Note 173 — Chapter V · FREETHOUGHT IN GREECE

At length it occurred to the statesman’s enemies to strike at him through his guide, philosopher, and friend. They had already procured the banishment of another of his teachers, Damon, as “an intriguer and a friend of despotism”;173 and one of their fanatics, Diopeithes, a priest and a violent demagogue,174 laid the way for an attack on Anaxagoras by obtaining the enactment of a law that “prosecutions should be laid against all who disbelieved in religion and held theories of their own about things on high.”175 Anaxagoras was thus open to indictment on the score alike of his physics and of his mythology; though, seeing that his contemporary Diogenes of Apollonia (who before Demokritos taught “nothing out of nothing: nothing into nothing,” and affirmed the sphericity of the earth) was also in some danger of his life at Athens,176 it is probable that the prosecution was grounded on his physicist teaching. Saved by Perikles from the death punishment, but by one account fined five talents,177 he either was exiled or chose to leave the intolerant city; and he made his home at Lampsakos, where, as the story runs, he won from the municipality the favour that every year the children should have a holiday in the month in which he died.178 It is significant of his general originality that he was reputed the first Greek who wrote a book in prose.179