In the northern city of Abdera, on the Thracian coast of the Aegean, the wind from the sea carried more than the smell of fish and tar. It carried laughter. At least, that is how later generations imagined it when they thought of Democritus, the philosopher who became known as “the laughing thinker.” While others frowned over the miseries of human life, Democritus was said to laugh at the vanity of human pursuits, not out of cruelty but from a kind of cosmic detachment. Whether this picture is literally accurate hardly matters. It captures something true about his philosophy: he invites us to see the world and ourselves from a standpoint so vast that our anxieties begin to look small. To reach that standpoint, he offers a bold, almost shocking claim: everything that exists is either atoms or void.Democritus was born around 460 BCE in Abdera, a relatively marginal Greek city compared to Athens or Corinth. Abdera had a reputation among other Greeks as a somewhat backward, provincial place, a target for jokes. That the most radical physical theory of antiquity should arise from there is one of history’s quiet ironies. Democritus travelled widely in his youth, if we can trust later reports: to Egypt to learn geometry, to the East to study with magi, across the Greek world absorbing local knowledge. However embroidered those tales may be, they convey the sense of a man with a wide horizon, dissatisfied with confining his thought to the customs of a single city.Selenius Media

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