PYTHAGORAS TO PLATO Xenophanes’ speculations about the heavenly bodies are less impressive Since he believed that the earth stretched beneath us to inWnity, he could not accept that the sun went below the earth when it set On the other hand, he found implausible Anaximenes’ idea of a horizontal rotation around a tilting earth He put forward a new and ingenious explanation: the sun, he maintained, was new every day It came into existence each morning from a congregation of tiny sparks, and later vanished oV into inWnity The appearance of circular movement is due simply to the great distance between the sun and ourselves It follows from this theory that there are innumerable suns, just as there are innumerable days, because the world lasts for ever even though it passes through aqueous and terrestrial phases (KRS 175, 179) Though Xenophanes’ cosmology is ill-founded, it is notable for its naturalism: it is free from the animist and semi-religious elements to be found in other Presocratic philosophers The rainbow, for instance, is not a divinity (like Iris in the Greek pantheon) nor a divine sign (like the one seen by Noah) It is simply a multicoloured cloud (KRS 178) This naturalism did not mean that Xenophanes was uninterested in religion: on the contrary, he was the most theological of all the Presocratics But he despised popular superstition, and defended an austere and sophisticated monotheism.4 He was not dogmatic, however, either in theology or in physics God did not tell us mortals all when time began Only through long-time search does knowledge come to man (KRS 188) Heraclitus Heraclitus was the last, and the most famous, of the early Ionian philosophers He was perhaps thirty years younger than Xenophanes, since he is reported to have been middle-aged when the sixth century ended (D.L 1) He lived in the great metropolis of Ephesus, midway between Miletus and Colophon We possess more substantial portions of his work than of any previous philosopher, but that does not mean we Wnd him easier to See Ch below 12