Anassimandro e la scrittura della ‘legge cosmica

The first writing on nature, by Anaximander from Miletus, is a ‘prose’ writing: this choice implies a deliberate break from literary tradition, which until then had been a uniformly poetic tradition. A systematic research of the database of Greek law inscriptions can show that Anaximander’s fragment 1, centered on a notorious image of offen-se and compensation, is formulated by a careful restyling of the techni-cal vocabulary of laws. This means that Anaximander tried to validate his own intuition of the cosmic order with the weight of a juridical norm. We can deduce from this fact some important consequences, not only for understanding some difficult points of his text, but also for defining the audience in the archaic polis to which Anaximander might have wanted to address himself with his cosmological knowledge in statu nascendi.