Strato of Lampsacus explained the cosmos without needing a god to build it
Watching water leave a spout and split into drops, Strato of Lampsacus concluded that falling things speed up. The third head of Aristotle's Lyceum pushed his master's ideas so far toward nature that he let weight and motion, rather than any divine craftsman, account for everything that exists.
Born in Lampsacus sometime between 340 and 330 BCE, Strato studied at Aristotle's school in Athens and then went to Egypt as tutor to the future Ptolemy II. There he also taught Aristarchus of Samos, who went on to propose the first known model placing the Sun at the centre. Around 287 BCE, after Theophrastus died, Strato came back to Athens to lead the Lyceum, and he died about two decades later. Nothing he wrote survives; his ideas reach us only in scraps quoted by others.
His passion for physical questions earned him the nickname Physicus, and Cicero, though he admired the man's talent, scolded him for neglecting ethics. Strato broke with Aristotle repeatedly. Heavier impacts from falling objects, he said, come from gathering speed, not from things gaining weight as they head to their natural place. Place was the space an object fills, not a surrounding surface, and he threw out the fifth element entirely. Time, he argued, is the quantity in which actions happen: we talk of more or less time, never of faster or slower time.
Matter, in his view, was made of tiny particles, yet he mocked Democritus's great empty void as something to be dreamt rather than taught. Small gaps between imperfectly fitting particles allowed compression and let light and heat pass through solids. Heat was the active principle. The soul worked through breath spreading from a ruling part in the head, all thought grew from sensation, and Plato's arguments for immortality were wrong. He even guessed that river silt raised the Black Sea until it burst through near Byzantium.
For centuries he was nearly forgotten. Then in 1678 Ralph Cudworth, attacking atheism, labelled his system one of four kinds and coined the word hylozoism for it. Pierre Bayle took up Stratonism as the ancient mirror of Spinoza in a 1705 book. Strato himself may still have accepted gods within the universe and probably never thought of himself as an atheist.
Source: Strato of Lampsacus
