Democritus was born at Abdera. He described himself in the Little World-System as a young man in the old age of Anaxagoras; Diogenes Laërtius says that he was forty years younger than Anaxagoras. On this evidence the date given for his birth by Apollodorus (in the 80th Olympiad, 460–456 BCE) is generally preferred to that suggested by Thrasylus (the third year of the 77th Olympiad, 470–469 BCE). He is variously reported to have lived between 90 and 109 years. To judge from the number of his writings, his literary activity extended over a considerable period, but we have no means of assigning different works to different times in his life. His statement that he wrote the Little World-System 730 years after the fall of Troy (Diogenes Laërtius, Lives IX, 41) is of little value since we cannot tell which of several possible chronologies for the Trojan War Democritus accepted.
Many stories, most of them apocryphal, relating to Democritus's life and character circulated in antiquity. There are the accounts of his saving the Abderites from a plague, of his dying by voluntarily abstaining from food, and of his reputation as the "Laughing Philosopher." The tradition that he traveled extensively is, however, more plausible and better grounded.
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