Thales

So those who prophesied in the time of Darius the son of Hystaspes, in the second year of his reign — Aggaeus and Zacharias and the Messenger among the Twelve, who prophesied in the first year of the forty-eighth Olympiad — are shown to be older than Pythagoras, who is placed about the sixty-second Olympiad, and than the oldest of the sages among the Greeks, Thales, who lived about the fiftieth Olympiad.

But the principle of the universe was not foreknown to the Greeks — neither to Thales, who took water for the first cause, nor to the other natural philosophers in succession;

Thales, at any rate, being asked what the divine is, said, "That which has neither beginning nor end.

For in the reign of Cyrus and Darius was Zechariah, at which time Thales, prince of natural philosophers, gave Croesus, when he questioned him, no certain answer about divinity, being troubled, no doubt, by the voices of the prophets.

For what certain answer did that Thales, prince of natural philosophers, return to Croesus when he questioned him about divinity, often frustrated in his respite for deliberation?

A regular Thales!

Why then do we admire Thales?

This is why people say that men like Anaxagoras and Thales may be wise but are not prudent, when they see them display ignorance of their own interests;

'Thales, the chief, one of the seven, to whom the remaining six are said to have yielded the first place, said that all things consist of water.

Well, then, as might be expected of a man wise in practical affairs, are many and ingenious inventions for the arts and business of life reported of Homer as they are of Thales the Milesian and Anacharsis the Scythian?

Why, take the case of Thales, Theodorus.

Hence it is, my friend, such a man, both in private, when he meets with individuals, and in public, as I said in the beginning, when he is obliged to speak in court or elsewhere about the things at his feet and before his eyes, is a laughing-stock not only to Thracian girls but to the multitude in general, for he falls into pits and all sorts of perplexities through inexperience, and his awkwardne …

as Thales water, Heraclitus fire, Anaximenes air, Anaximander all the heavenly bodies, Strato heaven and earth, Zeno air and aether, Plato the stars (which kind of gods he calls fiery) — when, considering of the world its greatness and force and power and honour and beauty, the resource, the constancy, the law of the several elements, which conspire to the begetting, nourishing, completing, and re …

So Thales fell into a well.

And I do not mean only those who fashion it out of manifest bodily things — as Hipparchus and Heraclitus out of fire, as Hippo and Thales out of water, as Empedocles and Critias out of blood, as Epicurus out of atoms (if atoms too compose corporealities by their conjunction), as Critolaus and his Peripatetics out of some fifth substance I know not what (if that too is a body, since it includes bod …