Thrace
A wealthy Greek colony on the Thracian coast that—despite a reputation for foolish citizens—produced two of antiquity's sharpest minds: the atomist Democritus and the sophist Protagoras.
Abdera through the eras
Refounded around 545 BCE by refugees from Ionian Teos fleeing Persian conquest, Abdera grew rich on trade and joined the Athenian-led Delian League after the Persian Wars. It became famous as the home of Democritus, who with his teacher Leucippus held that all things are made of indivisible atoms moving through the void, and of Protagoras, the first and greatest of the sophists, who declared that 'man is the measure of all things' and taught for fees across the Greek world.
Abdera's intellectual prestige faded as misfortune piled up—raids by neighboring Thracian tribes and the turbulence of the wars among Alexander's successors—though the atomist tradition it had birthed lived on, carried forward and transformed by Epicurus and his school in Athens. The city itself dwindled toward provincial obscurity, even as 'Abderite' became a byword for simplicity.
Teachers who lived here
Works composed here
by Protagoras
by Leucippus
by Leucippus
by Protagoras
by Democritus