Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

by Thomas Cahill

  Creeky old Xenophanes found this business too much altogether and sent around the anecdote—hilarious to Xenophanes—that Pythagoras had recognized the voice of a dead friend in the howling of a whipped puppy. Fiery Heraclitus, who had no patience for airy mystification, curtly dismissed Pythagoras as a fraud. Parmenides, however, who believed that our senses were deceived by accidental appearances and that deep reality was unchanging, was proud to associate himself with the theories of Pythagoras. And Empedocles, who was much under Pythagorean influence, went so far as to recall that in a former life he had been a bush.

  The Pythagoreans ate no flesh, fish, or fowl and only certain kinds of vegetables (apparently the ones that didn’t contain imprisoned souls). They utterly eschewed beans—whether out of respect for souls or for the quality of their communal air we don’t know—and must have been subject to all the wasting afflictions of a protein-poor diet. They scorned public sacrifices and other rituals of Greek religion and, burning only incense, spent their days in silence, examining their consciences and disciplining themselves in self-control. “Troubles are good,” went a Pythagorean saying, “but pleasures are always evil; for whoever has merited punishment must be punished.” “Pathei mathos” (Through suffering, understanding), went another of their sayings, entranced as they were by similarities of sounds. Sex was permitted but only to married couples under specially designated circumstances. Each initiate renounced all private possessions; and in the event that he or she returned to the extra-Pythagorean world, the departure was considered death and a gravestone was erected in commemoration of the apostasy.

  None of these things—neither the core doctrines nor the extreme discipline—had any precedents in Greek society. Though we no longer have the evidence to trace the route of transmission, we must assume that Pythagoras had come in contact with ideas and practices from the East, absorbing elements of Babylonian numerology, Persian dualism, and especially classical Indian culture with its central tenet of metempsychosis and its monastic practices. Out of this culture, after all, rose the reforms of Siddhartha Gautama, better known to history as the Buddha; and Pythagoras and the Buddha were almost exact contemporaries. Even the mysterious Pythagorean saying carved at Delphi—“E” (“Thou art”)—probably owes its origin to the key mantra of the Upanishads, “Tat tvam asi” (“Thou art the One”). The sense of both sayings lies in the affirmation of the eternal union of the soul with That-Which-Truly-IS, with divinity, with the eternal substance from which all mutable things spring—oneness with Oneness.

  Pythagoras found deep meaning in numbers. He is credited with discovering that the chief musical intervals produced on the vibrating strings of a lyre can be expressed as ratios: an octave as 2:1, a fifth as 3:2, a fourth as 4:3. Though these relationships still form the basis of Western musicology, Pythagoras went further. Everything, he thought, could be explained by numbers and their relationships to one another. Since the ratios between the basic musical intervals employ only the first four whole numbers, these numbers must be expressive of the deep harmony of the universe, in which the “spheres” or heavenly bodies sing while whirling through space and their music combines in harmonic chords to create the Music of the Spheres, which we are unable to hear only because the sounds are with us from birth and, there being no contrasting silence, we do not hear the harmonies. Pythagoras could hear them.

  Pythagoras played with these numbers till he hit on a particularly seductive arrangement:

  This pattern, an equilateral triangle using only the first four whole numbers (one dot at the head, followed by lines of two, three, and four dots) and composed nonetheless of a decade, took on mystical significance, somehow enunciating not only the nature of number but the nature of the universe itself. Nevertheless, Pythagoras’s playing with numbers and triangles also bequeathed us an exceedingly useful discovery, the Pythagorean theorem, which assures us that, no matter whose body we may be inhabiting for the moment, the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is always equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.

  The superior air that emanated from the Pythagoreans earned them enemies. In the mid-fifth century, their main foundations in southern Italy were set afire and many of their number were massacred. “Civil war was no rarity in Greek cities; yet here for the first time,” concludes the renowned German classicist Walter Burkert, “it seems to have led to a kind of pogrom, the persecution of those who were different from others in their way of life and disposition.” We know nothing more about the oppressors of the Pythagoreans, but we do know that southern Italy was also a stronghold of the most fanatical devotees of pleasure-inducing Dionysus—of whom, except for his philosophy, the beautiful, long-haired Pythagoras might have seemed the incarnation. But Dionysus was no friend to moderation, let alone discipline; and his disciples, the torchbearing bacchai and bacchoi, were not averse to a little dismemberment now and then, and their secret rites were always conducted in darkness.

  IT IS A REMARKABLE IRONY in the history of philosophy that, though Pythagoras was the least mainstream of the Presocratic philosophers—the least Greek, really—he exerted the greatest influence of all on Plato, who would in the fourth century B.C. become the philosopher of philosophers not only for the Greeks but for the entire Western tradition. As the philosopher-mathematician Alfred North Whitehead would say definitively in the twentieth century, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Another safe generalization may be stated thus: Though all great figures rise from their culture, they must, in some radical way, contradict that culture—and this Plato certainly set out to do.

  One of the first Greeks to write extensively in prose, Plato hit upon a lively format that puts him at a far remove from the vast majority of his sleep-inducing philosophical successors. Rather than lecturing at us about his ideas, he offers what he calls “dialogues,” theater-pieces that can be read aloud at a gathering of friends, with actors taking different parts. (That Plato could write so extensively in prose rather than in poetry is evidence that books were now circulating widely in the Greek world. An extended work of prose, unlike sung poetry, is necessarily based on a reading rather than a listening public.) Though each dialogue is intended to explore a particular philosophical theme, Plato’s interlocutors behave as human beings do: one character may be too dim to follow the argument, a second may become incensed over the intellectual position of a third or over what he takes to be the disparagement of his own ideas, a latecomer may arrive argumentative and inebriated. As the dialogue approaches its crux—the resolution of the theme, the main point of the whole discussion—one must pay close attention, but along the way to that moment Plato inserts many of the inconsequential (and entertaining) digressions that constitute normal human conversation. This witty format Plato modeled on short theater-pieces of his day called “mimes,” which were not silent, Chaplinesque affairs but noisy vaudeville sketches based on the comedy of daily life (“The Quack Doctor,” “The Unreliable Servant”). That he was quick to imagine such an unlikely use for this vulgar genre while singlehandedly launching the lofty tradition of Greek prose is suggestive of his keen originality.

  It is somewhat difficult to separate Plato from his teacher Socrates, since Socrates never wrote anything down but appears as the central character in almost all of Plato’s voluminous writings. While it is clear that Plato, especially in the later dialogues, has advanced into philosophical territory far beyond what the oral teachings of his revered Socrates could have contained, he continues to employ the character “Socrates” as his mouthpiece. Luckily, we have fairly extensive news of Socrates from other sources—especially from another student of his, Xenophon—and so may venture a portrait that does not rely exclusively on Plato’s highly literary (and therefore somewhat suspect) presentations.

  In Greek eyes, Socrates was a squat, ugly, barefoot man who did not bathe too often and was easy to spot shuffling through the
agora or passing the time in his favorite hangout, the shop of Simon the Cobbler. Looking nothing like a god or hero, he had bulging eyes, a flat, pug nose, prominent lips, and a pot belly. Though a stonemason and the son of a stonemason—and therefore an artisan from the lower reaches of the middle class—he wasn’t big on exercise and, when he could, declined involvement even in civic and political affairs. He wasn’t big on much of anything except his favorite pursuit: asking questions. While doing this, he maintained his famously unattractive posture, keeping his head down and squinting at people sideways or from under his brow. His series of questions, ever after known as “the Socratic method,” irked a great many citizens, since the abysmal ignorance of the person being questioned would be gradually, painfully, inexorably exposed to public view.

  Socrates seemed to take special delight in puncturing the pomposity of Athens’s leading citizens—which made him popular with young people, who enjoyed the spectacle of their elders’ discomfort. So Socrates became recognizable not only by his ugliness but by the crowd of admiring youths who clustered about him hoping to hear a zinger. Like an aging rock star whose unsavory lifestyle and consummate cool make him a favorite target of parents, Socrates was in danger of becoming the victim of his own success as “the Socratic method” turned into a byword for smart-assed, if inscrutable, backtalk. The loathing of the older generation only increased the chorus of adolescent admirers who flocked to his side; and there were times when he could barely open his mouth without hearing rowdy cheers of confirmation.

  All the same, except when he was dealing with the most insufferable blowhards, Socrates was respectful of those he questioned. But the questioning was relentless. Socrates thought of himself as serving his fellow Athenians in the role of “a gadfly,” impatient with imprecision, goading them to adequate formulations, stinging them out of their complacency. Even to friends, however, a gadfly can be intolerably irritating; to passing acquaintances, Socrates could be, as one of his young admirers put it, more like “a stingray,” reducing his interlocutors to a state of numb helplessness.

  In Book I of Plato’s masterwork, the Republic—which probably dates to an earlier phase than the subsequent dialogues that make up the bulk of the work—Socrates finds himself in conversation with his friend Polemarchus at the latter’s house in seaside Piraeus, while others listen in. Polemarchus, citing a line from the lyric poet Simonides, has opined that “morality lies in helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies.” “When you say ‘friends,’ ” queries Socrates meekly,

  “do you mean those who appear to a person to be good, or those who genuinely are good (even if they don’t appear to be)? And likewise for enemies.”

  “It seems plausible to suggest,” [Polemarchus] said, “that one treats as friends those one regards as good, and as enemies those one regards as bad.”

  “Isn’t it common to make mistakes about this, and think that people are good when they aren’t, and vice versa?”

  “Yes.”

  “When this happens, then, doesn’t one regard good people as enemies and bad people as friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “But all the same, in these circumstances it’s right for one to help bad people and harm good people, is it?”

  “Apparently.”

  “But good people are moral and not the kind to do wrong.”

  “True.”

  “On your line of reasoning, then, it’s right to harm people who do no wrong.”

  “Not at all, Socrates,” he said. “My reasoning must be flawed, I suppose.”

  “It’s right to harm wrongdoers, then,” I [that is, Socrates, who is giving the account of what transpired] said, “and to help those who do right?”

  “That sounds better.”

  “But since there are lots of people who are completely mistaken, Polemarchus, then it will commonly turn out to be right for people to harm friends (whom they regard as bad) and to help enemies (whom they regard as good). And in affirming this, we’ll be contradicting what we said Simonides meant.”

  “Yes,” he said, “that is a consequence of what we’re saying. Let’s change tack, however: we’re probably making a wrong assumption about friends and enemies.”

  “What assumption, Polemarchus?”

  “That someone who appears good is a friend.”

  “What shall we change that to instead?” I asked.

  “That someone who doesn’t just appear good, but actually is good, is a friend; and that someone who seems good, but actually isn’t, is an apparent friend, not a genuine one. And the same goes for enemies.”

  “So on this line of reasoning, it’s a good man who is a friend, and a bad man who is an enemy.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re telling us, then, that our original description of morality, when we said that it was right to do good to a friend and harm to an enemy, was incomplete. Now you want us to add that it is right to do good to a friend, provided he is good, and to harm an enemy, provided he is bad. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I think that’s a good way to put it.”

  “Can a moral person harm anyone?” I asked.

  “Yes, he can,” he replied. “He has to harm bad men, people who are his enemies.”

  “When horses are harmed, do they improve or deteriorate?”

  “Deteriorate.”

  “In respect of a state of goodness for dogs or of a state of goodness for horses?”

  “In respect of a state of goodness for horses.”

  “So the same goes for dogs too: when they are harmed, they deteriorate in respect of what it is to be a good dog, not in respect of what it is to be a good horse. Is that right?”

  “No doubt about it.”

  “And where people are concerned, my friend, shouldn’t we say that when they’re harmed they deteriorate in respect of what it is to be a good human?”

  “Yes.”

  “And isn’t a moral person a good human?”

  “There’s no doubt about that either.”

  “It necessarily follows, Polemarchus, that people who are harmed become less moral.”

  “So it seems.”

  “Now, can musicians use music to make people unmusical?”

  “Impossible.”

  “Can skilled horsemen use their skill to make people bad horsemen?”

  “No.”

  “So can moral people use morality to make people immoral? Or in general can good people use their goodness to make people bad?”

  “No, that’s impossible.”

  “I imagine this is because cooling things down, for instance, is not the function of warmth but of its opposite.”

  “Yes.”

  “And moistening things is not the function of dryness but of its opposite.”

  “Yes.”

  “So harming people is not the function of a good person, but of his opposite.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And a moral person is a good person?”

  “Of course.”

  “It is not the job of a moral person, then, Polemarchus, to harm a friend or anyone else; it is the job of his opposite, an immoral person.”

  “I think you’re absolutely correct, Socrates,” he said.

  “So the claim that it’s right and moral to give back to people what they are owed—if this is taken to mean that a moral person owes harm to his enemies and help to his friends—turns out to be a claim no clever person would make. I mean, it’s false: we’ve found that it is never right to harm anyone.”

  “I agree,” he said.

  The reader may find the Socratic method—the small-step-by-small-step analysis that is Socrates’s stock-in-trade—alluring or annoying, depending on temperament. Logical, philosophical types are fascinated, whereas the artistic and intuitive may find the process excruciating, especially when extended to book length—in the case of the Republic, nearly 150 times the length of the preceding excerpt—even though the discussions are punctuated by
comical interludes. Immediately after the exchange between Socrates and Polemarchus, for instance, Thrasymachus comes on “like a wild animal,” “hurl[ing] himself at us,” relates Socrates, “as if to tear us apart.” “What a lot of drivel, Socrates!” bellows Thrasymachus, who belittles Socrates for “feigning ignorance” and goes on to enunciate what was probably a common, if cynical, view—“that morality is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger party.” Socrates, who claims to have been “terrified and panic-stricken” by Thrasymachus’s aggression, goes on—ever so meekly, ever so reasonably—to make mincemeat of his antagonist, much to the satisfaction of his audience (whether ancient or modern). Though the operation takes up the balance of Book I (and runs about ten times as long as the excerpt), by the time Socrates has defanged Thrasymachus he also has the man eating out of his hand.

  Besides taking account of the general Socratic procedure of question and response, the reader cannot fail to notice the characteristically Greek turn of mind evident in Socrates’s approach: the essence of wetness is to moisten things, the essence of the musician is to make people more musical, the essence of the moral man is to make others more moral. The predilection for articulating the essence—and, therefore, the function or purpose—of something or someone, for defining its necessary qualities, builds on the original search of the Presocratics for the ultimate substance that lies beyond accidental appearances. We, suspicious of detached philosophical pronouncements on essences and far more comfortable with wisdom wrested from lived experience, must bear in mind how novel and fascinating this pursuit of essences—this insistence on precision rather than impressions—was in its time and how truly … essential it has proved to Western traditions of science and thought.