Anaximander, son of Praxiades, was born in the third year of the 42nd Olympiad (610 BC). According to Apollodorus of Athens , Greek grammarian of the 2nd century BC, he was sixty-four years old during the second year of the 58th Olympiad (547–546 BC), and died shortly afterwards. Establishing a timeline of his work is now impossible, since no document provides chronological references. Themistius , a 4th-century Byzantine rhetorician , mentions that he was the "first of the known Greeks to publish a written document on nature." Therefore, his texts would be amongst the earliest written in prose , at least in the Western world. By the time of Plato , his philosophy was almost forgotten, and Aristotle , his successor Theophrastus and a few doxographers provide us with the little information that remains. However, we know from Aristotle that Thales, also from Miletus, precedes ...