by A. A. Long
(2) The truths that the early Greek philosophers claim to know are not just any facts about the world, but the most important ones, the ones that make this world what it is. The philosophers’ claim to essentiality seems already to be implied in the story of the Thracian servant-girl laughing at Thales when he fell into the well (Plato, Tht. 174a), and this is certainly the interpretation of such anecdotes about Thales that Aristotle provides (Politics I.11 1259a9): the philosopher chooses to neglect the affairs of this world in order to devote himself to what are in fact more serious matters. The ruling principle (archê) that the philosopher searches for is of such power that discovering it means understanding the essence of the world; so too the stoicheia are not just any elements but those essential ones without which some complex phenomenon would not be what it is. The early Greek philosophers tend to interpret essentiality in a numerically reductive sense: essential principles must be one or few to justify their privilege. Already Thales posits a single originative principle, water; it takes several generations before his successors come to realize that nature’s diversity and processuality require more than one explanatory principle, and even then they keep to as few causes as possible. This is no doubt one important reason why the early Greek philosophers so often ascribe divine status to the principles they uncover, and like to apply to their presumed efficacy metaphors of unquestioned power – controlling, directing, steering – for in so doing they emphasize that these principles are of essential importance in explaining the world.
(3) But if the early Greek philosophers like to reduce causes to the minimum possible number, at the same time they try to use them to explain the maximum possible number of effects. They aim at a comprehensiveness which would allow them to speak of only one thing, but to say of it that it is, controls, or produces all things. Already Anaximander says that the apeiron is the principle and element of all the things that are, all the heavens and the worlds in them (Simplicius, In phys. 24.13); Anaximenes is reported to have said “that infinite air was the principle, from which the things that are becoming, and that are, and that shall be, and gods and things divine, all come into being, and the rest from its products” (Hippolytus, Ref. 1.7.1). When Xenophanes claims that “what we call all things are actually one” (Plato, Soph. 242c-d); when Heraclitus asserts, “Listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all things are one” (DK 22 B50); when Empedocles announces “the four roots of all things” (DK 31 B6); when Anaxagoras distinguishes Mind from all other things (DK 59 B12); or when Diogenes of Apollonia says that “air is that from which all the rest come into being” (Simplicius, In phys. 25.1) – to name only these – we find particularly striking formulations of the interdependence of essentiality and comprehensiveness. We emphasize the former if we concentrate upon the few causes and the latter if upon the multiple effects, but the genius of early Greek philosophy is precisely located in the connection between the two. This drive for comprehensiveness may also be why so many early Greek philosophers attempt to identify universal causes as well as to explain their workings in such special areas as cosmology, zoology, and anthropology. What Plutarch (Adv. Col. 1114b) says of Parmenides can be applied mutatis mutandis to most of the other early Greek philosophers as well:
He has said much about the earth and about the heavens and sun and moon, and he recounts the coming into being of men; and as befits an ancient natural philosopher, who put together his own book, not pulling apart someone else’s, he has left none of the important topics undiscussed. (DK 28 B10)
(4) The kind of picture of the world and its governing principles that the early Greek philosophers prefer to provide tends not to be a description of a static system so much as a dynamic narrative of how things come into being and pass away. Their inclination towards narrativity is already implied by their search for an archê, a word that means not only a ruling principle but also a beginning or a source; for them, to know what something is one must know above all whence it comes. Hence their emphasis upon causality and upon relations of determination; hence too the temporal structures they build into their systems, so that cosmology, zoology, and anthropology tend to turn in their hands into cosmogony, zoogony, and anthropogony. Even Parmenides, who locates in a single, unchanging, perfect being the only possible object of knowledge, includes in his poem an account of mortal opinions whose closing words, “Thus according to belief these things came to be and now are, and having matured will come to an end after this in the future…” (DK 28 B19), emphasize its temporal dynamic. In the case of Empedocles, there can be no doubt concerning the baroque complexity of the narrative structure with which he articulated his vision of the cosmic cycles, however much scholars may disagree about the exact details of his theory. For all the early Greek philosophers, the world we see is a world of change, and it is rendered intelligible by being inserted into a causal narrative as itself the effect of some larger cause.
(5) It may be only, in part at least, an impression due to the fragmentary and doxographic nature of much of our evidence, but nonetheless, most of the early Greek philosophers certainly seem to have placed more emphasis upon the enunciation of single doctrines or propositions than upon the systematic elaboration of an extended line of argument in all its rigour and continuity. In other words, they seem, like the early Greek poets, to have focused their attention more upon microscopic form than upon macroscopic form. Thales seems not to have written a book, at least none was extant several centuries after his death. Instead, he was associated with isolated doctrines whose connection and meaning were already unclear in antiquity. Diogenes Laertius reports that Anaximander made a summary exposition of his own views (D.L. II.2); that is, presumably, a book circulated under his name in which, in discontinuous sections, individual doctrines were asserted without full supporting argumentation. The nature of Heraclitus’ book is the object of considerable scholarly controversy, but the likeliest view is that it was a collection of aphorisms, most or all of them not connected grammatically with one another, perhaps grouped together by subject matter. Parmenides certainly wrote a single poem divided into two parts, but the philosophical justification of the second part and the precise relation between it and the first part are much debated. Zeno is thought to have published simply a loose collection of paradoxes and individual arguments. As for Empedocles, scholars disagree vigorously on whether his “On nature” and “Purifications” were one poem or two poems or two parts of the same poem, and if they were indeed different, what the doctrinal and textual relationship between them was.17 No doubt, better evidence might help clear up some of these obscurities. But it would be unlikely to change the fundamental impression that these philosophers devoted greater care to individual formulations than to large-scale organizational structures. For in any case their particular utterances are carefully crafted and memorably phrased. Anaximander’s single extant sentence is described by Theophrastus (via Simplicius) as being expressed with “rather poetic words” (Simplicius, In phys. 24.13);18 Heraclitus’ paradoxical formulations have always fascinated and perplexed readers; and the last of the early Greek thinkers, Diogenes of Apollonia, began his book with a sentence in which he declared that a philosophical style should be simple but at the same time elevated (DK 64 B1).
In all these ways, the early Greek philosophers continued to work within the discursive framework that they had inherited from the earliest Greek poets, and transformed it into a set of expectations that could continue to apply not only to poetry but also to serious prose.
3. IMMANENT POETICS IN EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY: THE PHILOSOPHER AS POET
One of the most grievous scandals of early Greek philosophy is the fact that, even after the invention of philosophical prose, some of the greatest thinkers returned to poetry as the medium in which to publicize their philosophical message.19 Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles wrote in the traditional meter of Greek epic poetry, and Heraclitus wrote in a prose evidently deeply shaped by various poetical techniques – at a time
when prose had been refined by their predecessors as a medium for philosophy and was already being used for history, mythological genealogy, and various kinds of technical treatises.20
To be sure, even earlier thinkers wrote a prose not entirely devoid of poetic features. Anaximander’s surviving sentence, as we saw earlier, was said by Theophrastus to have been expressed with “rather poetic words” (Simplicius, In phys. 24.13). So too, Anaximander’s and Anaximenes’ fondness for using striking and unexpected comparisons and similes in order to explain various natural phenomena is a philosophical adaptation of a love for explanatory analogies whose origin is probably to be found in the celebrated epic similes, so frequent in Homer, which explain what the audience does not know by a vividly worked out comparison to what it does know.21 When Anaximander says that a sphere of flame formed around the air surrounding the earth, “like bark around a tree” ([Plut.] Stromateis 2), that the shape of the earth “is similar to the drum of a column” (Aetius III.10.2), that the sun is a circle of fire “like a chariot wheel” with a hole “like the nozzle of a bellows” (Aetius II.25.1), or when Anaximenes says that the earth lies upon the air “like a lid” (Aristotle, De caelo II. 13 294b15), that the stars are implanted “like nails” in the sky (Aetius II.14.3), that the sun is flat “like a leaf” (Aetius II.22.1), or that the celestial bodies move around the earth “just as if a felt cap turns round our head” (Hippolytus, Ref. I.7.6), part of the effectiveness of the analogy derives from the surprise with which the most mundane and familiar of phenomena are suddenly revealed to have important and hitherto unimagined similarities with the most distant and puzzling ones. Such thinkers most likely learned this technique from Homer; in any case, its application provides a vividness and concreteness to their discourse that we may well wish to call poetic.
Nonetheless, with Xenophanes and the return to metrical poetry something new does come about, something that seems to cry out for explanation. Most often, scholars have connected the generic difference between prose and poetry with the geographical difference between Ionia in the East and Magna Graecia in the West, opposing what is taken to be the hard-nosed, empirical, innovative attitude of the Ionian tradition with a more conservative, mystical tendency in the West.22 There may be something to this, but noting that Xenophanes came from Colophon, that Pythagoras was born in Samos, and that prose flourished in the West as in the East, we might wonder whether it would not be more fruitful to ask what functions the choice of meter could have been designed to serve. For example, verse’s formal constraints make poetry much easier to remember and much harder to manipulate than prose. But suggesting that Xenophanes and his successors decided to write in verse because they wanted to cast their insights into a form that would not easily be forgotten or distorted does not explain why Xenophanes’ predecessors, and Empedocles’ successors, did not come up with the same idea. Instead, we should try to link the choice of poetic form to specific features of these thinkers’ situation and thought.
For Xenophanes’ choice, the decisive question is probably that of the circumstances of the diffusion of his works. He refuses that newfangled object, the book, as a medium of publication and prefers to return instead to the fundamentally oral situation of the public rhapsodic contest which pits one singer against another. He himself, as Diogenes Laertius informs us, was a rhapsode who also recited his own poems publicly (DK 21 A1), and the meters in which he composes – dactylic hexameters, elegiac couplets, iambic trimeters – are those typical of large-scale public recitation. By choosing this forum, Xenophanes assures himself a larger audience of nonspecialists and a wider (if not necessarily more lasting) conspicuousness and fame than any book, in this still not fully literate culture, could have secured him.
The agôn, the ritualized oral public competition, had in archaic Greece always been the scene for adjudicating the rivalry between one poetic display and another, but as Homer had become more and more canonized, the contest had come to focus upon measuring against one another not different poetic compositions but instead different performances of the same poetic compositions. By returning to this familiar discursive situation, and using it not in order to recite Homer’s poetry better than another rhapsode but in order to recite new poetry that was to be better (i.e., more truthful) than Homer’s own, Xenophanes maintains the form of this traditional institutional context but fills it with a new, antitraditional content. It is not as though Xenophanes were now substituting, for the very first time, truth for some other old-fashioned criterion of discursive success-after all, as we have seen, veridicality had always been a fundamental goal of the epic tradition – but rather that his is a new kind of truth, correspondence not to the legendary past of a specific contingent people, but to a fundamental and permanent structure necessarily valid for the whole world.23 Possession of this truth gives him the confidence not only to criticize the greatest of the archaic poets, Homer and Hesiod, but also to proclaim the superiority of his own philosophical poetry about moral and political virtue on the one hand over the standard monodic fare of symposia: “Battles of the Titans and of the Giants and of the Centaurs, inventions of earlier men, or violent civil strife, in which there is nothing useful” (DK 21 B1.21-23), and on the other over epinician choral lyric’s praise for “the athletic force of men or horses” (B2.11-12).
In Parmenides and Empedocles the choice of poetic form seems designed to resolve a crucial philosophical problem: given that all human beings are subject to the delusion of appearance, how can the philosopher know the truth of what he claims to know? For them, only a god could possibly be the source of a set of transcendent truths to which a mere mortal, if left to his own devices, would have had no access. But in archaic Greece, the language in which gods speak through human voices is in general that of metrical verse. Already in Homer, the bard is theios, divine,24 and feels obliged, at the beginning of his poem and at critical junctures within it, to invoke the divine instances that inspire him; for no merely human being, unassisted, could possibly compose a string of perfect hexameters – as Aristotle pointed out (Poetics 4 1449a26-28), epic dactyls were quite foreign to the ordinary rhythms of vernacular speech. Poets continued to feel obliged to their Muse throughout antiquity (and even much later), and the doctrine of divine inspiration of poetry, which Democritus bequeathed to Plato, remains an eloquent, even if sometimes highly ironical, testimony to the viability of this view within philosophy. But poets were not the only spokesmen of divinity in ancient Greece: the gods spoke through oracles, at Delphi and elsewhere, and in this period never did so except in poetic meters, almost always the very same dactylic hexameters that characterized epic poetry.25
Whatever other purposes it served in archaic Greece, then, the dactylic hexameter also seems to have functioned as an unmistakable sign that the ultimate source of the text it articulated was not human but divine. If so, then it is surely significant that the only two early Greek philosophers who wrote exclusively in dactylic hexameters were at the same time the only ones who explicitly claimed that the wisdom they proclaimed to humanity was derived from a divine source.
Parmenides presents his philosophical poem as the product of divine inspiration, the result of his own mystic initiation into the truth by the benevolence of a goddess, who speaks for most of its length and whose message he cites for the rest of us.26 Its opening narrates his journey to this goddess and his courteous and generous reception by her:
The mares that carry me as far as my heart ever aspires sped me on, when they had brought and set me on the far-famed road of the god, which bears the man who knows over all cities…. And the goddess greeted me kindly, and took my right hand in hers, and addressed me with these words: “Young man, you who come to my house in the company of immortal charioteers with the mares which bear you, greetings. No ill fate has sent you to travel this road-far indeed does it lie from the steps of men – but right and justice. It is proper that you should learn all things, both the unshaken heart of the well-rounded truth, and the o
pinions of mortals, in which there is no true reliance. But nonetheless you shall learn these things too…” (DK 28 B1.1-3, 22-31)
Scholars have long debated how to understand this detailed opening scene, which seems to have been far different from the rest of the poem in its concrete, narrative, autobiographical character. They have pointed to evident borrowings from Homer and Hesiod, have searched for affinities with the initiatory language of the religious mysteries, and have attempted to work out detailed allegorical interpretations.27 All these suggestions are plausible to some degree, but it should not be forgotten that this scene of divine instruction must not only be coherent with the contents of Parmenides’ philosophy but also, in some sense, be believed by readers if they are to accept the status of truth which that philosophy claims for itself. Thus, when the goddess describes to Parmenides the choice between the only two possible paths of inquiry – “Come now, and I will tell you (and you must carry my account away with you when you have heard it) the only ways of enquiry that are to be thought of” (B2. 1-2) – she is making a distinction, which no mortal could possibly make on his own, between a way of truth that no man has ever seen before and a path of error that is, strictly speaking, “an altogether indiscernible track: for you could not know what is not – that cannot be done – nor indicate it” (B2. 6-8). The words that she speaks to Parmenides he transmits to us. How could he, or we, have come to know this in any other way?
