CHAPTER XI 



DEMOCRITUS AND THE CONCEPT OF AN 

 ATOMIC UNIVERSE 



IT was late in the intellectual awakening of Greece that Athens 

 became its centre. While the little peninsula, whose after 

 life was to shed such a glow in the world, was given over to 

 the sack and slaughter of warring tribes, the shores and the 

 islands of the ^gean were astir with a varied activity. There, 

 and along the coasts of southernmost Italy, the Doric and Ionic 

 Greeks, driven from the mother-land, had flung wide their line 

 of colonies. Th&y were navigators and merchants, pirates, 

 too, perhaps ; they vied with the Phoenicians for the trade 

 of Egypt, and whithersoever they went, they planted their 

 depots and grew rich. And with nations as with the nouveaux 

 riches always, with their wealth they became civilised, built 

 palaces, and dabbled in philosophy and art. Some of their 

 people, the Sybarites, in Italy, studied so well the ulterior re- 

 finements of pleasure as to supply luxury with a synonym. 

 In Miletus on the Asian shore, Thales, and with him Greek 

 physical inquiry, was born. For a century or so half the great 

 names in Hellas were Ionian. 



At the top of the ^Egean where it washes the coast of the 

 ancient Thrak6, now a part of the Turkish dominion, lay the 

 Ionian city of Abdera. In that time it seems to have been 

 noted for its prosperity and general culture. It must have 

 been very rich, for there is a legend that when Xerxes came 

 with his Persian hordes on their way to Thermopylae, he was 

 entertained in Abdera by a private citizen. As a token of 

 time well spent, Xerxes, so the legend runs, left with this 

 Hegisistratus certain magi or wise men, for the instruction of 

 the rich man's sons. One of them, Democritus, must have 

 been a marvellous pupil. When he had learned all the magi 

 had to impart, he took his share of the parental estate in coin 

 of the realm, and diligently squandered it in seeing every corner 



