Anaximander taught that the world, and countless other worlds beyond our ken, came into being out of
the Boundless and will eventually be absorbed back into it. He gave a detailed account of the stages by
which the parts of the cosmos were differentiated, and of their shape and arrangement. What we see as
the sun, moon, and stars are really, according to him, great rings of fire, respectively twenty-seven,
eighteen, and nine times the diameter of the earth, and encircling it, but each concealed in a tube of mist
except for certain holes through which the fire shines out. The earth, a drum-shaped body with its depth
a third of its diameter, floats in the middle. The cosmos's existence is an imbalance in the Boundless, an
'injustice', which must in due course be corrected in accordance with an ordinance of Time. All cosmic
change, in other words, has its appointed season. The Boundless itself is everlasting and inexhaustible,
encompassing and directing all things. Now we may admire the grandeur of this system, and allow that it
is in some sense philosophical. Anaximander attempts to explain the visible world as the product of
orderly, universal processes, which, he infers, must continually be producing other worlds elsewhere.
(As Metrodorus of Chios later remarked, you do not get only one ear of corn growing in a field.) But the
system is only to a limited extent deduced from the visible world. Much is postulated that can have no
basis in rational inference, and some of it is undoubtedly inspired by Iranian cosmology.
The sequence earth-stars-moon-sun is distinctively Iranian, not Greek, and the Boundless that lies
beyond the sun corresponds to the Beginningless Lights which are the abode of Ohrmazd and the highest
paradise for the Zoroastrian. Ohrmazd created this world with the blessing of the unaging god Time, and
a finite duration of 12,000 years has been appointed for it. Thus the 'ordinance of Time' in
Anaximander's system was not a creation of his intellect but can be traced to barbarian theology. There,
however, it is a single, non-recurrent act of will; Anaximander made it into something resembling a law
of nature. This illustrates an important feature of the Greek philosophers' approach. They sought to
eliminate the arbitrary events characteristic of mythical narratives; but this did not by any means incline
them to eliminate divinity from the world. They preferred to depersonalize their gods and identify them
with the unchanging forces that govern the working of the universe.
The third of the Milesians, Anaximenes, goes further in the direction of extrapolating from the visible
world to what lies outside it. He holds that it is encompassed not by an undefined Boundless but by air,
to which he gives the qualities of Anaximander's Boundless: infinite extent, immortality, and perpetual
motion leading to the formation of worlds. Air surrounds and contains the world just as the soul, which
also consists of air, holds the body together. All other substances are derived from air by condensation or
rarefaction. The earth is flat and thin like a table and supported by air, as in Thales it was supported by
water. Vapours rising from it become rarefied and form fiery discs which also float on the air, like
leaves, and are the sun, moon, and stars. Among them, invisible to us, move certain solid bodies,
probably intended to account for eclipses.
It is difficult not to find Anaximenes' system somewhat crude after Anaximander's. Anaximander had
made a tremendous imaginative leap forward by reducing the earth to a small body in relation to the
cosmos and by dispensing with a material support for it; he apparently thought that equipoise was
enough. Anaximenes reverted to more conventional presuppositions. At the same time his is a more
economical construct. Nature does not change into something unimaginable at the edge of his cosmos.
Everything, inside and outside the cosmos, is based on something we have experience of, air and its