Eclipse and plague: Themistocles, Pericles, Anaxagoras and the Athenians’ war on science

Abstract

Abstract:The biography of Anaxagoras (500–428 BC), the most brilliant scientist of antiquity, contains many unresolved contradictions, which are best explained as follows. After he ‘predicted’ the fall of the meteorite at Aegospotami in 466, he lived nearby at Lampsacus as the protege of its ruler Themistocles. In 460 Pericles became his patron at Athens, where he lived for the next 30 years. In 431, Pericles was taking part in an expedition to the Peloponnese when the sun was eclipsed; he tried to dispel his helmsman’s fear by covering his face with his cloak, illustrating Anaxagoras’ correct account of eclipses. In 430 he led a second such expedition, which failed badly; its return coincided with the plague. The seer Diopeithes brought in a decree that targeted the ‘atheist’ Anaxagoras by banning astronomy. This enabled Thucydides son of Melesias and Cleon to attack Pericles by prosecuting Anaxagoras, on the ground that Pericles’ impiety had angered the gods, thereby causing the plague. Pericles sent Anaxagoras back to Lampsacus, where he soon died; Pericles was himself deposed and fined, in a first triumph for the Athenian populist reaction against the fifthcentury Enlightenment.

Crises (Staseis) and Changes (Metabolai)

“…Moving away from the religious or mythological explanations that, as a rule, attributed the origin of these phenomena to the god Poseidon, Thucydides seeks to establish natural causes for the epiklusis (flood), revealing a more rational and scientific perspective beyond that of the attentive and curious observer of nature, in accordance with Ionian natural philosophy. In this regard, Thucydides shows himself to be a man of his time, operating in line with new horizons of thought, working on the boundary between the rational and irrational, the profane and the divine, the physical and the metaphysical (Furley 2006, 421-23;Janko 2020).…”