olymp. 88, 1, B.C. 428, at the age of seventy-two. The treatise on Nature by Anaxagoras (which was written late in his life, and therefore at Athens) f was in the Ionic dialect, and in prose, des, archon in Olymp. 75, I. This time, in the midst of the terrors of the Persian war, was little favourable to the philosophical studies of Anaxagoras. t After Empedocles was known as a philosopher, Aristot. Metaph. i. 3, where 'l^ya. expresses the entire philosophical performances.
 * In tho archonship of Callias, who has heen confounded with Callias or Callia-