The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  To him tradition unanimously ascribed the introduction of mathematical and astronomical science into Greece. Antiquity told how, in Egypt, he calculated the heights of the pyramids by measuring their shadows when a man’s shadow equaled his height. Returning to Ionia, Thales pursued the fascinatingly logical study of geometry as a deductive science, and demonstrated several of the theorems later collected by Euclid.* As these theorems founded Greek geometry, so his studies of astronomy established that science for Western civilization, and disentangled it from its Oriental associations with astrology. He made several minor observations, and startled all Ionia by successfully predicting an eclipse of the sun for May 28, 585 B.C.,25 probably on the basis of Egyptian records and Babylonian calculations. For the rest his theory of the universe was not appreciably superior to the current cosmology of the Egyptians and the Jews. The world, he thought, was a hemisphere resting on an endless expanse of water, and the earth was a flat disk floating on the flat side of the interior of this hemisphere. We are reminded of Goethe’s remark that a man’s vices (or errors) are common to him with his epoch, but his virtues (or insights) are his own.

  As some Greek myths made Oceanus the father of all creation,26 so Thales made water the first principle of all things, their original form and their final destiny. Perhaps, says Aristotle, he had come to this opinion from observing “that the nutriment of everything is moist, and that . . . the seeds of everything have a moist nature;. . . and that from which everything is generated is always its first principle.”27 Or perhaps he believed that water was the most primitive or fundamental of the three forms—gas, liquid, solid—into which, theoretically, all substances may be changed. The significance of his thought lay not in reducing all things to water, but in reducing all things to one; here was the first monism in recorded history. Aristotle describes Thales’ view as materialistic; but Thales adds that every particle of the world is alive, that matter and life are inseparable and one, that there is an immortal “soul” in plants and metals as well as in animals and men; the vital power changes form, but never dies.28 Thales was wont to say that there is no essential difference between living and dead. When someone sought to nettle him by asking why, then, he chose life instead of death, he answered, “Because there is no difference.”29

  In his old age he received by common consent the title of sophos, or sage; and when Greece came to name its Seven Wise Men it placed Thales first. Being asked what was very difficult, he answered, in a famous apophthegm, “To know thyself.” Asked what was very easy, he answered, “To give advice.” To the question, what is God? he replied, “That which has neither beginning nor end.” Asked how men might live most virtuously and justly, he answered, “If we never do ourselves what we blame in others.”30 He died, says Diogenes Laertius,31 “while present as a spectator at a gymnastic contest, being worn out with heat and thirst and weakness, for he was very old.”

  Thales, says Strabo,32 was the first of those who wrote on physiologia—i.e., on the science of nature (physis), or on the principle of being and development in things. His work was vigorously advanced by his pupil Anaximander, who, though he lived from 611 to 549 B.C., expounded a philosophy surprisingly like that which Herbert Spencer, trembling before his own originality, published in A.D. 1860. The first principle, says Anaximander, was a vast Indefinite-Infinite (apeiron), a boundless mass possessing no specific qualities, but developing, by its inherent forces, into all the varied realities of the universe.* This animate and eternal but impersonal and unmoral Infinite is the only God in Anaximander’s system; it is the unvarying and everlasting One, as distinguished from the mutable evanescent Many of the world of things. (Here stems the metaphysics of the Eleatic School—that only the eternal One is real.) From this characterless Infinite are born new worlds in endless succession, and to it in endless succession they return as they evolve and die. In the primordial Infinite all opposites are contained—hot and cold, moist and dry, liquid and solid and gas . . . ; in development these potential qualities become actual, and make diverse and definite things; in dissolution these opposed qualities are again resolved into the Infinite. (A source for Heracleitus as well as for Spencer.) In this rise and fall of worlds the various elements struggle with one another, and encroach upon each other as hostile opposites. For this opposition they pay with dissolution; “Things perish into those from which they have been born.”

  Anaximander, though he too can be guilty of astronomic bizarferies forgivable in an age without instruments, advanced on Thales by conceiving the earth as a cylinder freely suspended in the center of the universe, and sustained only by being equidistant from all things.34 The sun, moon, and stars, he thought, moved in circles around the earth. To illustrate all this Anaximander, probably on Babylonian models, constructed at Sparta a gnomon, or sundial, on which he showed the movement of the planets, the obliquity of the ecliptic,* and the succession of solstices, equinoxes, and seasons.35 With the collaboration of his fellow Milesian, Hecataeus, he established geography as a science by drawing—apparently upon a tablet of brass—the first known map of the inhabited world.†

  In its earliest form, said Anaximander, the earth was in a fluid state; external heat dried some of it into land, and evaporated some of it into clouds; while the variations of heat in the atmosphere so formed caused the motions of the winds. Living organisms arose by gradual stages from the original moisture; land animals were at first fishes, and only with the drying’of the earth did they acquire their present shape. Man too was once a fish; he could not at his earliest appearance have been born as now, for he would have been too helpless to secure his food, and would have been destroyed.36

  A slighter figure is Anaximander’s pupil Anaximenes, whose first principle was air. All other elements are produced from air by rarefaction, which gives fire, or by condensation, which forms progressively wind, cloud, water, earth, and stone. As the soul, which is air, holds us together, so the air, or pneuma, of the world is its pervasive spirit, breath, or God.37 Here was an idea that would ride out all the storms of Greek philosophy, and find a haven in Stoicism and Christianity.

  This heyday of Miletus produced not only the earliest philosophy, but the earliest prose, and the first historiography, in Greece.‡ Poetry seems natural to a nation’s adolescence, when imagination is greater than knowledge, and a strong faith gives personality to the forces of nature in field, wood, sea, and sky; it is hard for poetry to avoid animism, or for animism to avoid poetry. Prose is the voice of knowledge freeing itself from imagination and faith; it is the language of secular, mundane, “prosaic” affairs; it is the emblem of a nation’s maturity, and the epitaph of its youth. Up to this time (600) nearly all Greek literature had taken a poetic form; education had transmitted in verse the lore and morals of the race; even early philosophers, like Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles, gave their systems a poetic dress. Just as science was at first a form of philosophy, struggling to free itself from the general, the speculative, the unverifiable, so philosophy was at first a form of poetry, striving to free itself from mythology, animism, and metaphor.

  It was therefore an event when Pherecydes and Anaximander expounded their doctrines in prose. Other men of the age, whom the Greeks called logographoi—reason writers, prose writers—began to chronicle in the new medium the annals of their states; so Cadmus (550) wrote a chronicle of Miletus, Eugaeon wrote of Samos, Xanthus wrote of Lydia. Towards the end of the century Hecataeus of Miletus advanced both history and geography in epochal works—the Historiai, or Inquiries, and the Ges periodos, or Circuit of the Earth. The latter divided the known planet into two continents, Europe and Asia, and included Egypt in Asia; if (as many doubt) the existing fragments are genuine, it was especially informative about Egypt, and provided a rich field for unacknowledged poaching by Herodotus. The Histories began with a skeptical blast: “I write what I consider to be the truth; for the traditions of the Greeks seem to me many and ridiculous.” Hecataeus accepted Homer as history, and
swallowed some tales with his eyes shut; nevertheless he made an honest effort to distinguish fact from myth, to trace real genealogies, and to arrive at a credible history of the Greeks. Greek historiography was old when the “Father of History” was born.

  To Hecataeus and the other logographoi who appeared in this age in most of the cities and colonies of Hellas, historia* meant any inquiry into the facts of any matter, and was applied to science and philosophy as well as to historiography in the modern sense. The term had a skeptical connotation in Ionia; it signified that the miracle stories of gods and demigod heroes were to be replaced with secular records of events, and rational interpretations of causes and effects. In Hecataeus the process begins; in Herodotus it advances; in Thucydides it is complete.

  The poverty of Greek prose before Herodotus is bound up with the conquest and impoverishment of Miletus in the very generation in which prose literature began. Internal decay followed the custom of history in smoothing the path of the conqueror. The growth of wealth and luxury made epicureanism fashionable, while stoicism and patriotism seemed antiquated and absurd; it became a byword among the Greeks that “once upon a time the Milesians were brave.”38 Competition for the goods of the earth became keener as the old faith lost its power to mitigate class strife by giving scruples to the strong and consolations to the weak. The rich, supporting an oligarchic dictatorship, became a united party against the poor, who wanted a democracy. The poor secured control of the government, expelled the rich, collected the remaining children of the rich on threshing floors, set oxen upon them, and had them trampled to death. The rich returned, recaptured power, coated the leaders of the democracy with pitch, and then burnt them alive.39 De nobis fabula narrabitur. When, about 560, Croesus began to subject to Lydian rule the Greek coast of Asia from Cnidus to the Hellespont, Miletus saved its independence by refusing to help her sister states. But in 546 Cyrus conquered Lydia, and without much difficulty absorbed the faction-torn cities of Ionia into the Persian Empire. The great age of Miletus was over. Science and philosophy, in the history of states, reach their height after decadence has set in; wisdom is a harbinger of death.

  2. Poly crates of Samos

  Across the bay from Miletus, near the outlets of the Maeander, stood the modest town of Myus, and the more famous city of Priene. There, in the sixth century, lived Bias, one of the Seven Wise Men. As Hermippus said, the Seven Wise Men were seventeen; for different Greeks made different lists of them, most frequently agreeing upon Thales, Solon, Bias, Pittacus of Mytilene, Periander of Corinth, Chilon of Sparta, and Cleobolus of Lindus in Rhodes. Greece respected wisdom as India respected holiness, as Renaissance Italy respected artistic genius, as young America naturally respects economic enterprise. The heroes of Greece were not saints, or artists, or millionaires, but sages; and her most honored sages were not theorists but men who had made their wisdom function actively in the world. The sayings of these men became proverbial among the Greeks, and were in some cases inscribed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. People liked to quote, for example, the remarks of Bias—that the most unfortunate of men is he who has not learned how to bear misfortune; that men ought to order their lives as if they were fated to live both a long and a short time; and that “wisdom should be cherished as a means of traveling from youth to old age, for it is more lasting than any other possession.”40

  West of Priene lay Samos, second largest of Ionia’s isles. The capital stood on the southeastern shore; and as one entered the well-protected harbor, passing the famous red ships of the Samian fleet, the city rose as if in tiers on the hill: first the wharves and shops, then the homes, then the fortress-acropolis and the great temple of Hera; and behind these a succession of ranges and peaks rising to a height of five thousand feet. It was a sight to stir the patriotism of every Samian soul.

  The zenith of Samos came in the third quarter of the sixth century, under Polycrates. The revenues from the busy port enabled the dictator to end a dangerous period of unemployment by a program, of public works that called forth the admiration of Herodotus. The greatest of these undertakings was a tunnel that carried the city’s water supply 4500 feet through a mountain; we catch some idea of Greek ability in mathematics and engineering when we learn that the two bores, begun at opposite ends, met in the center with an error of eighteen feet in direction and nine in height.*41

  Samos had been a cultured center long before Polycrates. Here, about 590, the fabulous Aesop had been the Phrygian slave of the Greek Iadmon. An unconfirmed tradition tells how Iadmon freed him, how Aesop traveled widely, met Solon, lived at the court of Croesus, embezzled the money that Croesus had commissioned him to distribute at Delphi, and met a violent death at the hands of the outraged Delphians.42 His fables, largely taken from Eastern sources, were well known at Athens in the classic age; Socrates, says Plutarch, put them into verse.43 Though their form was Oriental, their philosophy was characteristically Greek. “Sweet are the beauties of Nature, the earth and sea, the stars, and the orbs of sun and moon. But all the rest is fear and pain,”44 especially if one embezzles. We can still meet him in the Vatican, where a cup from the Periclean age represents him with half-bald head and Vandyke beard, listening profitably to a merry fox.45

  The great Pythagoras was born in Samos, but left it in 529 to live at Crotona in Italy. Anacreon came from Teos to sing Polycrates’ charms and to tutor his son. The greatest figure at the court was the artist Theodoras, the Leonardo of Samos, Jack-of-all-trades and master of most. The Greeks ascribed to him, perhaps as a cloture on research, the invention of the level, the square, and the lathe;46 he was a skilled engraver of gems, a metalworker, stoneworker, woodworker, sculptor, and architect. He took part in designing the second temple of Artemis at Ephesus, built a vast skias, or pavilion, for Sparta’s public assemblies, helped to introduce clay modeling into Greece, and shared with Rhoecus the honor of bringing from Egypt or Assyria to Samos the hollow casting of bronze.47 Before Theodoras the Greeks had made crude bronze statues by riveting plates of the metal to a “bridge” of wood;48 now they were prepared to produce such masterpieces in bronze as the Charioteer of Delphi and the Discus Thrower of Myron. Samos was famous also for its pottery; Pliny recommends it to us by telling us that the priests of Cybele would use nothing but Samian potsherds in depriving themselves of their manhood.49

  3. Heracleitus of Ephesus

  Across the Caystrian Gulf from Samos stood Ionia’s most famous city—Ephesus. Founded about 1000 by colonists from Athens, it prospered by tapping the trade of both the Cayster and the Maeander. Its population, its religion, and its art contained a strong Eastern element; the Artemis worshiped there began and ended as an Oriental goddess of motherhood and fertility. Her renowned temple had many deaths, and almost as many resurrections. On the site of an ancient altar twice built and twice destroyed, the first temple was erected about 600, and was probably the earliest important edifice in the Ionic style. The second temple was raised about 540, partly through the generosity of Croesus; Paeonius of Ephesus, Theodoras of Samos, and Demetrius, a priest of the shrine, shared in designing it. It was the largest Greek temple that had yet been built, and was ranked without dispute among the Seven Wonders of the World.*

  The city was known not only for its temple but for its poets, its philosophers, and its expensively gowned women.51 Here, as early as 690 B.C., lived Callinus, the earliest known elegiac poet of Greece. Far greater and uglier was Hipponax, who, towards 550, composed poems so coarse in subject, obscure in language, pointed in wit, and refined in metrical style, that all Greece began to talk about him, and all Ephesus to hate him. He was short and thin, lame and deformed, and completely disagreeable. Woman, he tells us, in one of his surviving fragments, brings two days of happiness to a man—“one when he marries her, the other when he buries her.”52 He was a ruthless satirist, and lampooned every notable in Ephesus from the lowest criminal to the highest priest of the temple. When two sculptors, Bupalus and Athenis, exhibited an elegant caricature of
him he attacked them with such corrosive verse that some of it has proved more durable than their stone, and sharper than the teeth of time. “Hold my coat,” says a typically polished morsel; “I shall hit Bupalus in the eye. I am ambidextrous, and I never miss my aim.”53 Tradition said that Hipponax died by suicide; but perhaps this was only a universal wish.

  The most illustrious son of Ephesus was Heracleitus the Obscure. Born about 530, he belonged to a noble family, and thought that democracy was a mistake. “There are many bad but few good,” he said (111*), and “one man to me is as ten thousand if he be the best” (113). But even aristocrats did not please him, nor women, nor scholars. “Abundant learning,” he wrote with genial particularity, “does not form the mind; if it did it would have instructed Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus” (16). “For the only real wisdom is to know that idea which by itself will govern everything on every occasion” (19). So he went off, like a Chinese sage, to live in the mountains and brood over the one idea that would explain all things. Disdaining to expound his conclusions in words intelligible to common men, and seeking in obscurity of life and speech some safety from individuality-destroying parties and mobs, he expressed his views in pithy and enigmatical apophthegms On Nature, which he deposited in the temple of Artemis for the mystification of posterity.

  Heracleitus has been represented in modern literature as building his philosophy around the notion of change; but the extant fragments hardly support this interpretation. Like most philosophers he longed to find the One behind the Many, some mind-steadying unity and order amid the chaotic flux and multiplicity of the world. “All things are one,” he said, as passionately as Parmenides (1); the problem of philosophy was, what is this one? Heracleitus answered, Fire. Perhaps he was influenced by the Persian worship of fire; probably, as we may judge from his identification of Fire with Soul and God, he used the term symbolically as well as literally, to mean energy as well as fire; the fragments permit no certainty. “This world . . . was made neither by a god nor by man, but it ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out” (20). Everything is a form of Fire, either in Fire’s “downward path” through progressive condensation into moisture, water, and earth; or in its “upward path” from earth to water to moisture to Fire.*54