Abdera

After being let out of the city they were stoned or rather had stones thrown at them until they crossed the border.

At Abdera a man was hosted by the city, led around the walls and then chased over the border.

Plutarch wrote that in his home city of Chaeronea a slave was made the personification of famine he was then led from the city and chased away.

Possibly the most extreme version of this expulsion from the community comes from the Roman writer Strabo.

The great 20th century physicist Richard Feynman once said that, if in some cataclysm all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe that it is the atomic hypothesis, that all things are made of atoms, little particles that move around in perpetual motion.

So who was this man who first put forth the scientific statement which, according to Feynman, contains the most information in the fewest words? Democritus was born in approximately 460 BC in Abdera, a town in northern Greece.

Perhaps more than any other pre-Socratic philosopher, Democritus deserves the epithet genius.

He is said to have written over 60 works on topics ranging from ethics, physics, astronomy, medicine, and musical theory, to name but a few of his subjects of interest.

So, get excited for your pumpkin spice lattes, which, yes, is made of atoms, and let's travel back to the Aegean Sea.

Before we talk about the science, well, the philosophy that became science, we need to talk about the man himself, Democritus, born around 460 BCE in a town called Abdera.

Now, if you were an ancient Greek elite, Abdera was essentially the punchline of every joke.

People from Abdera were stereotyped as being hopelessly slow-witted, rustic, and just generally bizarre.

But Democritus broke that mould, or rather, he proved that even in Abdera, you could breed a genius.

Now thankfully, Democritus was born wealthy, and his dad was so rich that he allegedly hosted the Persian king Xerxes' army when they marched through Thrace.

As a thank you, Xerxes left behind some of his personal scholars and magi to tutor young Democritus.

A massive multi-year backpacking trip across the known world.

Evidently the atom of Greek philosophy is an incomparably more meager idea than the atom of modern science with its formidable outfit of energies conceived as endowed with gravitation, cohesion, elasticity, radioactivity, electromagnetic properties, and chemical affinities.

At the same time we must remember that all this elaborate mechanism has been built up, stone by stone, on the simple foundations supplied by the constructive genius of two Ionian Greeks, Leucippus, whose birthplace is unknown, and Democritus, a native of Abdera on the barbarous Thracian coast, enjoying little popularity in their lifetime and unhonored after death even by the inheritors who traded most successfully on their discoveries.

Nine.

Leucippus.

And so much being certain, it was easy to believe, with or without evidence, that they taught their pupils to disregard every duty but the pursuit of their own private advantage.

4.

Protagoras The first and most famous of the sophists was Protagoras of Abdera.

Born in the year 480 B.C., he became a paid teacher at 30, and pursued that calling for a period of 40 years with brilliant success, traversing the whole breadth of the Hellenic world, and if we may judge from what seems to be the typical instance of Athens, exciting immense enthusiasm among the more enlightened classes of Greek society.

But it would be Lucian of Samosata in the second century AD who would be the first person to truly express disbelief in ghosts.

150 AD, he relates how Dema- Democritus, the learned man from Ab- Abdera in Thrace, lived in a tomb outside the city gates just to prove that cemeteries were not haunted by spirits of the departed.

Lucian relates how he persisted in his disbelief despite practical jokes perpetrated by some young men of Abdera, Abdera, who dressed up in black robes with skull masks to frighten him, making him think that they were ghosts themselves.

This account by Lucian notes something about the popular classical exp- expectation about how a ghost should look.

Then in the fifth century AD, the Christian priest Const- Constani- Constantius, Constan- Constantius of Leon recorded an instance of the reoccurring theme of the improperly buried dead, and those being the ones who always come back to haunt the living, who can only cease their haunting when their bones have been discovered, acknowledged, and properly buried.