terpret them counter-anthropomorphically as ultimate constituents of nature.
Heraclitus, who as a priest is a last remnant of the old pre-philosophical base,
continues this play with concepts on the border of the secular and the divine
as late as three generations into the secular intellectual community.
The first burst of creativity occurs in rivalry, not in unity. There are
several candidates for the basic elements: the anthropomorphic gods them-
selves; various physical elements as prime arche, or a non-physical element
such as the apeiron; the “unbounded” of Anaximander; or the numbers of the
Pythagoreans, at first conceived as quasi-physical entities like the collections
of pebbles used for calculation.^3 Personal lineages begin to appear from one
leader to the next across the generations. We see three lineages in Figure 3.1,
FIGURE 3.1. FORMING THE NETWORK OF GREEK PHILOSOPHERS,
600–465 B.C.E.Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^83