5. About Anaximander

Now Anaximander was a hearer of Thales. He was Anaximander of Miletus, son of Praxiades. He said that the beginning of the things that are was a certain nature of the Boundless from which came into being the heavens and the ordered worlds within them. And that this principle is eternal and grows not old and encompasses all the ordered worlds. And he says time is limited by birth, substance, and death. He said that the Boundless is a principle and element of the things that are and was the first to call it by the name of principle. But that there is an eternal movement towards Him wherein it happens that the heavens are born. And that the earth is a heavenly body supported by nothing, but remaining in its place by reason of its equal distance from everything. And that its form is a watery cylinder like a stone pillar; and that we tread on one of its surfaces, but that there is another opposite to it. And that the stars are a circle of fire distinct from the fire in the cosmos, but surrounded by air. And that certain fiery exhalations exist in those places where the stars appear, and by the obstruction of these exhalations come the eclipses. And that the moon appears sometimes waxing and sometimes waning through the obstruction or closing of her paths. And that the circle of the sun is 27 times greater than that of the moon and that the sun is in the highest place in the heavens and the circles of the fixed stars in the lowest. And that the animals came into being in moisture evaporated by the sun. And that mankind was at the beginning very like another animal, to wit, a fish. And that winds come from the separation and condensation of the subtler atoms of the air and rain from the earth giving back under the sun’s heat what it gets from the clouds, and lightnings from the severance of the clouds by the winds falling upon them. He was born in the 3rd year of the 42nd Olympiad.