Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

6

The Origins of Science, Philosophy and the Humanities

When Allan Bloom, a professor at the University of Chicago, published his book The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, he had no idea he was about to become notorious. Incensed by the ‘dumbing down’ that he saw everywhere about him, he pugnaciously advanced his view that the study of ‘high culture’ has to be the main aim of education. Above all, he said, we must pay attention to ancient Greece, because it provided ‘the models for modern achievement’. Bloom believed that the philosophers and poets of the classical world are those from whom we have most to learn, because the big issues they raised have not changed as the years have passed. They still have the power to inform and transform us, he said, to move us, and ‘to make us wise’.¹

His book provoked a storm of controversy. It became a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic and Bloom was himself transformed into a celebrity and a rich man. At the same time he was vilified. At a conference of academics at Chapel Hill, the campus of the University of North Carolina, about a year after his book appeared, called to consider the future of liberal education, ‘speaker after speaker’ denounced Bloom and other ‘cultural conservatives’ like him. According to the New York Times, these academics saw Bloom’s book as an attempt to foist the ‘elitist views of dead, white, European males’ on a generation of students who were now living in a different world, where the preoccupations of small city-states 2,500 years ago were long out of date.

These ‘culture wars’ are not so sharp as once they were but it is still necessary to highlight why the history of a small European country, thousands of years ago, is so important. In his book The Greeks, H. D. F. Kitto opens with these words: ‘The reader is asked, for the moment, to accept this as a reasonable statement of fact, that in a part of the world that had for centuries been civilised, and quite highly civilised, there gradually emerged a people, not very numerous, not very powerful, not very well organised, who had a totally new conception of what human life was for, and showed for the first time what the human mind was for.’² Or, as Sir Peter Hall puts it, in a chapter on ancient Athens which he calls ‘The fountainhead’: ‘The crucial point about Athens is that it was first. And first in no small sense: first in so many of the things that have mattered, ever since, to western civilisation and its meaning. Athens in the fifth century BCE gave us democracy, in a form as pure as we are likely to see . . . It gave us philosophy, including political philosophy, in a form so rounded, so complete, that hardly anyone added anything of moment to it for well over a millennium. It gave us the world’s first systematic written history. It systematised medical and scientific knowledge, and for the first time began to base them on generalisations from empirical observation. It gave us the first lyric poetry and then comedy and tragedy, all again at so completely an extraordinary pitch of sophistication and maturity, such that they might have been germinating under the Greek sun for hundreds of years. It left us the first naturalistic art; for the first time, human beings caught and registered for ever the breath of a wind, the quality of a smile. It single-handedly invented the principles and the norms of architecture . . .’³

A new conception of what human life is for. The fountainhead. First in so many ways that have mattered. That is why ancient Greece is so important, even today. The ancient Greeks may be long dead, were indeed overwhelmingly white, and, yes, by modern standards, unforgiveably male. Yet in discovering what the historian (and Librarian of Congress) Daniel Boorstin calls ‘the wondrous instrument within’ – the courageous human brain and its powers of observation and reason – the Greeks left us far more than any other comparable group. Their legacy is the greatest the world has yet known.⁴

There are two principal aspects to that legacy. One is that the Greeks were the first to truly understand that the world may be known, that knowledge can be acquired by systematic observation, without aid from the gods, that there is an order to the world and the universe which goes beyond the myths of our ancestors. And second, that there is a difference between nature – which operates according to invariable laws – and the affairs of men, which have no such order, but where order is imposed or agreed and can take various forms and is mutable. Compared with the idea that the world could be known only through or in relation to God, or even could be known not at all, this was a massive transformation.

The first farmers appear to have settled around Thessalonika, in the north of Greece, about 6500 BC. The Greek language is believed to have been brought to the area not before 2500 BC, possibly by invading Aryan-type people from the Russian steppes. (In other words, similar people to those who invaded northern India at much the same time.) Until at least 2000 BC, the prosperous towns of Greece were still unfortified, though bronze daggers began to lengthen into swords.⁵

Greece is a very broken-up country, with many islands and several peninsulas, which may have influenced the development there of the city-state. Kingship, and the aristocratic hero culture, which in Homer is the universal political arrangement, had vanished from most cities by the dawn of history (roughly 700 BC). The experience of Athens shows why – and how – monarchy was abolished.⁶ The first encroachment on the royal prerogative took place when the nobles elected a separate war chief, the Archon, because the priestly king of the time was not a fighter. This was followed by the promotion of the Archon over the king. According to tradition, the first Archon was Medon, who held office for life, and his family after him. The king lost power but he continued to be the city’s chief priest. Legal duties were divided: the Archon took cases concerning property, whereas the king tried religious cases and homicide. Thus there are parallels here with what was happening in Mesopotamia.⁷

War was also the background to a set of stories that became central to Greek self-consciousness, and the first written masterpieces of Western literature. They concerned the Achaean (i.e., Mycenean) expedition to Troy, a city in Asia Minor (now Turkey). Homer’s two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are often described as the earliest literature, the ‘primary source’ from which all European literature derives, the ‘gateway’ to new avenues of thought. Between them they contain around 28,000 lines and preceding their appearance and for hundreds of years following them, ‘there is nothing remotely resembling these amazing achievements’. Homer’s genius was recognised in Greece from the very beginning. Athenians referred to his books the way devout Christians nowadays refer to the Bible, or Muslims to the Qurʾan. Socrates quoted lines from the Iliad when he was on trial for his life.⁸

One important thing to say about these achievements is how very different they are from the early biblical narratives, which most scholars now accept as having been composed at more or less the same time. The Hebrew Bible, as we shall see in the next chapter, is the fruit of many hands but concerns itself with one theme: the history of the Israelites and what that reveals about God’s purpose. It is a history of ordinary mortals, essentially small, everyday people, trying to understand the divine will. Other nations, other peoples, worship different gods and that puts them in the wrong: they deserve – and receive – no sympathy. In strong contrast, Homer’s epics do not concern ordinary people so much as heroes and the gods themselves, who enshrine excellence in one form or another. But the stories are not really histories. They are more like modern novels which take an episode and examine it in detail for what it reveals about human nature. In Horace’s words, Homer plunges in, in medias res, in the middle of things. But in Homer the gods are not ‘unknowable’. They are in fact all too human, with human problems and failings. No less significantly, in Homer, the heroes’ enemies are themselves heroes, treated with sympathy at times, allowed their own dignity and honour. In composing his epics, Homer drew upon a vast number of poems and songs that had been transmitted orally for generations. They depended on myths and mythos, in Greek, from which the English word ‘myth’ derives, actually meant ‘word’, in the sense of ‘the last word’, a final pronouncement. This contrasted with logos, which also meant ‘word’ but in the sense of a truth which can be argued and maybe changed (as in, ‘what’s the word on . . .?’). Unlike logoi, which were written in prose, myths were recorded in verse.

The stories of Homer are in some ways the first ‘modern’ narratives. His characters are fully rounded, three-dimensional, with weaknesses as well as strengths, with differing motives and emotions, courageous at one moment, hesitant the next, more like real people than gods. Women are treated as sympathetically – and as fully – as men: for example, in Helen we see that beauty can be a curse as much as a blessing. Above all, as the story unfolds, Odysseus learns – his character develops – making him more interesting, and more dignified, than the deities. Odysseus shows himself as capable of rational thought, independent of the gods.

The same rationalising process that finds its first expression in Homer was brought to bear on communal life, with momentous consequences for mankind. As in the Iliad and the Odyssey, war played a part.

One of the inventions in that area of the world, among the Lydians – as we have seen – was coins. This spread quickly among the Greeks and the growing use of money enabled wealth to grow and more men acquired land. This land needed defending and, in conjunction with new weapons, in the seventh century BC a new sort of warrior, and a new sort of warfare, appeared. This was the development of the ‘hoplite’ infantry, boasting bronze helmets, spears and shields (hoplon is Greek for shield). Earlier fighting had mainly consisted of single combat: now, in the hoplite formations, men advanced (mainly in the valleys, to protect or attack the crops grown there) in disciplined masses, in careful formation of eight rows, with each man protected on his right-hand side by the shield of his comrade. If he fell the man in the row behind him took his place.⁹ As more men shared military experience, this had two consequences. One, power slipped from the old aristocracies, and two, a big gap opened up between rich and poor. (The hoplites had to provide their own armour, so they came mainly from middling to rich peasants.)

This gap opened up because land in Attica was poor, certainly so far as growing grain was concerned. Therefore, in bad years the poorer farmers had to borrow from their richer neighbours. With the invention of coins, however, instead of borrowing a sack of corn in the old way, to be repaid by a sack, the farmer now borrowed the price of a sack. But this sack was bought when corn was scarce – and therefore relatively expensive – and was generally repaid in times of plenty, in other words when corn was cheap. This caused debt to grow and in Attica the law allowed for creditors to seize an insolvent debtor and take him and his family into slavery. This ‘rich man’s law’ was bad enough, but the spread of writing, when the laws were set down, under the supervision of Dracon, made it worse, encouraging people to enforce their written rights. ‘Draconian law’, it was said, was written in blood.¹⁰

Dissatisfaction spread, so much so that the Athenians took what for us would be an unthinkable step. They appointed a tyrant to mediate. Originally, when it was first used in the Near East, tyrant was not a pejorative word. It was an informal title, equivalent to ‘boss’ or ‘chief’, and tyrants usually arose after a war, when their most important function was the equitable distribution of the enemy’s lands among the victorious troops. In Athens, Solon was chosen as tyrant because of his wide experience. A distant descendant of the kings, he had also written poems attacking the rich for their greed. He took office in 594 or 592 BC and his first move was to abolish enslavement for debt, and at the same time he cancelled all debts outstanding. He embargoed the export of all agricultural produce, except olive oil, in which Athens was swimming, arguing that the big landowners could not sell their produce in richer markets while fellow Athenians went hungry. His other move was to change the constitution. Until his period in office Athens had been governed by a tripartite system. By this time, there were the nine Archons at the top; next came the Council of Best Men, or aristoi, who met to discuss all major questions; and finally the Assembly of the People (ekklesia, from which we take the French word église, church). Solon transformed the Assembly, extending membership to tradespeople, and not just landowners, and also widened the eligibility for election to Archon. More than that, Archons had to account for their year in office before the Assembly and only those judged a success were eligible for the Council of Best Men. Thus the whole system became a good deal fairer and more open than it had been in the past, and the power of the Assembly was much enhanced. (This somewhat oversimplifies Athenian democracy but it does at least make clear that what we regard as democracy in the twenty-first century is actually elective oligarchy.¹¹)

Athenian democracy, however, cannot be understood without a full appreciation of what a polis was, and without taking on board how small – by modern standards – Greek city-states were. Both Plato and Aristotle thought that the ideal polis should have around 5,000 citizens and in fact very few had more than 20,000. ‘Citizen’ here means free males, so to these figures should be added women, children, foreigners and slaves. Peter Jones calculates that in 431 BC the total population of Athens was 325,000 and in 317 BC it was 185,000. In general, Greek poleis were roughly the size of a small English county and the polis owed a lot to Greece’s geography – with many islands and peninsulas, and with the country broken up into many smaller, self-contained geographical entities. But the polis also owed something to Greek nature. Whereas it originally meant ‘citadel’, it came to mean ‘the whole communal life of the people, political, cultural, moral . . .’¹² Greeks came to regard the polis as a form of life that enabled each individual to live life to the full, to realise his true potential. They tried hard not to forget what politics was for.¹³

Democracy was introduced into Athens in 507 BC by Cleisthenes and, by the time of Pericles (c. 495–429) – Athens’ so-called golden age – the Assembly was supreme, and with good reason. Though he had no shortage of enemies, Pericles was one of Greece’s greatest generals, among its finest orators and an exceptional leader. He installed state pay for jurors and council members, completed the city walls, which made Athens all but impregnable and, unusually for a military man and a politician (though this was the Athenian ideal), took a great interest in philosophical, artistic and scientific matters. His friends included Protagoras, Anaxagoras and Phidias, all of whom we shall meet shortly, while Socrates himself was close to both Alcibiades, Pericles’ ward, and Aspasia, his morganatic wife. Pericles rebuilt the Parthenon, which provided employment for countless craftsmen and helped to kick-start Athens’ golden age.

Under him, the Assembly now comprised every adult male who had not been disenfranchised by some serious offence. It was the sole legislative body and had complete control of both the administration and the judiciary. It met once a month, any citizen could speak and anyone could propose anything. But, with Assemblies of 5,000 and more, there was need of a committee to prepare business. This council was called the boule and it was scarcely less cumbersome, consisting of 500 citizens, not elected but chosen by ballot, the point being that in this way it never developed a corporate identity which might have corrupted and distorted the business of the Assembly. There were no professional lawyers. ‘The principle was preserved that the aggrieved man appealed directly to his fellow citizens for justice.’¹⁴ The jury was a selection of the Assembly and could vary from 101 to 1,001, according to the importance of the case. There was no appeal. If the offence did not carry a specific penalty then the prosecutor, if he won the case, would propose one penalty, while the accused proposed another. The jury then chose between the two. ‘To the Athenian, the responsibility of taking his own decisions, carrying them out, and accepting the consequences, was a necessary part of the life of a free man.’¹⁵

Given the size of Athens, democracy there was a remarkable – a unique – achievement. Not everyone liked it – Plato for one condemned it – and the arrangement was nothing like, say, parliamentary democracy in our own day. (To repeat Peter Jones’ point: modern democracies are elective oligarchies.) And this is one reason why another Greek idea, rhetoric, has not survived. Rhetoric was a way of speaking, arguing, persuading, that was necessary in a democracy where the assemblies were large, where there were no microphones, and where it was necessary to sway others in debate. Rhetoric developed its own rules and it encouraged great feats of eloquence and memory, which had a profound influence on the evolution of classical literature. In elective oligarchies, however, where the political etiquette is more intimate, and more cynical, rhetoric has no real place: to the modern ear it sounds forced and artificial.

If politics – democracy – is the most famous Greek idea that has come down to us, it is closely followed by science (scientia = knowledge, originally). This most profitable area of human activity is generally reckoned to have begun at Ionia, the western fringe of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the islands off the coast. According to Erwin Schrödinger, there are three main reasons why science began there. First, the region did not belong to a powerful state, which is usually hostile to free thinking. Second, the Ionians were a seafaring people, interposed between East and West, with strong trading links. Mercantile exchange is always the principal force in the exchange of ideas, which often stem from the solving of practical problems – navigation, means of transport, water supply, handicraft techniques. Third, the area was not ‘priest-ridden’; there was not, as in Babylon or Egypt, a hereditary, privileged, priestly caste with a vested interest in the status quo.¹⁶ In their comparison of early science in ancient Greece and China, Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin argue that the Greek philosopher/scientists enjoyed much less patronage than their contemporaries in China, who were employed by the emperor, and often charged with looking after the calendar, which was a state concern. This had the effect of making Chinese scientists much more circumspect in their views, and in embracing new concepts: they had much more to lose than in Greece, and they seldom argued as the Greeks argued. Instead, new ideas in China were invariably incorporated into existing theories, producing a ‘cascade’ of meanings; new notions never had to battle it out with old ones.¹⁷ In Greece on the other hand there was a ‘competition in wisdom’, just as in sports contests (sport was itself seen as a form of wisdom).¹⁸ Lloyd argues that there are far more first-person-singular statements in Greek science than in Chinese, much more egotism, individuals describe their mistakes more often, their uncertainties, and criticise themselves more.¹⁹ Greek plays poked fun at scientists and even this served a useful purpose.²⁰

What these Ionians grasped was that the world was something that could be understood, if one took the trouble to observe it properly. It was not a playground of the gods who acted arbitrarily on the spur of the moment, moved by grand passions of love, wrath or revenge. The Ionians were astonished by this and, as Schrödinger also remarked, ‘this was a complete novelty’.²¹ The Babylonians and the Egyptians knew a lot about the orbits of the heavenly bodies but regarded them as religious secrets.

The very first scientist, in the sixth century BC, was Thales of Miletus, a city on the Ionian coast. However, science is a modern word first used as we use it in the early nineteenth century, and the ancient Greeks would not have recognised it; they knew no boundaries between science and other fields of knowledge, and in fact they asked the questions out of which both science and philosophy emerged.²² Thales was not the first ancient figure to speculate about the origin and nature of the universe but he was the first ‘who expressed his ideas in logical and not mythological terms’.²³ As a merchant who had travelled to Egypt, he had picked up enough mathematics and Babylonian astronomy to be able to predict a total eclipse of the sun in the year 585 BC, which duly occurred, on the day we call 29 May. (For Aristotle, writing two centuries later, this was the moment when Greek philosophy began.)²⁴ But Thales is more often remembered for the basic scientific-philosophical question that he asked: what is the world made of ? The answer he gave – water – was wrong, but the very act of asking so fundamental a question was itself an innovation. His answer was also new because it implied that the world consists not of many things (as it so obviously does) but, underneath it all, of one thing. In other words, the universe is not only rational, and therefore knowable, but also simple.²⁵ Before Thales, the world was made by the gods, whose purpose could only be known indirectly, through myths, or – if the Jews were to be believed – not at all. This was an epochal change in thought (though to begin with it affected only a tiny number of people).

Thales’ immediate successor was another Ionian, Anaximander. He argued that the ultimate physical reality of the universe cannot be a recognisable physical substance (a concept not so far from the truth, as it turned out much later). Instead of water, he substituted an ‘undefined something’ with no chemical properties as we would recognise them, though he did identify what he called ‘oppositions’ – hotness and coldness, wetness and dryness, for example. This could be seen as a step towards the general concept of ‘matter’. Anaximander also had a theory of evolution. He rejected the idea that human beings had derived indirectly from the gods and the Titans (the children of Uranus, a family of giants) but thought that all living creatures arose first in the water, ‘covered with spiny shells’. Then, as part of the sea dried up, some of these creatures emerged on land, their shells cracked and released new kinds of animal. In this way, Anaximander thought ‘that man was originally a fish.’²⁶ Here too it is difficult to overstate the epochal change in thinking that was taking place – the rejection of gods and myths as ways to explain everything (or anything) and the beginnings of observation as a basis for reason. That man should be descended from other animals, not gods, was as great a break with past thinking as could be imagined.

For Anaximenes, the third of the Ionians, aer was the primary substance, which varied in interesting ways. It was a form of mist whose density varied. ‘When most uniform,’ he said, ‘it is invisible to the eye . . . Winds arise when the aer is dense, and moves under pressure. When it becomes denser still, clouds are formed, and so it changes into water. Hail occurs when the water descending from the clouds solidifies, and snow when it solidifies in a wetter condition.’²⁷ There is not much wrong with this reasoning, which was to lead, a hundred years later, to the atomic theory of Democritus.

Before Democritus, however, came Pythagoras, another Ionian. He grew up on Samos, an island to the north of Miletus, off the Turkish coast, but emigrated to Croton, in Greek Italy, because, it is said, the pirate king, Polycrates, despite luring poets and artists to Samos, and building impressive walls, headed a dissolute court that Pythagoras, a deeply religious – not to say mystical – man, hated. All his life, Pythagoras was a paradoxical soul. He taught a wide number of superstitions – for example, that you do not poke a fire with a knife (you might hurt the fire, which would seek revenge). But Pythagoras’ fame rests on the theorem named after him. This particular theorem (about how to obtain a right angle), we should never forget, was not merely an abstraction: obtaining an absolute upright was essential in building. This interest in mathematics led on to a fascination with music and with number. It was Pythagoras who discovered that, by stopping a lyre-string at three-quarters, two-thirds or half its length, the fourth, fifth and octave of a note may be obtained, and that these notes, suitably arranged, ‘may move us to tears’.²⁸ This phenomenon convinced Pythagoras that numbers held the secret of the universe, that number – rather than water or any other substance – was the basic ‘element’. This mystical concern with harmony persuaded Pythagoras and his followers that there was a beauty in numbers, and this led, among other things, to the idea we call ‘square numbers’ – those that can be represented as squares:

But this fascination also led Pythagoras to what we now call numerology, a belief in the mystical meaning of numbers. This was an elaborate dead-end.

The Pythagoreans also knew that the earth was a sphere and were possibly the first to draw this conclusion, their reasoning based on the outline of the shadow during eclipses of the moon (which they also knew had no light of its own). They thought that the earth always presented the same face to the ‘Central Fire’ of the universe (not the sun), rather as the moon always presents the same face to the earth. For this reason they imagined that half the earth was uninhabitable. It was the varying brightness of Mercury and Venus which persuaded Heraclitus (who was very close to the later Pythagoreans) that they changed their distance from earth. These orbits added to the complexity of the heavens and confirmed the planets as ‘wanderers’ (the original meaning of the word).²⁹

This quest for what the universe was made of was continued by the two main ‘atomists’, Leucippus of Miletus (fl. 440 BC), and Democritus of Abdera (fl. 410 BC).³⁰ They argued that the world consisted of ‘an infinity’ of tiny atoms moving randomly in ‘an infinite void’. These atoms, solid corpuscles too small to be seen, exist in all manner of shapes and it is their ‘motions, collisions, and transient configurations’ that account for the great variety of substances and the different phenomena that we experience. In other words, reality is a lifeless piece of machinery, in which everything that occurs is the outcome of inert, material atoms moving according to their nature. ‘No mind and no divinity intrude into this world . . . There is no room for purpose or freedom.’³¹

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae was partially convinced by the atomists. There must be some fundamental particle, he thought: ‘How can hair come from what is not hair, or flesh from what is not flesh?’³² But he also felt that none of the familiar forms of matter – hair or flesh, say – was quite pure, that everything was made up of a mixture, which had arisen from the ‘primordial chaos’. He reserved a special place for mind, which for him was a substance: mind could not have arisen from something that was not mind. Mind alone was pure, in the sense that it was not mixed with anything. In 468–467 BC, a huge meteorite fell to earth in the Gallipoli peninsula and this seems to have given Anaxagoras new ideas about the heavens. He proposed that the sun was ‘another such mass of incandescent stone’, ‘larger than the Peloponnese’, and the same went for the stars, which were so far away that we do not feel their heat. He thought that the moon was made of the same material as the earth ‘with plains and rough ground in it’.³³

The arguments of the atomists were strikingly near the mark, as experiments confirmed more than two thousand years later. (As a theory it was, as Schrödinger put it, the most beautiful of all ‘sleeping beauties’.³⁴) But, inevitably perhaps, not everyone at the time accepted their ideas. Empedocles of Acragas (fl. 450), a rough contemporary of Leucippus, identified four elements or ‘roots’ (as he called them) of all material things: fire, air, earth and water (introduced in mythological garb as Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis). From these four roots, Empedocles wrote, ‘sprang all things that were and are and shall be, trees and men and women, beasts and birds and water-bred fishes, and the long-lived gods too, most mighty in their prerogatives . . . For there are these things alone, and running through one another they assume many a shape.’ But he also thought that material ingredients by themselves could not explain motion and change. He therefore introduced two additional, immaterial principles: love and strife, which ‘induce the four roots to congregate and separate’.³⁵

As ever, we do well not to make more of Ionian positivism than is there. Pythagoras had such an immense reputation that he was credited with many things he may not have been responsible for – even his famous theorem, which may have been the work of later followers. And these first ‘scientists’ have been compared to a ‘flotilla’ of small boats headed in all directions and united only by a fascination for uncharted waters.

In the Iliad and the Odyssey, plague is attributed to divine intervention (an idea that was to be resurrected more than a millennium later by Christianity), but in the reports of the battles themselves the treatment of wounds is carefully described and Homer makes it clear that this was already a specialist skill. Asclepius, referred to by him as a great healer, was subsequently deified in the Greek manner and a cult in his honour was established. Archaeologists have identified at least a hundred temples to Asclepius, to which the sick would flock in search of a cure.³⁶

In the fifth and fourth centuries, a new and more secular traditional grew up, associated with the name of Hippocrates of Cos (about 460–377 BC), who was a meticulous observer. (Celsus recognised Hippocrates as the man who detached medicine from philosophy.³⁷) One of his treatises examined the effects of climate and environment on physique and psychology, another – entitled The Sacred Disease – was an investigation of epilepsy. Hippocrates discounted divine intervention and attributed this malady to ‘natural causes . . . men think it divine because they do not understand it . . . all diseases alike are divine, and all are human; all have their antecedent causes’. His own theory was that epilepsy was caused by a blockage (by phlegm) of the veins in the brain.

Probably under the influence of Empedocles, Hippocrates’ school adopted the theory of the Four Humours: phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile ‘which reflect in the body the four elements [or “roots”] of the cosmos, fire, air, water and earth, and each of which is associated with the basic qualities of hot, dry, cold and moist. Phlegm, for example, which is cold, increases in quantity in the winter, and therefore during the winter phlegmatic ailments are more common. Their proper balance in the body is the cause of good health, imbalance causes pain, and temperaments differ according to which humour predominates (phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric and melancholic).’ Purging the body, through blood-letting or laxatives, for example, was the right way to restore balance and therefore health.³⁸ As the historian Andrew Burn points out, ‘This theory was to exercise a thoroughly deleterious influence on medicine for 2,000 years; because under it one could account for anything, it blocked the way to further inquiry based on observation.’ (Hippocrates’ method for treating dislocation of the jaw was still being used in France in the nineteenth century.³⁹) Hippocrates also taught that the careful observation of symptoms was an important part of medicine – examination of the body, posture, breathing, sleep, urine and stools, sputum, whether or not the patient is coughing, sneezing, has flatulence or lesions, and so on. Treatment did not only include diet, but might also entail bathing or massage, and many herbal remedies, including emetics, to promote vomiting, and expectorants to produce coughing. But Hippocrates was probably even more famous for his oath, which was taken on adoption into his school. The chief features of the oath were to always put the patient first, never to give poison or procure abortion, or to use one’s position of authority to seduce ‘male or female, slave or free’. The oath covers patient–client confidentiality in such detail that it has secured a high status for doctors for most of history.

It does not take much imagination to see how shocking all this would have been for people to whom the heavenly bodies and winds were gods, or agents of the gods. Moves were made against these ‘advanced’ intellectuals, as holy men sought to impeach them and Aristophanes famously lampooned them in The Clouds. But the new ideas were part of an evolving culture in the Greek poleis. Geoffrey Lloyd has shown, for instance, that a word like ‘witness’, as used in the Athenian courts, was also the root for ‘evidence’ as used by early scientists, and the term ‘cross-examination’ likewise was adapted to describe the testing of a hypothesis.⁴⁰

The birth of reflection in Ionia, what some modern scholars call Ionian Positivism, or the Ionian Enlightenment, occurred in a dual form: science and philosophy. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes can all be regarded as the earliest philosophers as well as the earliest scientists. Both science and philosophy stemmed from the idea that there was a kosmos that was logical, part of a natural order that could, given time, be understood. Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin say that the Greek philosophers invented the very concept of nature ‘to underline their superiority over poets and religious leaders’.⁴¹

Thales and his immediate followers had sought answers to these questions by observation, but it was Parmenides, born c. 515 BC in Elea (Velia) in southern Italy, then part of Magna Graecia, who first invented a recognisably ‘philosophical’ method, as we would understand that term today. His achievement is difficult to gauge because only about 160 lines of a poem, On Nature, have survived. But he was a great sceptic, in particular about the unity of reality and the method of observation as a way to understand it. Instead, he preferred to work things through by means of raw thought, purely mental processes, what he called noema. In believing that this was a viable alternative to scientific observation, he established a division in mental life that exists to this day.⁴²

Parmenides became known as a sophist. To begin with, this essentially meant a wise man (sophos), or lover of wisdom (philo-sophos), but our modern term, philosopher, conceals the very practical nature of the sophists in ancient Greece. As classicist Michael Grant tells it, sophists were the first form of higher education – in the Western world at least – developing into teachers who travelled around giving instruction in return for a fee. Such instruction varied from rhetoric (so that pupils could be articulate in political discussion in the Assembly, a quality much admired in Greece), to mathematics, logic, grammar, politics, and astronomy. Because they travelled around, and had many different pupils, in differing circumstances, the sophists became adept at arguing different points of view, and in time this bred a scepticism about their approach. It wasn’t helped by the sophists’ continued stress on the difference between physis, nature, and nomos, the laws of Greece. (It was in their interests to stress this division because the laws of nature were inflexible, whereas the laws of the land could be modified and improved by educated people – i.e., the very students they taught, and received income from.) Thus sophistry, which began as a love of wisdom and knowledge, came to embody ‘cunning reason, designed to put bad arguments in a good light’.⁴³

The most renowned of the Greek sophists was Protagoras of Abdera in Thrace (c. 490/485–after 421/411 BC). His scepticism extended even to the gods. ‘I know nothing about the gods, either that they are or they are not, or what are their shapes.’⁴⁴ (Xenophanes had also been sceptical: he asked why the gods should have human form. On that basis, horses would worship horse gods. He thought there might just as easily be one god as many.⁴⁵) Protagoras is probably best remembered, however, for another statement, that ‘the human being is the measure of all things: of things that are, that they are; and things that are not, that they are not.’

This is how philosophy started, but there are three great Greek philosophers whose names everyone knows – Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. In his book on Protagoras, Plato described Socrates (c. 470–399 BC) making fun of the sophists who he said were more interested in verbal pyrotechnics than genuine learning. But, like Parmenides and Protagoras, Socrates also turned away from scientific observation and concentrated more on what might be achieved by raw thought. However, he never wrote any books and what we know about him is largely due to Plato and to Aristophanes who portrayed Socrates, unflatteringly, in two plays. He is remembered now primarily for three reasons: his conviction that there is an eternal and unchanging ‘absolute standard’ as to what is good and right, the belief that all nature works towards a purpose, which is the apprehension of this ‘standard’; that to discover this standard one must above all know oneself; and his ‘Socratic method’ of questioning everything and everyone he came across (‘the unexamined life is not worth living’). Socrates played more than word games, though; he believed he had a mission from the gods to make people think and so he played mental games to provoke people into questioning all that they took for granted. His aim was to help people lead a good and fulfilling life but his mischievous methods led eventually to his trial on charges of mocking democracy and public morality, and of corrupting the youth, by teaching them to disobey their parents. When he was found guilty, he was allowed by law to suggest the penalty. Had he chosen exile this would surely have been granted. But, contentious as ever, he said that what he really deserved was maintenance for life as a public benefactor but that he would agree to a fine. The jury was insulted and ordered him – by a larger majority than had convicted him – to commit suicide. After a delay when, according to Plato, he spoke eloquently on the soul, he drank hemlock at sundown.⁴⁶

Plato, who was born c. 429 BC, originally wanted to be a poet but around 407 he met Socrates, was inspired by the older man and decided to devote himself to philosophy. He travelled a lot, in southern Italy and Sicily, and is reported to have had a number of adventures, in one of which he may have been detained at Aegina, and released only after paying a ransom. Returning to Athens, he founded his famous Academy, about a kilometre outside the city, beyond the Dipylon gate, named in honour of the hero Academus, whose tomb was nearby. (There would be four prominent schools in Athens: the Academy, the Lyceum, the Stoa – home of the Stoics – and the Garden of Epicurus.) Apart from his championing, and reporting, of Socrates’ views, Plato shows all the strengths and weaknesses of the ‘raw thought’ approach to understanding the world. He had a fantastic range and, unlike Socrates, he wrote many books. In the Phaedo, he defends his theory that the soul is immortal (discussed in the last chapter); in the Timaeus (an astronomer) he explores his famous theory of the origins of life, recounted as the myth of the imaginary continent of Atlantis and how the Athenians defeated the invasion of the bull-worshipping sea-power. Plato then lapses into his familiar mystical intuitionism when he says that Timaeus introduced God as the intelligent, effective cause of the whole world and its moral order, but ruling at times in ways that we can never know.⁴⁷ The Timaeus would find echoes in Christianity (see below, Chapter 8).

With great inventiveness, Plato also contemplated the mathematicisation of nature. The cosmos, he said, was the handiwork of a benevolent craftsman, a rational god, the Demiurge, the personification of reason. He it was who had created order out of chaos and, taking over Empedocles’ idea of the four roots – earth, water, air and fire – and under Pythagoras’ influence also, Plato reduced everything to triangles. Equilateral triangles were the basic entity of the world, he said. This ‘geometrical atomisation’ explained both stability and change. It was already known in Plato’s day that there are only five regular geometrical solids: the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the icosahedron (twenty equilateral triangles), the cube, and the dodecahedron (twelve pentagons). Plato linked each of these with the roots: fire = tetrahedron; air = octahedron; water = icosahedron; earth (the most stable) = cube. The dodecahedron, he said, was identified with the cosmos as a whole. What matters here is not the slippery way Plato links the five shapes with the four roots, and ropes in the cosmos to even up the numbers, or the way he conveniently ignores the fact that a cube is not composed of equilateral triangles; instead, Plato’s proposal that each of these solids (the ‘Platonic solids’) could be decomposed into triangles and resurrected in different ways, to produce different substances, develops and refines the ideas of a basic material in the universe, beneath appearances, which accounts for stability and change at the same time. This is not so very different from the view we have now.⁴⁸

But the heart of Plato’s doctrine, where he is at his most influential but also his most mystical, was the theory of ‘ideas’. This word, which really means ‘forms’, was first used by Democritus to designate atoms, but Plato gave it an entirely new twist. Plato seems to have believed that he was building on both Socrates and the Pythagoreans: Socrates had argued that virtue existed in and of itself, independently of virtuous people; the Pythagoreans had revealed abstract order, the pattern of numbers underlying the universe. To this Plato added his own contribution, first and foremost related to beauty. He conceived it possible to proceed from contemplation of one beautiful body to another, and another, to the notion that there existed, in another realm, ideal beauty, the idea in its purest form. The pure essence of the Beautiful (and other forms, like Goodness and Truth) became available to the initiated through study, self-knowledge, intuition, and love. For Plato, the world of being was organised at four levels: shadows, perceptible objects, mathematical objects and ideas. In the same way, knowledge existed in four states: illusion, belief, mathematical knowledge, and dialectic (inquiry, discussion, study, criticism) – which eventually provided access to ‘the supreme world of ideas’.⁴⁹

This all-embracing theory even encompassed politics as Plato tried to imagine the ideal city. In the Republic, he dismissed the four ‘impure’ forms of government (timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny) and in their place imagined a system where the specific aim was to produce ideal governors. Initially, men must be free to develop themselves as Socrates had indicated, so women and children were held in common. This freed men to pursue a strict system of education: gymnastics (from the age of seventeen to twenty); the theory of numbers (twenty to thirty years); and finally the theory of ideas (thirty to thirty-five years). The graduate of this system would thus be fit to fulfil office between the ages of thirty-five and fifty, when he would retire to his studies.⁵⁰ In the Laws Plato carried his theories much further. Here too he envisaged an early form of communism of possessions, women and children. The main aim now was to protect the individual from ‘the tumultuous attractions of his instincts’ and so regulations were rampant. Education, heavily weighted to mathematics, was the prerogative of the state. Liberty all but disappeared: women inspectors could enter young households at will. Pederasty was proscribed (a great innovation this), as were journeys abroad for those under the age of fifty. At the same time, religion was compulsory – unbelievers were shut up in a ‘house of correction’ for five years, until they saw reason. Those judged incorrigible were put to death.⁵¹

To the modern reader, the mystical intuitionism of Plato is as maddening as his energy, consistency and breadth of interests are impressive. His writing embraced everything from psychology and eschatology to ethics and politics. His importance lies in his influence, in particular the attempts in Alexandria in the first century AD, by Philo and the Fathers of the Church, to marry the Old Testament and Plato into a new wisdom which, it was believed, Christianity ‘brought to completion’ (see Chapter 8, below). Plato’s intuition, about hidden worlds, the immortality of the soul, and his idea that the soul was a separate substance, were elaborated by Christian Neoplatonists down the ages.⁵² That same intuition would irritate later philosophers (such as Karl Popper) who thought its inherent anti-scientific approach did as much harm as good. This issue is discussed in the Conclusion.

‘Aristotle is the colossus whose works both illuminate and cast a shadow on European thought in the next two thousand years.’⁵³ And, as Daniel Boorstin also says, ‘Who would have guessed that Plato’s most famous disciple would become (in words attributed to Plato) “the foal that kicks its mother”?’

Aristotle (384–322) was a very practical man who had little time for Plato’s more intuitive and mystical side. Nor was he enamoured of the emphasis at the Academy on mathematics. (Over the entrance, so legend has it, was the inscription: ‘Only geometers may enter.’) He came from a family of doctors and his father, Nicomachus, was the personal physician to the king of Macedonia, Amyntas, who was the father of Philip of Macedon and grandfather of Alexander the Great. After he was orphaned, Aristotle was sent to Athens for his education, where he arrived in 367 BC, when he was seventeen. He joined Plato’s academy but all his life he was an outsider. As a ‘metic’, a resident foreigner, he could not own real estate in Athens.⁵⁴ He remained at the Academy for more than twenty years (no fees were charged and a scholar could remain for as long as he was able to support himself), leaving only at Plato’s death in 347 BC. Fortune then smiled on him, however, for at that time Philip of Macedon was looking for a tutor for his son, Alexander. ‘It was an encounter that should have sparked more consequences than it did: the West’s most influential philosopher in close contact with the future conqueror of vast stretches of the Middle East, the largest empire of the West before Roman times.’ In fact, Aristotle got more out of it than did Alexander the Great. Bertrand Russell thought that the young Alexander ‘must have been bored by the prosy old pedant set over him by his father to keep him out of mischief’.⁵⁵ For his part, Aristotle was doubly rewarded by the Macedonians. He was well paid (dying a rich man), and they aided his researches into natural history by having the royal gamekeepers tag the wild animals of the area so he could follow their movements. In Macedonia, Aristotle also forged a friendship with the general Antipater that would prove decisive later on.

After Alexander acceded to the throne in Macedonia, in 336 BC, Aristotle returned to Athens. It was now more than ten years since Plato had died and the Academy was much changed. But Aristotle was by then rich enough to set up his own teaching centre in the Lyceum, a grove and gymnasium about a kilometre from the Agora of Athens. There it became the practice for Aristotle to stroll on the public walkway (peripatos) talking philosophy with his students ‘until it was time for their rubbing with oil’. Like the Academy, the Lyceum had a number of lecture rooms but it also had a library: according to tradition, Aristotle put together the first systematically arranged collection of books. (He may well have believed that all knowledge could fit into a coherent whole, though the present arrangement of his books was made by the Romans in the first century AD.) In the mornings he gave lectures for serious scholars, but the evenings were open to anyone. The day was completed by Symposia, or festive dinners, conducted according to rules that Aristotle himself drew up.⁵⁶ These dinners were an Athens institution, the equivalent of clubs in later ages. There were rules/fashions governing even the way the couches were arranged and how the wine was served.

Aristotle spent more than a decade at the Lyceum. During that time he wrote and lectured on a vast repertoire of subjects, no less impressive than Plato’s in its range, reaching from logic and politics to poetry and biology. His attempt to classify everything, and to count what he could, also made him our first encyclopaedist. The irony is that Aristotle’s ‘published’ works (as we would say) have not survived. What has come down to us are his morning lectures, added to and annotated by his students.⁵⁷ Aristotle was forced to leave Athens when, in the summer of 323 BC, news arrived of the death of Alexander. The Athenian Assembly immediately declared war on Antipater, Aristotle’s former friend and patron, who was by now the general in charge in Macedonia. Aristotle, the ‘metic’, was seen as a Macedonian and so was immediately suspect and he fled to Chalcis, a Macedonian stronghold. This at least had the effect, as Aristotle himself aptly observed, of preventing the Athenians from ‘sinning twice against philosophy’.⁵⁸ He died a year later, aged sixty-three, still in Chalcis.

Bertrand Russell thought that Aristotle was ‘the first [philosopher] to write like a professor . . . a professional teacher, not an inspired prophet’. In place of Plato’s mysticism, Aristotle substituted a shrewd common sense.⁵⁹ The most striking contrast to Plato’s approach came in politics. Instead of Plato’s intuitive outline of an ideal commonwealth, Aristotle’s theories were solidly founded on research – for example, his assistant’s descriptions of 158 different political systems, covering the Mediterranean world from Marseilles to Cyprus. His survey convinced him that the ideal city did not exist, could not exist. No constitution was perfect, governments were bound to differ ‘on climate, geographical conditions and historical precedents’. He himself preferred a form of democracy open only to educated men.⁶⁰

His aptitude for classifying the natural world, though imaginative, also acted as a straitjacket for later generations, especially in biology. He subscribed to the view that there was an underlying unity in nature. ‘The observed facts show that nature is not a series of episodes, like a bad tragedy’ (Metaphysics).⁶¹ But at the same time he thought that nature was constantly changing. ‘So, goodbye to the Forms. They are idle prattle, and if they do exist are wholly irrelevant.’ In fact, Aristotle turned Plato upside-down. For example, for him the existence of musicians did not depend on some Idea called Music. Abstractions don’t really exist, in the way that trees or animals do. They exist only in the mind. ‘Musicianship cannot exist unless there are musicians.’⁶²

If he had a mystical side, it lay in his tendency to see purpose everywhere; he thought for instance that every species of animal fulfilled some special purpose, that it existed for a reason: ‘Nature does nothing in vain.’ But for the most part he strained to be logical – indeed, he can claim to be the founder of logic. He called it analytics but either way he was the first to explain deductive reasoning, the science of drawing conclusions from premises in formal syllogisms. He thought this was a basic tool for understanding any subject.⁶³ Logic led his thinking about animals, and in two ways. With the help of those Macedonian gamekeepers he described (in meticulous detail) and classified more than 400 species of animal. For example:

The eight ‘great categories’ of the animal kingdom according to Aristotle

I

Animals with red blood

1

Two species: bipeds and quadrupeds

Two species: bipeds and quadrupeds

2–4

Oviparous:

2

Birds: eight species

3

Reptiles

4

Fish

II

Animals with white blood

5

with soft bodies (cephalpoda)

6

with soft bodies covered by scales (crustaceans)

7

with soft bodies covered with a shell (gasteropoda)

8

insects (nine species) and worms.

Logic (not to mention common sense) also led him to dissect animals, because this would enable him to describe their internal anatomy. This reinforced his view that life was a unity; he showed that, inside, animals were not that different from man, or from each other.⁶⁴

His view of being – existence – was also fairly commonsensical. It had ten aspects: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, possession, action, passion. The only mystical element related to substance which had two sides to it: action, ‘when its form was realised’; and potential, before realisation had occurred. When a sculptor turned raw bronze into the finished piece, he ‘realised’ the substance.⁶⁵ This too reflected Aristotle’s obsession with purpose.

Change and purpose applied to humans and animals. His idea of God was the opposite. Amid all this change, over and above and around it, he proclaimed an unmoved mover which was God. God, he said, was pure thought, pure action, ‘without matter, accident or development’. Everything in the universe aspired to this state, which he said equated to true beauty, intelligence and harmony. This harmony was the aim of learning and here he was, perhaps, closest to Plato.⁶⁶ The collection of lectures in which these views appear was called by Aristotle himself ‘first’ or ‘primary’ philosophy. Later editors, however, placed this material after another collection on Physics and they became known as Meta ta physika. This is where our word ‘metaphysics’ comes from.⁶⁷

Nowhere is Aristotle’s common sense more in evidence than in his treatise on ethics. Everyone wanted happiness, he said, but it was a mistake to look for it in pleasure, wealth and respect, as most citizens understood it. Happiness, harmony – virtue – came from behaviour that was consistent with the nature of man, in other words in behaving reasonably. Happiness involved control over the passions; one should always seek in life an average position, halfway between opposing excesses. As Pierre Leveque says, Aristotle was later accused of being ‘dry’ (writing like a professor, as Russell put it) but even if this is true (and all we have are his notebooks, remember), his ability to stay close to the real, the particular, and the commonsensical far outweigh any shortcomings on this score. For him, humans were born with potential and, given the use of reason and the right upbringing/education, could be ethically good. This was the very opposite of what would become the Christian view under St Augustine and the notion of original sin.

The very same preoccupations of philosophy were a major concern of tragic drama, a unique and particular glory of Athens. ‘Other cities under democracies had developed comedy, but tragedy was the invention of Athens alone.’⁶⁸ ‘This tragic poetry, even though the music and dancing which were essential to its performance are lost, remains one of the decisive theatrical and literary innovations and achievements of all time. It was designed to express the deepest thoughts of which men and women are capable, and in particular, to examine and assess their relationships with the divine powers.’⁶⁹

Though the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides – the only tragic authors whose works have survived – are classics to us, to the Athenians of ancient Greece they were brand new, exploiting and reflecting the new realities of democracy, science and military tactics. The new wisdom had put man into a new relation, both with the gods and with his fellow men. In classical tragedy, human nature is pitted against the nature of the gods, free will set against destiny. Though man always loses – killed or banished through his ignorance or defiance of the gods, or his hubris, his arrogant self-confidence – death is used in tragedy as a device to concentrate the mind, to provoke thought and reflection as to why it comes about. Though direct links between tragedy and contemporary politics are hard to discern, they are there. The drama in Athens exemplifies a stage in the evolution of man’s self-consciousness: is self-confidence, as reflected in the advances in science and philosophy and politics and law the same as arrogance? What is the true place for the gods, amid all this new knowledge?

The development of Athenian theatre was a direct effect of a long period of prosperity. We infer there was prosperity in Athens because this was a time that saw the planting of many olive trees. Since olive trees do not produce their fruit for about thirty years, their planting indicates that people were, at the least, optimistic about the future. The growth in the export of olive oil also encouraged the development of pottery, in which the oil was transported. About 535 BC came the invention of red-figure vase painting. Hitherto, black figures had been painted on vases, with the details incised. Now the whole surface was blackened, with figures picked out in the natural red. This allowed much more variety and realism.⁷⁰ But the prosperity brought about by the international trade in olive oil spread to the peasants and it was their rituals, with choral song and mimic dancing, celebrating Dionysus, god of the vine, whose blood was shed for the service of men, that formed the basis of early theatre. When Dionysus was worshipped, the usual sacrifice was a goat and the ritual itself was known as the trag-odia, or Goat-Song. Thus there is a direct link between sacrifice and tragedy: this primitive ritual lives on in our most powerful form of theatre. In the beginning, trag-odia was a purely religious celebration, with a single celebrant, called the Responder, who narrated the Birth of the Divine Child and ‘the calculations of his enemies’. In between episodes, a chorus sang and danced (it was their role to highlight issues raised by the Responder for general contemplation).⁷¹ Before long, innovations proliferated. Narratives were taken from gods other than Dionysus, and dialogue was introduced, usually between the Responder and the leader of the chorus. Around 534 BC, Thespis introduced a further change: the solo voice, or hypokrites, now made successive entries, each time changing his costume and mask in the dressing tent, or skēnē (our word scene). In this way the solo voice represented different characters, adding to the complexity of the narrative, and his speeches were delivered accompanied by the music of a double flute. The chorus, which still occupied the stage most of the time, sang or danced the emotions evoked by the developing story.

There was an annual festival of Dionysus at Athens, held in the shadow of the Acropolis and here the tragic drama became established as a regular occurrence. Prizes were offered for the best plays and for technical innovation: Thespis was an early winner, for his skēnē, and Phrynichus also won for introducing roles for women (though the characters were always played by men). In their explorations of character, plot and counter-plot, it became the custom for playwrights to compose tetralogies, which comprised three tragedies and a satire.⁷²

The first of the three great Athenian tragedians was Aeschylus (525/524–456 BC), with his ‘rich and pregnant’ language. He introduced a second actor, which made dialogue less stilted, more realistic, adding to the tension, and he was also alive to the dramatic possibilities in delay.⁷³ The early plays had not much drama, or revelation, or excitement, as we would understand the terms. Usually, the central dilemma was given early on and the rest of the play revolved around the reactions of the characters. But in The Persians, for example, Aeschylus delays the main development for 300 lines. Even so the climax occurs before the play has reached its mid-point.⁷⁴ Seventy-two tragedies by Aeschylus are recorded in one catalogue, but only seven have come down to us.

Sophocles (c. 496–406 BC) was the son of Sophilus, a successful arms manufacturer from Colonus outside Athens. He may have studied under Aeschylus and knew Pericles, who saw to it that Sophocles was given a number of important posts: collector of tribute, general, priest, ambassador. When he turned to writing he was no less fortunate: his 120 plays won twenty-four awards and it is a tragedy in itself that – again – only seven survive.⁷⁵ But his plays introduced two innovations over and above those of Aeschylus. First he allowed a third actor to appear, adding complexity and depth to his plotting. No less important, his plots used myths that were very familiar to his audiences. This allowed him to develop and refine the technique of ‘tragic irony’ – when the audience knows what will happen but the characters do not. This stimulated tension and encouraged reflection in his audiences as they compared the human view of predicaments with the established perspective of the gods and destiny. Such ambiguity was part of the attraction and still appeals, even today. Aristotle saw Oedipus Rex as the greatest play of all for its concern with self-knowledge and ignorance and for its dramatic tension; and of course its influence is felt in our own day, thanks to Freud and the Oedipus complex. Sophocles’ main point, however, was that man is often trapped by forces greater than he. Heroes can fail.

Euripides (485/480–406 BC), the third of the great tragedians, was more colloquial, more strident. He came from a family of hereditary priests and in Athens was much more of an outsider than Sophocles: his ninety or so plays won few prizes. The best known is Medea, a work that deals with a novel theme in Greek drama: the terrible passions that can transform a woman who has been dealt a great wrong. His aim is less to show the difference between hubris and other emotions than to show how human personality can deteriorate in response to vengeance and retribution. Euripides is more interested in the calculated venalities of humans than the more arbitrary and wayward power of the gods. Love, and the victims of love, especially women, are a major preoccupation. As a result, under Euripides the individual assumes larger importance than before and psychology takes centre-stage over destiny.⁷⁶ (Medea was not Greek, but an outsider from the Black Sea, so in this play there may also have been references to ‘barbarian’ behaviour. See Chapter 10 below.)

The works of Homer, and the great tragedians, were based on myth. There was a fair measure of real history included, but no one knew just how much. It is, however, also to the Greeks’ credit that they invented history proper, an emancipation from myth if still not quite history as we know it today.

Herodotus (c. 480–425) is generally described as ‘the father of history’ though he probably loved a good story too much to be completely reliable. He came from a family of poets at Halicarnassus, now Bodrum in Turkey, on the Aegean coast. He set himself the task of writing about the wars of Greece, first the battles between Athens and Sparta, then the invasions of the Greek mainland by the forces of the Persian kings, Darius I (490) and Xerxes I (480–479). Herodotus chose these for the simple reason that he believed they were the most important events that had ever taken place. Apart from his basic idea, of writing history as opposed to myth, his work stands out for three reasons. There was his research method (the original meaning of historia was ‘research’): he travelled widely, consulting archives and eyewitnesses where he could, checking land surveys (to get the names right, and the shapes of battlefields) and literary sources. There was his approach, distilled from Homer, of conceding that both sides had stories worth telling, with their own heroes, skilful commanders, clever weapons and tactics. And third, he was obsessed – as were Homer and the tragedians – by hubris. He thought that all men who ‘soared high’ must be tainted by an arrogance that would provoke the gods.⁷⁷ This, and his belief in divine intervention, invalidated many of his arguments about the causes and outcomes of battles. But this accorded more or less with the understanding of his readers and his lucid style (and sheer hard work) ensured that his book was extremely popular.

Thucydides (c. 460/455–c. 400) made two more innovations. He selected a war theme also but he chose a battle of his own time: in effect, he invented contemporary history. He too thought that the Peloponnesian War (431–404, between Athens and Sparta) was the most important thing that had ever happened. He did not have Herodotus’ eye for anecdote but – and this was his second innovation – he allowed little or no place for the gods in war. ‘Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides attached primary importance in military affairs to intelligence. The word gnome, meaning understanding or judgement, appears more than three hundred times in the book and intelligent men are singled out for praise time and again, notably Themistocles, Pericles and Theramenes.’⁷⁸ This allowed Thucydides to achieve the penetrating insight that the war had two sets of origins, the proximate causes and the underlying ones, which he identified as Sparta’s fear of Athenian expansion. Such a distinction, between immediate causes and basic realities, ignoring the gods, was a major advance in political thinking. ‘In this sense Thucydides has also been called the founder of political history.’⁷⁹

Just as prosperity was a factor in Greek drama, so peace helped create the golden age of classical art. By 450 BC, roughly speaking, Athens was secure again after a period of war. She had managed this by putting herself at the head of a confederacy in which the other city-states paid her tribute in return for her navy defending them against any attack from outside, in particular from the Persians. In 454 Pericles, the great Athenian general and leader, set aside a proportion of this tribute for extensive rebuilding after the ravages of earlier wars: his aim was to make Athens a show-place for Greece.⁸⁰ She would never look so splendid again.

In art and architecture, a number of purely pragmatic or technical advances had been made at the end of the sixth century/beginning of the fifth: the triangular pediment had been invented, together with square metopes, various forms of distinctive column, caryatids (female figures acting as supports for the pediments), town-planning, and red figures on pottery. And, as happened at other times in history (the High Renaissance, for example), a greater than usual number of talents were alive at more or less the same time: Euphronius, Euthymides, Myron, Phidias, Polyclitus, Polygnotus, the Berlin, Niobid and Achilles Painters (whose actual names are not known, but who are named for their most distinguished works). This happy set of circumstances resulted in a golden age for art, the very world that we now revere as ‘classical’. It produced the telesterion at Eleusis, the temples of Poseidon at Sounium and of Nemesis at Rhamnus, the famous temple of Zeus at Olympia and its statue, the bronze charioteer from Delphi, the temple of Apollo at Bassae, but above all in Athens the Odeon (the original, not the one there now) and the temples of Hephaestus and Dionysus, not to mention a completely new arrangement for the sacred hill of the acropolis, which we know as the Parthenon. These temples, of course, are not one work of art each, but very many.

The great temple of the Parthenon was built on a site that had always been dedicated to Athena, the guardian goddess of the city (full name Athena Polias. The name Athena Parthenos meant she had been later amalgamated with the ancient virgin fertility goddess). Its architect, Ictinus, and master-builder, Callicrates, devised a number of optical illusions in their design to make the temple more striking (for example, the columns lean slightly inward and are laid in a shallow convex line, to make the lines seem longer). They combined the more robust Doric colonnades with more slender, elegant Ionic friezes and so arranged the main temple and entrance (the Propylaea) for maximum visual effect. The success of the Parthenon, with the ‘Critian Boy’ statue and the Erechtheum, and the Greek style in general, may be judged from the fact that it is by far the most imitated style the world over.

Phidias, the sculptor who masterminded the reliefs for the friezes and the free-standing figures in the temple, was only the first of three who made mid-century statuary famous in Athens – the others were Myron and Polyclitus. Phidias’ frieze (which he designed and then had as many as seventy other sculptors execute) was originally 520 feet long – 420 of which survive, mainly in the British Museum in London. It depicts Athens’ most famous festival, the Great Panathenaea in which, every four years, the new robe of the great goddess, woven by the citizens’ daughters, was brought to the Acropolis. The two pediments of the temple show the birth of Athena and her conflict with Poseidon, the sea god, for control of Attica. But Phidias’ masterpiece was the free-standing Athena Parthenos, forty feet tall and made (perhaps the first of its kind) of gold and ivory (chryselephantinon). Like so much else, she has been lost but is known from Pausanias’ description, small copies, and coins. About her shoulders she wears her miracle-working short goatskin cloak, her aegis. Phidias depicted himself on her shield (as a bald man), a bad case of hubris forcing him to flee to Olympia where he designed a second gold and ivory statue, of Zeus. This was later removed to Constantinople, where it burned in a fire. But again we know what it looked like from coins and replicas. Its expression was so sublime and gentle, it was said, ‘that it could console the deepest sorrow’ and was regarded as one of the seven wonders of the world.⁸¹

At its highest, classical statuary represents ‘ideal realism’, beauty that ought to exist. Its two main forms are the male nude (kouros) and the draped female, usually a deity (kore). The male nude appears to have originated from Naxos and Paros, islands rich in limestone and marble, which enabled the creation of large-scale images. The female figure developed in Athens but only after the flight of Ionians to the city following the Persian invasion of 546 BC.⁸² The tradition of the kouros starts from the fact that, in ancient Greece, athletic contests were a form of worship: in taking part in the games, Greek athletes were competing in a religious ceremony. There was thus a mystical aspect to competition but, more important from an artistic point of view, bodies – athletic male bodies in particular – were seen in a religious light. The perfectly formed body was viewed as a virtue, an attribute of someone with godlike powers. Artists therefore sought to show bodies as real as possible, in the way in which the muscles and hair and genitals or feet or eyes were represented; but at the same time they combined the best parts of different people, to create humans who were also, in effect, superhuman in their beauty – gods. This clearly owed a lot to Plato’s theory of forms. The most famous is Myron’s ‘Discus Thrower’ (Discobolus) which was probably part of a group and also survives only in Roman copies. The tense moment before the athlete explodes into action is beautifully caught. In rational Athens it was a virtue to have one’s passions under control, as the gods did. Likewise the statues.⁸³

Red-figure vases seem to have been introduced in Athens around 530 BC. The colour scheme is the exact opposite of what went before: instead of a black figure on a red ground (the fine Ceramicus clay in Attica was rich in iron, which gave it its colour), we have a red figure on a black ground. At the same time, the brush replaced the incisor. This enabled far more detail to be included and a greater flexibility in subject matter, poses, and comment.⁸⁴ Greek vases were popular all over the ancient Mediterranean world: their subject matter was partly myth, but also, partly, scenes of everyday life – weddings, burials, love scenes, athletic games, people gossiping at the well. They show what earrings people wore, how they bound up their penises, prior to athletic combat, what musical instruments were played, what hairstyles were fashionable. In the fifth century, the Athenian poet Critias listed the most distinguished products of the different states: the furniture of Chios and Miletus, the gold cups and decorative bronzes of Etruria, the chariots of Thebes, the alphabet of the Phoenicians, and from Athens the potter’s wheel and ‘the child of the clay and oven, the finest pottery, the household’s blessing’.⁸⁵

The development of Greek painting can perhaps be seen best in the evolution of vase decoration, from the ‘pioneer’ style of Euphronius, through the Niobid Painter, to the Berlin Painter and his pupil the Achilles Painter. Drawing and subject matter become ever freer and more varied, never quite losing their tenderness and restrained ambience. Although often very beautiful, these objects are documents before they are works of art. No ancient people has given us such an intimate account of themselves as the Greeks did in their vase painting. It may be the first form of popular art.

Sir John Boardman has also made the point that, for the Greeks, the experience of art was not as our own. There was a uniformity in classical Greece that we would find taxing, ‘as if all twenty-first-century cities were comprised of art nouveau buildings’. On the other hand, all the art of Greece was finished to a high degree – there was nothing ‘shoddy or cheap’ about the experience of art in Greece. Probably, much public art was taken for granted: the mythological stories were well known, literacy was low, and so sculpture in particular would be a form of ever-present, pre-Herodotus history.⁸⁶

In classical art, two things go together. There is first the sheer observation of the natural world, from the finest points of anatomy and musculature to the arrangement of flowers in a nosegay, the expressions of horror, lust or slyness, the movement of dogs, horses or musicians, much of it not lacking a sense of humour either. There was a down-to-earth quality about all this, and a growing mastery over the materials used. This is most clearly shown in the way drapery is handled in sculpture. Greek sculptors became masters in the way they represented clothing in stone, the way it fell, so as to both conceal and reveal the human form underneath. (The figure of a woman touching her sandal from the temple of Athena Nike, in the Acropolis, is a superb example.) But, beneath and beyond this observation and realism, there was a restrained quality, a serene harmony of the figures, a ‘bridled passion’ which the Greeks valued because it epitomised their achievement – the discovery of the intellect, or reason, as a way forward.⁸⁷ This restraint is sometimes misconceived as an emotional coldness and, certainly, in the centuries which followed, ‘classicism’ and ‘romanticism’ have often been contrasted, as opposing forms of sensibility. But this is to misconceive the Greeks, and classicism. They made a distinction between techne, what artists knew, and sophia, what poets and musicians knew, but they were not passionless. One of Phrynichus’ plays, The Taking of Miletus, made the Athenians weep so much that it had to be banned.⁸⁸ The Greeks valued calm because they knew where passion could lead. (Plato wanted to ‘silence’ emotion because it interfered with cool, rational thought.) This is what classicism is all about.

Many gods in classical Greece were female – not least Athena herself. But ideas about women, sex and gender were very different from now and women played almost no role in public life. They were not full citizens, so had no direct part in politics, they owned no property, and they belonged to their fathers until marriage, after which they were the property of their husbands. If a woman’s father died, she became the property of his next male kin. When a husband went out at night to attend symposia – fashionable dinners with serious conversation – his wife stayed at home: female company was provided by hetairai, cultured women brought in expressly. Aristotle was only one ancient Greek who believed that women were inferior to men.⁸⁹ One scholar has claimed that the Greek masculine world was nervous about women, as ‘a defiling element’ who, in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, are put there to ‘subvert the orderliness of male society’.⁹⁰ In recent years there has been a vast amount of scholarship on gender in ancient Greece. The overall message appears to be that there was a tension between the idea of the home-loving, child-bearing woman and the wild, unrestrained emotional woman (like Medea).

The sculptor Praxiteles (middle of the fourth century BC) introduced the female nude into Western art – what was to become, probably, the single most popular subject of all time. In the process he refined the technique of marble carving, producing smooth planes that depicted skin, female skin especially, with great realism and the hint, more than the hint, of eroticism. Praxiteles’ statue of Aphrodite for Cnidus, c. 364/361, on the Turkish coast, was described by the Elder Pliny as ‘the finest statue ever made anywhere in the world’.⁹¹ It was certainly one of the most influential, although it is now lost.

Whatever the reason for the classical Greek attitude to women, male homosexuality in Greece was far more common, more so than now. Right across the country, and not just in Athens, male partnerships between an older man and his younger beloved were regarded as the norm (which is another reason why classical sculpture consists of so many male nudes, or kouroi). Plato has Phaedrus argue that ‘the most formidable army in the world’ would comprise pairs of male lovers and, indeed, in the fourth century BC, something just like this was actually established – the Theban Sacred Band – and won the battle of Leuctra. ‘A whole educational philosophy was built around such relationships.’⁹² As with gender studies, there has been an explosion of scholarship in this area.

Given the importance of the Greek legacy, it is perhaps necessary to point out here that, three times recently, scholars have claimed that the Greeks themselves were heavily influenced from outside. The first time was in 1984 when the German historian Walter Burkhart identified a number of specific areas of Greek life and thought that had been shaped by Middle Eastern civilisations. He argued, for instance, that the Hebrew and Assyrian names for Greeks, respectively Jawan and Iawan, or Ionian, showed unmistakable contact between specific areas. In the Odyssey Homer mentioned Phoinikes, men of Sidon, as producers of costly metal vessels. The hoplite weaponry is closely linked to Assyrian arms. The Greek names for the letters of the alphabet (alpha, beta, gamma), are Semitic words, as are many loan words: chrysos (= gold), chiton (= garment, related to cotton). The Akkadian unit of weight, mena, became the Greek mna, and harasu, to scratch or incise, became charaxai, which eventually became the English word ‘character’, an incised letter. The idea of the Hippocratic oath was derived from Babylonian magicians, says Burkhart, as well as the practice of interring guardian figures under buildings (which, as we have seen, began in the Natufian culture). More controversially, Asclepius may be Az(u)gallat(u), ‘the great physician’ in Akkadian, while Lamia may be Lamashtu, the Near Eastern demoness. Finally (though Burkhart gives rafts of other examples), he finds parallels between the Odyssey and the Iliad, on the one hand, and Gilgamesh on the other.⁹³

More recently, and even more controversially, Martin Bernal, a professor of government at Columbia University in New York, has argued, in Black Athena, that northern Africa, in particular ancient Egypt – several dynasties of whom were black – was the predominant influence on classical Greece. He argued that the bull cult started in Egypt before transferring to Crete in the Minoan civilisation. He too looked at loan words and at parallels between, for example, Egyptian writing and Aeschylus’ The Supplicants. Kephisos, the name for rivers and streams all over Greece, he derives from Kbh, ‘a common Egyptian river name, “fresh”.’ In a chapter on Athens, he argues that the name is derived from the Egyptian HtNt: ‘In antiquity, Athena was constantly identified with the Egyptian goddess, Nt or Neit. Both were virgin divinities of water, weaving and wisdom.’ And so on into pottery styles, military terms and the meaning of sphinxes.⁹⁴ Bernal was even more heavily criticised than Allan Bloom was, for poor scholarship and faulty interpretation of dates and data, and for not delivering later volumes as promised.

The third time that outside influence on Greece has been advanced comes from M. L. West, in The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (1997). West confirms a heavy overlap between, for example, Gilgamesh and the Iliad, between Gilgamesh and Odysseus, and between Sappho and Babylonian poems.⁹⁵ This is not to diminish the Greek achievement, just to place it in sensible context, and to reaffirm, pace Bernal, that on balance the traditional view of Greece, that it owes more to the Middle East and the Balkans than to north Africa, still prevails. Such a background is a necessary perspective, to show where Greek ideas may have originated, but it does nothing to change the importance of those ideas.

Aristotle died in 322 BC. In 1962 Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford historian of ideas, gave a series of lectures at Yale, later published in book form, in which he noted that a great change came over Greece in the wake of Aristotle’s death. ‘Some sixteen years or so later, Epicurus began to teach in Athens, and after him Zeno, a Phoenician from Kition in Cyprus. Within a few years theirs are the dominant philosophical schools in Athens. It is as if political philosophy had suddenly vanished away. There is nothing about the city, the education of citizens to perform their tasks within it . . . [T]he notion of fulfilment as necessarily social and public disappears without a trace. Within twenty years or less we find, in place of hierarchy, equality; in place of emphasis on the superiority of specialists, the doctrine that any man can discover the truth for himself and live the good life as well as any other man; in place of emphasis on intellectual gifts . . . there is now stress upon the will, moral qualities, character . . . in the place of the outer life, the inner life; in place of political commitment . . . we now have a notion of individual self-sufficiency, praise of austerity, a puritanical emphasis on duty . . . stress on the fact that the highest of all values is peace of soul, individual salvation, obtained not by knowledge of the accumulating kind, not by the gradual increase of scientific information (as Aristotle taught) . . . but by sudden conversion – a shining of the inner light. Men are distinguished into the converted and the unconverted.’⁹⁶

This is, says Berlin, the birth of Greek individualism, one of the three great turning points in Western political theory (we shall come across the other two in due course). In Greece’s classical period, Berlin says, it was a commonplace that human beings were conceived in essentially social terms. It is taken for granted by all – philosophers, dramatists, historians – that ‘the natural life of men is the institutionalised life of the polis’. ‘One should say not that a citizen belongs to himself,’ says Aristotle, in the Politics, ‘but that all belong to the polis: for the individual is a part of the polis.’⁹⁷ Epicurus, on the other hand, says something very different, ‘Man is not by nature adapted for living in civic communities.’⁹⁸ Nothing, he adds, is an end in itself except individual happiness. Justice, taxes, voting – these have no value in themselves, other than their utilitarian value for what happiness they bring the individual. Independence is everything. In the same way, the Stoics, after Zeno, sought apathia, passionlessness – their ideal was to be impassive, dry, detached and invulnerable. ‘Man is a dog tied to a cart; if he is wise he will run with it.’⁹⁹ Zeno, a mathematician as well as a Stoic, told men to look into themselves, because there was nowhere else to look, and to obey the laws of physis, nature, but none other. Society was a fundamental hindrance to the all-important aim in life – which was self-sufficiency. He and his supporters advocated extreme social freedom: sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, incest, the eating of human flesh. Human law is irrational, ‘nothing to the wise man’.¹⁰⁰

Berlin thought that the consequences of this break in thought were immense. ‘For the first time the idea gains ground that politics is a squalid occupation, not worthy of the wise and the good. The division of ethics and politics is made absolute . . . Not public order but personal salvation is all that matters.’¹⁰¹ Most historians, he acknowledged, agree that this change came about because of Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great’s destruction of so many city-states in their conquests, as a result of which the polis became insignificant. With the old, familiar landmarks gone, and with man surrounded by a vast empire, a concern with personal salvation made sense. Men retreated into themselves.¹⁰²

Berlin didn’t agree. He thought it all happened too quickly. Furthermore, the poleis were not destroyed by Alexander – in fact, new ones were created.¹⁰³ Instead, Berlin saw the origin of the new ideas beginning in Antiphon, a sophist at the end of the fifth century, and in Diogenes, who reacted against the polis with a belief that only the truly independent man was free, ‘and freedom alone makes happy’. Only the construction of a private life can satisfy the deepest needs of man, who can attain to happiness and dignity only by following nature, which means ignoring artificial arrangements.¹⁰⁴ Berlin in fact wonders if this was not an idea imported from the Orient, since Zeno came from the Phoenician colony of Cyprus, Diogenes from Babylon, and others of like mind from Sidon, Syria and the Bosporus. (‘Not a single Stoic was born in old Greece.’)

Whatever its origin, the revolution in ideas consisted of five core elements. One, politics and ethics were divorced. ‘The natural unit is now no longer the group . . . but the individual. His needs, his purposes, his solutions, his fate are what matter.’ Two, the only genuine life is the inner life – the outer life is expendable. Three, ethics are the ethics of the individual, leading to a new value on privacy, in turn leading to one of the main ideas of freedom by which we now live, that frontiers must be drawn, beyond which the State is not entitled to venture. Four, politics was degraded, as unworthy of a truly gifted man. And fifth, there grew up a fundamental division, between the view that there is a common bond among people, a unity to life, and that all men are islands. This has surely been a fundamental political difference between people ever since.

‘Classical’ is itself an idea. In the twenty-first century, it confirms a measure of excellence and a certain taste: classical music; classic rock; this or that publisher’s list of ‘the classics’ – books we all ought to be familiar with from whatever era; even classic cars, an established category in auction house sales. When we describe something as ‘a classic’ we mean that it is the best of its kind, good enough to endure as a standard in the future. But when we speak about classical Greece, we are talking about Greece in general, and Athens in particular, in the fifth century BC, the names and ideas addressed in this chapter.¹⁰⁵ Ideas and practices which were all new but have stood the test of time since, as Allan Bloom insisted. We shall see in Chapter 9 that it was the Roman reverence for the Greek way of life that gave rise to the notion of the ‘classics’, the idea that the best that has been thought and written and carved and painted in the past is worth preserving and profiting from. We have a lot to thank the Romans for, but here is perhaps the best answer to those who attacked Allan Bloom and his like for championing the achievements of ‘dead, white, European males’ in a small city-state 2,500 years ago. These are the words of the German historian of science Theodor Gomperz: ‘Nearly our entire intellectual education originates from the Greeks. A thorough knowledge of their origin is the indisputable prerequisite for freeing ourselves from their overwhelming influence.’¹⁰⁶