The speculations of the earliest Greek philosophers on the origins and structure of the universe took as their starting point the view of the world found in the poetry of Homer and Hesiod: ‘‘The so-called Presocratics were still embedded in the older traditions and were using them, at least as a kind of ‘scaffolding’; their constructs were helped, though sometimes also somewhat twisted, by this pre-existing scaffolding’’ (Burkert 1999, 104). On this Homeric and Hesiodic model, which was itself deeply indebted to Near Eastern views of the world (cf. West 1997, 137-50), the cosmos was conceived as a flat, circular earth surrounded by Ocean, and covered by a dome-like sky containing sun, moon, and stars. Whereas the poets saw the origins of the universe in terms of anthropomorphic deities giving birth to other gods, the Presocratics sought to explain the universe in abstract, impersonal, and rational terms, as when Anaximander derives everything from the ‘‘infinite’’ (apeiron). The crucial difference between the mythological cosmogony of Hesiod and the philosophical cosmogonies of the Presocratics is well brought out by a later anecdote that purports to explain why Epicurus became a philosopher: having asked his schoolteacher where Hesiod’s Chasm came from if it came first, the teacher replied that such questions were the domain ofthe philosophers, whereat Epicurus left school to study with them (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians 10.18-19).
By seeking to explain the universe in a systematic and rational manner, the Preso-cratics revolutionized Greek views of the origin and nature of the world (Vernant 1982, 102-29). The tragedians responded to the new ‘‘natural philosophy’’ in various ways, yet the fact that the world of the plays remained the divinely governed universe of heroic myth imposed limits on their innovations. In Euripides’ lost Wise Melanippe, the title character gives an account of the origins of the world that is still based in the anthropomorphic creationism of Hesiod: ‘‘This story is not mine, but from my mother. Heaven and Earth were once a single form; but when they were separated from one another, they bore all things and brought them into the light: trees, winged creatures, beasts nourished by the sea, and the human race’’ (fr. 484). Euripides’ plays (of which only a fifth have survived complete) are likely to have contained more passages of this kind: the second hypothesis to Rhesus claims that ‘‘the [play’s] preoccupation with celestial phenomena points to Euripides.’’
Reflection on such matters, however, was not confined to Euripides. The third play of Aeschylus’ Suppliants trilogy, the Danaids, presents the ‘‘marriage’’ ofHeaven and Earth as the cause of nature’s growth (Aeschylus fr. 44). As in Wise Melanippe, the explanation is simultaneously anthropomorphic and cosmic. Aeschylus also adapts the Presocratic idea of a unified and ordered cosmos in his vision of a Zeus-centered universe: ‘‘Zeus is air, Zeus is earth, Zeus is heaven, Zeus is all things and whatever is beyond them’’ (fr. 70; cf. Suppliants 91-103, Agamemnon 160-66). Speculation on the causes of natural phenomena is found in all three tragedians, as, for example, on the source of the Nile (Aeschylus fr. 300, Suppliants 559-61; Sophocles fr. 882; Euripides, Helen 1-3) or the origin of snow (Aeschylus, Suppliants 792-93). There is even influence from contemporary medicine: Apollo’s theory of the male’s key role in human reproduction (Aeschylus, Eumenides 657-61; cf. Euripides, Orestes 552-53) draws on the ideas of phusiologoi like Anaxagoras (cf. Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals 763b31-3). These proto-scientific elements co-exist with the traditional view of a sentient natural world, to whom one can appeal in times of grief or despair (Sophocles, Ajax 412-27, Philoctetes 936-40; Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 88-91). Sophocles in particular uses the world of nature metaphorically, stressing that all things are changed or destroyed by time (Ajax 670-75, Oedipus at Colonus607-28).
World History
