246 HEIDEL. 



Anaximenes with Sparta, it is reported '^^ that Anaximander warned 

 the Spartans to abandon their city -and houses and Hve in the open 

 because he anticipated the earthquake which destroyed the entire 

 city. We cannot, unfortunately, rely implicitly on these statements; 

 l)Ut if they were true we should have the more reason to suspect that 

 the bronze map of the earth which Aristagoras of Miletus brought to 

 Sparta ^^ in his effort to persuade that State to aid the lonians in over- 

 throwing the Persian power was in fact the map of Anaximander who 

 was commended to the Spartans by personal relations. ^^ But whether 

 this map was that made by Anaximander or, as some prefer to think, 

 the revised and perfected map of Hecataeus, who was conspicuously 

 prominent in the Ionian revolt, makes very little difference for our 

 purposes. The presence of a sun-dial at Sparta is as intelligible as 

 that of the map; for both were related to geography, and Anaxi- 

 mander no less than Hecataeus was a geographer. Nor should it 

 cause surprise that Anaximander should thus be supposed to have 

 visited Sparta. It is true that we have no other record of his travels, 

 but in view of the scantiness of the reports regarding him, this is not 

 significant. One can hardly think of a geographer, especially of a 

 pioneer in the field, as confining his studies to his native city and 

 to such information as he could there obtain at second hand. His 

 successor Hecataeus, we are told, had travelled widely. 



Of the ' sphere ' which Anaximander is said to have constructed we 

 cannot say much. Its relation to his astronomical or cosmological 

 studies is sufficiently obvious. It was as natural that he should 

 attempt a graphic or plastic representation of the heavens as of the 

 earth. Whatever its form, it would serve to visualize the obliquity 

 of the zodiac, which he discovered, and to relate the constellations, in 

 their risings and settings, to the seasons and the changing position of 

 the sun. Anaximander presumably never realized how much this 

 attempt was destined to contribute to the final overthrow of his 

 conception of a disk earth and to the eventual revision of his map; 

 for, once the heavens came to be clearly visualized as a sphere, the 

 advance of geometry, which he is said to have cultivated, and the 



21 V\l. 15, 5. 22 Hdt. 5.49. 



23 It is quite possible that Anaximander may have been sent by Croesus as 

 one of his ambassadors to Sparta when he sought an alliance with the leading 

 power in Greece (Hdt. 1.69); though the Lydians were by this time pretty 

 well Hellenized, diplomacy would suggest that on such an errand he should 

 ■send Greeks, and none would have been more suitable, it would seem, than a 

 man of prominence among the Milesians, his subject allies. At any rate, 

 Lydia and Miletus clearly had relations with Sparta at that time which would 

 readily account for Anaximander going there. 



