Pherecydes of Syros

Pherecydes of Syros was a Greek pre-Socratic thinker from the island of Syros in the Cyclades, active in the 6th century BCE. He is often counted among the first Greek writers to set out philosophical ideas in prose rather than verse, which places him between mythical thought and the philosophy that followed. Ancient tradition presents him as a teacher of Pythagoras and an older contemporary of Anaximander, although the sources disagree about his exact dates.

Little is known about his life. Some ancient writers included him among the Seven Sages of Greece, and he was said to have travelled widely, even to Egypt, though that journey is a stock detail in many philosophers' biographies. Stories credit him with remarkable predictions, such as an earthquake, a shipwreck and the fall of Messene, and his death is described in several contradictory ways.

His principal work, known as the Heptamychos or Pentemychos, is lost apart from a few fragments, including one from an Egyptian papyrus. It dealt with cosmogony, the origin of the universe, and theogony, the origin of the gods, and presented these ideas through mythic figures that he reshaped. Zas, meaning 'life', takes the place of Zeus as king of the gods; Chronos, or Time, generates the elements; and after a battle with the serpent Ophion, Chthonie becomes the Earth. Aristotle regarded him as one of the first to move beyond mythical explanation toward a systematic account of the world, though many later writers still called him a theologian.

His influence is most visible in later doxographers, who credited him with introducing the transmigration of souls into Greek religion, a doctrine later associated with Pythagoreanism and Orphism. Cicero and Augustine of Hippo also attributed to him the teaching of the immortality of the soul. Pherecydes thus links the mythology of Hesiod with pre-Socratic philosophy.