First published Sat Mar 10, 2007;
substantive revision Mon Nov 5, 2012
The Presocratics were 6th and 5th
century BCE Greek thinkers who introduced a new way of
inquiring into the world and the place of human beings
in it. They were recognized in antiquity as the first
philosophers and scientists of the Western tradition.
This article is a general introduction to the most
important Presocratic philosophers and the main themes
of Presocratic thought. More detailed discussions can be
found by consulting the articles on these philosophers
(and related topics) in the SEP (listed below). The
standard collection of texts for the Presocratics is
that by H. Diels revised by W. Kranz (abbreviated as
DK). In it, each thinker is assigned an identifying
chapter number (e.g., Heraclitus is 22, Anaxagoras 59);
then the reports from ancient authors about that
thinker’s life and thought are collected in a section of
“testimonies” (A) and numbered in order, while the
passages the editors take to be direct quotations are
collected and numbered in a section of “fragments” (B).
Alleged imitations in later authors are sometimes added
in a section labeled C. Thus, each piece of text can be
uniquely identified: DK 59B12.3 identifies line 3 of
Anaxagoras fragment 12; DK 22A1 identifies testimonium 1
on Heraclitus.
Contents:
1. Who Were the
Presocratic Philosophers?
2. The Milesians
3. Xenophanes of
Colophon and Heraclitus of Ephesus
4. Parmenides of Elea
5. The Pythagorean
Tradition
6. Other Eleatics: Zeno
and Melissus
7. The Pluralists:
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and Empedocles of Acragas
Our understanding of the Presocratics
is complicated by the incomplete nature of our evidence.
Most of them wrote at least one “book” (short pieces of
prose writing, it seems, or, in some cases, poems of not
great length), but no complete work survives. Instead,
we are dependent on later philosophers, historians, and
compilers of collections of ancient wisdom for
disconnected quotations (fragments) and reports about
their views (testimonia). In some cases, these sources
had direct access to the works of the Presocratics, but
in many others, the line is indirect and often depends
on the work of Aristotle, Theophrastus, and other
ancient philosophers who did have access. The sources
for the fragments and testimonia made selective use of
the material available to them, in accordance with their
own special, and varied, interests in the early
thinkers. (For analyses of the doxographic tradition,
and the influence of Aristotle and Theophrastus on later
sources, see Mansfeld 1999, Runia 2008, and Mansfeld and
Runia 1997, 2009a, and 2009b.) Although any account of a
Presocratic thinker has to be a reconstruction, we
should not be overly pessimistic about the possibility
of reaching a historically responsible understanding of
these early Greek thinkers.
Calling this group “Presocratic
philosophers” raises certain difficulties. The term was
made current by Hermann Diels in the nineteenth century,
and was meant to mark a contrast between Socrates who
was interested in moral problems, and his predecessors,
who were supposed to be primarily concerned with
cosmological and physical speculation.
“Presocratic,” if taken strictly as a
chronological term, is not quite accurate, for the last
of them were contemporaneous with Socrates and even
Plato. Moreover, several of the early Greek thinkers
explored questions about ethics and the best way to live
a human life. The term may also suggest that these
thinkers are somehow inferior to Socrates and Plato, of
interest only as their predecessors, and its suggestion
of archaism may imply that philosophy only becomes
interesting when we arrive at the classical period of
Plato and Aristotle. Some scholars now deliberately
avoid the term, but if we take it to refer to the early
Greek thinkers who were not influenced by the views of
Socrates, whether his predecessors or contemporaries,
there is probably no harm in using it. (For discussions
of the notion of Presocratic philosophy, see Long’s
introduction in Long 1999, Laks 2006, and the articles
in Laks and Louguet 2002.)
A second problem lies in referring to
these thinkers as philosophers. That is almost certainly
not how they could have described themselves. While it
is true that Heraclitus says that “those who are lovers
of wisdom must be inquirers into many things” (22B35),
the word he uses, philosophos, does not have the special
sense that it acquires in the works of Plato and
Aristotle, when the philosopher is contrasted with both
the ordinary person and other experts, including the
sophist (particularly in Plato), or in the resulting
modern sense in which we can distinguish philosophy from
physics or psychology; yet the Presocratics certainly
saw themselves as set apart from the ordinary person and
also from other thinkers (poets and historical writers,
for example) who were their predecessors and
contemporaries. As the fragment from Heraclitus shows,
the early Greek philosophers thought of themselves as
inquirers into many things, and the range of their
inquiry was vast. They had views about the nature of the
world, and these views encompass what we today call
physics, chemistry, geology, meteorology, astronomy,
embryology, and psychology (and other areas of natural
inquiry), as well as theology, metaphysics,
epistemology, and ethics. In the earliest of the
Presocratics, the Milesians, it can indeed be difficult
to discern the strictly philosophical aspects of the
views in the evidence available to us. Nevertheless,
despite the danger of misunderstanding and thus
underestimating these thinkers on account of
anachronism, there is an important sense in which it is
quite reasonable to refer to them as philosophers. That
sense is inherent in Aristotle’s view (see, e.g., Met.
I, Phys. I, De Anima I): these thinkers were his
predecessors in a particular sort of inquiry, and even
though Aristotle thinks that they were all, for one
reason or another, unsuccessful and even amateurish, he
sees in them a similarity such that he can trace a line
of continuity of both subject and method from their work
to his own. The questions that the early Greek
philosophers asked, the sorts of answers that they gave,
and the views that they had of their own inquiries were
the foundation for the development of philosophy as it
came to be defined in the work of Plato and Aristotle
and their successors. Perhaps the fundamental
characteristic is the commitment to explain the world in
terms of its own inherent principles.
By contrast, consider the 7th century
BCE poem of Hesiod, his Theogony (genealogy of the
gods). Hesiod tells the traditional story of the
Olympian gods, beginning with Chaos, a vague divine
primordial entity or condition. From Chaos, a sequence
of gods is generated, often by sexual congress, but
sometimes no particular cause is given. Each divine
figure that arises is connected with a part of the
physical universe, so his theogony is also a cosmogony
(an account of the generation of the world). The
divinities (and the associated parts of the world) come
to be and struggle violently among themselves; finally
Zeus triumphs and establishes and maintains an order of
power among the others who remain. Hesiod’s world is one
in which the major divinities are individuals who behave
like super-human beings (Gaia or earth, Ouranos or sky,
Cronos — an unlocated regal power, Zeus); some of the
others are personified characteristics (e.g., Momus,
blame; and Dusnomia, lawlessness). For the Greeks, the
fundamental properties of divinity are immortality and
power, and each of Hesiod’s characters has these
properties (even though in the story some are defeated,
and seem to be destroyed). Hesiod’s story is like a vast
Hollywood-style family history, with envy, rage, love,
and lust all playing important parts in the coming-to-be
of the world as we know it. The earliest rulers of the
universe are violently overthrown by their offspring
(Ouranos is overthrown by Cronos, Cronos by Zeus). Zeus
insures his continued power by swallowing his first
consort Metis (counsel or wisdom); by this he prevents
the predicted birth of rivals and acquires her attribute
of wisdom (Theogony 886–900). In a second poem, Works
and Days, Hesiod pays more attention to human beings,
telling the story of earlier, greater creatures who died
out or were destroyed by themselves or Zeus. Humans were
created by Zeus, are under his power, and are subject to
his judgment and to divine intervention for either good
or ill. (A good discussion of the Hesiodic myths in
relation to Presocratic philosophy can be found in
McKirahan 2011. Burkert 2008 surveys influence from the
east on the development of Presocratic philosophy,
especially the myths, astronomy, and cosmogony of the
Babylonians, Persians, and Egyptians.)
Hesiod’s world, like Homer’s, is one
that is god-saturated, where the gods may intervene in
all aspects of the world, from the weather to mundane
particulars of human life, reaching into the ordinary
world order from outside, in a way that humans must
accept but cannot ultimately understand. The
Presocratics reject this account, instead seeing the
world as a kosmos, an ordered natural arrangement that
is inherently intelligible and not subject to
supra-natural intervention. A striking example is
Xenophanes 21B32: “And she whom they call Iris, this too
is by nature cloud / purple, red, and greeny yellow to
behold.” Iris, the rainbow, traditional messenger of the
gods, is after all, not supra-natural, not a sign from
the gods on Olympus who are outside of and immune from
the usual world order; rather it is, in its essence,
colored cloud.
Calling the Presocratics philosophers
also suggests that they share a certain outlook with one
another; an outlook that can be contrasted with that of
other early Greek writers. Although scholars disagree
about the extent of the divergence between the early
Greek philosophers and their non-philosophical
predecessors and contemporaries, it seems evident that
Presocratic thought exhibits a significant difference
not only in its understanding of the nature of the
world, but also in its view of the sort of explanation
of it that is possible. This is evident in Heraclitus.
Although Heraclitus asserts that those who love wisdom
must be inquirers into many things, inquiry alone is not
sufficient. At 22B40 he rebukes four of his
predecessors: “Much learning does not teach
understanding; else it would have taught Hesiod and
Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus.”
Heraclitus’ implicit contrast is with himself; in 22B1
he suggests that he alone truly understands all things,
because he grasps the account that enables him to
“distinguish each thing in accordance with its nature”
and say how it is. For Heraclitus there is an underlying
principle that unites and explains everything. It is
this that others have failed to see and understand.
According to Heraclitus, the four have amassed a great
deal of information — Hesiod was a traditional source of
information about the gods, Pythagoras was renowned for
his learning and especially views about how one ought to
live, Xenophanes taught about the proper view of the
gods and the natural world, Hecataeus was an early
historian — but because they have failed to grasp the
deeper significance of the facts available to them,
their unconnected bits of knowledge do not constitute
understanding. Just as the world is an ordered
arrangement, so human knowledge of that world must be
ordered in a certain way.
2. The Milesians
In his account of his predecessors’
searches for “causes and principles” of the natural
world and natural phenomena, Aristotle says that Thales
of Miletus (a city in Ionia, on the west coast of what
is now Turkey) was the first to engage in such inquiry.
He seems to have lived around the beginning of the 6th
c. BCE. Aristotle mentions that some more ancient
persons placed great importance on water (Metaphysics
983b27–33), like Thales himself, and then later raises
the question of whether perhaps Hesiod was the first to
look for a cause of motion and change (984b23ff.). These
suggestions are rhetorical: Aristotle does not seriously
imply that those he mentions are engaged in the same
sort of inquiry as he thinks Thales was. Two other Greek
thinkers from this very early period, Anaximander and
Anaximenes, were also from Miletus, and although the
ancient tradition that the three were related as master
and pupil may not be correct, there are enough
fundamental similarities in their views to justify
treating them together.
The tradition claims that Thales
predicted a solar eclipse in 585 BC (11A5), introduced
geometry into Greece from Egypt (11A11), and produced
some engineering marvels; Anaximander is reported to
have invented the gnomon, that raised piece of a sundial
whose shadow marks time (12A1), and to have been the
first to draw a map of the inhabited world (12A6).
Regardless of whether these reports are correct (and in
the case of Thales’ prediction they almost certainly are
not), they indicate something important about the
Milesians: their interests in measuring and explaining
celestial and terrestrial phenomena were as strong as
their concern with the more abstract inquiries into the
causes and principles of substance and change that
Aristotle attributes to them (Algra 1999, White 2008).
They did not see the scientific and philosophical
questions as belonging to separate disciplines,
requiring distinct methods of inquiry. The assumptions
and principles that we (along with Aristotle) see as
constituting the philosophical foundations of their
theories are, for the most part, implicit in the claims
that they make. Nevertheless, it is legitimate to treat
the Milesians as having philosophical views, even though
no clear statements of these views or specific arguments
for them can be found in the surviving fragments and
testimonia.
Aristotle’s comments do not sound as
if they were based on first-hand knowledge of Thales’
views, and the doxographical reports say that Thales did
not write a book. Yet Aristotle is confident that Thales
belongs, even if honorifically, to that group of
thinkers that he calls “inquirers into nature” and
distinguishes him from earlier poetical “myth-makers.”
In Book I of the Metaphysics, Aristotle claims that the
earliest of these, among whom he places the Milesians,
explained things only in terms of their matter (Met. I.3
983b6–18). This claim is anachronistic in that it
presupposes Aristotle’s own novel view that a complete
explanation must encompass four factors: what he called
the material, efficient, formal, and final causes. Yet
there is something in what Aristotle says. In his
discussion, Aristotle links Thales’ claim that the world
rests on water with the view that water was the archē,
or fundamental principle, and he adds that “that from
which they come to be is a principle of all things”
(983b24–25; 11A12). He suggests that Thales chose water
because of its fundamental role in coming-to-be,
nutrition, and growth, and claims that water is the
origin of the nature of moist things.
Aristotle’s general assertion about
the first thinkers who gave accounts of nature (and his
specific discussion of Thales’ reliance on water as a
first principle) brings out a difficulty in interpreting
the early Presocratics. According to Aristotle’s general
account, the Presocratics claimed that there was a
single enduring material stuff that is both the origin
of all things and their continuing nature. Thus, on this
view, when Thales says that the first principle is
water, he should be understood as claiming both that the
original state of things was water and that even now
(despite appearances), everything is really water in
some state or another. The change from the original
state to the present one involves changes in the
material stuff such that although it may not now appear
to be water everywhere (but seems to be airier or
earthier than water in its usual state, or its original
one), there is no transformation of water into a
different kind of stuff (air or earth, for instance).
Yet, when Aristotle comes to give what details he can of
Thales’ view, he suggests only that for Thales, water
was the first principle because everything comes from
water. Water, then, was perhaps the original state of
things for Thales, and water is a necessary condition
for everything that is generated naturally, but
Aristotle’s summary of Thales’ view does not imply that
Thales claimed that water endures through whatever
changes have occurred since the original state, and now
just has some new or additional properties. Thales may
well have thought that certain characteristics of the
original water persisted: in particular its capacity for
motion (which must have been innate in order to generate
the changes from the original state). This is suggested
by Thales’ reported claims that the lodestone (with its
magnetic properties) and amber (which when rubbed
exhibits powers of attraction through static
electricity) have souls and that all things are full of
gods. Aristotle surmises that Thales identified soul
(that which makes a thing alive and thus capable of
motion) with something in the whole universe, and so
supposed that everything was full of gods (11A22)—water,
or soul, being a divine natural principle. Certainly the
claim that the lodestone has soul suggests this account.
Given that the analysis of change (both qualitative and
substantial) in terms of a substratum that gains and
loses properties is Aristotelian (although perhaps
foreshadowed in Plato), it is not surprising that the
earlier views were unclear on this issue, and it is
probable that the Milesian view did not distinguish the
notions of an original matter and an enduring underlying
stuff.
The reports about Thales show him
employing a certain kind of explanation: ultimately the
explanation of why things are as they are is grounded in
water as the basic stuff of the universe and the changes
that it undergoes through its own inherent nature. In
this, Thales marks a radical change from all other
previous sorts of accounts of the world (both Greek and
non-Greek). Like the other Presocratics, Thales sees
nature as a complete and self-ordering system, and sees
no reason to call on divine intervention from outside
the natural world to supplement his account—water itself
may be divine, but it is not something that intervenes
in the natural world from outside. While the evidence
for Thales’ naturalistic account is circumstantial, this
attitude can be directly verified for Anaximander.
In the one fragment that can be
securely attributed to Anaximander (although the extent
of the implied quotation is uncertain), he emphasizes
the orderly nature of the universe, and indicates that
the order is internal rather than imposed from outside.
Simplicius, a 6th c. CE commentator on Aristotle’s
Physics, writes:
Of those who say that [the first
principle] is one and moving and indefinite,
Anaximander, son of Praxiades, a Milesian who became
successor and pupil to Thales, said that the indefinite
(to apeiron) is both principle (archē) and element
(stoicheion) of the things that are, and he was the
first to introduce this name of the principle. He says
that it is neither water nor any other of the so-called
elements, but some other indefinite (apeiron) nature,
from which come to be all the heavens and the worlds in
them; and those things, from which there is coming-to-be
for the things that are, are also those into which is
their passing-away, in accordance with what must be. For
they give penalty (dikê) and recompense to one another
for their injustice (adikia) in accordance with the
ordering of time—speaking of them in rather poetical
terms. It is clear that having seen the change of the
four elements into each other, he did not think it fit
to make some one of these underlying subject, but
something else, apart from these. (Simplicius,
Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics 24, lines 13ff. = 12A9
and B1)[1]
Thus, there is an original (and
originating) indefinite stuff, from which all the
heavens and the worlds in them come to be. This claim
probably means that the original state of the universe
was an indefinitely large mass of stuff that was also
indefinite in its character.[2] This stuff then gave
rise through its own inherent power to the ingredients
that themselves constitute the world as we perceive it.
A testimony about Anaximander from
Pseudo-Plutarch (12A10) says that “Something productive
of hot and cold was separated off from the eternal at
the genesis of this world and from this a sphere of
flame grew around the air around the earth like the bark
around a tree.” Neither the cause nor the precise
process of separation is explained, but it is probable
that Anaximander would have thought of the original
source of change as part of the character of the
indefinite itself. The passage from Simplicius shows
that Anaximander does not think that the eternal
indefinite stuff gives rise directly to the cosmos as we
know it. Rather, the apeiron somehow generates the
opposites hot and cold. Hot and cold are themselves
stuffs with powers; and it is the actions of these
stuffs/powers that produce the things that come to be in
our world. The opposites act on, dominate, and contain
each other, producing a regulated structure; thus things
pass away into those things from which they came to be.
It is this structured arrangement that Anaximander
refers to when he speaks of justice and reparation. Over
the course of time, the cycles of the seasons, the
rotations of the heavens, and other sorts of cyclical
change (including coming-to-be and passing-away) are
regulated and thus form a system. This system, ruled by
the justice of the ordering of time is in sharp contrast
with the chaotic and capricious world of the personified
Greek gods who interfere in the workings of the heavens
and in the affairs of human beings (Kahn 1985a, Vlastos
1947, Guthrie 1962).
The pattern that can be seen in Thales
and Anaximander of an original basic stuff giving rise
to the phenomena of the cosmos continues in the views of
the third of the Milesians, Anaximenes. He replaces
Anaximander’s apeiron with air, thus eliminating the
first stage of the coming-to-be of the cosmos (the
something productive of hot and cold). Rather, he
returns to an originating stuff more like Thales’ water.
In 13A5, Aristotle’s associate Theophrastus, quoted by
Simplicius, speculates that Anaximenes chose air because
he agreed that a basic principle must be neutral (as
Anaximander’s apeiron is) but not so lacking in
properties that it seems to be nothing at all. Air can
apparently take on various properties of color,
temperature, humidity, motion, taste, and smell.
Moreover, according to Theophrastus, Anaximenes
explicitly states the natural mechanism for change; it
is the condensation and rarefaction of air that
naturally determine the particular characters of the
things produced from the originating stuff. Rarified,
air becomes fire; more and more condensed, it becomes
progressively wind, cloud, water, earth, and finally
stones. “The rest,” says Theophrastus, “come to be from
these.” Plutarch says that condensation and rarefaction
are connected with cooling and heating, and he gives the
example of breath (13B1). Releasing air from the mouth
with compressed lips produces cool air (as in cooling
soup by blowing on it), but relaxed lips produce warm
air (as when one blows on cold hands to warm them up).
Does the originating stuff persist
through the changes that it undergoes in the generating
processes? Aristotle’s account suggests that it does,
that Anaximenes, for instance, would have thought that
stone was really air, although in an altered state, just
as we might say that ice is really water, cooled to a
point where it goes from a liquid to a solid state.
Because the water does not cease to be water when it is
cooled and becomes ice, it can return to a liquid when
heated and then become a gas when more heat is applied.
On this view, the Milesians were material monists,
committed to the reality of a single material stuff that
undergoes many alterations but persists through the
changes (Barnes 1979, Guthrie 1962, Sedley, 2007 and
2009). Yet there are reasons to doubt that this was
actually the Milesian view. It presumes that the early
Greek thinkers anticipated Aristotle’s general theory
that change requires enduring underlying substances that
gain and lose properties. The earliest Greeks thought
more in terms of powers (Vlastos 1947, Heidel 1906), and
the metaphysical problem of what it is to be a substance
was yet to be addressed. Clearly the Milesians were
interested in the original stuff from which the world
was formed (Anaximander and Anaximenes are explicit
about transformations of such an eternal original
stuff), but the view that this endured as a single
substratum may not have been theirs. Rather, it has been
suggested by Graham (1997 and 2006) that the Milesians
were not, in Aristotle’s sense, material monists. On
this view, the original/originating stuff is transformed
into other substances. Anaximenes, for instance, may
have thought that the change from air to water does not
involve the persistence of air as any sort of
substratum. There is no special role that air plays in
the theory except that it is the original stuff and so
first in an analysis of the law-like cyclical changes
that produce various substances as the cosmos develops
(Graham 2006, ch. 4). Such an interpretation suggests
how different the Milesian conception of the world is
from our own, or even from Aristotle’s.
3. Xenophanes of Colophon and
Heraclitus of Ephesus
Living in the last years of the 6th c.
and the beginning of the 5th, Xenophanes and Heraclitus
continue the Milesian interest in the nature of the
physical world, and both offer cosmological accounts;
yet they go further than the Milesians not only through
their focus on the human subject and the expanded range
of their physical explanations, but by investigating the
nature of inquiry itself. Both explore the possibility
of human understanding and question its limits. Recent
work on Xenophanes’ epistemology and his cosmology has
made much of his scientific work clearer and more
impressive (Lesher 1992, Mourelatos 2008). He has, to a
great extent, been rescued from his traditional status
as a minor traveling poet-sage who railed against the
glorification of athletes and made some interesting
comments about the relativity of human conceptions of
the gods. Instead, he has come to be seen as an original
thinker in his own right who influenced later
philosophers trying to distinguish the realms of the
human and the divine, and exploring the possibility that
human beings can gain knowledge and wisdom, i.e., are
able to have a god’s eye view of things and understand
them.
Xenophanes claims that all
meteorological phenomena are clouds, colored, moving,
incandescent: rainbow, St. Elmo’s Fire, the sun, the
moon. Clouds are fed by exhalations from the land and
sea (mixtures of earth and water). The motions of earth
and water, and hence of clouds, account for all the
things we find around us. His explanations of
meteorological and heavenly phenomena lead to a
naturalistic science:
She whom they call Iris, this too is
by nature (pephuke) cloud
purple, and red, and greeny-yellow to
behold. (21B32)
Xenophanes says that the star-like
phenomena seen when aboard ship, which some call the
Dioscuri, are cloudlets, glimmering because of their
kind of motion. (A39)
In the 1980’s Alexander Mourelatos
argued that Xenophanes employs an important new pattern
of explanation: X is really Y, where Y reveals the true
character of X. Xenophanes signals this by the use of
pephuke in B32, and no doubt it (or some word like it)
was there in the original of A39 as well. Xenophanes
thus provides an account of a phenomenon often taken to
be a sign from the divine—Iris as the messenger; the
Dioscuri (St. Elmo’s fire) as comfort for sailors—that
reduces it to a natural occurrence.
That meteorological phenomena are not
divine is not all that Xenophanes has to say about the
gods. He notes anthropomorphic tendencies in conceptions
of the gods (B14: “Mortals suppose that the gods are
born, and have their own dress, voice, and body;” B16:
“Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and dark,
Thracians, that theirs are grey-eyed and red-haired”).
He also famously suggests that horses, oxen, and lions
would have equine, bovine, and leonine gods (B15). Yet
Xenophanes also makes positive claims about the nature
of the divine, including the claim that there is a
single greatest god:
One god greatest among gods and men,
Resembling mortals neither in body nor
in thought.
but completely without toil he
agitates all things by the
thought of his mind.
… always he remains in the same
(state), agitated not at all,
nor is it fitting that he come and go
to different places at different times.
(B23, 24, 25, 26)
While indifferent to the affairs of
human beings, Xenophanes’ divine being understands and
controls a cosmos that is infused with divine thinking,
understood, organized, and managed by divine
intellection. Moreover, B18 suggests that Xenophanes is
optimistic about the capacities of human intelligence:
Indeed not even from the beginning did
the gods indicate all things to mortals, but, in time,
inquiring, they discover better.
Having already removed the gods as
bearers of knowledge to humans, denying that the divine
takes an active interest in what mortals can or cannot
know, Xenophanes asserts the conclusion to be drawn from
his naturalistic interpretation of phenomena: the gods
are not going to reveal anything to us; we are
epistemologically autonomous and must rely on our own
capacity for inquiry. That way, we “discover better,” as
he says (see Lesher 1991). This is an optimistic
conclusion, suggesting that human thought can mimic
divine understanding, at least to some degree.
Xenophanes’ own practice seems consistent with the
claims of B18; his own inquiries and explanations led
him to unified explanations of terrestrial and celestial
phenomena. Yet B34 suggests skepticism:
And of course the clear and certain
truth no man has seen,
nor will there be anyone who knows
about the gods and what I say about all things;
for even if, in the best case, he
should chance to speak what is the case,
all the same, he himself does not
know; but opinion is found over all.
Whether this is global or limited
skepticism is controversial (Lesher 1992 and 1994 argues
for a limited interpretation). Xenophanes stresses the
difficulty of coming to certainty, particularly about
things beyond our direct experience.
Famously obscure, accused by Plato of
incoherence and by Aristotle of denying the law of
non-contradiction, Heraclitus writes in an aphoristic
style, his apparently paradoxical claims presenting
difficulties to any interpreter. Nevertheless, he raises
important questions about knowledge and the nature of
the world. The opening of Heraclitus’ book refers to a
“logos which holds forever.”[3] There is disagreement
about exactly what Heraclitus meant by using the term
logos, but it is clear from 22B1 and B2 as well as B50
and other fragments that he refers to an objective
law-like principle that governs the cosmos, and which it
is possible (but difficult) for humans to come to
understand. There is a single order that directs all
things (“all things are one” B50); this order is divine,
and is sometimes connected by humans with the
traditional gods (it is “both unwilling and willing to
be called by the name of Zeus” B32). Just as Zeus, in
the traditional view, controls from Olympus with a
thunderbolt, so this single ordered system steers and
controls the whole cosmos from within. The sign of the
unchanging order of the eternal system is fire—just as
fire is always changing and always the same, so with the
logos that embodies the order and rules all things.
The plan or order that steers the
cosmos is, itself, a rational order. This means not only
that it is non-capricious and so intelligible (in the
sense that humans can, at least in principle, come to
understand it), it is also an intelligent system: there
is an intelligent plan at work, if only in the sense of
the cosmos working itself out in accordance with
rational principles.[4] Consider B114:
Those who would speak with
understanding must ground themselves firmly in that
which is common to all, just as a city does in its law,
and even more firmly! For all human laws are nourished
by one law, the divine; for it rules as far at it wishes
and suffices for all, and is still more than enough.
Heraclitus is not only claiming that
human prescriptive law must harmonize with divine law,
but he is also asserting that divine law encompasses
both the universal laws of the cosmos itself and the
particular laws of men. The cosmos itself is an
intelligent, eternal (and hence divine) system that
orders and regulates itself in an intelligent way: the
logos is the account of this self-regulation. We can
come to grasp and understand at least part of this
divine system. This is not merely because we ourselves
are part of (contained in) the system, but because we
have, through our capacity for intelligent thinking, the
power to grasp the system as a whole, through knowing
the logos. How this grasping is supposed to work is
tantalizingly obscure.
Heraclitus regards the order of cosmos
as like a language that can be read or heard and
understood by those who are attuned to it. That language
is not just the physical evidence around us (“Eyes and
ears are bad witnesses to those with barbarian souls”
B107); the sheer accumulation of information is not the
same as wisdom (see the rebuke in 22B40, quoted above).
Although the evidence of the senses is important (see
B55 and other fragments on direct experience vs.
hearsay), careful and thoughtful inquiry is also
necessary. Those who are lovers of wisdom must be good
inquirers into many things (B35; also B101: “I enquired
into myself”), and must be able to grasp how the
phenomena are signs or evidence of the larger order; as
Heraclitus notes in B123, “nature is accustomed to hide
itself,” and the evidence must be carefully interpreted.
That evidence is the interplay of opposing states and
forces, which Heraclitus points to by claims about the
unity of opposites and the roles of strife in human life
as well as in the cosmos. There are fragments that
proclaim the unity or identity of opposites: the road up
and down are one and the same (B60), the path of writing
is both straight and crooked (B59), sea water is very
pure and very foul (B61). The famous river fragments
(B49a, B12, B91a) question the identity of things over
time, while a number of fragments point to the
relativity of value judgments (B9, B82, B102).
Anaximander’s system of just reciprocity ordered by time
is replaced by a system governed by war: “It is right to
know that war is common and justice strife, and that all
things come to be through strife and are so ordained”
(B80). The changes and alterations that constitute the
processes of the cosmos are regular and capable of being
understood by one who can speak the language of the
logos and thus interpret properly. Although the evidence
is confusing, it points to the deeper regularities that
constitute the cosmos, just as Heraclitus’ own remarks
can seem obscure yet point to the truth. Heraclitus
surely has his own message (and his delivery of it) in
mind in B93, “The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither
speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign.”
One of the earliest of the Greek
philosophers to discuss the human soul, Heraclitus’
claims about it, like his other views, are expressed
enigmatically. Yet it seems fairly clear that he treats
soul as the seat of emotion, movement, and intellect.
B107 (quoted above) indicates that understanding is a
function of soul, and in B117, the drunken man who must
be led by a boy because he has lost control of his legs,
and also does not know where he goes or what he does.
Drunkenness is the cause of all this: because his soul
has become wet its powers are dampened down and become
ineffective. B118 asserts “gleam of light: dry soul,
wisest and best.” This suggests that for Heraclitus,
soul is a stuff that is affected by changes along the
hot/cold and wet/dry continua. Although Heraclitus says
that it is only divine nature that has complete
understanding (B78), his linking of fire with the logos
and the divine, along with his view that the best and
wisest soul is hot and dry, suggests that humans who
care for their souls and search for the truth contained
in the logos can overcome human ignorance and approach
understanding. (Betegh 2007 and 2009, and Dilcher 1995
both discuss the nature and importance of soul for
Heraclitus; see also Granger 2000 and Kahn 1979.)
4. Parmenides of Elea
Parmenides, born ca.
510 BCE in the Greek colony of Elea in southern Italy
(south of Naples, and now known as Velia), explores the
nature of philosophical inquiry, concentrating less on
knowledge or understanding (although he has views about
these) than on what can be understood. Xenophanes
identified genuine knowledge with the grasping of the
sure and certain truth and claimed that “no man has
seen” it (21B34); Heraclitus had asserted that divine
nature, not human, has right understanding (22B78).
Parmenides argues that human thought can reach genuine
knowledge or understanding, and that there can be
certain marks or signs that act as guarantees that the
goal of knowledge has been reached. A fundamental part
of Parmenides’ claim is that what must be (cannot
not-be, as Parmenides puts it) is more knowable than
what is merely contingent (what may or may not be),
which can be the object only of belief.
Parmenides gives us a poem in Homeric
hexameters, narrating the journey of a young man (a
kouros, in Greek) who is taken to meet a goddess who
promises to teach him “all things” (28B1). The content
of the story the goddess tells is not the knowledge that
will allow humans, by having it, to know. Rather, the
goddess gives the kouros the tools to acquire that
knowledge himself:
It is right that you learn all things,
Both the unshaking heart of
well-persuasive truth,
and the beliefs of mortals, in which
there is no true trust.
But nevertheless, you shall learn
these things too, how it were right that the things that
seem be reliably, being indeed the whole of things.
(B1.28–32)
The goddess does not provide a list of
true propositions, as a body of knowledge for him to
acquire, and false ones to be avoided. Rather, in
teaching the kouros how to evaluate claims about
what-is, the goddess gives him the power to know all, by
testing and evaluation, accepting or rejecting claims
about the ultimate nature of things—that being what, and
all that, is capable of being known. For Parmenides, the
mark of what is known is that it is something that
genuinely is, with no taint of what-is-not. That is why,
for him, it not only is, but must be and cannot not-be.
He sets this out in the key passages of B2 and B3:[5]
Come now, and I will tell you, and
you, hearing, preserve the story,
the only routes of inquiry there are
for thinking;
the one that it is and that it cannot
not be
is the path of Persuasion (for it
attends upon truth)
the other, that it is not and that it
is right that it not be,
this I point out to you is a path
wholly inscrutable
for you could not know what is not
(for it is not to be accomplished)
nor could you point it out… For the
same thing is for thinking and for being.
The routes are methods of inquiry:
keeping on the correct route will bring one to what-is,
the real object of thought and understanding. Although
what the goddess tells the kouros has divine sanction
(hers), that is not why he should accept it. Rather, the
truth she tells reveals a mark of its own truth: it is
testable by reason or thought itself. In B7 the goddess
warns that we must control our thought in the face of
the ever-present seductions of sense-experience:
For never shall this be forced
through: that things that are not are;
but restrain your thought from this
route of inquiry,
nor let much-experienced habit force
you along this path,
to ply an aimless eye and resounding
ear
and tongue, but judge by thinking
(logos) the much-battled testing
spoken by me.
The kouros himself can reach a
decision or determination of the truth solely through
use of his logos. Logos here means thinking or
reasoning. It is probably not reason as a faculty that
Parmenides intends here, but the reasoning aspect of
noos, the capacity for thought in general. In any case,
the test (restated at B8.15–16), is “is or is not?” –
this is not just the question of non-contradiction
(which would give us coherence), but whether or not the
claim that something is entails, on further examination,
the actual reality of what-is-not.
The arguments of B8 demonstrate how
what-is must be, and in applying these arguments as
tests against any suggested basic entity in the
Presocratic search for ultimate causes or principles,
the kouros can determine whether or not a proposed
theory is acceptable. For Parmenides noos is not itself
an infallible capacity. One can think well or badly;
correct thinking is that which takes the correct route
and so reaches what-is. The mortals on the incorrect
route are thinking, but their thoughts have no real
object (none that is real in the appropriate way), and
so cannot be completed or perfected by reaching the
truth. In B8 Parmenides sets out the criteria for the
being of what-is, and then the arguments for those
criteria:
… a single account still
remains of the route that it is; and
on this route there are
very many signs, that what-is is
ungenerable and imperishable,
a whole of a single kind, and
unshaking and complete;
nor was it nor will it be, since it is
now all together
one, cohesive. (B8.1–6)
Any thing that genuinely is cannot be
subject to coming-to-be or passing-away, must be of a
single nature, and must be complete, in the sense of
being unchangeably and unalterably what it is. These are
signs for what any ultimate cause or principle must be
like, if it is to be satisfactory as a principle, as
something that can be known. The signs are adverbial,
showing how what-is is (Mourelatos 2008). Only an entity
which is in the complete way can be grasped and
understood in its entirety by thought. McKirahan (2008)
provides a thorough analysis of the arguments of B8, as
does Palmer 2009.
After laying out the arguments about
what-is, the goddess turns to the route of mortals, in
an account which she calls “deceptive.” Although
Parmenides has been read as thus rejecting any
possibility of cosmological inquiry (Barnes 1979, Owen
1960), there are persuasive interpretations that allow
for justified belief about the contingent world, a world
that may or may not be, and is not such that it must be
(Nehamas 2002, Curd 2004, Palmer 2009). The problem of
mortals is that they mistake what they perceive for what
there is (and must be). As long as one realizes that the
world of perception is not genuinely real, and cannot
therefore be the object of knowledge, it may be possible
for there to be justified belief about the cosmos. Some
details of Parmenides’ own cosmology are given, arguably
as justified belief, in the Doxa section of the poem,
and more in the testimonia from later authors.
Parmenides marks a sharp distinction between being
(what-is and must be) and becoming, and between
knowledge and perception-based belief or opinion.
5. The Pythagorean Tradition
In the last quarter
of the sixth century, before Parmenides’ birth,
Pythagoras of Samos (an Aegean island) arrived in
Croton, in southern Italy. He established a community of
followers who adopted his political views, which favored
rule by the “better people,” and also the way of life he
recommended on what seem to have been more or less
philosophical bases. The traditional view has been that
the aristocracy, the “better people,” generally meant
the rich. But Burkert notes that as early as the 4th c.
BCE there were two traditions about Pythagoras, one that
meshes with the traditional view and associates
Pythagoras with political tyrants, and another that
credits him with rejecting tyrannies for aristocracies
that might not have been grounded in wealth (Burkert
1972, 119). The Pythagorean Archytas (born late 5th
century) lived in a democracy (Tarentum in southern
Italy), and seems to have argued for fair and
proportionate dealings between rich and poor (Huffman
2005). The Pythagorean way of life included adherence to
certain prescriptions including religious rites and
dietary restrictions (see the general discussion in Kahn
2001).
Like Socrates, Pythagoras wrote
nothing himself, but had a great influence on those who
followed him. He had a reputation for great learning and
wisdom (see Empedocles 31B129), although he was treated
satirically by both Xenophanes (21B7) and Heraclitus
(22B40, B129). We do not know to what extent this
included knowledge of mathematics, as would be suggested
by the attribution to him of the famous Pythagorean
theorem of geometry. The details of Pythagoras’ views
are unclear, but he seems to have advocated the
immortality of the soul (a novel idea among the Greeks,
also developed in Orphic religion) and the possibility
of the transmigration of the human soul after death into
other animal forms. Pythagorean writers after his own
time stressed the mathematical structure and order of
the universe. This is often attributed directly to
Pythagoras (primarily because of the geometrical theorem
that bears his name), but recent scholarship has shown
that the evidence for attributing this
mathematically-based cosmology to Pythagoras himself is
convoluted and doubtful (Burkert 1972, Huffman 1993 and
2005; but see Zhmud 1997).
What seems clear is that the early
Pythagoreans conceived of nature as a structured system
ordered by number (see the SEP entry on Pythagoras), and
that such post-Parmenidean Pythagoreans as Philolaus
(last half of the 5th century, more than a generation
after Pythagoras’ death) and Archytas (late 5th to early
4th century) held more complicated views about the
relation between mathematics and cosmology than it is
reasonable to suppose Pythagoras himself could have
advanced. The Pythagorean tradition thus includes two
strains. There are reports of a split in the period
after Pythagoras’ death between what we would term the
more philosophically inclined Pythagoreans and others
who primarily adopted the Pythagorean ethical, religious
and political attitudes. The latter, called the
acusmatici, followed the Pythagorean precepts, or
acusmata (which means “things heard”). The former, the
philosophical Pythagoreans (including Philolaus and
Archytas), were the called mathematici, and while they
recognized that the acusmatici were indeed Pythagoreans
by virtue of accepting Pythagorean precepts, they
claimed that they themselves were the true followers of
Pythagoras.
Philolaus of Croton seems to have
blended the Pythagorean life with an awareness of and
appreciation for the arguments of Parmenides (Huffman
1993). According to Philolaus, “Nature in the cosmos was
fitted together out of unlimiteds and limiters” (44B1).
These limiters and unlimiteds play the role of
Parmenidean basic realities—they are and unchangingly
must be what they are, and so can be known; they are
joined together in a harmonia (literally, a carpenter’s
joint; metaphorically, a harmony), and “it was not
possible for any of the things that are and are known by
us to come to be, without the existence of the being of
things from which the cosmos was put together” (44B6).
The unlimiteds are unstructured stuffs and continua; the
limiters impose structure (shape, form, mathematical
structure) on the unlimiteds. Things become knowable
because they are structured in this way; the structure
can apparently be expressed in a numerical ratio that
allows for understanding: “All things that are known
have number; for without this nothing whatever could
possibly be thought of or known” (44B4).
6. Other Eleatics: Zeno and Melissus
Parmenides had argued
that there were strict metaphysical requirements on any
object of knowledge; the later Eleatics, Zeno of Elea
(born ca. 490) and Melissus of Samos (fl. ca. 440),
extended and explored the consequences of his arguments.
Zeno paid particular attention to the contrast between
the requirements of logical argument and the evidence of
the senses (Vlastos 1967 is a masterly treatment of
Zeno; see also McKirahan 1999 and 2005). The four famous
paradoxes of motion, for which he is now and in
antiquity best known, purported to show that, despite
the evidence all around us, the ordinary motion of
everyday life is impossible. The paradoxes claim that
motions can never be begun (the Achilles) or be
completed (the Dichotomy), entail contradictions (the
Moving Blocks), or are altogether impossible (the
Arrow).[6] Recent philosophers of space and time (see
Grünbaum 1967, articles in Salmon 2001, Huggett 1999)
hold that the arguments are reductios of the theses that
space and time are continuous (the Achilles and the
Dichotomy) or discrete (the Moving Blocks and the
Arrow). Consider the Dichotomy: a runner can never
complete a run from point A to point B. First, the
runner must move from A to a point halfway between A and
B (call it C). But between A and C there is yet another
halfway point (D), and the runner must first reach D.
But between A and D there is yet another halfway point …
and so on, ad infinitum. So the runner, starting at A,
can never reach B. The argument assumes that it is
impossible to pass an infinite number of points in a
finite time. Similarly, Zeno produced paradoxes showing
that plurality is impossible: if things are many,
contradictions follow (Plato’s Parmenides 127e1ff.; Zeno
in 29B1, 29B2, and 29B3); there were also purported
proofs that place is impossible (29A24) and that things
cannot have parts (the Millet Seed, 29A29).
Melissus, dismissed as a simple-minded
thinker by Aristotle (and by some contemporary scholars
as well), expands Parmenides’ arguments about the nature
of what-is. It is Melissus who explicitly claims that
only one thing can be: if what-is is unlimited (as he
thinks it is), it must be one and all alike (if there
were two [in number or in character] they would be
“limited against each other” 30B6). Melissus
specifically argues against the empty (the void), and
rejects the possibility of rearrangement (which would
allow for the appearance of coming-to-be and
passing-away)—all these characteristics are incompatible
with the unity of what-is. Melissus thus claims that
what is real is completely unlike the world that we
experience: the split between appearance and reality is
complete and unbridgeable.
7. The Pluralists: Anaxagoras of
Clazomenae and Empedocles of Acragas
While Zeno and
Melissus reinforced Parmenides’ distinction between
what-is (i.e., what must be) and what appears, other
post-Parmenidean thinkers accepted Parmenides’ arguments
against coming-to-be and passing-away (as characterizing
what-is), and about the nature of what is ultimately
real, and argued that they did not rule out the
possibility of metaphysically-based (or rational)
cosmology. Both Anaxagoras and Empedocles worked within
the Parmenidean pattern while developing distinct
cosmological systems that addressed their own particular
concerns (especially in the case of Empedocles, concerns
about the proper way to live).
Anaxagoras (writing in the mid-5th c.)
claims, “The Greeks [i.e., ordinary people] do not think
correctly about coming-to-be and passing-away; for no
thing comes to be or passes away, but is mixed together
and dissociated from the things that are. And thus they
would be correct to call coming-to-be mixing-together
and passing-away dissociating” (59B17). What seem to be
generated objects (human beings, plants, animals, the
moon, the stars) are instead temporary mixtures of
ingredients (such as earth, air, fire, water, hair,
flesh, blood, dense, dark, rare, bright, and so on).[7]
The original state was one of universal mixture: “All
things were together, unlimited both in amount and in
smallness, for the small, too, was unlimited. And
because all things were together, nothing was evident”
(59B1). This mixture is set into rotary motion by the
operation of Mind (Nous – B12, B13, B14; see discussions
in Laks 1993, Lesher 1995, Menn 1995, Curd 2007), a
separate cosmic entity that does not share in such
mixture. As the rotation spreads out through the
unlimited mass of indistinguishably intermingled
ingredients, the rotation causes a winnowing or
separating effect, and the cosmos as we know it emerges
from the mixture. Moreover, not only were all things
together, they are even now all together, in a different
way, despite the differentiations now achieved.
Everything is in everything (59B5, B6, B11), in some
proportions, however small or great – this is a move to
prevent even the appearance of coming-to-be from
what-is-not.
Anaxagoras marks an important
theoretical step in attributing the motion of his
ingredients to an external, independent, intelligent
force (although both Plato and Aristotle were
disappointed that his theory was not properly—from their
point of view—teleological; on this see Sedley 2007).
The rotation is ultimately causally responsible for the
formation of the heavens and the activities of the great
masses of the earth and the water on the earth, as well
as all meteorological phenomena. Insofar as the causes
of the operations of the heavens and the phenomena
apparent to us from day to day are the same at both the
macro- and micro-level (the rotations that cause the
apparent motions of the stars are the same as those that
govern the cycles of weather and life and death on
earth), we can infer the nature of what is real from
what is apparent. Although we do not perceive all things
as being together, and the move to the ultimate
explanations is an inference, it is a legitimate one
(“owing to their [the senses’] feebleness, we are not
able to determine the truth” yet “appearances are a
sight of the unseen” 59B21 and 21a).
A younger contemporary of Anaxagoras,
Empedocles, who lived in Sicily, also recognized the
force of Parmenides’ arguments against coming-to-be and
passing-away. (Empedocles also adopts Parmenides’ poetic
meter in order to tell his story.) Empedocles proposes a
cosmos formed of the four roots (as he calls them),
earth, water, air, and fire along with the motive forces
of Love and Strife. Love unites opposed (unlike) things,
mixing unlikes, while Strife sets unlikes in opposition
and pulls them apart, with the effect that it mixes like
with like. Just as painters can produce fantastically
lifelike scenes just by mixing colors, so the operations
of Love and Strife, using just the four roots can
produce “trees and men and women, and beasts and birds
and water-nourished fish, and long-lived gods best in
honors” (31B17). These are the things that Empedocles
calls “mortal,” and he even provides recipes. 31B73
tells how Kypris (the goddess Aphrodite, i.e. love)
fashions shapes (or kinds): “she moistened earth in
rain, and gave it to quick fire to harden.” B96 gives a
recipe for bones, while in B98 flesh and blood have the
same recipe (earth, water, air, and fire in equal
proportions), but differ in the refinement of the
mixture.
Like the other Presocratics,
Empedocles has a cosmological theory, in his case, an
unending cycle involving the competition between Love
and Strife. Love overcomes the separating influence of
Strife, bringing together unlikes and so preventing the
clinging together of likes. The triumph of Love results
in the Sphere, which is a complete mixture because the
four unlike roots are as mixed (integrated) as possible.
Strife breaks up the sphere by beginning to attract like
to like and so pulling the mixture apart, until, when it
triumphs, there is complete segregation of the roots.
Love resists the separation of unlikes and the clinging
together of likes, by trying to keep unlike things
mixed. The cosmos as we know it is a result of
intermediate phases between the two extremes of the
triumph of one of the forces.[8]
Although Empedocles has a cosmic story
to tell, cosmology is not his sole interest. Like the
Pythagoreans, Empedocles thought that how one lived was
as important as one’s theoretical commitments (and that
the two were intimately connected). The ancient evidence
seems to suggest that Empedocles was the author of two
works, commonly called in modern scholarship the Physics
and the Purifications, one cosmological and the other
ethico-religious. The relation between the two works has
been a matter of some controversy. In the 1990s new
evidence from the Strasbourg Papyrus showed
unequivocally that the cosmological and ethico-religious
aspects of Empedocles’ thought are inextricably
intertwined (Martin and Primavesi 1999, Primavesi 2008,
Kingsley 1995), although commentators still disagree
about whether this new evidence supports the conclusion
that there was a single poem combining both.[9] The
correct philosophical understanding of the physical
world and the correct way to live cannot be separated
from one another in Empedocles’ thought (a similar
attitude appears in Heraclitus); one cannot fully
understand the world without living correctly.[10] Like
the Pythagoreans, the Empedoclean way of life included
vegetarianism and a story of transmigrating daimōns who
seem to have some kind of personal identity.
8. Presocratic Atomism
The pluralism of Anaxagoras and
Empedocles maintained the Eleatic strictures on
metaphysically acceptable basic entities (things that
are and must be just what they are) by adopting an
irreducible pluralism of stuffs meeting these standards
that could pass on their qualities to items constructed
from them. Ancient atomism responded more radically:
what is real is an infinite number of solid, uncuttable
(atomon) units of matter. All atoms are made of the same
stuff (solid matter, in itself otherwise indeterminate),
differing from one another (according to Aristotle) only
in shape, position, arrangement. (Later sources say that
atoms differ in weight; this is certainly true for
post-Aristotelian atomism, but less likely for
Presocratic atomism.) In addition, the Presocratic
atomists, Leucippus and Democritus (Democritus was born
in about 460 BCE in Abdera in Northern Greece, shortly
after Socrates was born in Athens), enthusiastically
endorsed the reality of the empty (or void).[11] The
void is what separates atoms and allows for the
differences noted above (except weight, which could not
be accounted for by void, since void in an atom would
make it divisible and, hence, not an atom) (Sedley 1982;
see also Sedley 2008).
Like Anaxagoras, the atomists consider
all phenomenal objects and characteristics as emerging
from the background mixture; in the case of atomism, the
mix of atoms and void (Wardy 1988). Everything is
constructed of atoms and void: the shapes of the atoms
and their arrangement with respect to each other (and
the intervening void) give physical objects their
apparent characteristics. As Democritus says: “By
convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention
hot, by convention cold, by convention color: in reality
atoms and void” (68B125 = B9). For example, Theophrastus
says that the flavors differ according to the shapes of
the atoms that compose various objects; thus “Democritus
makes sweet that which is round and quite large,
astringent that which large, rough, polygonal and not
rounded” (de Caus. Plant. 6.1.6 = 68A129). Simplicius
reports that things composed of sharp and very fine
atoms in similar positions are hot and fiery; those
composed of atoms with the opposite character come to be
cold and watery (in Phys. 36.3–6 = 67A14). Moreover,
Theophrastus reports that the atomists explain why iron
is harder than lead but lighter; it is harder because of
the uneven arrangements of the atoms that make it up,
lighter because it contains more void than lead. Lead,
on the other hand, has less void than iron, but the even
arrangement of the atoms makes lead easier to cut or to
bend.
Adopting a strong distinction between
appearance and reality, and denying the accuracy of
appearances, as we see him do in the above quotation,
Democritus was seen by some ancient sources (especially
Sextus Empiricus) as a sort of skeptic, yet the evidence
is unclear. It is true that Democritus is quoted as
saying, “In truth we know nothing; for truth is in the
depths” (68B117). So for him, the truth is not given in
the appearances. Yet, even Sextus seems to agree that
Democritus allows for knowledge:
But in the Rules [Democritus] says
that there are two kinds of knowing, one through the
senses and the other through the understanding. The one
through the understanding he calls genuine, witnessing
to its trustworthiness in deciding truth; the one
through the senses he names bastard, denying it
steadfastness in the discernment of what is true. He
says in these words, “There are two forms of knowing,
one genuine and the other bastard. To the bastard belong
all these: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. The
other, the genuine, has been separated from this”
[68B11]. Then preferring the genuine to the bastard, he
continues, saying, “Whenever the bastard is no longer
able to see more finely nor hear nor smell nor taste nor
perceive by touch, but something finer…”
Thus Sextus suggests that the evidence
of the senses, when properly interpreted by reason, can
be taken as a guide to reality (the claim that
“appearances are a sight of the unseen” is attributed to
Democritus as well as to Anaxagoras). We just need to
know how to follow this guide, through proper reasoning,
so as to reach the truth—i.e., the theory of atoms and
void (Lee 2005).
In addition to fragments advancing
these metaphysical and physical doctrines, there are a
number of ethical fragments attributed to Democritus
(but the question of authenticity looms large here);
although a passage reported in John Stobaeus seems to
link moderation and cheerfulness with small measured
movements in the soul and says that excess and
deficiencies give rise to large movements (68B191), it
is unclear whether or how these claims are directly
related to the metaphysical aspects of atomism (Vlastos
1945 and 1946, Kahn 1985b). Democritus was identified in
antiquity with the idea of “good cheer” (euthumiē) as
the proper guiding objective in living one’s life. In
this, as in other aspects of his philosophy, he may have
had some influence on the formation of Epicurus’
philosophy a century later.
9. Diogenes of Apollonia and the
Sophists
In the last part of the 5th century,
Diogenes of Apollonia (active after 440 BCE) revived and
revised the Milesian system of cosmology, claiming that
“all the things that are are alterations from the same
thing and are the same thing” (64B2); he identified this
single basic substance with air, like Anaximenes more
than a century before (Graham 2006, Laks 2008, 2008a).
Yet Diogenes takes care to give arguments for the
existence and properties of his basic principle. In B2
he says that only things that are alike can affect one
another. If there were a plurality of basic substances,
each differing in what Diogenes calls their “own proper
nature,” there could be no interaction between them. Yet
the evidence of the senses is clear: things mix and
separate and interact with one another. Thus, all things
must be forms of some one single thing. Like Anaxagoras,
Diogenes claims that the cosmic system is ordered by
intelligence, and he argues that that “which possesses
intelligence (noēsis) is what human beings call air”
(B5). Humans and animals live by breathing air, and are
governed by it —in them air is both soul and
intelligence, or mind (B4). Moreover, Diogenes argues,
air governs and rules all things and is god (B5). Thus,
like Anaxagoras, Diogenes has a theory grounded in
intelligence, although Diogenes is more fully committed
to teleological explanations, insofar as he states
explicitly that intelligence (noēsis) orders things in a
good way (B3). In presenting his arguments, Diogenes
fulfills his own requirement for a philosophical claim.
In B1 he says, “In my opinion, anyone beginning a logos
(account) ought to present a starting principle (archē)
that is indisputable and a style that is simple and
stately.” He notes that his theory that air is soul and
intelligence “will have been made clearly evident in
this book” (B4).
Theophrastus says that Diogenes was
the last of the physical philosophers, the physiologoi,
or “inquirers into nature,” as Aristotle called them.
There was also another group of thinkers active about
this time: the Sophists. Many of our views about this
group have been shaped by Plato’s aggressively negative
assessment of them: in his dialogues Plato expressly
contrasts the genuine philosopher, i.e., Socrates, with
the Sophists, especially in their role as teachers of
young men growing into their maturity (youths at the age
when Socrates, too, engaged with them in his
discussions). Modern scholarship (Woodruff and Gagarin
2008, Kerferd 1981, Guthrie 1969) has shown the
diversity of their views. They were not completely
uninterested in the theoretical problems that concerned
others of the Presocratics. Gorgias of Leontini explored
the possibility of the sort of theoretical knowledge
that Parmenides explored: in his On Nature, or On
what-is-not, Gorgias claims that nothing satisfies
Parmenides’ requirements for what-is (Mansfeld 1985,
Mourelatos 1987b, Palmer 1999, Caston 2002, Curd 2006).
Protagoras, too, questioned the possibility of the sort
of objective knowledge that the Presocratics sought. The
Sophists explored ethical and political questions: Does
law or convention ground what is right, or is it a
matter of nature? They were peripatetic, sometimes
serving as diplomats, and they were both entertainers
and teachers. They gave public displays of rhetoric
(this contrasts with Diogenes of Apollonia’s comments
about his book, which seems to imply a more private
enterprise)[12] and took on students, teaching both the
art of rhetoric and the skills necessary for succeeding
in Greek political life. With the Sophists, as with
Socrates, interest in ethics and political thought
becomes a more prominent aspect of Greek philosophy.
10. The Presocratic Legacy
The range of Presocratic thought shows
that the first philosophers were not merely physicists
(although they were certainly that). Their interests
extended to religious and ethical thought, the nature of
understanding, mathematics, meteorology, the nature of
explanation, and the roles of mechanism, matter, form,
and structure in the world. Almost all the Presocratics
seemed to have something to say about embryology, and
fragments of Diogenes and Empedocles show a keen
interest in the structures of the body; the overlap
between ancient philosophy and ancient medicine is of
growing interest to scholars of early Greek thought
(Longrigg 1963, van der Eijk 2008). Recent discoveries,
such as the Derveni Papyrus (Betegh 2004, Kouremenos et
al. 2006, Janko 2001, Laks and Most 1997), show that
interest in and knowledge of the early philosophers was
not necessarily limited to a small audience of
rationalistic intellectuals. They passed on many of what
later became the basic concerns of philosophy to Plato
and Aristotle, and ultimately to the whole tradition of
Western philosophical thought.
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Philosophy
as a discipline isn't easy to define precisely. Issuing
from a sense of wonderment about life and the world, it
often involves a keen interest in major questions about
ourselves, our experience, and our place in the universe
as a whole. But philosophy is also reflectively
concerned with the methods its practitioners
employ in the effort to resolve such questions. Emerging
as a central feature of Western culture, philosophy is a
tradition of thinking and writing about particular
issues in special ways.
Thus,
philosophy must be regarded both as content and as
activity: It considers alternative views of what is real
and the development of reasons for accepting them. It
requires both a careful, sympathetic reading of
classical texts and a critical, logical examination of
the arguments
they express. It offers all of us the chance to create
and adopt significant beliefs about life and the world,
but it also requires each of us to acquire the habits of
criticical thinking. Philosophy is both sublime and
nitpicking.
Since our
personal growth in these matters naturally retraces the
process of cultural development, study of the history of
philosophy in our culture provides an excellent
introduction to the discipline as a whole. Here our aim
is to examine the appearance of Western philosophy as an
interesting and valuable component of our cultural
heritage.
Abstract
thought about the ultimate nature of the world and of
human life began to appear in cultures all over the
world during the
sixth century B.C.E., as an urge to move beyond
superstition toward explanation. We focus here on its
embodiment among the
ancient Greeks, whose active and tumultuous social
life provided ample opportunities for the expression of
philosophical thinking of three sorts:
Speculative
thinking expresses human curiosity about the world,
striving to understand in natural (rather than
super-natural) terms how things really are, what they
are made of, and how they function.
Practical
thinking emphasizes the desire to guide conduct by
comprehending the nature of life and the place of
human beings and human behavior in the greater scheme
of reality.
Critical
thinking (the hallmark of philosophy itself) involves
a careful examination of the foundations upon which
thinking of any sort must rely, trying to achieve an
effective method for assessing the reliability of
positions adopted on the significant issues.
Beginning with
clear examples of thinking of the first two sorts, we will
see the gradual emergence of inclinations toward the
third.
During the
sixth century, in the Greek colony at Miletus, a group
of thinkers began to engage in an extended exploration
of the speculative issues. Although these Milesians
wrote little themselves, other ancient authorities
recorded some of their central tenets. Their central
urge was to show that the complex world has a simple,
permanent underpinning in the reality
of a single kind of stuff from which all else emerges.
The
philosopherThales,
for example, is remembered as having asserted that all
comes from water. (Fragments)
Although we have no record of the reasoning that led
Thales to this conclusion, it isn't hard to imagine what
it might have been. If we suppose that the ultimate
stuff of the world must be chosen from among things
familiar to us, water isn't a bad choice: most of the
earth is covered with it, it appears in solid, liquid,
and gaseous forms, and it is clearly essential to the
existence of life. Everything is moist.
Thales's
student Anaximander,
however, found this answer far too simple. Proper
attention to the changing face of the universe, he
supposed, requires us to consider the cyclical
interaction of things of at least four sorts: the hot,
the cold, the dry, and the wet. (Fragments)
Anaximander held that all of these elements originally
arise from a primal, turbulent mass, the the
Boundless or Infinite {Gk. απειρων
[apeirôn]}. It is only by a gradual process of
distillation that everything else emerges—earth, air,
fire, water, of course—and even living things evolve.
The
next Milesian, Anaximenes,
returned to the conviction that there must be a single
kind of stuff at the heart of everything, and he
proposed vapor or mist {Gk. αερ [aer]} as the most
likely candidate. (Fragments)
Not only does this warm, wet air combine two of the four
elements together, but it also provides a familiar pair
of processes for changes in its state: condensation and
evaporation. Thus, in its most rarified form of breath
or spirit, Anaximenes's air constitutes the highest
representation of life.
As interesting
as Milesian speculations are, they embody only the most
primitive variety of philosophical speculation. Although
they disagreed with each other on many points, each of
the thinkers appears to have been satisfied with the
activity of proposing his own views in relative
isolation from those of his teacher or contemporaries.
Later generations initiated the move toward critical
thinking by arguing with each other.
The Greek
colony in Italy at the same time devoted much more
concern to practical matters. Followers of the legendary
Pythagoras
developed a comprehensive view of a human life in
harmony with all of the natural world. Since the
Pythagoreans persisted for many generations as a
quasi-religious sect, protecting themselves behind a
veil of secrecy, it is difficult to recover a detailed
account of the original doctrines of their leader, but
the basic outlines are clear.
Pythagoras
was interested in mathematics: he discovered a proof of
the geometrical theorem that still bears his name,
described the relationship between the length of strings
and the musical pitches they produce when plucked, and
engaged in extensive observation of the apparent motion
of celestial objects. In each of these aspects of the
world, Pythagoras saw order, a regularity of occurrences
that could be described in terms of mathematical ratios.
The aim of
human life, then, must be to live in harmony with this
natural regularity. Our lives are merely small portions
of a greater whole. (Fragments)
Since the spirit (or breath) of human beings is divine
air, Pythagoras supposed, it is naturally immortal; its
existence naturally outlives the relatively temporary
functions of the human body. Pythagoreans therefore
believed that the
soul "transmigrates" into other living bodies at
death, with animals and plants participating along with
human beings in a grand cycle of reincarnation.
Even those who
did not fully accept the religious implications of
Pythagorean thought were often influenced by its
thematic structure. As we'll see later, many Western
philosophers have been interested in the immortality of
the human soul and in the relationship between human
beings and the natural world.
During the fifth
century B.C.E., Greek philosophers began to engage
in extended controversies that represent a movement
toward the development of genuinely critical thinking.
Although they often lacked enough common ground upon
which to adjudicate their disputes and rarely engaged in
the self-criticism that is characteristic of genuine
philosophy, these thinkers did try to defend their own
positions and attack those of their rivals by providing
attempts at rational argumentation.
Dissatisfied
with earlier efforts to comprehend the world, Heraclitus
of Ephesus earned his reputation as "the Riddler"
by delivering his pronouncements in deliberately
contradictory (or at least paradoxical)
form. The structure of puzzling statements, he believed,
mirrors the chaotic structure of thought, which in turn
is parallel to the complex, dynamic character of the
world itself.
Rejecting the
Pythagorean ideal
of harmony as peaceful coexistence, Heraclitus saw
the natural world as an environment of perpetual
struggle and strife. "All is flux," he supposed;
everything is changing all the time. As Heraclitus is
often reported to have said, "Upon those who step into
the same river, different waters flow." The tension and
conflict which govern everything in our experience are
moderated only by the operation of a universal principle
of proportionality in all things.
Against
this position, the Eleatics
defended the unity and stability of the universe. Their leader, Parmenides
supposed that language embodies a logic of perfect
immutability: "What is, is." (Fragments)
Since everything is what it is and not something else,
he argued in Περι Φυσις (On
Nature), it can never correct to say that
one and the same thing both has and does not have some
feature, so the supposed change from having the feature
to not having it is utterly impossible. Of course,
change does seem to occur, so we must distinguish
sharply between the many mere appearances that are part
of our experience and the one true reality that is
discernible only by intellect.
Other
Eleatics delighted in attacking Heraclitus
with arguments
designed to show the absurdity of his notion that
the world is perpetual changing. Zeno
of Elea in particular fashioned four paradoxes
about motion, covering every possible combination of
continuous or discrete intervals and the direct motion
of single bodies or the relative motion of several:
The
Dichotomy: It is impossible to move around a
racetrack since we must first go halfway, and before
that go half of halfway, and before that half of half
of halfway, and . . . . If space
is infinitely divisible, we have infinitely many
partial distances to cover, and cannot get under way
in any finite time.
Achilles
and the Tortoise: Similarly, given a ten meter
head-start, a tortoise can never be overtaken by
Achilles in a race, since Achilles must catch up to
where the tortoise began. But by then the tortoise has
moved ahead, and Achilles must catch up to that new
point, and so on. Again, the suppostition that things
really move leads to an infinite regress.
The
Arrow: If, on the other hand, motion occurs in
discrete intervals, then at any given moment during
its flight through the air, an arrow is not moving.
But since its entire flight comprises only such
moments, the arrow never moves.
The
Stadium: Similarly, if three chariots of equal
length, one stationary and the others travelling in
opposite directions, were to pass by each other at the
same time, then each of the supposedly moving ones
would take only half as long to pass the other as to
pass the third, making 1=2!
The patent
absurdity that results in each of these cases, Zeno
concluded, shows that motion (and, hence, change of any
sort) is impossible. (Fragments)
What all of
this raises is the question of "the one and the many."
How can there be any genuine unity in a world that
appears to be multiple? To the extent that a
satisfactory answer involves a distinction between appearance
and reality and the use of dialectical
reasoning in the effort to understand what is
real, this pursuit of the Eleatics set important
standards for the future development of Western thought.
In the next
generation, Empedocles
introduced the plurality from the very beginning.
Everything in the world, he supposed, is ultimately made
up of some mixture of the four elements, considered as
irreducible components. The unique character of each
item depends solely upon the special balance of the four
that is present only in it. Change takes place because
there are two competing forces at work in the world.
Love {Gk. φιλια
[philia]} is always putting things together, while
Strife {Gk. νεικος
[neikos]} is always tearing them apart. The
interplay of the two constitutes the activity we see in
nature.
His
rival, Anaxagoras
of Clazomenae, returned in some measure to the Milesian
effort to identify a
common stuff out of which everything is composed.
Matter is, indeed, a chaotic primordial mass, infinitely
divisible in principle, yet in which nothing is
differentiated. But Anaxagoras held that order is
brought to this mass by the power of Mind {Gk. νους
[nous]}, the source of all explanation by
reference to cosmic intelligence. Although later
philosophers praised Anaxagoras for this explicit
introduction of mind into the description of the world,
it is not clear whether he meant by his use of this word
what they would suppose. (Fragments)
The
inclination to regard the world as pluralistic took its
most extreme form in the work of the ancient atomists.
Although the basic outlines of the view were apparently
developed by Leucippus,
the more complete exposition by Democritus,
including a discussion of its ethical implications, was
more influential. Our best source of information about
the atomists is the poem De Rerum Natura (On
the Nature of Things) by the later Roman
philosopher Lucretius.
For the
atomists, all substance is material and the true
elements of the natural world are the tiny, indivisible,
unobservable solid bodies called "atoms." Since these
particles exist, packed more or less densely together,
in an infinite empty space, their motion is not only
possible but ineveitable. Everything that happens in the
world, the atomists supposed, is a result of microscopic
collisions among atoms. Thus, as Epicurus
would later make clear, the
actions and passions of human life are also
inevitable consequences of material motions. Although
atomism has a decidedly modern ring, notice that, since
it could not be based on observation of microscopic
particles in the way that modern science is, ancient
atomism was merely another fashionable form of
cosmological speculation.
Fifth-century
Athens was a politically troubled city-state: it underwent a
sequence of external attacks and internal rebellions that no
social entity could envy. During several decades, however,
the Athenians maintained a nominally democratic government
in which (at least some) citizens had the opportunity to
participate directly in important social decisions. This
contributed to a renewed interest in practical philosophy.
Itinerate teachers known as the
sophists offered to provide their students with
training in the effective exercise of citizenship.
Since the
central goal of political manipulation was to outwit and
publicly defeat an opponent, the rhetorical techniques of
persuasion naturally played an important role. But the
best of the Sophists also made use of Eleatic
methods of logical argumentation in pursuit of similar
aims. Driven by the urge to defend expedient solutions to
particular problems, their efforts often encouraged
relativism or evan an extreme skepticism
about the likelihood of discovering the truth.
A Sophist named
Gorgias, for example, argued (perhaps ironically) that: (a)
Nothing exists; (b) If it did, we could not know it; and (c)
If we knew anything, we could not talk about it. Protagoras,
on the other hand, supposed that since human beings are "the
measure of all things," it follows that truth is
subjectively unique to each individual. In a more political
vein, Thrasymachus argued that it is better to perform
unjust actions than to be the victim of the injustice
committed by others. The ideas and methods of these thinkers
provided the lively intellectual environment in which the
greatest Athenian philosophers thrived.
Pan-Hellenic Games
4
Ancient Greek Sport Festivals and Greek Poleis
Over a fixed circuit
of four years (periodos), the Greek World gathered to
participate in the four major panhellenic festivals, the
Olympic (founded in c.776BC in honour of Zeus), the
Isthmian (c.581BC honouring Poseidon), the Nemean
(c.573BC, Zeus) and the Pythian (c.582BC, Apollo Pythios)
Games, which, alongside the athletics, staged a musical
competition of great antiquity and enormous prestige.
Much has been argued
on whether the character of these gatherings (panegyris)
was indeed "panhellenic", a pretty loose and unhelpful
term anyway. Probably with the emergence of the
Polis-cult, in 8th c. BC the character of the Greek
sanctuaries changed (although, initially, Olympia seems to
be the place of gathering for NW Peloponnese and Delphi
seemed to attract people from much further afield), and
instead of being restricted to locals it became interstate
influencing a much broader area, attracting visiting
citizens of other poleis. Nevertheless, specific
sanctuaries still belonged to and were controlled by
specific poleis, and, for example, in order for someone to
participate in the Olympic Games, he had to be invited by
the city of Elis. Moreover, there was no such thing as a
panhellenic centre.
Archaeology has
furthermore revealed an alteration in the pattern of
dedications in Greek sanctuaries. In Delphi, there was a
wide range of dedications and archaeological material -
even from Crete. Delphi, being on the trade-route from
West to East for ships sailing in the Corinthian Gulf,
enjoyed dedications even by non-Greeks. Additionally,
Herodotus describes how the Kings of Lydia made impressive
dedications to Delphi, which undoubtedly attracted
visitors and magnified Delphi. This is less true with
Olympia, where the majority of foreign dedications are
from S. Italy and Sicily as well as Epidamnus - although
these are indeed Greek colonies and therefore perhaps not
really "foreign". Archaeological sites show a sharp
increase in dedications of valuable objects - bronze,
jewellery, painted pottery and terracotta along with arms
and armour, which are of particular importance, as the
emergence of the City-State system was contemporary with
and basis of the hoplite warfare. In Olympia, large bronze
tripods of a very practical shape were excavated, usually
dedicated by members of the elite. This phenomenon was
less dramatically obvious in Delphi. Clearly the pattern
shifted from cemetery to sanctuary dedications, which also
discloses a different mentality emerging from a change in
interests. This way, personal status was displayed during
one's life, rather than family status displayed after
one's death. Wealth was deposited in such a way that it
would be visible for sometime and to the entire Greek
World and especially to elite members of other Greek
Poleis, and not only during the burial to the local
community. Thus, apart from honouring the god, dedications
stood for advertisements of status.
For reasons difficult
to identify, sanctuaries get more global significance,
especially with regard to athletic festivals, which
gradually become a formal ritualised process.
Archaeological findings only help us understand the
function that the Games served, and literary evidence
gives us a more coherent interpretation of festivals.
Although in the Iliad there are references to Games (the
Games held by Achilles at the funeral of Patroclos) and
Hesiod refers to them as well, Games at a religious
festival are much different; they take place regularly and
preparation is required.
The periodos, namely
the four-year circle in which the major festivals
occurred, displays, according to C. Morgan, serious
political considerations: "It is interesting to note that
athletic contests were founded at around the same time at
the two sites more closely connected with Corinth, Isthmia
and Delphi, in emulation of Olympia. These were then
copied at Nemea, a political creation like Isthmia, which
was at least indirectly controlled by Argos, a rival Polis
to Corinth and probably eager to copy Corinthian
achievements." Morgan implies that Corinth was of major
importance in sanctuary activity, as it was the city that
created and controlled the Isthmian Games and provoked its
rivals into festival activity. So far as the city of
Athens was concerned, there was indeed an attempt to
create a rival to the events of the four major interstate
sanctuaries of the Greek mainland, but it did not succeed,
as the Panathenaic festival and Games remained more
Athenian than Greek. This phenomenon is a new form of
competition between the Poleis, which may offer some
interesting conclusions regarding the basis and origins of
the religious festivals (which are perhaps similar to the
competitions on which city would construct the greatest
temple) - was there a use of religion for competing
purposes?
Using the advantage to
show themselves off in public, the athletes, who had to be
all Greek citizens, went into training in their cities -
Pausanias records that in Olympia, competitors had to
swear that they had been training for ten months and that,
later in Antiquity, they had to come and reside to the
sanctuary for thirty days before the competition.
In order to prevent
wars from disrupting the Games and to make sure that the
thousands of visitors and athletes who came to Olympia and
also had to return home were safe, Olympic Truce
(Olympiake Ekecheiria: suspension specifically of the
military hostilities) was declared, at first probably
restricted to a month's time before and after the Games,
and later extended to two and even to three months, as
athletes and visitors came from greater distances.
Therefore, the Eleians were not permitted to be at war
with anyone during the Truce and were punished by fines
according to the Olympic Law. The Games were preceded by
heralds-sacred ambassadors (theoroi from Delphi and
spondoforoi from Olympia and Athens) travelled to cities
to announce the formal Truce that would facilitate the
gatherings (panegyreis), enjoying generous and luxurious
hospitality and usually inviolability.What is also
interesting, is that slaves and non-Greeks during the
Ekecheiria could take advantage of the temporary
inviolability (asylia). Nevertheless, the Truce did not
always work; Thucydides (5.49-50), reports an event in
c.420BC, when, during the Olympic Games, hostilities
between Eleia and Sparta did not actually cease. In
general, the attitude towards the Olympic Truce was
extremely legalistic and it was universally acknowledged.
A characteristic example is the year's Truce between
Athens and Sparta in c.421-420BC, right in the middle of
the Great Peloponnesian War. There is, however, the
question on whether the Truce always came to force on
time.
Apart from honouring
the Gods, taking part in the panhellenic Games was a sign
of status. As T. Martin underlines, excellence (arete) was
a competitive value for male Greek aristocrats - as well
as for all Greek citizens - that was vividly displayed in
the Games. "The emphasis on physical prowess and fitness,
competition and public recognition by other men
corresponded to the idea of Greek masculine identity as it
developed in this period." The status gained by success in
athletic competition was really high. The athletes had to
be healthy and able to train. They did not engage
themselves in activities which would damage their
physique, therefore preparing for the Olympic Games (or
indeed all panhellenic Games) was incompatible with
labour-workers, who, anyway, could not afford to actually
get there, abandoning their work for so long. So, although
only the non-Greeks were excluded from the Games, the
elite was actually only able to participate and win. One
more argument to support the view that the panhellenic
Games were elitist events, is that chariot-racing
(hippodromion), one of the categories of sport that were
recognised, was quite expensive and was itself an
advertisement of wealth and power. This is because horses
cannot be used for other activities apart from equestrian
fighting, which requires a different kind of training. In
other words, in the Archaic period, the Games were an
essentially elite competition. In later times (4th c. BC
onwards) the character of things changes and panhellenic
festivals including the Olympic Games were dominated by
professional athletes, who made their living from
appearance fees and prizes won at various Games held all
over Greece (T. Martin).
The agon
(competition), according to Bruid-Zaidman, was the "most
highly esteemed method of measuring oneself against
others, precisely because the Gods themselves sanctioned
it". The prizes for the Olympic victors were symbolic
crowns of olive (Olympia), laurel (Delphi), pine (Isthmia)
and wild celery (Nemea). Nevertheless, the cities took
credit for the success of their citizens. Home cities
granted to their victors such honours as triumphal
entries, statues, money prizes and free entertainment for
life at public banquets (sitesis) (Murray). In Athens, the
victors and their descendants would enjoy lifetime dining
rights in the Prytaneion. The victors were treated as
major benefactors by the home city, and many well-known
individuals were Olympic victors, such as Cylon, Theagones
of Thasos, who competed successively at all the Games in a
cycle and was victorious, and thus gained the glorious
title of periodonikes, Miltiades, who was a chariot race
winner and founder of a colony in the Chersonese, as well
as Alcibiades. Actually, according to Plutarch (Life of
Alcibiades 11), Alcibiades, in the Olympic Games of
c.416BC, entered seven teams of the particularly
prestigious chariot race, and came first, second and
fourth (Thucydides), or first, second and third
(Euripides). In 4th c. BC, the dead Olympic victors were
treated similarly to heroes and hero-cults, not only in
Athens, but in a number of Greek cities. This was surely
an indication that they were particularly important
people, and it signifies that victory was regarded as gift
from the Gods, so the victor was considered to be a divine
favourite. Not surprisingly, Greek cities competed
fiercely with each other through the medium of their prize
athletes.
Although implications
and overtones of panhellenic festivals should not be seen
as straightforward political moves, it is well accepted
that a gathering of the powerful Hellenes every four years
provided plenty of opportunities of varied activities that
were of a political character and, of course, for
diplomatic negotiations, usually quiet. Cities took the
opportunity to make policy statements through public
oration, since they knew that they were going to be widely
publicised. Finley reports that treaties and other state
documents were frequently publicly displayed in Olympia,
inscribed on stone or bronze plaques, as, for example, the
Decree of the Acharnanian League in c.216BC. Finley argues
that "The deposition of this Decree in Olympia is an
example of a common custom of solemnising public documents
by placing copies in the great panhellenic shrine of
Zeus." Although it might be a rather generalised
statement, victorious athletes were tempted to and
frequently actually entering the political field. The best
example on that is definitely Alcibiades, son of Cleinias,
who "illustrates the interplay between Games and
politics", according to Finley. Alcibiades actually used
his Olympic victories as one of his arguments in the
public debate held in Athens over the launching of the
Sicilian Expedition, dated c.415BC. Victors in the chariot
race had a claim to be taken seriously, and in such
Ekklesia debates personalities were discussed alongside
any other arguments. An extreme aspect of the behaviour
associated with Olympic victors is the fact that a number
of them may go on to act as tyrants. Pausanias (6.9)
delivers the story of Cleomedes of Astypalaea, who
destroyed a school by throwing a discus some years after
his victory in the Games. Instead of punishment, the
Oracle said to treat him as a hero. However, we have to
mention that not every outstanding athlete was interested
in politics and some even entered the political field only
when they were old enough and had to retire from the
Games, as, for example, Theogenes.
As seen, literary
evidence provides us with more opportunity to explore the
other, of significantly minor importance, social and
political influences of the panhellenic festivals. Apart
from the historical, another form of evidence for
victories in Olympia, Nemea, Isthmia and Delphi were the
Victory Odes. Pindar of Thebes, writing in the early 5th
c. BC named about thirty other contests apart from the
major ones and implied that many more existed. The glory
(kleos) of the victors was celebrated by Pindar in his
Epiniceian ("victory") Odes. They were written for public
performance, and many dedicators are from Italy and
Sicily, while fewer from Athens. In these Odes, there was
a celebration of the individual, his ancestry and his
city, as well, set in the framework of an appropriate
myth.
Xenia and philoxenia
(hospitality and friendliness towards strangers) were two
fundamental elements of Greek society in Archaic and
Classical years. The panhellenic nature of the Games,
therefore, allowed for the establishment and renewal of
these bonds - especially when it comes to meeting on
neutral grounds under the strict enforcement of the Truce.
Pindar himself praises the xenoi, as well as the
victorious citizens. Anyway, we must always keep in mind
that one of the characteristics of Zeus, in whose honour
the Olympic and Nemean Games were held, was "Xenios" (of
the guests), which makes this side of the festivals
another form of dedication to the him. Everything that
occurred in the Games was, in other words, under his
patronage.
The case of women in
relation with the panhellenic festivals is another example
that proves how religion integrated in civic life. Much
has been debated on the suppressed role of women in
Classical Athens, who were, however, priestesses of
Athena, and virgins even carried her peplos in the Grand
Panathenaic procession. Married women were not allowed to
take part in or even attend the Olympic Games, where men
competed without clothes, but apparently the ban applied
only to married women as Pausanias states elsewhere that
"virgins were not refused admission".
Unfortunately, no
other written evidence survives to explain this
discrimination, but perhaps, as was the case in Athens,
but it seems that only virgins were considered to be pure
enough to attend sacred rites. Nevertheless, women had
their own separate festival at Olympia on a different date
in honour of Hera, the wife of Zeus. Worth mentioning is
also that the Pythia of the Delphic oracle was a mature
virgin woman, usually of low class.
In conclusion, the
major panhellenic festivals were considerably affected by
and also affected themselves both the social and the
political life of the Greek poleis, their most essential
influence probably being Panhellenic and National, in that
they definitely contributed to the reinforcement of the
National Consciousness, although "National" is perhaps not
the best word - it is not clear what precisely it refers
to, especially in Greek Antiquity.
Select
Bibliography
·M.I
Finley / H.W Pleket, The Olympic Games: the first thousand
years (London, 1976)
·C.
Morgan, Athletes and Oracles: the transformation of
Olympia and Delphi in the eighth century BC (Cambridge,
1990)
·J.
Swaddling, The ancient Olympic Games (London, 1980)
·R.
Osborne, Greece in the Making 1200-479BC (London, 1996)
·Bruit
Zaidman and Schmitt Pantel, Religion in the ancient Greek
City, (Cambridge,1999)
·U.
Wilcken, Griechische Geschichte (im Rahmen der
Altertumsgeschichte) (Muenchen, 1962) O. Murray, Early
Greece (Cambridge, Mass., 1993)
Ritual
expressed the relationship between mortals and the
gods. At one end of the scale, individuals prayed and
made small offerings to the deities that presided over
the household, while, at the other, the whole of the
Greek world came together at the major interstate
games held in honor of the principal gods such as
Zeus, Apollo, and Poseidon.
Ancient
Mysteries of The World: The Ancient Greek Festivals,
Rites and Games
The
rites performed at temples and shrines of all kinds
varied as much as the holy places themselves. Most
rituals were accompanied by prayers, for which there
were special formulaic phrases, and which might be
spoken privately for individual needs, pronounced before
a gathering, or spoken in unison by a crow following the
lead of a herald.
There
was a formulaic element to hymns, too, which often
included reference to the deity’s life story and sphere
of influence. The simplest form of offering was a
libation-a few drops of wine or other liquids poured
first into a flat dish and then onto the ground, the
remainder being drunk by each of those present in turn.
Libations might be performed in the home every morning
and evening, or at the beginning of a meal, or just
before setting off on a journey. Offerings of hair,
clothes, or personal belongings were made at rites of
passage, particularly in preparation for marriage and in
connection with childbirth. More permanent dedications
could be made at a sanctuary in the form of votive
reliefs, and even statues, representing either the deity
or the worshipper.
The
heart of Greek religious ritual, however, lay in
sacrifice. A few deities demanded “bloodless sacrifices”
in the form of the first fruits of cereal and olive
crops, of bread, cakes, cooked vegetables, or even burnt
spices, but commonest was the blood sacrifice. The most
humble victim would be a dove or cockerel, then a
piglet, lamb, or kid, then a full-grown sheep or goat,
and at the top end of the scale, the ox. To sacrifice to
the Olympians was to “fumigate,” because the gods were
thought to enjoy the smell of the fatty smoke rising,
but to a hero one had to “devote” the victim by burning
it whole. An individual or family would probably
sacrifice one small animal, but the great city festivals
in honor of the gods, which usually lasted several days,
entailed the slaughter of dozens of sheep and cattle. A
festival procession would be followed by the sacrifice,
after which the meat would be prepared for a ritual
feast. The cooked meat was divided into portions of
equal size but variable quality; its distribution among
the assembled worshippers was sometimes decided by lot,
sometimes by the recipients’ political and social
status.
Some
festivals held at local village or city level included
athletic competitions, but the best known are the
Panhelenic games at the great interstate sanctuaries.
These may have originated in the funeral games held in
honor of the dead, such as those for Patroklos described
in the Iliad, but they developed over time to include
more and more events, with subdivisions for different
age groups. The oldest were the games in honor of Zeus
at Olympia, traditionally founded in 776BCE, followed by
the Pythian Games for Apollo at Delphi founded in
586BCE, the Isthmian Games for Poseidon in 580BCE, and
the Nemean Games for Zeus in 573BCE.
The
Olympic and Pythian Games were held once every four
years, the Isthmian and Nemean every two, and between
them they made up a “circuit” (periodos). Special honors
were accorded to “circuit-winners”
(periodonikos)-individuals who had won victories at all
four games. The prizes for the Panhellenic games had no
inherent value. Instead the victor in each event was
awarded an honorific crown (stephanos), made of a plant
which had a mythological connection with the sanctuary
in question-wild olive at Olympia, laurel at Delphi,
pine at the Isthmos, and wild celery at nemea.
A
special feature of the games at Olympia was the Olympic
Truce, the terms of which stipulated that all states had
to suspend any hostilities for several weeks either side
of the festival to allow athletes safe passage to and
from the games. The Olympic officials had the power to
impose hefty fines on any state which broke the truce
and ban its athletes from competing.
The
earliest games consisted only of the stadion, which was
a sprint over a distance of a stade, or 600 feet (about
180m), but longer foot-races were added over time, the
two-stade diaulos, the long-distance dolichos (ca.
16,000 feet, or nearly 5,000m), and the grueling
hoplites, run over a distance of two to four stades in
full hoplite armor weighing around 56 pounds (25kg).
There was also wrestling, boxing and the pankration (a
kind of all-in wrestling), and the pentathlon, which
consisted of running, jumping, throwing the javelin and
discus, and wrestling; two and four-horse chariot-racing
and horse-racing were accommodated in the hippodrome. By
400BCE the games lasted for five days, instead of the
original one. All males who were native Greek-speakers
and free citizens were entitled to take part in the
games, provided they were not ritually impure.
Women
were not usually allowed among the spectators, although
exceptions were made for certain priestesses and
virgins, and there was nothing to prevent women from
entering teams in the chariot-race, a competition in
which the fourth-century BCE Spartan princess Kyniska
won several victories.
One of the things we'll
hear argued about the modern Olympic Games is
the question of amateurism (and professionalism)
of athletes.
This was not a concern of
the Greeks since ancient athletes regularly
received prizes worth substantial amounts of
money. In fact, the word athlete is an ancient Greek word
that means "one who competes for a prize" and
was related to two other Greek words, athlos meaning "contest" and athlon meaning "prize."
Our first glimpse of
organized Greek athletics is in the 23rd book of
Homer's Iliad, where Achilles organizes funeral
games for his friend Patroklos who was killed
during the Trojan War. In each of the eight
events contested on the plain of Troy, material
prizes are offered to each competitor,
including tripods, cauldrons, valuable metal,
oxen, and women.
Material
awards were routinely given as
prizes (more info) at most of the athletic
festival sites all over the Greek world. During
the 8th, 7th, and 6th centuries BC, dozens of
athletic events were established as parts of
religious festivals honoring heroes, gods, or
even victorious battles.
Athletes who won at any of
these Pan-Hellenic games could be assured of great wealth
when they returned home.
According to the Roman
author Plutarch, an Olympic victor who was a
citizen of Athens could expect to receive in the
year 600 BC a cash award of 500 drachmai, a literal fortune.
An Isthmian victor would receive 100 drachmai.
From an Athenian
inscription of the 5th century BC, we learn that
Athenian Olympic victors received a free meal
in the City Hall every day for the rest of their
lives, a kind of early pension plan.
Later, in the Hellenistic
and Roman periods, pensions
for athletes became more formalized and could
actually be bought and sold.
This
evidence suggests that there were no amateur
athletes in ancient Greece, but there were no
professional athletes either, for there was no
distinction between the two categories, all were
simply athletes.
The concept of "amateur
athletics," developed in the 19th century AD,
would have been very foreign to the ancient
Greeks since the winning of a valuable or
prestigious prize was an important part of being
an athlete.
Ancient
stadium of Olympia
The stadium of Olympia, situated east
of the sacred Altis enclosure, was where the ancient
Olympic Games and the Heraia, the women's games in
honour of Hera, were held. Before the sixth century BC
the running events were held on a flat area along the
treasuries' terrace, east of the great altar of Zeus. A
first stadium (Stadium I) was formed in the Archaic
period (mid sixth century BC) by leveling the area south
of the Kronios hill inside the Altis. The west short
side of the stadium faced the altar of Zeus, to whom the
Games were dedicated. In the late sixth century BC a new
stadium (Stadium II) was created east of its
predecessor, with a racetrack extending beyond the
treasuries' terrace; an artificial bank, three metres
high, was formed along the south side, while the hill
side formed a natural seating area along the north. The
stadium received its final form (Stadium III) in the
fifth century when the great temple of Zeus was built.
By then the Games had become very popular, attracting a
great number of both visitors and athletes, so a new
stadium was deemed necessary. The new stadium was moved
eighty-two metres to the east and seven metres to the
north, and was surrounded by artificial banks for the
spectators. After the construction of the Echo Hall in
the mid-fourth century BC the stadium was isolated from
the Altis, which shows that the Games had lost their
purely religious character and had become more of an
athletic and social event.
The racetrack is 212.54 metres long
and 30-34 metres wide. Two stone markers 192.27 metres
apart - that is one Olympic stade or six hundred Olympic
feet (1 foot=32.04 metres), indicate the starting and
finishing lines. On the south bank is a podium for
judges, and opposite this, on the north bank, the altar
of Demeter Chamyne, whose priestess was the only woman
allowed to watch the games. The stadium could
accommodate approximately forty-five thousand people,
but the banks never had permanent seats. There were a
few stone seats for the officials, and wooden benches
may have been added in Roman times when the stadium was
repaired (Stadium IV-V). A stone drain round the track
opened at intervals into small basins where rain water
collected. A vaulted entrance for the athletes,
thirty-two metres long, the so-called Krypte, was built
in the late third century BC and a monumental portico
was added to its west extremity in the Roman period. A
large number of votive offerings, mostly of bronze, were
found inside the wells along the embankments. Originally
there to supply the spectators with drinking water,
these wells, which date to the Archaic period, were
subsequently used as votive pits.
The early German excavations first
investigated the race track, but the recent German
excavations of 1952-1966 uncovered the entire monument.
In 2004, the ancient stadium of Olympia will re-live its
former glory, since it will host the shot put event of
the Athens Olympic Games.
5
Panhellenic Games
The
Panhellenic games, which pitted one Greek polis
(city-state; pl. poleis) against another, were
religious events and athletic competitions for
talented, generally wealthy, individual athletes in
the areas of speed, strength, dexterity, and
endurance, according to Sarah Pomeroy in Ancient
Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History
(1999). Despite the competition between poleis in the
area of arete (the Greek concept of virtue), the four,
cyclical festivals temporarily united the religiously
and culturally closely linked, Greek-speaking world.
These important events were held regularly during a
four-year period that was named for the most famous of
the four. Called an Olympiad, it was named for the
Olympic games, which were held at Elis, in the
Peloponnese, northwest of Sparta, for five summer
days, once every four years. Peace was so essential
for the purpose of convening people from throughout
Greece for the Panhellenic [pan=all; Hellenic=Greek]
games, that Olympia even had a famous truce for the
duration of the games. The Greek term for this is
ekecheiria.
Location of the Games
The Olympic Games were held at the sanctuary of
the Olympian Zeus at Elis; the Pythian Games were held
at Delphi; the Nemean, in Argos, at the sanctuary of
Nemea, renowned for the labor in which Heracles killed
the lion whose hide the hero wore from then on; and
the Isthmian games, held at the Isthmus of Corinth.
Crown Games
These four
games were stephanitic or crown games because the
victors won a crown or wreath as prize. These prizes
were a wreath of olive (kotinos) for the Olympic
victors; laurel, for the victory most closely
associated with Apollo, the one at Delphi; wild celery
crowned the Nemean victors, and pine garlanded victors
at the Isthmus.
"The kotinos, a crown always cut from the same old
olive tree called kallistefanos (good to crown) that
grew to the right of the opisthodomos of the temple of
Zeus, was given as a prize to the winners of the
Olympic Games, starting from the first Games held in
Olympia in 776 B.C. until the last ancient Olympic
Games, promoting truce and peace between peoples."
Gods Honored
The Olympic games chiefly honored the Olympian
Zeus; the Pythian games honored Apollo; the Nemean
games honored the Nemean Zeus; and the Isthmian
honored Poseidon.
Dates
Pomeroy dates the games to 582 B.C. for the ones
at Delphi; 581, for the Isthmian; and 573 for the ones
at Argos. Tradition dates the Olympics to 776 B.C. It
is thought that we can trace all four sets of games
back at least as far as the Trojan War funeral games
Achilles held for his beloved Patrocles/Patroclus in
The Iliad, which is attributed to Homer. Origin
stories go further back than that, to the mythological
period of such great heroes as Hercules (Heracles) and
Theseus.
Panathenaea
Not properly one of the panhellenic games -- and
there are some noticeable differences, the Great
Panathenaea was modeled on them, according to Nancy
Evans, in Civic Rites: Democracy and Religion in
Ancient Athens (2010). Once every four years Athens
celebrated 's birthday with a 4-day festival featuring
athletic competitions. On the other years, there were
minor celebrations. There were team as well as
individual events in the Panathenaea, with Athena's
special olive oil going as the prize. There were also
torch races. The highlight was a procession and the
religious sacrifices.
Crowning of the
winners of the Olympic Games was made, as known, by
olive branch.
The kotinos, a
crown always cut from the same old olive tree called
kallistefanos (good to crown) that grew to the right of
the opisthodomos of the temple of Zeus, was given as a
prize to the winners of the Olympic Games, starting from
the first Games held in Olympia in 776 B.C. until the
last ancient Olympic Games, promoting truce and peace
between peoples.
The kotinos is
the emblem, symbolism and continuation of the tradition,
but also tribute to the olive tree, paid by the Olympic
Games of 2004 A.D., held in Athens.
A "Panathenaic
amphora" full of olive oil was given as a prize to the
winners of sports competitions during the Panathenaea,
which were also important sports events of ancient
Athens: the prize was amphorae filled with oil as part
of the grand celebration of the Panathenaea in honour of
the goddess Athena. The amphora itself was a guarantee
of the olive oil quality. This is the first example of
an accredited product in world history.
Even in modern
Greece, the olive and olive oil are associated with all
phases of social and religious activities. The kotinos
made of olive symbolized and still symbolizes for us
Greeks the highest distinction of morality.
7
Ancient Olympics - Games, Ritual and Warfare
The Ancient Olympic Games Began as a Celebration of
Death
It's
a curious aspect of sports that even when they are part
of a celebration of global peace, like the Olympics,
they are nationalistic, competitive, violent, and
potentially deadly. Substitute "panhellenic" (open to
all Greeks) for "global" and the same could be said
about the ancient Olympics. Sports, in general, could be
described as ritualized warfare where one power competes
with another, where each hero (star athlete) strives to
defeat a worthy opponent within a setting where death is
unlikely.
Rituals of Compensation for the Catastrophe of Death
Control and ritual seem to be the defining terms. In
coming to grips with the eternally present fact of death
(remember: antiquity was a time of high infant
mortality, death by diseases we can now control, and
almost incessant warfare), the ancients put on shows
where death was under human control. Sometimes the
outcome of these shows was purposeful submission to
death (as in the gladiatorial games), at other times, it
was victory.
Origin of the Games in Funerals
"The[re]
are a number of possible explanations of the custom
of funeral games such as to honor a dead warrior by
reenacting his military skills, or as a renewal and
affirmation of life to compensate for the loss of a
warrior or as an expression of the aggressive
impulses that accompany rage over the death. Perhaps
they are all true at the same time." - Roger Dunkle's Recreation and Games *
In
honor of his friend Patroclus, Achilles held funeral
games (as described in Iliad 23). In honor of their
father, Marcus and Decimus Brutus held the first
gladiatorial games in Rome in 264 B.C. Pythian Games
celebrated Apollo's slaying of the Python. The Isthmian
games were a funeral tribute to the hero Melicertes. The
Nemean games celebrated either Hercules' killing of the
Nemean lion or the funeral of Opheltes. All of these
games celebrated death. But what about the Olympics?
The Olympic games also began as a celebration of death,
but like the Nemean games, the mythological explanations
for the Olympics are confused. Two central figures used
to explain the origins are Pelops and Hercules who are
genealogically linked insofar as Hercules' mortal father
was Pelops' grandson.
Pelops
Pelops wished to marry Hippodamia, the daughter of King
Oenomaus of Pisa who had promised his daughter to the
man who could win a chariot race against him. If the
suitor lost the race, he would also lose his head.
Through treachery, Oenomaus had kept his daughter
unmarried and through treachery, Pelops won the race,
killed the king, and married Hippodamia. Pelops
celebrated his victory or King Oenomaus' funeral with
Olympic games.
The site of the ancient Olympics was in Elis, which is
in Pisa, in the Peloponnese
Hercules
After Hercules cleaned the Augean stables, the king of
Elis (in Pisa) welshed on his deal, so, when Hercules
had a chance -- after he finished his labors -- he
returned to Elis to wage war. The conclusion was
foregone. After Hercules sacked the city, he put on the
Olympic games to honor his father Zeus. In another
version, Hercules merely regularized the games Pelops
had instituted.
7 RELIGIOUS FESTIVALS I have already, in my former volume, touched upon the
many-sided character of the Grecian religion, entering as it
did into all the enjoyments and sufferings, the hopes and
fears, the affections and antipathies, of the people, not
simply imposing restraints and obligations, but protecting,
multiplying, and diversifying all the social pleasures and
all the decorations of existence. Each city and even each
village had its peculiar religious festivals, wherein the
sacrifices to the gods were usually followed by public
recreations of one kind or other, by feasting on the
victims, processional marches, singing and dancing, or
competition in strong and active exercises. The festival was
originally local, but friendship or communion of race was
shown by inviting others, non-residents, to partake in its
attractions. In the case of a colony and its metropolis, it
was a frequent practice that citizens of the metropolis were
honored with a privileged seat at the festivals of the
colony, or that one of their number was presented with the
first taste of the sacrificial victim. Reciprocal frequentation of religious festivals was
thus the standing evidence of friendship and fraternity
among cities not politically united. That it must have
existed to a certain degree from the earliest days, there
can be no reasonable doubt; though in Homer and Hesiod we
find only the celebration of funeral games, by a chief at
his own private expense, in honor of his deceased father or
friend, with all the accompanying recrea- tions, however, of
a public festival, and with strangers not only present, but
also contending for valuable prizes. Passing to historical Greece during the seventh century
BC, we find evidence of two festivals, even then very
considerable, and frequented by Greeks from many different
cities and districts, the festival at Delos, in honor of
Apollo, the great place of meeting for Ionians throughout
the Aegean, and the Olympic games. The Homeric Hymn to the
Delian Apollo, which must be placed earlier than 600 BC,
dwells with emphasis on the splendor of the Delian festival,
unrivalled throughout Greece, as it would appear, during all
the first period of this history, for wealth, finery of
attire, and variety of exhibitions as well in poetical
genius as in bodily activity, equalling probably at that
time, if not surpassing, the Olympic games. The complete and undiminished grandeur of this Delian
Pan-Ionic festival is one of our chief marks of the first
period of Grecian history, before the comparative
prostration of the Ionic Greeks through the rise of Persia:
it was celebrated periodically in every fourth year, to the
honor of Apollo and Artemis. It was distinguished from the
Olympic games by two circumstances both deserving of notice,
first, by including solemn matches not only of gymnastic,
but also of musical and poetical excellence, whereas the
latter had no place at Olympia; secondly, by the admission
of men, women, and children indiscriminately as spectators,
whereas women were formally excluded from the Olympic
ceremony. Such exclusion may have depended in part on the
inland situation of Olympia, less easily approachable by
females than the island of Delos; but even making allowance
for this circumstance, both the one distinction and the
other mark the rougher character of the Aetolo-Dorians in
Peloponnesus. The Delian festival, which greatly dwindled
away during the subjection of the Asiatic and insular Greeks
to Persia, was revived afterwards by Athens during the
period of her empire, when she was peeking in every way to
strengthen her central ascendency in the Aegean. But though
it continued to be ostentatiously celebrated under her
management, it never regained that commanding sanctity and
crowded frequentation which we find attested in the Homeric
Hymn to Apollo for its earlier period. OLYMPIC FESTIVAL Very different was the fate of the Olympic festival, on
the banks of the Alpheius in Peloponnesus, near the old
oracular temple of the Olympian Zeus, which not only grew up
uninterruptedly from small beginnings to the maximum of
Pan-Hellenic importance, but even preserved its crowds of
visitors and its celebrity for many centuries after the
extinction of Greek freedom, and only received its final
abolition, after more than eleven hundred years of
continuance, from the decree of the Christian emperor
Theodosius in 394 AD. I have already recounted, in the
preceding volume of this history, the attempt made by
Pheidon, despot of Argos, to restore to the Pisatans, or to
acquire for himself, the administration of this festival, an
event which proves the importance of the festival in
Peloponnesus, even so early as 740 BC. At that time, and for
some years afterwards, it seems to have been frequented
chiefly, if not exclusively, by the neighboring inhabitants
of central and western Peloponnesus, Spartans, Messenians,
Arkadians, Triphylians, Pisatans, Eleians, and Achaeans, and
it forms an important link connecting the Etolo-Eleians, and
their privileges as Agonothets to solemnize and preside over
it, with Sparta. From the year 720 BC, we trace positive
evidences of the gradual presence of more distant Greeks,
Corinthians, Megarians, Boeotians, Athenians, and even
Smyrnoeans from Asia. We observe also another proof of growing importance, in
the increased number and variety of matches exhibited to the
spectators, and in the substitution of the simple crown of
olive, an honorary reward, in place of the mure substantial
present which the Olympic festival and all other Grecian
festivals began by conferring upon the victor. The humble
constitution of the Olympic games presented originally
nothing more than a match of runners in the measured course
called the Stadium : a continuous series of the victorious
runners was formally inscribed and preserved by the Eleians,
beginning with Koroebus in 776 BC, and was made to serve by
chronological inquirers from the third century BC downwards,
as a means of measuring the chronolgical sequence of Grecian
events. It was on the occasion of the 7th Olympiad after
Koroebus, that Daikles the Messenian first received for his
victory in the stadium no farther recompense than a wreath
from the sacred olive-tree near Olympia : the honor of being
proclaimed victor was found sufficient, without any
pecuniary addition. But until the 14th Olympiad, there was
no other match for the spectators to witness beside that of
simple runners in the stadium. On that occasion a second
race was first introduced, of runners in the double stadium,
or up and down the course; in the next, or 15th Olympiad
(720 BC), a third match, the long course for runners, or
several times up and down the stadium. There were thus three
races, the simple stadium, the double stadium, or diaulos,
and the long course, ordolichos, all for runners, which
continued without addition until the 18th Olympiad, when the
wrestling-match and the complicated pentathlon including
jumping, running, the quoit, the javelin, and wrestling were
both added. PROGRESS OF THE OLYMPIC FESTIVAL A farther novelty appears in the 23d Olympiad (688 BC),
the boxing-match; and another, still more important, in the
2oth (680 B.), the chariot with four full-grown horses. This
last-mentioned addition is deserving of special notice, not
merely as it diversified the scene by the introduction of
horses, but also as it brought in a totally new class of
competitors, rich men and women, who possessed the finest
horses and could hire the most skilful drivers, without any
personal superiority, or power of bodily display, in
themselves. The prodigious exhibition of wealth in which the
chariot proprietors indulged,is not only an evidence of
growing importance in the Olympic games, but also served
materially to increase that importance, and to heighten the
interest of spectators. Two farther matches were added in
the 33d Olympiad (648 BC), the pankration, or boxing and
wrestling conjoined, with the hand unarmed or divested of
that hard leather cestus worn by the pugilist, which
rendered the blow of the latter more terrible, but at the
same time prevented him from grasping or keeping hold of his
adversary, and the single race-horse. Many other novelties
were introduced one after the other, which it is unnecessary
fully to enumerate, the race between men clothed in full
panoply, and bearing each his shield, the different matches
between boys, analogous to those between full-grown men, and
between colts, of the same nature as between full-grown
horses. At the maximum of its attraction the Olympic solemnity
occupied five days, but until the 77th Olympiad, all the
various matches had been compressed into one, beginning at
daybreak and not always closing before dark. 3The 77th
Olympiad follows immediately after the successful expulsion
of the Persian invaders from Greece, when th Pan-Hellenic
feeling had been keenly stimulated by resistance to a common
enemy; and we may easily conceive that this was a suitable
moment for imparting additional dignity to the chief
national festival. We are thus enabled partially to trace the steps by
which, during the two centuries succeeding 776 BC, the
festival of the Olympic Zeus in the Pisatid gradually passed
from a local to a national character, and acquired an
attractive force capable of bringing together into temporary
union the dispersed fragment of Hellas, from Marseilles to
Trebizond. In this important function it did not long stand
alone. During the sixth century BC, three other festivals,
at first local, became successively nationalized, the Pythia
near Delphi, the Isthmia, near Corinth, the Nemea near
Kleonae, between Sicyon and Argos. In regard to the Pythian festival, we find a short
notice of the particular incidents and individuals by whom
its reconstitution and enlargement were brought about, a
notice the more interesting, inasmuch as these very
incidents are themselves a manifestation of something like
Pan-Hellenic patriotism, standing almost alone in an age
which presents little else in operation except distinct
city-interests. At the time when the Homeric Hymn to the
Delphinian Apollo was composed (probably in the seventh
century BC), the Pythian festival had as yet acquired little
eminence. The rich and holy temple of Apollo was then purely
oracular, established for the purpose of communicating to
pious inquirers "the counsels of the immortals". Multitudes
of visitors came to consult it, as well as to sacrifice
victims and to deposit costly offerings; but while the god
delighted in the sound of the harp as an accompaniment to
the singing of paeans, he was by no means anxious to
encourage horse-races and chariot- races in the
neighborhood, nay, this psalmist considers that the noise of
horses would be "a nuisance", the drinking of mules a
desecration to the sacred fountains, and the ostentation of
fine-built chariots objectionable, as tending to divert the
attention of thet spectators away from the great temple and
its wealth. GROUND NEAR THE DELPHIAN TEMPLE. From such inconveniences the god was protected by
placing his sanctuary "in the rocky Pytho", a rugged and
uneven recess, of no great dimensions, embosomed in the
southern declivity of Parnassus, and about two thousand feet
above the level of the sea, while the topmost Parnassian
summits reach a height of near eight thousand feet. The
situation was extremely imposing, but unsuited by nature for
the congregation of any considerable number of spectators,
altogether impracticable for chariot-races, and only
rendered practicable by later art and outlay for the theatre
as well as for the stadium; the original stadium, when first
established, was placed in the plain beneath. It furnished
little means of subsistence, but the sacrifices and presents
of visitors enabled the ministers of the temple to live in
abundance, and gathered together by degrees a village around
it. Near the sanctuary of Pytho, and about the same
altitude, was situated the ancient Phocian town of Krissa,
on a projecting spur of Parnassus, overhung above by the
line of rocky precipice called the Phiedriades, and itself
overhanging below the deep ravine through which flows the
river Pleistus. On the other side of this river rises the
steep mountain Kirphis, which projects southward into the
Corinthian gulf, the river reaching that gulf through the
road Krisstean or Kirrhaean plain, which stretches westward
nearly to the Lokrian town of Amphissa; a plain for the most
part fertile and productive, though least so in its eastern
part immediately under the Kirphis, where the sea-port
Kirrha was placed. The temple, the oracle, and the wealth of
Pytho, belong to the very earliest periods of Grecian
antiquity; but the octennial solemnity in honor of the god
included at first no other competition except that of bards,
who sang each a posau with the harp. It has been already
mentioned, in my preceding volume, that the Amphiktyonic
assembly held one of its half-yearly meetings near the
temple of Pytho, the other at Thermopylae.
