Anaxarchus

« Anaxarchus ( c.380- c.330 BC) The Greek philosopher Anaxarchus of Abdera was a friend of Alexander the Great, teacher and friend of Pyrrho, and heroic victim of a tyrant.

More a court philosopher than a school one, and anambiguous personality, he seems to have mixed a highly original philosophical cocktail: a primarily ethical, cynicallyinclined outlook, combined with certain elements of Democritean ethics, epistemology and physics.

His onlyattested work was a treatise On Kingship, his dominant interest perhaps being the theory and practice of relationsbetween intellectual and ruler.

Little is known of Anaxarchus' early life before meeting Alexander.

His background lay in the writings of Democritus , like him a native of Abdera, and in the teaching of the obscure Diogenes of Smyrna, a pupil of the sceptical Democritean, Metrodorus of Chios.

The ancient writers of philosophical ‘successions' placedAnaxarchus in a chain running from the Eleatics and Democritus to Pyrrho , to give Pyrrhonian scepticism a distinguished ancestry.

That chain underlies the life of Anaxarchus recounted by Diogenes Laertius (Book IX ).

After somehow joining Alexander's inner circle, Anaxarchus followed him on his eastern campaign, and brought Pyrrho withhim.

Alexander's biographers frequently cite his witticisms and sayings.

He comes over mainly as caustic andarrogant - strongly enough placed to have no fear of making enemies, notably Nicocreon, who later took cruelvengeance on him, and Callisthenes, a relative of Aristotle who was eventually put to death by Alexander.

This feudwith Callisthenes explains the striking hostility of the Peripatetic tradition towards Anaxarchus, described in it as avoluptuary and an odious flatterer of Alexander ( A4, A9 ).

His attitude towards the king seems actually to have been the much more complex one of a sort of philosopher-jester.

Boldly exercising his ‘freedom of speech' ( parrhēsia ) in sometimes risky jokes, he pretends to encourage Alexander's ambitions of conquering the world, of being hailed inthe oriental fashion ( proskyn ēsis ), or of being acknowledged as a god, using doubled-edged arguments which are implicitly derisive.

He mocks the tears which Alexander sheds after killing his friend Clitus, with the put-down remarkthat ‘everything done by those in power is just and lawful'.

In these different situations, Anaxarchus ‘skilfully mixessweetness and acidity' ( A7), and perhaps shows how we may interpret his ambition of ‘bringing people back to their senses in the easiest way' ( A1).

The two preserved fragments of his treatise On Kingship happen to bear on the two areas in which the relations between the intellectual and power can pose thorny problems: the spoken word ( fr. 1) and money ( fr.

2 ).

In these areas, one should show the kind of wisdom which Anaxarchus ( fr.

1 ) defines as ‘knowledge of the measures of kairos [the right moment]'.

The tales of Anaxarchus' death, however, confirm that he was not merely an opportunistic courtier.

Having accidentally fallen into the hands of his old enemy, the Cypriottyrant Nicocreon, he was thrown into a mortar and crushed with iron pestles.

Retaining his calm and his irony evenunder torture, he said: ‘Crush, crush Anaxarchus' container; Anaxarchus himself you will not crush.' This heroicdeath, like Socrates', long remained a paradigm of philosophical martyrdom.

According to Plutarch, Anaxarchus ‘fromthe beginning beat an original path in philosophy'.

This frustratingly brief statement is hard to flesh out.

On thebasis of his nickname, ‘the happiness man' ( eudaimonikos ), earned by ‘his impassivity and his even temper in life' (A1), late sources ( A14 ) implausibly make him the founder of a ‘happiness school'.

In reality, ‘impassivity' was a Cynic trait and ‘even temper' a Democritean one.

Both passed, in time, into Pyrrhonism (see Pyrrhonism §6 ). According to Sextus Empiricus (A16 ), many ranked Anaxarchus with the philosophers who ‘abolished the criterion of truth'.

However, it is unlikely that he maintained a very sophisticated scepticism.

In one of his preserved fragments(fr.

1 ) he presents himself implicitly as a ‘polymath', someone of multiple knowledge, and one anecdote ( A11 ) has him, in conversation with Alexander, preaching the Democritean doctrine of infinite worlds.

If there is any scepticismin him, it is rather a practical, lived scepticism, albeit influenced by Democritus' famous assault on the reality of thesensible world (see Democritus §3 ).

It is expressed in the ironic yet despairing saying attributed to Anaxarchus, as also to the Cynic Monimus: ‘They compared existing things to a stage-painting ( skēnographia ), and thought that they resembled the images seen in dreaming or insanity' ( A16 ).

Just as an old world was vanishing and a new one being born amidst the din, the blood and the fury, Anaxarchus knew how to give striking expression to that feelingof unreality which accompanies such turnings in the tide of history.

In that troubled age, which lost its bearingswithout finding new ones, Anaxarchus remained happy both in pleasure and under torture.

He won and kept thefriendship of people like Alexander and Pyrrho, and aroused the lasting hatred and resentment of someone likeNicocreon.

No doubt he was, as Timon suggests ( A10 ), an ambiguous man.

Certainly he was no ordinary man.. »