Appendix B
Chronology

Our evidence for Presocratic chronology is scrappy, confused and unreliable: few thinkers can be dated with any precision; and monumental dispute governs all. My chronological table, then, has no high aspirations: its sole aim is to provide the reader with a rough and approximate idea of the temporal relationships that hold among the Presocratic philosophers. The table is tentative (broken lines indicate uncertainty); and it represents orthodoxy (in so far as any view here is orthodox). The reader who is hungry for more information should begin by consulting the relevant pages of Guthrie [25] or of Zeller-Mondolfo [26].