Introduction

By the end of the Persian Wars in 478, Greeks from the west (Asia Minor, especially Miletos, Ephesos, and Kolophon) and the east (southern Italy, especially Kroton and Elea) had laid important foundations for the intellectual achievements in philosophy and science that were to become one of the Greeks’ lasting contributions to human culture. But Athens, the eventual home of the most important thinkers of the classical period - Sokrates, Plato, and Aristotle - and the spawning ground for all the major philosophical schools and movements that continued beyond the classical period, was not yet an important intellectual center, nor had ‘‘knowledge’’ been articulated into fields anything like the array Aristotle and his school, the Lyceum (Lykeion), would have discerned by the time of Aristotle’s death in 322. Although the development of knowledge continued throughout the Greek world in the classical period, and the famous individuals who are remembered as Pre-Socratics, Sophists, ethnographers, doctors, and mathematicians tended still to hail from cities other than Athens and to travel widely, it was in classical Athens, as far as we can tell from the evidence that we have, that intellectual activity developed toward a conception of knowledge in general. From various stimuli in the democracy arose the Sophistic movement, the Socratic movement, the Platonic Academy, and the Lyceum of Aristotle, whose writings communicate the comprehensive and structured overview of‘‘knowledge’’ that rates as one of the most impressive achievements of the Greeks.

Athens’ importance in this development was surely the result of its political and economic power in the so-called Periklean period: indeed, Perikles himself is portrayed as a personal devotee of new learning and an eager associate of the leading contemporary intellectuals. The thinkers who tended to gather in Athens from about the middle of the fifth century represent, from all appearances, both those interested in exchanging theories and views for their own sake and those attracted to the financial benefits of promulgating their knowledge in the democracy, among relatively wealthy individuals who themselves stood to gain socially and politically from the skills and clout arising from intellectual education. Yet, for all the historical credibility that an Athenocentric picture of the development of classical knowledge bears, we must remain mindful of the Athenocentrism of our sources, which, for the pre-Platonic period (to about 390), are largely Plato’s dialogues, Aristotle’s brilliant but self-centered histories of previous thought, and scholarly exegeses within the traditions of the Peripatetics, as Aristotle’s followers were called. Thinkers who could not be usefully imagined by Plato in discussion with Sokrates (with or without historical accuracy), or who did not fit conveniently into Aristotle’s histories of his predecessors, are unlikely to have left much trace in the historical record, and those who did meet these criteria were submitted to the filtering that these criteria brought along. The more directly historical reports of Aristotle’s colleagues in the Peripatos, such as Eudemos on astronomy and mathematics, have by and large not survived, although we have, by chance, a history of medicine by Menon (late fourth century) partially preserved on papyrus. Outside the philosophical literature, we have good evidence for a general intellectual upheaval in Athens in the tragedies of Euripides, the comedies of Aristophanes, and the History of Thucydides, and the Athenian provenance of this material leaves us with a circular problem: was this literature produced in Athens because Athens was special, or does Athens appear to be special because this literature happens to survive? Although a final answer remains elusive, the traditional assumption has been that Athens was indeed the center of intellectual progress in the classical period, and remained the center until Alexandria took its place in the course of the Hellenistic period (but see Thomas 2000: 10-12, with further bibliography, for arguments against excessive Athenocentrism).

In this chapter I will describe, in four categories, the ‘‘Pre-Socratic’’ intellectual landscape at the beginning of the classical period, then proceed to a brief chronological account of the ‘‘Sophistic’’ developments of Periklean Athens, the intellectual response to Sokrates’ execution in 399 (as well as, perhaps, the crises of the Peloponnesian Wars and the oligarchic revolutions of 411 and 404), and the basic approaches of the major schools that emerged from the Sophistic and Socratic movements through the first three-quarters of the fourth century. I will emphasize fields of inquiry and the methods and assumptions that direct the inquiries as well as the individuals whose names have been attached to these inquiries. Further detail on both the knowledge and the knowers is readily available in a number of recently published general reference works on ancient Greek philosophy and thought as well as more specialized studies.