Commentary

This sentence is the single surviving words of Anaximander's treatise, quoted by Simplicius, and it is therefore the foundation of any reconstruction of his thought. It describes a cosmic process in which things arise from and return to their source by necessity, and it uses the language of justice and reparation to describe the exchange of opposites. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, in The Presocratic Philosophers, argue that the legal vocabulary is a metaphor for the balance of the elements and that the passage reflects a cosmology of compensation. Charles Kahn, in Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (1960), stresses that the fragment presents a physical order governed by necessity rather than by divine will, a reading that makes it a landmark of early natural philosophy. Jonathan Barnes cautions that Simplicius' quotation is brief and that the interpretation of the opposites and of time depends heavily on later testimonia. W. K. C. Guthrie, in A History of Greek Philosophy, notes the difficulty of knowing the referent of the things that come to be. The English here is an approximation, and the Greek should be consulted in Diels-Kranz before quotation.