Anaxagoras was an Ionian philosopher. He was born in 488 BC at Clazomense and died in 428 BC. When only about twenty years of age he settled at Athens, and soon gained a high reputation, and gathered round him a circle of renowned pupils, including Pericles, Euripides, Socrates, etc. At the age of fifty he was publicly charged with impiety and condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to perpetual banishment. Thereupon he went to Lampsacus, where he died. Anaxagoras belonged to the atomic school of Ionic philosophers. He held that there was an infinite number of different kinds of elementary atoms, and that these, in themselves motionless and originally existing in a state of chaos, were put in motion by an eternal, immaterial, spiritual, elementary being, Nous (Intelligence), from which motion the world was produced. The stars were, according to him, of earthy materials; the sun a glowing mass, about as large as the Peloponnesus;
the earth was flat; the moon a dark, inhabitable body, receiving its light from the sun; the comets wandering stars. Research Anaxagoras
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