What survives of Anaxagoras

Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 155.26 (c. 540 CE)

The opening of the book, copied out by a commentator who says plainly that he is quoting at length because the work had become hard to find.

Simplicius wrote nearly a thousand years after Anaxagoras and is the reason we have him at all. He seems to have known it.

Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 164.24 (c. 540 CE)

Quoted while explaining what Aristotle had meant in criticising Anaxagoras. To make the criticism intelligible he had to reproduce the passage being criticised.

The idea that mind is distinct from matter enters European philosophy here, in a passage preserved as a footnote to somebody else's objection.

Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 163.18 (c. 540 CE)

Copied as evidence of what the earlier thinkers had actually held about generation, against the summaries then in circulation.

Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 34.29 (c. 540 CE)

Preserved in the same commentary, in a passage about whether the separating-out happened once or elsewhere as well.

Read by some as other worlds with their own suns and their own farmers, by others as a description of this one. The Greek does not settle it.

Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians I.140 (c. 200 CE)

Quoted with approval as a rule for reasoning from what can be seen to what cannot. It is the one line of Anaxagoras that reached us through someone other than Simplicius.