Anaxarchus

Anaxarchus (/ˌænəɡˈzɑːrkəs/; Greek: Ἀνάξαρχος; c. 380 – c. 320 BC) was a Greek philosopher of the school of Democritus. Together with Pyrrho, he accompanied Alexander the Great into Asia. The reports of his philosophical views suggest that he was a forerunner of the Greek skeptics.

Life

Anaxarchus was born at Abdera in Thrace. He was the companion and friend of Alexander the Great in his Asiatic campaigns. His relationship with Alexander, however, was ambiguous, owing to contradictory sources.¹ Some paint Anarxchus as a flatterer, among them Plutarch, who tells a story that at Bactra, in 327 BC in a debate with Callisthenes, Anaxarchus advised all to worship Alexander as a god even during his lifetime. In contrast, others paint Anaxarchus as scathingly ironic towards the monarch.¹ According to Diogenes Laertius, in response to Alexander's claim to have been the son of Zeus-Ammon, Anaxarchus pointed to his bleeding wound and remarked, "See the blood of a mortal, not ichor, such as flows from the veins of the immortal gods."²

When Alexander was trying to show that he was divine so that the Greeks would perform proskynesis to him, Anaxarchus said that Alexander could "more justly be considered a god than Dionysus or Heracles".³

Diogenes Laertius says that Anaxarchus earned the enmity of Nicocreon, the tyrant of , with an inappropriate joke against tyrants in a banquet in in 331 BC. Later, when Anaxarchus was forced to land in Cyprus against his will, Nicocreon ordered him to be pounded to death in a mortar. The philosopher endured this torture with fortitude, and even taunted the king: "[You merely] pound away at the bag of Anaxarchus; you are not pounding Anaxarchus [himself]!" When Nicocreon threatened to cut out his tongue, Anaxarchus instead bit it off himself, and spat it in the tyrant's face.