Pyrrho of Elis, upon returning home from India, where he had been with Alexander the Great, where he had met, so we are told, naked gymnosophists, must have thereafter seen Greece very differently. Diogenes Laertius, in writing about the lives of the eminent philosophers, found it noteworthy to record something as mundane as Pyrrho washing a pig. But why is something like that worth mentioning? This essay looks at a few dozen people, starting with Thales and ending with Augustine, in other words: a thousand years of thought. By answering questions like the one asked here as a paradigm, and there are many, or just attempting to do so, you come face to face with Ancient thought. This essay sets out to trace the best reflections of a bygone era back to, better: back into, the minds that conceived them. It is written in the belief that you need to know not the many sayings, useful as they may be as mnemonics, but the mechanisms by which these ideas were put together, because only by knowing the cogwheels driving the production by which a worthy thought is put into the world, can you ask what their answers to your your questions might have been. Because only then can you put the raw material of your inquiry in at the one end, and see what comes out at the other, processed. And listen to what they might have said to what you want answered.