256 HEIDEL. 



two, father and son. If they were not related to the great Anaxi- 

 mander, his fame may account for the perpetuation of the name 

 in his city. Anaximander the Younger is called an historian, which 

 might be significant if we were not immediately informed what sort 

 of history he wrote without getting the least intimation that he pro- 

 duced anything beyond the Interpretation of Pythagorean Symbols. 

 Though Suidas gives us no specimen of his interpretations and we 

 have no evidence in regard to them from other sources, we fortunately 

 are not without instructive examples of the same literary kind from 

 other hands. ^* At their best they are reports of an antiquarian 

 character regarding curious practices in Greece or foreign lands; at 

 their worst they are stupid attempts at symbolical interpretation. 

 They cannot predispose us to think of Anaximander the Younger as 

 a serious rival of his great eponym; and in any case the fact that he is 

 called an historian, with such a work and such only to his credit, offers 

 no justification for assigning to him every fragment or notice which 

 would be appropriate to an historian. 



Having seen what manner of man Anaximander the Younger was 

 according to the only certain information we have regarding him, we 

 must now canvass the data which Greek tradition attributes simply to 

 'Anaximander' and modern scholars commonly credit to the account 

 of the author of the Interpretation of Pythagorean Symbols. A scho- 

 lium on Dionysius Tbrax *^ reports, " Ephorus among others in his 

 second book says that Cadmus was the inventor of the alphabet; 

 others say that he was not the inventor but the transmitter to us of 

 the invention of the Phoenicians, as Herodotus also in his History and 

 Aristotle report, for they say that Phoenicians invented the alphabet 

 and Cadmus brought it to Greece. Pythodorus, however, in his 

 treatise On the Alphabet and Phillis of Delos, in his treatise On Chro- 

 nology, say that before the time of Cadmus Danaus imported it; and 

 they are confirmed by the Milesian writers Anaximander and Diony- 

 sius and Hecataeus, who are cited in this connection by Apollodorus 

 also in his treatise On the Catalogue of Ships." The word vaguely 

 rendered 'writers' in the foregoing version should probably be trans- 

 lated 'historians,' its usual meaning in later Greek. Possibly it was 

 this consideration that prevailed with modern scholars, leading them 



44 See y3 I 357^ ^3 g^ When one- considers Heraclitus fr. 129 Diels and 

 Hdt. 2.49, 2.81, Plut. Qu. Conviv. 728, 729A, where Hdt. 2.37 is quoted, one 

 understands the reason for studying the derivation of the Pythagorean sym- 

 bols. 



45 P. 183. 1 Hilgard. 



