Book 1
1.22
Herodotus, Duris, and Democritus are agreed that Thales was the son of Examyas and Cleobulina, and belonged to the ThelidaeNelidac, if Bywater’s emendation is correct. who are Phoenicians, and among the noblest of the descendants of Cadmus and Agenor. As Plato testifies, he was one of the Seven Sages. He was the first to receive the name of Sage, in the archonship of Damasias582 b.c. at Athens, when the term was applied to all the Seven Sages, as Demetrius of Phalerum mentions in his List of Archons. He was admitted to citizenship at Miletus when he came to that town along with Nileos, who had been expelled from Phoenicia. Most writers, however, represent him as a genuine Milesian and of a distinguished family.
1.23
After engaging in politics he became a student of nature. According to some he left nothing in writing; for the Nautical AstronomyCf. Simplicius, In Phys. i. 23, 29-33 d. attributed to him is said to be by Phocus of Samos. Callimachus knows him as the discoverer of the Ursa Minor; for he says in his Iambics: Who first of men the course made plain Of those small stars we call the Wain, Whereby Phoenicians sail the main.Greek mariners steered by the Great Bear, the Phoenicians by the Little Bear, as Ovid states, Tristia, iv. 3. 1, 2.. But according to others he wrote nothing but two treatises, one On the Solstice and one On the Equinox, regarding all other matters as incognizable. He seems by some accounts to have been the first to study astronomy,See Sir T. L. Heath, Aristarchus of Samos, pp. 12-23., the first to predict eclipses of the sun and to fix the solstices; so Eudemus in his History of Astronomy. It was this which gained for him the admiration of Xenophanes and Herodotus and the notice of Heraclitus and Democritus.
