Anaxagoras and the stone of Aegospotami
A falling stone, and a philosopher who said the Sun itself was a stone.
Key facts
- People and tradition
- Ancient Greece
- Region
- Europe and the Mediterranean
- When
- About 467 BC
The story
Greek writers recorded that around 467 BC a large stone fell from the sky at Aegospotami, on the Gallipoli peninsula in what is now Turkey. Later authors described it as brownish and as big as a wagon-load, and said it was still shown to visitors centuries later.
The event became tied to the philosopher Anaxagoras of Clazomenae. He taught that the Sun was not a god but a mass of red-hot stone, larger than the Peloponnese, and that the heavenly bodies were made of earthly material. Later stories said he had even predicted the fall. His views on the Sun led to a charge of impiety in Athens, and he left the city.
What science says
Anaxagoras was wrong about the Sun, which is a ball of hot gas powered by nuclear fusion, but right in a deeper way: meteorites show that the bodies of the Solar System are made of the same chemical elements as Earth. The Aegospotami stone has not survived, so no one can say what type of meteorite it was, but its description fits a large fall.
Did you know?
Some ancient writers linked the fall with a comet seen at about the same time.
More than two thousand years passed before most scholars agreed that stones really do fall from the sky.