Meanwhile, back in Athens, Aeschylus wrote a play which featured both the question of the Nile’s floods and Anaxagoras’ new theory:
I have learned to praise the race
of the Ethiopian land, where seven-streamed Nile
rolls with rain of winds on earth,
where sun beaming out fiery flame
melts the mountain snow, and all thriving
Egypt, flooded with the holy stream
raises the life-giving ear of Demeter.[24]
The theory Aeschylus presents that the Nile is flooded by melting snow, is unique to Anaxagoras. Though we do not know when Aeschylus wrote these words, it had to be before 460 BC. Presumably, the poet got the theory from the horse’s mouth, as both the poet and the philosopher were members of Pericles’ circle, and Pericles had produced Aeschylus’ play The Persians.
This is how Anaxagoras’ theories started being declaimed in the Theater of Dionysus and tested on Nile cruises. A new day of scientific awareness and secular curiosity was dawning on Greece. Literacy was carrying new ideas to the ends of the Greek world, from Halicarnassus to Marseilles to Naucratis in the mouth of the Nile.
But all was not smooth sailing for the philosopher-scientists of Greece. Sometime before Socrates became a prominent thinker, Anaxagoras was accused of impiety. According to his critics, Anaxagoras said that the sun was a stone and the moon an earthy body, instead of the sun being the god Helios and the moon the goddess Selene. Anaxagoras was accused of impiety because his views were too different from ordinary pious beliefs, and perhaps too abstruse. He failed to “know himself,” to recognize the limits of human power and rational inquiry. Too much curiosity was hubris, human presumptuousness. Indeed, it took a certain kind of chutzpah to elaborate theories of the heavens and the earth, astronomy, geology, oceanography, to travel to far-off lands seeking to know the nature of things — why the Nile River floods in summer, where it flows from—and to come back with new theories challenging traditional beliefs. To be sure, Anaxagoras held views that could not be reconciled with traditional mythology. He was not hostile to religion, however, despite what his critics might think. He believed that all things were originally mixed together in a great cosmic soup. “Mind,” or Nous, however, was distinct from this mixture: “It is the finest of all objects,” said Anaxagoras, “and the purest, and it exercises complete oversight over everything and prevails above all. And all things that have soul, the greater and the smaller, these does mind rule.”[25] His Mind was a kind of omniscient organizer of the world. But the philosopher’s god was too strange for the common people to accept.
Threatened with a trial because of his radical new ideas, Anaxagoras left the city where he had built his reputation and settled in far-off Lampsacus, located on the east bank of the Hellenspont just across the waterway from Aegospotami, where stood the famous meteorite whose fall he had “predicted.”[26] Anaxagoras was the first philosopher to make his home in Athens. He left before Socrates became an important figure, yet he left a lasting impression on his adopted city Athens. The two great philosophers of Athens in the Golden Age—the one the embodiment of the scientific enlightenment, the other the champion of humanistic ethics—probably never met.[27]
[24].Fr. 300 Radt.
[25].Anaxagoras B12 (in part).
[26].Diogenes Laertius 2.14.
[27].This is the obvious implication of Plato Phaedo 97b-c; cf. Apology 26d-e. To the contrary, Diogenes Laertius 2.19.