I 4 SCIENCE OF THE GREEKS. PT. i. 



do not move. He believed that all the heavenly bodies 

 were fiery stones: the sun he thought was a huge fiery 

 stone as big as the Peloponnesus. He was the first 

 scientific man who was persecuted for declaring boldly 

 what he believed to be the truth. The Greeks were very 

 angry with him for teaching that the sun was not a god ; 

 so he was tried at Athens, when quite an old man, and 

 condemned to death. His friend Pericles pleaded for him, 

 and the sentence was changed to a fine and banishment, 

 and he retired to Lampsacus, where he went on teaching 

 science and philosophy till his death. 



Anaxagoras was the first Greek philosopher who taught 

 that there must be one Great Intelligence ruling over the 

 universe. So that the Greeks punished as an atheist the 

 man who first taught them of a Supreme God. This 

 example should teach us to be very careful how we con- 

 demn the opinions of others, for fear that we, like the 

 Greeks, should think another wicked only because his 

 thoughts are nobler than we can understand. 



Hippocrates, 420 B.C. While Anaxagoras was study- 

 ing the heavens, another man, born about 420 B.C. in the 

 little island of Cos, was studying men, and how to make 

 their lives healthier and happier. Hippocrates, the Father 

 of Medicine, belonged to a family of doctors and priests. 

 The Greeks did not understand that illness comes to us 

 because we do not know how to take care of our bodies. 

 They thought that every illness was a punishment sent be- 

 cause one of their gods was angry, so when they were ill 

 they sent a present to the temple of yEsculapius, the god of 

 medicine, and then went to the priests of ^Esculapius to 

 cure them. The ancestors of Hippocrates were all priests 

 of ^Esculapius, but he separated himself from the priest- 

 hood and devoted his time to studying the human body. 



