Anaxagoras, a Grecian philosopher, born at Clazomenae in Ionia, about 500 B. 0., died in 428. He rejected wealth and honors that he might indulge his love of meditation and philosophy. From Clazomenae he removed to Athens, where he lived in the closest intimacy with Pericles, and also numbered among his friends or pupils several of the most distinguished Athenians of that period. Anaxagoras is generally considered the first of the Greeks who conceived of God as a Divine Mind (by him termed acting upon matter with conscious intelligence and design. He taught that the sun was no deity, but an inanimate fiery mass, and therefore not a proper object of worship; and that the miraculous appearances at sacrifices were explicable by natural laws. He suggested that the moon shone by reflected light, and rightly explained solar and lunar eclipses. His attempt to account for these phenomena, at that time regarded as supernatural, on natural principles, brought him into great danger. He gave moral expositions of the myths of Homer, and explained the names of the gods by allegory. As a penalty for what was accounted his impiety, he was condemned to die; hut through the influence of Pericles his sentence was commuted to banishment, He retired to Lampsacus, on the Hellespont, and died there a few years later in poverty. A little before his death the senate of Lampsacus sent messengers to inquire what commemoration would be most acceptable to him; he answered, " Let all the boys have a play day on the anniversary of my death !" This festival was called Anaxagoreia, and was observed for centuries.

The fragments of his works have been collected by Schaubach (Leip-sic, 1827), and by Schorn (Bonn, 1829).