by A. A. Long
24 On the attribution of this text to Antiphon, see Bastianini and Decleva Caizzi [449] 214–15.
25 For a review of scholarly opinion on this passage, see Bastianini and Decleva Caizzi [449] 221–22.
26 See 1B.I.28-30 where laws as “agreements” are distinguished from “natural” things.
27 Ostwald [458] 298.
28 For Plato’s probable allusion to Antiphon at Laws X 889a-890a, cf. Decleva Caizzi [452]. His name occurs only at Menexenus 236a, on which cf. my remarks op. cit. 293-96.
29 Antiphon illustrates the uniformity of human nature by reference to respiration, laughter and weeping, hearing and vision, hands and feet (1A.II-III). Xenophon contrasts him as a hedonist and defender of material success with Socrates (Mem. 1.6).
30 Cf. DK 87 B14, where the subject of the expression “deprived of its starting-point” should be gnômê, and not nature, as commonly assumed; cf. Decleva Caizzi [452] 304.
31 Antiphon was condemned to death for being the real planner of the oligarchic revolution of 411 B.C. Thucydides (VIII.68) describes him as a brilliant man, who made the best self-defence speech he had ever heard (for a probable fragment of this, cf. CPF I.1* 17.4.). Antiphon was executed, refused burial on Attic soil, and his descendants were stripped of their civic rights.
32 The anonymous speech writer, critical of philosophy, who is mentioned at the end of the Euthydemus, though it fits Isocrates, could also apply to Antiphon, as is well observed by A. E. Taylor, Plato the Man and his Work (London, 1960), 100–102.
33 See M. Ostwald, “Plato on law and nature,” in H. North ed., Interpretations of Plato, Mnemosyne supp. 50 (1977), 41–63.
This chapter was originally written in Italian. I am very grateful to Tony Long not only for translating it into English but also for making many valuable suggestions in the course of its composition.
GLENN W. MOST
16 The poetics of early Greek philosophy
INTRODUCTION: THE POETICS OF EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY?
For some readers, the very title of this chapter will seem a paradox or a provocation. After all, while the term “Presocratics” is modern, the concept has ancient roots;1 and from the very beginning it has been used to distinguish philosophers who, for the most part, wrote in prose, from poets who composed in verse. Such a distinction, which establishes the largely nonphilosophical character of the early Greek poets and the largely nonpoetical character of the early Greek philosophers, may seem self-evident to us, but in fact it has not always been so. Heraclitus names Hesiod and Xenophanes, in the same breath with Pythagoras and Hecataeus (DK 22 B40); Hippias wrote a treatise paralleling the opinions of poets and philosophers (DK 86 B6); Plato does not distinguish sharply between poets and philosophers among his predecessors, and he has his Protagoras claim that ancient poets were really sophists but disguised their opinions for fear of exciting hostility (Prot. 316d-e). As far as we know, Aristotle was the first author to distinguish terminologically between what he called mythologoi and theologoi on the one hand and physikoi or physiologoi on the other. On his view, the former group were really storytellers, poets narrating myths about heroes and gods, and any views about the nature of the world that might be extracted from their works were incidental, obscure, and philosophically uninteresting; the latter group, beginning with Thales, were engaged in basically the same kind of investigation of the physical world as Aristotle himself was and, even though their theories were, unsurprisingly, deficient in comparison with his own, nonetheless they were philosophically serious, that is, they were worth studying, pillaging, and refuting. Only such a distinction, combined with specific views about the true nature of poiêsis as the telling of mythoi, could permit Aristotle to declare famously in the opening chapter of his Poetics that Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except their meter, so that it would be right to call the one a poet and the other a physiologos rather than a poet (1447b17-20).
It was this distinction of Aristotle’s that formed the foundation for his student Theophrastus’ collection of the physical doctrines of the early Greek philosophers, and in turn Theophrastus’ work went on to provide the basis upon which virtually all ancient and, ultimately, modern discussions of these thinkers have been constructed.2 For this tradition, the difference between the early Greek poets and the early Greek philosophers is not merely one between verse and prose but also involves larger oppositions – between myth and reason, tradition and innovation, community and individual, constraint and freedom, error and truth. For that large part of the modern Western philosophical tradition that prides itself, rightly, upon having emancipated itself from what it sees as the shackles of myth and religion, the early Greek thinkers represent a crucial first step in a millennial process of enlightenment that leaves behind the seductive chimeras of poetry to move forward towards the cold, clear light of reason. How dare one impute a poetics to them?
And yet there are at least three senses in which one can usefully, indeed importantly discuss the poetics of early Greek philosophy. The first, most obvious, and perhaps least interesting sense is an explicit, conscious form of poetics. One of the many subjects that the early Greek thinkers thought about was poetry-indeed, considering the prestige poetry enjoyed in their society, it would have been astonishing, in fact irresponsible for them not to have done so – and their views on this subject can be considered as more or less rudimentary contributions to a particular philosophical discipline, the examination of the nature and aims of poetry, which later came to be termed “poetics.”3 In this sense, early Greek philosophy, which reflects about poetry just as it reflects about divinity or knowledge, has a poetics in much the same way as it has a theology or an epistemology. The range of explicit views about poetry that can be attributed to these thinkers is quite broad, stretching from admiration and acknowledgment through outright hostility; yet, they all share certain common themes that have continued to be important in later European poetics. Above all, the early Greek philosophers’ explicit poetics often seem to express their distance from the established authorities of Greek poetry: by the very gesture of defining and demarcating what poets could hope to know or communicate, the philosophers seem to be suggesting that they themselves are exempt from such limitations. Thereby, of course, they seem to be carving out for themselves a discursive space that would be autonomous and privileged over other forms of social communication. Thus an explicit poetics can be understood to be a tactical instrument in the service of philosophical self-legitimation.
Secondly, the heritage of the earliest Greek poetry was a decisive factor in defining the parameters of the communicative situation of early Greek philosophy. Homer and Hesiod are not only important early evidence for the constraints that governed serious public discourse in archaic Greece, but they also massively influenced those constraints for many centuries in later Greek (and even non-Greek) culture. As a consequence, some of the fundamental criteria that the early Greek philosophers were obliged to try to satisfy in their reflections upon the cosmos and in their communication of these reflections to their listeners and readers inevitably bear a striking affinity to the most prominent features of the works of Homer and Hesiod. For all the undeniable novelty of many of the questions and answers of early Greek philosophy, the basic direction those questions took and the basic form of what could count as a satisfactory answer for them remained in many cases quite similar to analogous features of early Greek poetry. This similarity is not likely to be a merely casual parallel, or the result of some obscure trait of the abstract archaic Greek soul postulated by exponents of the Zeitgeist approach to intellectual history, but should rather be understood as a concrete measure of the extraordinary literary, educational, and cultural success of a very small number of poetic texts, those ascribed to Homer and Hesiod. The ways in which these two poets inevitably shaped the discursive parameters within which the early Greek philosophers operated may be termed an implicit poetics, for, however strong the influence of the poets upon the philosopher
s may have been, it is most likely to have been subliminal, rather than conscious. Any Greek producing public discourse in this period would inevitably have undergone that influence, and it is not likely that, in these regards, the early Greek philosophers were consciously attempting to rival the earliest Greek poets.
By contrast, the third, and even more interesting, kind of early Greek philosophical poetics is likely to have been fully conscious: the immanent poetic character of much of the work of the early Greek philosophers. Beyond the fundamental and widely shared discursive constraints just discussed, certain early Greek philosophers in particular seem to have chosen deliberately to deploy highly specific textual strategies closely associated with early Greek poetry. The most obvious example, of course, is the curious decision on the part of Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles to present their philosophical views to the world in the form of poetic meters, especially dactylic hexameters; indeed, the problem of why, even after the invention of philosophical prose, these figures returned to the more ancient form of verse, remains a central interpretative difficulty in accounts of early Greek thought. But the problem is not limited to these three. No less striking, in the present connection, is the evident care that Heraclitus took to formulate his insights in a language that borrowed from traditional forms of poetry effective means of expression in order to make them seem more plausible. We may term this third kind of poetics immanent, for it makes systematic use of specific poetic devices in the service of a philosophical communication. If it is a truism, proven most incontrovertibly by these four figures, that there is no ancient (or even modern) philosopher whose discursive form can safely be neglected if his thought is entirely to be understood, all the same it is particularly true in the case of the early Greek thinkers as a group that no account of their philosophy that considers only the structure of their arguments, and not also the form in which they chose to communicate those arguments to their public, can be considered fully satisfactory.
One important reason for this lies in the fact that it was only gradually that the practice of philosophy was institutionalized as a professional discipline during the history of European culture. For the most part, modern philosophers are professionals who write for other professionals. Author and audience are a clearly defined segment of society, marked off from other people both by an attitude, on the part of the larger social system, compounded of vague respect but basic indifference, and by a set of identifiable objective features: membership in publicly certified institutions and self-regulating associations; publication in certain kinds of journals and books, sold in special stores; and a well-established system of examinations, sanctions, and rewards, in which success is due largely (but never exclusively) to the satisfaction of publicly acknowledged criteria. In antiquity, it was only with the Neoplatonists of late antiquity, if at all, that such a closed system came to characterize philosophy; indeed, it was not until the fourth century B.C. that the first step in this direction was taken, with the sequential establishment of a series of competing philosophical schools in Athens. In the period considered in this volume, on the other hand, philosophy did not yet exist as a largely separate segment of social discourse, and the authors we call philosophers wrote not only for one another but also for the larger society of which they were a part. Hence it is not surprising that they had a more conscious, and perhaps more fruitful, dependence upon the basic texts of their culture (which in the case of Greek culture were poetic texts) than many modern philosophers do. To ignore this dependence, to disparage it as unphilosophical, or even just to excuse it as a regrettable form of primitive thought from which the really interesting core, the logical arguments, can be extracted and rescued, is inadvertently to acknowledge allegiance to a very recent and quite provincial notion of what philosophy is and is not, and to retroject that notion unhistorically into a discursive situation of the distant past whose participants would certainly have found such ideas very strange indeed.
Therefore, one reason to study the poetics of early Greek philosophy is to broaden our sense of what makes philosophy philosophy.
1. EXPLICIT POETICS IN EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY: THE QUARREL BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY
Throughout antiquity, and in fact until the Enlightenment, the most widespread view of Homer and Hesiod seems to have been that they were teachers, from whom one could, and should, learn not only certain heroic legends or divine myths but also patterns of conduct, models of discourse, and many specific varieties of practical knowledge-indeed, at the limit, divine sages who knew everything and could serve as the source of all human knowledge. Although Plato, in his Ion, portrayed Socrates thoroughly destroying the rhapsode Ion’s naive view that Homer must be a great poet precisely because he was a great doctor, prophet, and general, Ion’s own view survived its annihilation by Plato and went on to be echoed for many centuries, supported as it was by the realities of an educational system in which all Greek children who learned to read anything at all in school learned to read Homer (and in which many never learned to read much if anything else).
It is to this widespread view that Xenophanes and Heraclitus are pointing when the former says: “From the beginning all have learned according to Homer” (DK 21 B10), and the latter: “Hesiod is the teacher of the most men […]” (DK 22 B57).4 But, as we shall see shortly, precisely these two thinkers are the ones whose surviving fragments contain the harshest direct criticisms of Homer and Hesiod that survive from early Greece. Hence they are not simply acknowledging the pedagogical privilege widely accorded to the early epic poets – let alone praising it. Instead, they are denouncing the fact that so many Greeks have simply taken over erroneous views from the ancient poets without examining them critically or thinking for themselves. Against the cultural dominance of such poets, these writers rise in protest and demand that henceforth Greece learn from – themselves. It is worth emphasizing that neither here nor elsewhere do the early Greek philosophers ever criticize the archaic Greek poets as being deficient in aesthetic beauty or rhetorical persuasiveness, but only in terms of the falsity of their content. The clear implication is that it is only because their poetry was so beguilingly beautiful that they were able hitherto to fool so many people. As we shall see later, not beauty, but truth is for them the decisive criterion of ultimate discursive success.
The quarrel of the early Greek philosophers with the traditional poets begins with Xenophanes, who asserts that “both Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all the things that are blameworthy and a reproach among men: stealing, committing adultery, and deceiving one another” (DK 21 B11).5 Though the context of this fragment is lost, its tone is obviously reproachful: instead of praising the poets, for example, for depicting the gods as being powerful enough to be able to get away with activities regarded as shameful among humans (Homer’s view of the gods is sometimes not much different from this), Xenophanes accuses them of committing a pejorative anthropomorphism, not only attaching human actions to the gods, but attaching the basest ones at that. Xenophanes does not explicitly say here that the poets have lied about the gods, but surely this was his meaning: for if gods do these things, then they are at a lower moral level even than most humans, and why then should we worship them? We know from other fragments that Xenophanes had developed a radically innovative theology that posited only a single, nonanthropomorphic divinity. Evidently, his critique of the epic tradition was designed to clear a space for his own views.6 From our perspective, what counts as a god worthy of human reverence has evolved between Homer’s time and genre and Xenophanes’; but from Xenophanes’ perspective, the earlier view is simply wrong while his is right.
It is in Heraclitus that this quarrel reaches its bitterest extreme.7 Heraclitus accuses Hesiod and Pythagoras, Xenophanes himself, and Hecataeus of having learned many things but not having acquired intelligence (22 B 40): elements of knowledge, single facts, even if juxtaposed with one another in the kind of vast encyclopedic constructs typical at least of certain forms of archaic Gr
eek thought, are no substitute for the profound analytical intelligence that can recognize deep structures underlying the surface of appearances, and Heraclitus illustrates this principle, polemically and drastically, by simple reference to four very different kinds of sages.8 Elsewhere, Heraclitus derided Homer for having failed, according to a traditional anecdote, to answer a children’s riddle (DK 22 B56) and asserted, with a contemptuous pun, that Homer and Archilochus, so far from being performed by rhapsodes, should be beaten (rapizesthai) and thrown out of the poetic competitions (B42). Heraclitus’ attacks upon Hesiod, on the other hand, are more specifically aimed, no doubt because he felt that the very nature of his poetry made him a more serious rival. Thus, the passage that says that “Hesiod is the teacher of the most men,” goes on to assert, “They think that he knows the most, he who did not even know the day and the night, for they are one” (B57)–surely a serious oversight for someone who composed a poem called Works and Days!–while elsewhere Heraclitus was reported to have criticized Hesiod for claiming that some days are good, others bad, and thereby ignoring the fact that all days have exactly the same nature (B106). For Heraclitus, day and night, so far from being opposed to one another as irreconcilable contradictories, are in fact complementary partners in a larger, deeper, and more complex structure. For him, the laborious erudition of a Hesiod, who assigns day and night to different places in his cosmic genealogy and gathers traditional lore about lucky and unlucky days, is simply futile.
Both Xenophanes and Heraclitus seem to have directed their attention to poetry not for its own sake but to criticize authoritative doctrines in order to clear a space for their own. It was not until Democritus, later in the fifth century, that a Greek philosopher seems to have developed a theory of poetics in its own right; among the titles of lost works ascribed to him (D.L. IX.48) figure Mousika (The arts of the Muses), Peri poesios (On poetry), and Peri rhythmôn kai harmoniês (On rhythms and harmony). Not that this is particularly surprising: about the same time, Greek poets and musicians began to compose prose treatises of their own about the arts they practised. Unfortunately, little is known about Democritus’ poetic theories besides his emphasis upon what he called enthousiasmos, a temporary state of divine possession, to which anything fine that poets composed was due (DK 68 B17, 18). This theory may have been designed to mediate contemporary philosophical expectations of poetry with the traditional claims of the poets themselves concerning the source of their knowledge and abilities.9 But its prime historical importance lies in the fact that Plato was to take it up once again in his own poetics and combine it with the view that the poets were not able to give an account of what they seemed to claim to know – thereby condemning the poets for some readers as ignorant and elevating them for others as inspired.
