A few years ago, my wife, Sarah, and I went on a sailing trip on the eastern Aegean. Thirty or forty miles to the south of our boat was Miletus, the birthplace of some of the first recorded theorists of the physical world. Across a nearby peninsula, just 70 miles away, was Lesbos, the island of Sappho and Alcaeus, the greatest early lyric poets. To the south in Samos was the birthplace of Pythagoras, an early theorist of an everlasting soul. It struck me that not so far out of view from the cockpit of our small boat was the whole province in which Greek philosophy had begun.

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Persons: Sarah, Heraclitus, Alcaeus, Pythagoras Locations: Turkey, Miletus, Ephesus, Lesbos, Samos