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Homer
Hesiod
Another image of God as a man
with a white beard. Click for details.
Apollo
Pythia of Delphi (on the left)
Mount Olympus, home of the gods
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Between the years 1000 and 800, people on the Greek mainland and Greeks in Asia Minor became more settled and grew in number. By 750, a continuing growth in population and trade resulted in an amalgamation of villages and the rise of many small city-states. By the 700s, along the coast of Asia Minor numerous Greek city-states were thriving, such as Smyrna, Ephesus and Miletus. On the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece were the city-states of Argos, Olympia, Corinth and Sparta. And on the peninsula of Attica was Athens, which governed more than a thousand square miles.
Wealthy farmers had begun growing crops that would sell abroad - mainly wine and olive oil. The Greeks increased their trade in timber and grain, which they moved across local seas. Trade increased between the Greeks and the island of Cyprus, and the Greeks established trading contacts at harbors on the coast of northern Syria, contacts that again introduced Greeks to writing.
Many landless Greeks were hired to make pottery, furniture and other wares, and some employers accumulated much wealth. An industry arose in the forging of iron - Greece lacking the necessary tin to forge bronze. The use of iron spread among the Greeks, and iron tools increased productivity in both agriculture and manufacturing. With the increase in productivity and prosperity, the population of the Greeks soared. With more people and limited land, young Greeks began migrating elsewhere. Greeks established colonies in southern Italy at Cumae, just west of what would in Roman times would be Neapolis (Naples), and Croton. On the island of Sicily they established colonies at Syracuse and Messana. They established colonies on the North African coast, at what is now Libya, and at points around the perimeter of the Black Sea.
Homer was a Greek poet who lived on the coast of Asia Minor. He is credited with having written, sometime before 700 BCE, the epic poem the Iliad, a story that had been passed from generation to generation by those who told stories from memory, a story about war between the Mycenae Greeks and the city of Troy. Homer's Iliad played on conflicts of will among the gods. Like the Sumerian scribes, those who wrote the Old Testament, and those in India who wrote the Ramayana and Mahabharata, Homer described events as governed by the gods, and for centuries to come the Greeks would view his works as divinely inspired. For the Greeks, Homer's works would become a reference for religious thought. The Greeks would study Homer like Jews would study the Talmud and Christians their New Testament.
In Homer's Iliad the father god of the Greeks, Zeus, prefers love to war, but, while he is distracted with lovemaking, lesser gods create war. Foremost among these lesser gods is the troublesome goddess of love, Aphrodite, who creates a love affair between the mortals Helen of Troy and a Greek aristocrat named Paris.
Homer and his readers perceived the Trojan War as taking place in a great age of heroes - a time when aristocrats led armies and accepted raiding and plundering as normal activity. Homer's work extolled soldierly honor and duty, the obligation of revenge, pride, class privilege, military prowess and glory. The Iliad also extolled emotional control over surrender to rage. It extolled individualism, and it depicted human life as precious.
Homer described mortals as making decisions, but also he described them as committing acts they did not intend, acts originating in emotion as if emotion rather than reason led men to follow the dictates of the gods. Homer described dreams as religious messages, such as those sent by Zeus to the Greek king Agamemnon. And Homer's Iliad described religious rituals that included cremation - which allowed a warrior's remains to be transported home for ceremonial entombment.
Into the twenty-first century some people appreciate, in the words of the historian Philip Bobbitt, the Iliad's implicit assertion that no particular people, era or group is intrinsically evil, and that no particular class or country is predestined as the one and only bearer of civilization.
Another Greek poet who wrote before 700 was Hesiod - also from the coast of Asia Minor. Many Greeks were attracted to his ideas, and after many generations the Greeks viewed his writings, like those of Homer, as divinely inspired. Hesiod speculated and worked popular religious myths into what he thought was an improved view of the reality of the gods. He believed that the Greeks were descended from a golden race that lived in idle luxury in the distant past, before Zeus was lord, when Zeus' father was king, and Hesiod sought to account for the golden race's demise and successive declines in civilization.
To explain the fall, Hesiod reworked an old myth about the god Prometheus - a tale reverently believed by the Greeks. Like the Hindu god Agne, Prometheus was a god of fire, a god interested in the welfare of humans and a god who taught humanity their arts and crafts. Hesiod described Prometheus as stealing fire from the heavens and giving it to mankind. This theft angered Zeus, and he had Prometheus chained to a rock on a mountain in the Caucasus, where an eagle or vulture tore at his liver each day, Zeus causing the liver of Prometheus to grow anew each night in preparation for the next day's torture.
To punish mankind for accepting fire stolen from the heavens, Zeus was said to have sent them a curse in the form of woman. The woman's name was Pandora, and Zeus sent her with a magic box that he forbade her to open. But after she had been on earth awhile she grew curious and opened the box, and out came the earthly plagues and misfortunes that forever after harmed humankind. Pandora hurriedly put the lid back on the box, but all that remained inside was hope.
Eventually, Zeus became angry enough with conditions on earth that he summoned other gods to a conference at his heavenly palace. To arrive at Zeus' palace, the gods traveled across the Milky Way, and there with Zeus they decided to destroy humankind and to provide the earth with a new race of mortals more worthy of life and more reverent to them. Zeus feared that the destruction of humankind by fire might set heaven itself aflame, so he called for assistance from a god of the sea, and humankind was instead swept away by a great flood.
The Greeks of these times acquired a vision of the world different from those who worshiped Yahweh. For centuries to come, the Hebrew worshipers of Yahweh would see the universe as guided by divine purpose, and they would hope for divine intervention that would deliver them from their suffering. Those who worshiped the gods of Homer and Hesiod looked for no such intervention. They perceived the universe not as guided by a single divine will but as a chaotic conflict of divine wills. They saw their gods as experiencing the same blessings and misfortunes experienced by humans. They viewed their gods not only as vain in their desire for reverence from humans but as generally imperfect and as negligent and playful.
Like others the Greeks believed that gods rather than men made laws, and they wished to obey these laws in order to please their gods. But the Greeks did not claim their gods as wise as much as the priests of Yahweh claimed that Yahweh was the source of wisdom. The gods of the Greeks, for example, were incestuous, while the Greeks abhorred incest. And seeing their gods as more human and with faults of their own, they were more inclined to look for wisdom within themselves. The priests of Yahweh wanted people to focus on their sins and sufferings. The religion of the Greeks, on the other hand, glorified the ups and downs of life, which led to their greater appreciation of grace and life for its own sake.
The Greeks saw Zeus as a god of the sky, the god of thunder and lightning and all other aspects of the weather. They saw Zeus as the lord of the heavens, the father of other gods and of humankind. They saw Zeus as their god and concerned primarily with them - attributing to themselves a greater importance than to other peoples. The Greeks did not see their father-god as jealous, but they did see him as a god who became angry, and they respected him and feared his thunderbolts.
The Greeks had a goddess called Athena, who was said to have sprung from the forehead of Zeus. She was a goddess of war and peace, of wisdom and a patron of arts and crafts. The Greeks also believed in a god called Eros, a god of love (from whom the word erotic is derived), a god whom the Romans would call Cupid. The Greeks had a goddess of love and beauty named Aphrodite, who would also be called Venus. They believed that Aphrodite had a sweet smile and bathed in sweet smelling flowers, that she was a goddess of fertility, that plants bloomed after having been touched by her feet and that she made gardens grow and animals multiply. They believed that Aphrodite's ability to exude love and desire stole the wits even from the wise.
Another Greek god was Adonis, a god the Greeks acquired from Syria or the Phoenicians sometime around the time of Homer or Hesiod. Greek myth described Adonis as a beautiful youth with whom both the goddesses Aphrodite and Persephone fell in love. Persephone was the daughter of Zeus and a goddess of fertility in competition with Aphrodite. She presided over Hades, the place where the spirits of the dead resided. According to the myth of Adonis, Persephone, wanting Adonis, held him captive in Hades, and Aphrodite, also wanting Adonis, freed him from Hades and Persephone's captivity. Then, while hunting, Adonis was killed by a wild boar, which sent him back to Hades and Persephone. Aphrodite bitterly mourned his death and pleaded with Zeus to restore Adonis to her. Zeus decided to be impartial between the desires of Persephone and Aphrodite, and he decreed that Adonis would spend his winter months with Persephone - an annual death - and his summer months with Aphrodite - an annual resurrection. These deaths and resurrections coincided with the seasonal cycles and the growth of crops. Adonis had become a fertility god. Every year, Greeks celebrated Adonis' death and resurrection, often with wailing and the beating of one's own breast with one's fists.
One of the important gods among the Greeks was Apollo, believed to be the son of Zeus. Apollo was a god of foreign origin who changed across the centuries. Since the time of Homer, Apollo was seen as a god of life, light, knowledge and laws, a god who made men aware of their guilt, and a god of healing. For some, Apollo was a god of crops and herds. He became established at Delphi and was to be seen as a god of communion, music, poetry, dance and prophecy. At Delphi was an "eternal" and sacred fire, and a woman at the temple's core, served as the Pythia, an oracle, a possessed medium, communicating with Apollo. She was a local woman, young or maybe old, poor and illiterate or perhaps not. People, including statesmen, came as pilgrims to Delphi from various parts of Greece to put questions to Apollo, questions such as whether they should marry, whether their spouse was unfaithful, whether their city should go to war. The pilgrim would receive messages in the form of riddles that would leave him the task of interpretation. [note]
Like the Sumerians, Egyptians and others, the Greeks of different cities were slow in seeking compromise and mutual understanding. And without the kind of political unity that the pharaohs had created in Egypt or that Hammurabi had created in Mesopotamia, wars erupted frequently between the Greek city-states - over water, trade and other matters. These wars portended a disastrous future for the Greeks, but for the time being those who went to war were mostly landowning farmers - aristocrats - who could not stay long from their fields. So their wars were shorter and less damaging than would be the wars of later times.
Aristocrats and the wealthy among the Greeks ate better than did ordinary Greeks - ordinary Greeks living on a few figs, olives and coarse bread. The aristocrats and rich lived in fine houses, wore fine, embroidered robes and gold trinkets. They had trimmed beards and perfumed hair. As the men of war, aristocrats had finely smithed armor. It had been aristocratic youth alone who were given schooling, which was mainly military training: horsemanship, chariot racing, foot racing, the long-jump, throwing a discus and javelin, wrestling and boxing. Instruction included indoctrination about the ideal noble warrior. Choral music, dancing and playing the lyre were added to the curriculum in an attempt to instill in aristocratic youth the refinement that was supposed to be a part of their superiority. Then poetry reading was added to their curriculum to celebrate further their superiority and to set themselves apart from common Greeks, who remained illiterate.
A sense of religious community had developed among Greece's aristocrats, and, beginning in 776, aristocrats from various city-states held mid-summer religious festivals at Olympia, on the Peloponnese peninsula. Greeks believed Olympia to be the center of the world and Mount Olympus the home of the gods, and Olympia was a place of sanctuary and worship. And, for these religious festivals at Olympia, participating cities would put aside their differences and postpone their wars.
The festival at Olympia took place in a stadium that held around twenty thousand spectators. It opened with as many as a hundred oxen sacrificed to Zeus. Participants prayed and were judged for their moral suitability. The festival exalted the warrior tradition of the aristocrats and their god-given right of supremacy over common folk. Participants competed in athletic competitions, sang, played music, danced, read their poetry and competed in oratory.
Living in a city, a Greek king had a good view of his subjects, and his subjects had a good view of their king, and those unhappy with their king, including aristocrats and others of wealth, could murmur together and gain strength and courage from their numbers. In the 700s were numerous risings against monarchical rule led by men from the community's aristocratic and wealthy families. Many kings were deposed and replaced by cliques of wealthy men, their rule to be known as oligarchies. Then sometime after the year 675 came rebellions against these oligarchies, led by men of commerce - in such commercially developed cities such as Argos, Sicyon, Corinth, Mytilene, Samos, Naxos, Miletus, and Megara. These men of commerce often took power allied with common people, promising to rule in the interest of common people. And peasants grasped at the opportunity to strike against those local aristocrats who dominated them. But the leaders of these rebellions did not believe in democracy. Few people did. Instead, they established tyrannies: popular but despotic rule. And as men of commerce they allowed economic improvements which helped them maintain popular support.
The political upheavals of the 600s enhanced a longing for security among the Greeks. Some among the Greeks found relief in a new religious cult that promoted everlasting life and community. The new cult was believed to have been founded by a priest and poet named Orpheus, who was from Thrace. The new cult worshiped a god called Dionysus, a god of fertility and vegetation. The movement's practices and outlook were partly a reversion to pre-civilized communal worship. Like the religious rites of the pre-civilized, the worshipers of Dionysus had to be initiated. And the worshipers of Dionysus, like people of other cults, worshiped, ate and danced together.
The Dionysus cult held a special attraction for women, who broke away from domination by males and abandoned their families. Cult members believed that people could touch the greatness of the supernatural through their emotions. They hiked to hilltops at night, carrying torches, and there they danced wildly and worked themselves into self-abandon. Rumors spread to males who were opposed to women dancing together, and they imagined the eating of raw meat and that the dances culminated in sexual ecstasy - similar to fertility rites.
Men and women members of the Dionysian movement traveled about Greece claiming personal intimacy with the gods and proclaiming Dionysus a son of Zeus. Some of them made their living by making prophesy and by performing what they believed were ritual purifications and spiritual healings. They told their listeners of a paradise that could be theirs. They told their listeners that they should be aware of the divine origins of their soul and that through the ecstasy of the movement's rituals they could let their souls escape from the prison of their body. They claimed that their movement's rituals and purification rites would liberate their souls from prevailing evils. They preached that by following the movement's strict rules of conduct, including living ascetically and not eating animal meat, they could achieve eternal blessedness. They spoke of their judgment after death according to their deeds during life, and they warned people that they would either receive the reward of eternal bliss or they would suffer punishment in Hades.
Men of wealth, power and influence in Greece feared that the worship of Dionysus might become so widespread that it would disrupt the peace and order upon which they depended. But the spread of the worship of Dionysus proved to have limits. Many Greeks wished to hold onto the gods with whom they grew up, and many believed more in reason than in letting their emotions lead them to an acceptance of promises of eternal bliss.
Sparta was a collection of villages and agricultural lands on the Peloponnese peninsula, inland from the sea and surrounded by mountains, about a hundred miles south of Athens. It was a city-state ruled by Dorian Greeks who had conquered local farmers who became known as Helots. The Spartans had made themselves a ruling aristocracy over the Helots, who outnumbered the Spartans seven to one. The Helots apparently had suffered the consequences of military weakness, the peoples of farming communities such as theirs having been traditionally less warlike than pastoral, nomadic peoples.
Sparta's economy was almost entirely agriculture, with only a few craftsmen and tradesmen. Spartans saw themselves as warriors and looked upon trade and commerce as beneath their dignity. Each Spartan family had an allotment of land and managed the Helots that came with the property, and they took half of what the Helots produced. With land divided equally among them, and not allowed to sell their land, no great disparity in wealth arose among the Spartans.
And without a disparity in wealth, kingship did not become the property of a single family. Nor could there be an oligarchy of the rich. Instead, among the Spartans as among the pre-civilized, rule remained with popularly selected kings – two kings. Power was divided between a body of elders, the two kings and five ephors - the ephors overseeing legality and able to imprison a king.
Without a division in wealth among the Spartans, there was greater stability than with the peoples of other Greek cities. But the enslavement of the Helots was a source of trouble. Occasionally the Helots revolted, and the Spartans suppressed the revolts with bloody reprisals. To guard against plots among the Helots, the Spartans created a secret police, and Spartans were free to kill a Helot if they merely regarded him with suspicion.
Being greatly outnumbered by the Helots, as well as needing to defend themselves from outsiders, the Spartans saw their ability to wage war as paramount in preserving their way of life. And having the Helots to labor for them, the Spartans were able to devote a good portion of their lives to training for warfare. Being a warrior was a job of glamour in Sparta, and young men hoped for the drama of military action. From the age of seven the Spartans reared their sons as warriors, putting them in barracks and giving them rigorous physical training - until the age of thirty. Respecting strength, discipline and equality among themselves, the Spartans forbade themselves luxuries, including possessing wealth in the form of silver or gold.
Sparta's concern for strength and discipline extended to Spartan women, who enjoyed a status uncommon elsewhere in Greece. Not understanding genetics, the Spartans believed that females who became physically strong through exercise passed these acquired characteristics biologically to their children. So to breed a physically strong and healthy progeny, girls and young women were trained in gymnastics.
Also to maintain their success and way of life, the Spartans forbade any among them to travel abroad or to receive visitations by outsiders. Sparta was a closed society, void of the stimulations of travel that had contributed to the creativity found in other Greek cities. Philosophy and critical literature would not develop in Sparta as elsewhere among the Greeks, but the Spartans did enjoy music and choral poetry, and every year they held a grand festival of poetry in honor of the god Apollo.
Athens was a city on the water's edge, and unlike Sparta it was a city of maritime trade and commerce, but like Sparta it was devoted mainly to agriculture. By the 600's, Athens governed an area of about twenty-five by fifty miles. And with enough land for distribution among its people, the Athenians prospered. They had no need for additional lands and launched no wars of conquests. And they enjoyed peace as well as prosperity.
Like most other cities in the 600s, Athens was ruled by an oligarchy. Power within Athens and its surrounding countryside was distributed among local families of wealth, each ruling over the common people in its locality, providing these local people the kind of protection that the Sicilian Mafia in modern times provided people in its community.
With success in agriculture in Athens came a rise in population. There might have been a problem with rains having washed away topsoil, reducing the amount of land for farming, but there was definitely the problem of fathers dividing their land among their sons. Land was divided into smaller and smaller plots. People began plowing land that was only marginally arable, and over-plowing increased soil exhaustion. Those who owned and worked small plots of land were at times obliged to borrow money to tide themselves over until their next successful harvest. Money was lent at high interest rates, and across Attica small farms became covered with stones on which mortgage bonds were written. Increasingly, small farmers were working the lands of their debtor, giving up a sixth of their crop to their debtor, or they were being sold as slaves abroad.
Another source of trouble in Athens was its numerous slaves who were foreigners or the descendants of foreigners. A third of the people of Athens were foreigner-slaves. And with an abundant supply of slave labor, landless freemen could be hired to work in fields or small shops at very low wages. City jobs were also occupied by slaves. People of wealth and the city saw themselves as benefiting from slavery. And those with wealth felt no responsibility for those who had grown poor.
In 621 BCE, while unrest was rising among the poor of Athens, a man named Draco (Drako) led the ruling oligarchy in Athens. Draco had existing laws put into writing. He made a legal distinction between intentionally killing someone and accidental homicide. He asserted state power in intervening in blood-feuds. And for almost everything that the ruling elite considered a crime he devised one penalty: death. Not only were rebellion and murder punished by death, so too were idleness and the stealing of vegetables and fruit. It was from Draco's name that the word Dracoian would be derived.
If Draco's laws could have been enforced effectively and allowed to work long enough, they might have ended rebellion by killing most of Athens' malcontents. But before this could happen, unrest among common Athenians grew rather than abated, and, fearing revolution, the elite decided to try appeasement through reform. In the year 594 the elite chose as their leader a fellow aristocrat named Solon. Solon was one of only a few aristocrats in Athens who were interested in philosophy, and he was religiously devout. He believed in the innate superiority of his own class but he also believed in a justice that was decreed by Zeus for all Athenian citizens.
Solon described Athens as having fallen into "base slavery." Under Solon, slavery was to continue, but he put restrictions on it. Solon prohibited enslavement of the poor and rescued many Athenians who had been sold and sent abroad. He forbade Athenians to sell their children into slavery - except for girls who had committed fornication before marriage. And he made a master responsible for protecting his slaves and liable for his slave's actions.
Solon wished to protect the poor from the rich and the rich from the poor, and using dictatorial powers given him by fellow aristocrats he overturned Draco's death penalties, except for murder. To preserve the justice of Zeus he increased state intervention in society. He had the state give relief to the poor. He canceled mortgages. He passed a law against debt-bondage. He put an end to tenant farming by returning farms to those who had lost them through debt. And he limited the size of land that any one person could own.
Solon left the aristocracy with much of their land. He also left the aristocracy with top government jobs and seats on ruling bodies. Under his laws only those whose lands produced a certain amount could hold office. But Solon took a step in the direction of democracy: the Athenian citizen would be given a voice in an assembly. Solon also gave common people a greater role in Athens' system of justice: positions on the city's courts. Judges were chosen by lot so that the poorest people would have their turn sitting with the panel of judges that decided cases. And Solon maintained a check on judges by allowing them to be accused of wrongdoing after their service as judges had ended.
Solon reduced the penalty for idleness to a small fine. He enacted laws to care for widows and orphans. Under Solon it was illegal to strike another person, and parents could be punished for mistreating their children. Under Solon it was illegal to slander others, to use abusive language or to engage in other forms of offensive conduct. Solon outlawed pimping and male prostitution, and he had the city remove the dead from its streets.
Solon's laws eased the sufferings of the poor and saved others from slipping into degradation. But Athens continued to be overpopulated in relation to the availability of land and the productivity of its agriculture, and common Athenian citizens continued to suffer from or to feel threatened by hunger and poverty. Hoping that a rising economy would, as the saying goes, raise all boats, Solon encouraged trade. After this failed to end economic hardship and unrest, Solon hoped to create a spirit of cooperation among the common people by launching military campaigns and building empire. With this, Solon instituted another intrusion by the state into the lives of people: the conscription of males from the ages of eighteen to sixty for military service.
The inability of common people to change government through elections left violence as the likely means of change, and, when Solon's military aggressions resulted in defeat, unrest at home brought the violent uprising that the elite had long feared - after Solon and his aristocratic allies had ruled for thirty-four years. The uprising was led by a man named Pisistratus, an enterprising aristocrat whom the ruling elite of Athens had driven into exile. While abroad, Pisistratus had gained wealth in mining and timber ventures. With his own wealth he had hired an army. And in 560 BCE, with this army and other men who joined him, he marched toward Athens and defeated a force that the ruling elite of Athens had sent out against him.
Pisistratus took power by having his army occupy a hill overlooking Athens. He had become popular among the Athenians, but to consolidate his power his army disarmed the populace. For added security his army took as hostages the sons of leading families, while the head of some families fled into exile. But he left their property unconfiscated, just as the former rulers had left his property unconfiscated after driving him into exile.
Pisistratus tolerated no political party except his own, but he sought continued support from the common people of Athens. Like Solon, Pisistratus increased state involvement in social matters. He sponsored religious festivals and public games. He went further than Solon's reforms by taxing everyone equally, and he moved to protect the common farmer from those with wealth by providing them with the loans they might need between good harvests. With an aggressive foreign policy he supported trade and industry, and he helped trade by building roads. He improved the city's means of obtaining fresh water. He beautified the city by sponsoring sculpture for public places and by improving the city's temples. His policies and interventions gave Athenians full employment and brought renewed prosperity, giving Pisistratus success where Solon had failed.
The Athenians had been living in communities of related families. And, as when Athens had a king, the city's ruler tried to arbitrate conflicts between families. But it was left to each family to protect its members and to punish others for shedding the blood of one of its members. It was the duty of the head of an Athenian family to administer justice in behalf of the family, to enforce morality within his family and to see to it that his women and children were clothed. If one were without a family one might be killed with impunity.
An Athenian could have only one wife. But he could have a concubine living within his family - whose children were not recognized as legitimate and not given citizenship. Wives, on the other hand, were valued as the bearers of children with citizenship status. The Athenians believed that females should be virgins at marriage and remain faithful through their marriage. And while the male was not required to be faithful to his wife, law demanded that a husband divorce an unfaithful wife and return her dowry.
In Athens, women were without independent status. They could own no property except their clothes, jewelry and slaves, and they could enter into only minor market transactions. As members of farming families, women had helped in the fields, but with city-dwelling had come the practice of protecting women from public view and confining them to their homes. In such homes, women had their own quarters, and they dined together in a room apart from the men. A man committed an outrage if he entered a house without an invitation from the master of the house and women were in the house.
Women were expected to be accompanied if they left their house. They were to be under the protection of a guardian at all times: their father or a close male relative if they were unmarried, their husband if they were married, their son or a close male relative if they were widowed. The only women free of these controls were foreign women, or those few citizens who were living in dire poverty and forced to labor outside the home, or prostitutes.
Philosophy came to the Greeks after writing had been around for a while. It came when people were searching for exactitude rather than the flights of the imagination that were traditional in verbal stories, and it came after people had become free of tribal conformity. In Greece, as in India, it was pursued by those who were free from having to labor through each day at menial tasks. Philosophy was the preoccupation of only a few - mainly aristocrats.
Among the Greeks, philosophy began as an investigation of the properties of nature - a move beyond accepting all as spirit and the product of magic. Philosophy among the Greeks is believed to have begun in the city of Miletus, the richest and most powerful Greek city on the coast of Asia Minor. Miletus was on the edge of interacting cultures: Greek, Mesopotamian and Egyptian. The people of Miletus traveled, giving them an awareness of conflicting ideas, which encouraged thinking. And among the aristocrats of Miletus was an independence of thought that was a part of an effort toward individual excellence that had been encouraged as justification for their privileges.
The first known philosopher of Miletus was Thales (pronounced ThAH-lez), who is thought to have entered manhood around the end of the 600s BCE. All that is known about him is what others wrote centuries later - mainly Plato and Aristotle. Thales was a man of wealth, leisure and energy. He went to Egypt and saw there the use of simple and practical geometry in land surveying. He was interested in the nature of things and worked this geometry into a set of new mathematic principles. He became an engineer, and it is said that for king Croesus of Lydia he made the river Halyes passable by diverting its waters. Thales was also interested in heavenly bodies. In his travels he might have come into contact with the astronomical data that Babylonians had accumulated across the centuries, but he also made his own observations of the stars, and he predicted a solar eclipse.
Like others of his time, Thales was unconcerned with that ingredient of scientific proof called verification, and he believed in gods. But, as an engineer who manipulated material realities he thought the material world was understandable rather than just mystery and magic, and this led him to speculate about its basic nature. He believed with his contemporaries that the world was flat and rested on a great body of water. He saw that water was necessary to live and that it was everywhere. He theorized that the world is in essence water and that it had originally been in the form of water - as if without moisture everything would become dust and nothingness.
Thales was mentor to a younger generation of aristocratic thinkers, and among his disciples was Anaximander, also of Miletus, who lived from around 611 to around 547. Anaximander disagreed with Thales about the world being of one substance. Such uniformity, he believed, obviously did not exist. And he thought of substances meeting substances, force meeting force, producing physical changes -- change other than that created by the whims of gods.
Also, Anaximander adopted the Egyptian belief in endlessness. Infinity and eternity are difficult if not impossible to visualize, but Anaximander at least grasped it as an idea, an idea that rivaled that which he rejected: that something could be created out of nothing. This led him to speculate that the universe was boundless and everlasting. And he speculated that there were countless other worlds beyond the world known to humanity.
Like Thales, Anaximander dabbled in mathematics and made contributions to geometry. He is believed to have introduced the Greeks to the sundial. And, like Thales, his interest in the world led him to travel. And his travels led him to make a contribution to geography. He was the first to map what the Greeks knew of the world, and in an effort to see the heavens clearly and rationally, he attempted to map the distribution of celestial bodies. He theorized that the earth was at rest in the center of space. Anaximander speculated that early in its history the earth was covered with water, as indicated by signs of marine fossils across plains and mountains. [note] And he theorized that if the first creatures on earth were of the sea, humanity must have evolved from such creatures.
Pythagoras (piTHAgeres) lived from around 582 to 507 and was another remarkable thinker from Asia Minor. From Asia Minor he had migrated to Croton, a Greek city in Italy. He believed in the magic of the gods. He was influenced by the cult that worshiped the god Dionysus, and he believed in Zeus, Apollo and other Greek gods and in the old and common notion of the transmigration of souls. He believed that the dust one can see floating about in sunlight was pulled about by a spirit. But he also believed in self-examination, and he was interested in astronomy and mathematics and wished to apply observation and reason toward understanding the universe and its gods. He wished to combine his ideas on religion, astronomy and mathematics into a coherent view that would create a way of life beneficial to others.
Pythagoras and his followers advanced astronomy by examining the movements of celestial bodies. They observed the shadow of the earth on the moon, and they made some calculations and concluded that the earth was a sphere. They also concluded that the earth was one of a group of planets. They blended these observations with Greek religion, concluding that the sun reflected light from a great fire at the center of the universe, which they called the throne of Zeus, around which, they believed, all else revolved.
Pythagoras advanced geometry from practical measurements to new geometric theorems. He found harmony in geometry and arithmetic, and in the harmonics of sound he found mathematics - that the tone of a vibrating string depends upon its length. He concluded that mathematical harmony was a part of the perfection of the heavens. Like the Sumerians and others, he believed that the heavens moved in cycles and were essentially unchanging, as permanent as the realities of mathematics. He believed that the universe and mathematics were in essence idea created by the gods. He believed that mathematics held the universe together and that its harmony created a kinship between the gods and humankind.
If reality was unchanging the changes that one saw on earth had to be an illusion, and this is what Pythagoras claimed. He described knowledge through sense perception as faulty compared to the reason that allowed one to grasp unchanging mathematical principles.
Having described mathematics a divinely created, Pythagoras searched for signs of divinity within numbers. With much theorizing he found what he was looking for. For example, the first number greater than 1 that could be the square of two numbers is the number 4, and mixing this with his belief about justice as a work of the gods he concluded that the number 4 contained the divinity of justice.
Pythagoras created a religious sect organized around strict religious rules. Believing that souls migrated after death into the bodies of other beings, he saw the possibility of an animal containing a human-like soul, and therefore he saw eating animals as cannibalism and as an abomination. He and his followers became vegetarians. But they forbade the eating of beans, which they thought harmful to the soul.
In his later years, according to his followers, Pythagoras searched for the significance of his own brilliance and concluded that he was semi-divine. After his death, some of his followers described him as having been capable of miracles. Some claimed that he was the son of Apollo. But whatever he was, he had created a school of philosophy that would influence other Greek philosophers and would rival the views of those who believed in the validity of sense perception.
When the Persians extended their empire to Greek areas in Asia Minor in the mid-500s, a Greek named Xenophanes (zenAHfenes) chose to flee rather than live under Persian rule. He became a philosopher and a wanderer from city to city, attended by a slave. He was disgusted with the Greeks for their feeble resistance against the Persians, and his disgust spread to a rejection of religion. He favored what he thought was reason rather than being guided in outlook by emotions or mere tradition. He objected to mysticism and to divine revelations. He rejected the revered poet Hesiod, and he denounced Pythagoras. He described the priests of the Dionysus movement as impostors. He described the gods of Homer as morally bankrupt. All they had taught men, he said, is theft, adultery and mutual deceit. He ridiculed seeing gods as human-like and said that if oxen, horses or lions had hands to make images of their gods they would fashion them in their own image. He pointed out that Thracians represented their god as Thracian and that black Africans saw their gods as black.
Xenophanes constructed a philosophy of his own, knowing that he was going beyond humanity's ability to know. He speculated that the earth stretched infinitely in all directions, that the earth was infinitely deep and that air extended infinitely upwards. He imagined a god as a central force in the universe but not human-like in shape, thought or emotions: a god that is everywhere and everything, a god that is the whole universe. And his belief that god is nature and nature is god left him open to the charge that he believed in no god at all.
Xenophanes influenced a Greek named Heraclitus (herakl-EYE-tes), who is estimated to have been born around 540 BCE. Heraclitus was from Ephesus, another city on the coast of Asia Minor. Like Xenophanes, Heraclitus despised traditional religion. Homer, he believed, deserved to be flogged.
Heraclitus realized that knowledge was not simply a collection of facts. He knew what every modern psychologist knows: pieces of information arriving through the senses must be tied together. Sense experience he realized was not enough. People, he believed, were dependent upon their intelligence. He is reported to have said that eyes and ears were poor witnesses if one had a barbarian soul. Names, he is reported to have said, encourage us to look at the world in a fragmentary way and to obscure the whole. And he tried to construct a view of the whole according to what seemed reasonable, or that which fit together - on a theory of coherence rather than a construction of isolated but proven facts.
Unlike Pythagoras, Heraclitus believed in a continuum between the world of change visible in materiality on earth and the world of the heavens. And Heraclitus believed that the universe consisted of motion, that everything was in a state of change - as in the comment attributed to him that one never steps in the same river twice. Change, Heraclitus believed, made yearning for permanence in God and immortality futile. Change, he believed, was the work of conflict, and conflict was a permanent and integral part of nature, in the physical world and in human society. Conflict, he believed, created both development and decay. He said that the ever-presence of conflict made wars inevitable and that humans were unable to harmonize their differences through reason.
Heraclitus saw chance as an element in development, that beauty comes from things let loose by chance. [note] But, Heraclitus accepted the view of Pythagoras that behind all was harmony. Heraclitus synthesized the world of conflict and the harmony, seeing the world as a harmony of opposing forces - which some have compared to the opposing tensions in a bow (as in bow and arrow) when the cord is pulled back. Combining his believe in conflict and harmony, Heraclitus believed in a single unchanging law that governs all change, and he believed in a supreme god who presided over the universe and was the mover behind all things.
Fire had been held in awe by the ancients and had been seen as a spiritual force, and Heraclitus also saw soul or spirit in fire. Fire, he observed, was an element that was always changing and yet was always the same. Humans, he concluded, were flames while things were processes.
About a creator and the world, Heraclitus, in Fragment 30, wrote,
... neither a god nor man has made it. It always was, it is, it will be: an ever-living fire.
Heraclitus was an elitist. He believed in government by aristocrats, and he intended his writings to be read only by a worthy minority. Common people, he believed, were incapable of philosophy. He believed that clarity about oneself led to appropriate behavior toward others and that the search for enlightenment could lead to a sound mind and virtue. And in seeing conflict as pervasive, he introduced the idea of objectivity and compromise to decide questions of justice.
Recommended Books
The Bronze Age in Barbarian Europe: from the Megaliths to the Celts, by Jacques Briard
Life and Learning in Ancient Athens, by Richard W. Hibler, 1988
The History of the Greek City States, 700-338 B.C., by Raphael Sealy
Rise of the Greeks, by Michael Grant
History of Ancient Greece, by Jean Hatzfelt
Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: from Thales to Aristotle, edited by Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd and C.D.C. Reeve, 1995
Ancient Greece: a Concise History, by Peter Green
The Greek Way, by Edith Hamilton
Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery, by Isaac Asimov, 1994
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