Dicks, "Thales" (Classical Quarterly, 1959)

D. R. Dicks published "Thales" in The Classical Quarterly in 1959, a close critical examination of everything later Greek and Roman writers credited to Thales of Miletus, including the geometry, the water doctrine and the celebrated prediction of a solar eclipse that Herodotus reports stopped a battle between the Lydians and the Medes. Dicks's central argument is methodological: the ascriptions to Thales survive only in sources written centuries after his death, and the astronomical knowledge needed to predict the exact local visibility of a specific eclipse, as opposed to the general chance of one occurring somewhere in a given period, was not available anywhere in the sixth century BCE, the Babylonian Saros cycle included. The article remains the standard citation for scholarly caution about the eclipse story specifically, without denying that Thales was a real and significant early Greek thinker.