Greek knowledge, originally called sophia or ‘‘wisdom,’’ was the domain of poets - traditionally named as Homer, Hesiod, and the legendary figures of Orpheus and Musaios - and sages - who traditionally number seven, though the exact names vary from list to list - until a group of thinkers in sixth-century Miletos developed universalizing, naturalizing models of the world, or kosmos, its constitution, origins, and operation: these thinkers, connected with Thales, are identified by Aristotle (Metaphysics 1.3-10) and his heirs as the first Greek philosophers, also called physikoi or ‘‘physicists’’ since their field of inquiry was the physical world. The old knowledge embedded in the pre-philosophical, pre-scientific expertise of the poet and the sage was surely broader than cosmology, covering, at least in a practical aspect, most of the fields of knowledge that would become differentiated over the philosophical and scientific period: the nature of the divine and its interactions with humans (Hesiod’s Theogony, and presupposed by the myths that function in our earliest literature as the media for saying anything at all), justice on a corporate level (Homer’s Iliad) and on the scale of human morality (Iliad, Homer’s Odyssey, Hesiod’s Works and Days), geography and ethnography (in the Homeric catalogue of ships, Iliad 2.484-877), implicit arts of language and tactics of persuasion ( passim in the four great epic poems), the physiology of humans, animals, and plants (to be inferred from Homeric narrative and similes), as well as the origin and nature of the physical kosmos, including astronomy, meteorology and weather signs (Theogony and Works and Days, with references in the Iliad and Odyssey).
In distinction from what should be called philosophical or scientific knowledge, though, this early wisdom rested on the authority of tradition, divine inspiration, and respected individual men. Insofar as it depended on a narrative of divine acts to explain phenomena or social practices, it was arbitrary, unfit for generalization, unverifiable, and justifiable only circularly, through its own modes of myth or divine will. Its relationship to repeatable human experience and observation was, however, probably closer to empiricism, valued highly in later science, than were the highly speculative practices in early philosophy and science, which were based on reason, analogy, and symmetry sooner than perception. Indeed, the practical orientation of information preserved in Homer and anecdotes about the seven sages suggests that pre-philosophical knowledge had a tighter connection to experience than most of Greek knowledge in its abstracted, generalized, justified guises. Nor, of course, did this ‘‘pre-philosophical’’ knowledge perish in the philosophical period, but survived, probably with a high level of continuity right through antiquity, as the main mode of popular, sub-literate, non-elite belief and thought.
At the end of the Persian Wars the philosophical turn, so to speak, was about a century underway. (Laks 2005 responds to recent proposals that Greek ‘‘philosophy’’ began with Plato.) Although the precise chronology of the late archaic thinkers is obscure, as are their communications and interrelations, at least four self-conscious traditions of‘‘knowledge’’ were in play in 478, differentiated partly by subject matter but also, importantly, by epistemological attitude. These traditions included, in addition to Milesian cosmology and natural philosophy, the mathematical and proto-logical approach of the Pythagoreans, the skeptical and argumentative approach that culminated in the Eleatics, and a tradition based in the rationalization of traditional myth that would give rise to history.
Science of the Milesians
The three major cosmologists from Miletos, Thales, Anaximandros, and Anaximenes, by 478 all dead for fifty years or more (Anaximenes, the youngest, is traditionally said to have been active 546-525), had set the stage for further physical and cosmological inquiries. Their views may have been confronted by Herakleitos of Ephesos (traditional period of activity c. 500) and Parmenides of Elea (traditional period of activity c. the 69th Olympiad, 504-501), who will feature more prominently below, but were not significantly developed by any thinker known by name until the mid-fifth century, at the hands of Anaxagoras of Klazomenai (c. 500-428) and Empedokles of Akragas (c. 492-432).
Thales, the oldest of the Milesians (mature around 585, when he is said to have predicted an eclipse) and probably the teacher of the other two, had posited that the world came to be out of water and was still supported by water: since by Aristotle’s time there was no trace or record of a written work agreed to have been authored by Thales, we depend ultimately on oral tradition for information about his radical departure from the mythical tradition regarding the origin of the world. It is possible, indeed, to understand his theory as a direct rationalization of myth, since the origin of the world from a mixture and separation of water gods is claimed in Babylonian and Egyptian myth, reflected in the Hebrew Genesis, and implied at Iliad 14.201: but Thales understood water as a physical substance (albeit possibly divine) rather than a set of anthropomorphic gods.
Anaximandros next, writing in prose, had proposed that the world is bounded by, and composed of, the apeiron or ‘‘indefinite,’’ by which he may have meant an undifferentiated substance composed of a pair of opposed qualities - such as the hot and the cold, or the wet and the dry - in an unspecified proportion or mixture: the birth of the world then amounted to the separation of these qualities, perhaps into what would later be recognized as the four basic elements, fire, water, air, and earth. This is one way Aristotle understands Anaximandros’ cosmology, operating under the assumption of a law of conservation of matter that took hold in the wake of Parmenides. Alternatively, the evidence supports the interpretation that the indefinite has produced the world of opposites, in a generative act that does not imply a conservation of matter. In several respects Anaximandros appears to have responded to the views of his master Thales: although our sources are especially problematic, this explanation of the material composition of the world seems to extend the views of his predecessor, solving a problem left open by the thesis that the world was created from water. In opposition to Thales, however, Anaximandros claimed that the earth is not supported by water, but floats freely in the apeiron by a cosmic symmetry, being caused by nothing to move one way or another. This reasoned refutation of a predecessor was a second key development in the formation of Greek philosophy and science.
Anaximenes, finally, revising Milesian cosmology into the form that was influential in the fifth century, posited air as both the origin, and possibly basic composite, of the world and the body that supported the earth. Anaximenes went further than the other Milesians in naming a process, condensation and rarefaction, by which the differentiated matter of the world came to be from the original air. As with the other Milesians, the persistence of the original stuff in the present constitution of the world is unclear: it could be that differentiated matter, such as fire, water, and earth, really is air, under various appearances, or it could be that fire, water, and earth have been generated from air, which is something different. (Stokes 1971: 43-8 shows that the concepts of condensation and rarefaction need not have implied the persistence of the air.) Air was the element most frequently posited as the material of the world by later monists, thinkers who believed there was just one basic stuff that, under various appearances, really constituted the world.
Mathematics and mysticism of the Pythagoreans
The second tradition of knowledge in play in 478 was the more mystical knowledge of the Pythagoreans, followers of the sage Pythagoras of Kroton, who had migrated to southern Italy around 530 from his birthplace in Samos. Pythagoras was leader of a sect based on religious and dietary principles probably connected to the transmigration of souls, and the Pythagoreans seem to have enjoyed leadership in the political life of Kroton. Although many aspects of Pythagorean knowledge differ little from the embedded knowledge of the poets and other sages, the Pythagoreans bequeathed two important ideas to general developments of the classical period. First, they asserted the importance of number, obscure as it is, to the constitution of all that exists: physical bodies, their physical properties (such as straight and bent), the animate world (male and female), and the moral realm (good and bad). Hence they were credited in the classical period with laying foundations for the fields of knowledge that are readily understood as mathematical, especially music, geometry, and astronomy. Second, they understood polar oppositions as the basic modes of phenomenal existence, the way the world appears to humans who perceive it through their sensory faculties rather than their minds. Although all things are number in basic reality, their phenomena consist in members of pairs of opposed states, such as male or female: according to Aristotle (Metaphysics 1.5), the ten canonical oppositions were, in addition to the three mentioned above, the limited and unlimited, odd and even, unity and multiplicity, right and left, still and moving, light and dark, square and oblong. Although Aristotle seems to attribute this so-called ‘‘Table of Opposites’’ to Pythagoreans of the classical period, polar thought was characteristic of much early speculation and argument, and the early Pythagoreans, whose insistence on the centrality of number would have given them a ready basis for perceiving fundamental, mutually exclusive oppositions, like that between odd and even, seem good candidates for promoting this mode of thought (Lloyd 1966).
Skepticism, argument, and proof: the Eleatics
The third tradition, overlapping in subject matter with the others, is distinctive for its epistemological attitude: it featured a strong skeptical aspect and an insistence that true knowledge differs from any rival claims, whether the beliefs of the many or the polymathia (‘‘much learning’’) of the traditional poets and sages. Most of the Pre-Socratics, to judge from the fragments (normally referred to by the numbers assigned in Diels-Kranz), were dogmatic and confident in their knowledge. Herakleitos of Ephesos and Parmenides of Elea, mentioned above, were the immediate representatives of this tradition to the early classical period; both may have been still alive in 478, and Plato even represents Parmenides in Athens conversing with a young Sokrates at a date that cannot much precede 450 (Parmenides). In their skeptical and polemical bent these figures were both preceded by, and possibly influenced by, the Ionian Xenophanes of Kolophon (mature c. 545), whose writings in a variety of poetic verse forms addressed topics in cosmology and natural philosophy reminiscent of the Milesians, but stand out for their hostility to the anthropomorphic gods of Homer and Hesiod (Diels-Kranz 21 B 11), to anthropomorphism in general (B 14-16), and to humans’ ability to know in general (B 18, 34). He said that there is one god supreme in the world, and this figure turns out to resemble the impersonal, natural deity later posited by Plato and especially Aristotle (B 23-6). Xenophanes allegedly left his home at the age of twenty-five and wandered the world for sixty-seven years, and thus he could have made contact with both Herakleitos in the west and Parmenides in the east.
Regardless of the historical connections, these younger figures shared Xenophanes’ interest in second-order questions, that is, the problems surrounding how we know what we claim to know. Herakleitos, like Xenophanes, attacked famous wise men of the Greek tradition (e. g., Diels-Kranz 22 B 40, 42, 56, 57) as well as his contemporary conventional thinkers, whom he compared to deaf people (B 34). Writing in short prose aphorisms, Herakleitos most famously claimed the counter-intuitive (and possibly counter-Pythagorean) unity of opposites: that is, he pointed to an underlying identity behind apparent oppositions in the world, such as the way up and the way down. Though the examples of identical opposites mentioned in the fragments vary significantly in the ways they are opposed (for example, alternating phases such as day and night are also said to be the same), it seems that the critical unity of opposites should be thought of as a tension, just as two opposing stress forces are in tension in the constitution of the lyre, or the bow. The world as a whole, according to Herakleitos, is in a constant state of change or flux, and thus its unity might amount to a constant tensional force among elements which itself creates a system, the world. In a more Milesian mode, Herakleitos also claimed that fire was the single basic principle of process in the world. From yet another point of view, it was Logos (‘‘Reason’’) that unified the world: this may have been another way to think of the tension between opposites, which can be understood from an intellectual perspective, but not from the appearances of the senses. It was the Logos to which the truly wise man was attuned and to which the multitudes of the people were deaf.
Parmenides, finally, offered a perspective of the world even more counter-intuitive than that of Herakleitos, and his claims about ultimate reality posed the most lasting challenge to thinkers of the classical period, especially the atomists, some of the Sophists, and Plato. Writing, like Xenophanes, in verse which many scholars believe has poetic qualities, and under the instruction of an unnamed goddess, Parmenides used the logic of polar oppositions, especially the jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive alternatives of ‘‘what is’’ and ‘‘what is not,’’ to prove through an extended argument (Diels-Kranz 28 B 8) that the underlying reality of the world is single, unchanging, and indivisible. Even more radically than the Milesians, the Pythagoreans, or Herakleitos, Parmenides posited a fundamental disconnection between the reality that truly exists, which can be discerned and known only by the intellect, and the world of appearances, which can be perceived, albeit falsely, through the senses and believed in through mechanisms of human convention and human language. Thus he described an apparently dualist world, which he represented in his poem as two textually separated parts or ‘‘Ways,’’ labeled by modern scholars as the Way of Truth (B 1-8) and the Way of Seeming (B 9-19). (One can also understand the Way of Seeming as the appearance, to humans, of the one world that is accurately described in the Way of Truth.) Consistent with his claim (B 2, 6) that what is must be the same as what can be thought, which must in turn be the same as what can be said (presumably in a purely logical discourse, since ordinary human language is part of the Way of Seeming), the Way of Truth uses logic and argument to trace out the nature of what really is. For the first time in recorded Greek thought, a developed argument usurped all other forms of access to the truth, especially sense experience and ordinary language, to reveal a reality that flew in the face of the conclusions likely from any other method. The role of divine revelation in Parmenides’ ‘‘knowledge’’ of the truth remains unclear, but it is clear that the authority Parmenides claims for his conclusions lies in his argument, not with the goddess who helped steer him to the beginning of the correct path. With Parmenides’ argument, epistemological questions were privileged as they had never been before. Even if Xenophanes and Her-akleitos had been aiming in the same direction, in a certain way Parmenides’ poem first enabled a clear distinction between natural science and philosophy.
The rationalization of myth
The fourth tradition of knowledge inherited by the Greeks of the classical period was a rationalizing approach to the traditional ‘‘knowledge’’ of human history, ethnography, and geography that had been the subject matter, we assume, for an originally vast amount of oral epic poetry, including local epics (Fowler 1996). Although this tradition is not part of Greek philosophy, it is a critical tradition of Greek knowledge. On the one hand, it shares with Greek philosophy and natural science an effort of the human mind to submit inherited ‘‘truth’’ to external, generalized standards such as consistency, non-contradiction, and correspondence with the relevant phenomena. On the other hand, it was a practice called in many accounts historia, or ‘‘investigation,’’ the same word used of investigations in natural science that followed strict empirical standards (Thomas 2000).
As city-states developed through the archaic period, local historians endeavored to record continuous genealogies of leading families that would be chronologically plausible, positing the correct number of human generations from the divine paternities to the Trojan War and from the returns of the heroes from Troy down to the present day, and geo-politically authoritative, representing geographical proximity, ethnic identity, and political alliance through mythical relationships. Thus we see in Athenian myth, for example, doublings of names (Erechtheus and Erichthonios, two Pandions, among others) that must be the inventions of anonymous rationalizing mythographers trying to fill the missing generations; we see the Trojan War hero Aias of Salamis, who in Homeric poetry bore no relationship to Athens, naturalized as an Athenian hero with a local cult and indeed as forefather of one of the ten tribes of Kleisthenes.
In a different sort of rationalizing turn, we see the mythographer Pherekydes of Syros (active around 544) writing cosmogonic myth in prose rather than transmitting it in verse, as Hesiod and the oral tradition had: this choice indicates self-conscious differentiation from the epic poets, and the fragments, though sparse and difficult, bear comparison with the cosmological fragments of Anaximandros (Schibli 1990), even while Aristotle treated Pherekydes among mythologists rather than Milesians. Other archaic mythographers such as Akousilaos of Argos (who, we are told by Josephus Contra Apionem 1-13, ‘‘lived before the Persian Wars’’) made a career of correcting other poets, such as Hesiod’s poetic catalogues of human genealogy. Crowning this tradition, finally, and laying the groundwork for further progress in history, ethnography, and geography during the classical period, was Hekataios of
Miletos (active 500-494), who wrote in prose a Circumnavigation of the World (a catalogue of information about peoples encountered on a coastal journey around the Mediterranean and Black Seas) and the Genealogies, which rationalized traditional myths such as stories in the life of Herakles by claiming that they had been exaggerated or had reinterpreted original metaphors as literal truths. His revision of a map of the world allegedly handed down by his fellow Milesian Anaximandros shows his connection to the Milesian traditions of investigation and improvement on the work of predecessors, and the polemical mention of his name by Herakleitos (22 B 40) shows that he was recognized by his contemporaries as a practitioner of knowledge, even if his version of knowledge is among those Herakleitos scorned.
World History
