Heraclitus and Democritus

The thing between these two men is the whole known world, and in Milan around 1486 that was a fresh picture. Ptolemy's Geography, the atlas of the ancient Greek astronomer, had only recently gone into print, and one early study traced this globe to the edition published at Ulm in 1482. You can still pick out the Mediterranean and the ridge of the Alps. There are no Americas on it. Columbus would not sail for another six years. On the left, Heraclitus of Ephesus, the gloomy philosopher, weeps over what people make of that world. Democritus of Abdera, the younger man, laughs, pointing at the globe with a book in his other hand and looking straight out at us. Roman writers such as Seneca had paired the two as opposite ways of facing human folly, and humanists in Florence took the pair up to argue that a philosopher ought to be cheerful. In the reliefs behind them run the chariots of Saturn and Jupiter, the planets astrologers tied to the melancholic and the cheerful temperament.