The coastal towns of Miletus and Ephesus spawned the men who challenged traditional thinking about Nature. Thales (620–546 BC), for one, hailed from Miletus, an Ionian city that was considered the richest and most powerful of its time. Thales preceded Plato by about two centuries and argued against religion as an authority to describe Nature. Instead, Thales doctrine outlined that water is the universal primary substance.
Anaximenes (died circa 528 BC), another Milesian, followed Anaximander, but preferred the earlier notion that everything is made of one common substance. In his case it was air. He wrote, “The soul, being our air, controls us, and beneath air encompasses the whole world.”
Another Ionian philosopher, Xenophanes (circa 570–circa 475 BC), suggested that earth was the fundamental substance. He wrote, “For all things come from earth, and in earth all things end.”
Heraclitus (530 BC–470 BC), around 500 BC, appeared on the scene. Based in Ephesus, he taught that the fundamental substance is fire. He wrote, “This ordered kosmos, which is the same for all, was not created by any one of the gods or of mankind, but it was ever and is and shall be ever-living Fire, kindled in measure and quenched in measure.”
Steven Weinberg in his book on science history, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (2015), summarizes the appearance of the four key elements after a century of Greek philosophizing, “Heraclitus elsewhere emphasized the endless changes in nature, so for him it was more natural to take flickering fire, an agent of change, as the fundamental element than the more stable earth, air, or water.”
And these four elements of Nature as defined by the Greeks formed the basis of a major clue in Breach of Trust — Air, Fire, Earth, and Water or AFEW — that investigators pursue.
[1] The cultural climate in Ionia (Greece) was such that the ancient (pre-Socratic) philosophers began to “form hypotheses about the natural world based on ideas gained from both personal experience and deep reflection.” According to a May 2017 Wikipedia entry, “Thales and his successors, called physiologoi, those who discoursed on Nature, were skeptical of religious explanations for natural phenomena and instead sought purely mechanical and physical explanations. They are credited as being of critical importance to the development of the ‘scientific attitude’ towards the study of Nature.”
[2] In A World Perspective Through 21st Century Eyes (2004), p.233, I delve into more detail on the four basic elements of Nature – air, fire, earth, and water – as described by Greek philosopher Empedocles.
[3] The image below is considered the oldest method for teaching physical science. It has been traced to the Egyptians, as far back as 5000 BC. The ancient Greek philosophers, who had been credited with this teaching method, likely derived aspects of their doctrines from the Egyptians.