Democritus was the first man who proposed that matter
is made up of particles.
Happiness resides not in possessions, and not in gold,
happiness dwells in the soul. Democritus.
Useful known and unknown views of the father of modern medicine, Hippocrates and his teacher Democritus.
It was this which gained for him the admiration of Xenophanes and Herodotus and the notice of Heraclitus and Democritus'(D.L. I.23).
Somewhere around 500 BCE, Democritus first put forward the idea that everything in the world
was made of small indivisible particles called atoms.
It was practiced by a few philosophers(Democritus) and statesmen(the orator Demosthenes),
but it was particularly Zeno and the Greek and Roman Stoic philosophers who justified the practice.
Similar to the atomists of Democritus, the Mo Jing stated that a point is the smallest unit,
and cannot be cut in half, since'nothing' cannot be halved.
Other influential pre-Socratics or rational philosophers include Protagoras(like Anaxagoras a friend of Pericles),
known for his famous dictum"man is the measure of all things" and Democritus, who proposed that matter was composed of atoms.