67 Ancient People You Should Know

Anaximander of Miletus (c. 611 - c. 547 B.C.) was a pupil of Thales and teacher of Anaximenes. He is credited with inventing the gnomon on the sundial and with drawing the first map of the world in which people live. He may have drawn a map of the universe. Anaximander may also have been the first to write a philosophical treatise. He believed in an eternal motion and a boundless nature.

Anaximenes (d. c. 528 B.C.) accounted for natural phenomena like lightning and earthquakes though his philosophical theory. A student of Anaximander, Anaximenes did not share his belief that there was an underlying boundless indeterminateness or apeiron. Instead, Anaximenes thought the underlying principle behind everything was air/mist, which had the advantage of being empirically observable. Different densities of air (rarified and condensed) accounted for different forms. Since everything is made of air, Anaximenes' theory of the soul is that it is made of air and holds us together. He believed the earth was a flat disk with fiery evaporations becoming heavenly bodies.

Heraclitus (fl. 69th Olympiad, 504-501 B.C.) is the first philosopher known to use the word kosmos for world order, which he says ever was and ever will be, not created by god or man. Heraclitus is thought to have abdicated the throne of Ephesus in favor of his brother. He was known as Weeping Philosopher and Heraclitus the Obscure.

Heraclitus uniquely put his philosophy into aphorisms, like "On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow." (DK22B12), which is part of his confusing theories of Universal Flux and the Identity of Opposites. In addition to nature, Heraclitus made human nature a concern of philosophy.

Parmenides (b 510 B.C.) was a Greek philosophy from Elea in Italy. He argued against the existence of a void, a theory used by later philosophers in the expression "nature abhors a vacuum," which stimulated experiments to disprove it. Parmenides argued that change and motion are only delusions.

Empedocles of Acragas (c. 495-435 B.C.) was known as a poet, statesman, and physician, as well as philosopher. Empedocles encouraged people to look upon him as a miracle worker. Philosophically he believed there were elements that were the building blocks of everything else: earth, air, fire, and water. These are the four elements that are paired with the four humors in Hippocratic medicine and even modern typologies. The next philosophical step would be to realize a different type of universal element -- atoms, as the Pre-socratic philosophers known as Atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, reasoned.

Empedocles believed in transmigration of the soul and thought that he would be come back as a god, so he jumped into the Mt. Aetna volcano.

Imhotep was a famous Egyptian architect and physician from the 27th century B.C. The step pyramid at Saqqara is thought to have been designed by Imhotep for 3rd Dynasty Pharaoh Djoser (Zoser). The medicine of the 17th century B.C. Edwin Smith Papyrus is also attributed to Imhotep.

Hippocrates of Cos, the father of medicine, lived from about 460-377 B.C. Hippocrates may have trained to become a merchant before training medical students that there are scientific reasons for ailments. Before the Hippocratic corpus, medical conditions were attributed to divine intervention. Hippocratic medicine made diagnoses and prescribed simple treatments like diet, hygiene, and sleep. The name Hippocrates is familiar because of the oath that doctors take (Hippocratic Oath) and a body of early medical treatises that are attributed to Hippocrates (Hippocratic corpus).

Galen was born in 129 A.D. in Pergamum, an important medical center with a sanctuary to the healing god. There Galen became an attendant of Asclepius. He worked at a gladiatorial school which gave him experience with violent injuries and trauma. Later, Galen went to Rome and practiced medicine at the imperial court. He dissected animals because he couldn't directly study humans. A prolific writer, of 600 books Galen wrote 20 survive. His anatomical writing became medical school standards until the 16th century Vesalius, who could perform human dissections, proved Galen inaccurate.

Herodotus (c. 484-425 B.C.) is the first historian proper, and so is called the father of history. He traveled around most of the known world. On one trip Herodotus probably went to Egypt, Phoenicia, and Mesopotamia; on another he went to Scythia. Herodotus traveled to learn about foreign countries. His Histories sometimes read like a travelogue, with information on the Persian Empire and the origins of the conflict between Persia and Greece based on mythological prehistory. Even with the fantastic elements, Herodotus' history was an advance over the previous writers of quasi-history, known as logographers.

Thucydides (born c. 460-455 B.C.) wrote a valuable first-hand account of the Peloponnesian War (History of the Peloponnesian Wa) and improved the way in which history was written.

Thucydides wrote his history based on information about the war from his days as an Athenian commander and interviews with people on both sides of the war. Unlike his predecessor, Herodotus, he didn't delve into the background, but laid out the facts as he saw them, chronologically. We recognize more of what we consider the historical method in Thucydides than we do in his predecessor, Herodotus.