Fragments

What survives of Anaximander

Nothing Anaximander wrote survives complete. One line reached us, copied into a later writer's own work while he was arguing about something else.

  1. DK 12 B1, Wording disputed

    Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 24.13 (c. 540 CE)

    A commentator setting out what the earliest thinkers had said about the origin of things. He was reading Theophrastus, Aristotle's pupil, who had summarised Anaximander eight centuries before him — so the line reaches us at two removes and through a summary.

    Where Anaximander's own words stop and Theophrastus's paraphrase begins has been argued over for a century. Most agree the clause about penalty and time is his; the frame around it may not be.

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