Anaxarchus (c.380–c.330 BC)

The Greek philosopher Anaxarchus of Abdera was a friend of Alexander the Great, teacher and friend of Pyrrho, and heroic victim of a tyrant. More a court philosopher than a school one, and an ambiguous personality, he seems to have mixed a highly original philosophical cocktail: a primarily ethical, cynically inclined outlook, combined with certain elements of Democritean ethics, epistemology and physics. His only attested work was a treatise On Kingship, his dominant interest perhaps being the theory and practice of relations between intellectual and ruler.