Routledge History of Philosophy Volume I

From the Beginning to Plato

C. C. W. Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415062725
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134924455
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Volume 1 of the Routledge History of Philosophy covers one of the most remarkable periods in human thought. In the space of two and a half centuries, philosophy developed from quasi-mythological speculation to a state in which many of the most fundamental questions about the universe, the mind and human conduct had been vigorously pursued, and some of the most enduring masterworks of Western thought had been written.
The essays present the fundamental approaches and thinkers of Greek philosophy in chronological order. Each is written by a recognised authority in the particular field, and takes account of the large amount of high-quality work done in the last few decades on Platonic and pre-Platonic philosophy. All write in an accessible style, meeting the needs of the non-specialist without loss of scholarly precision. Topics covered range from early Greek speculative thought, its cultural and social setting, to the Sophists, Socrates and culminate in three chapters on Plato's lasting contribution to all central areas of philosophy.
Supplemented with a chronology, a glossary of technical terms and an extensive bibliography, this volume will prove an invaluable and comprehensive guide to the beginnings of philosophy.

CHAPTER 1

The polis and its culture

Robin Osborne

INTRODUCTION

‘We love wisdom without becoming soft’, Thucydides has the Athenian politician Pericles claim, using the verb philosophein.¹ Claims to, and respect for, wisdom in archaic Greece were by no means restricted to those whom the western tradition, building on Aristotle’s review of past thinkers in Metaphysics Book 1, has effectively canonized as ‘philosophers’. This chapter has two functions: to reveal something of the social, economic and political conditions of the world in which Greek philosophy, as we define it, was created; and to indicate some of the ways in which issues which we would classify as ‘philosophical’, or which have clear philosophical implications, were raised and discussed by those whose work is nowadays classed as ‘literature’ or ‘art’ rather than ‘philosophy’, and thus to put philosophia back into the wider context of sophia—‘wisdom’.

Discussions of the background to early Greek philosophy frequently stress the intimate link between philosophical and political developments.² Part of my aim in this chapter is to make the case for the importance of other factors, and to stress the extent to which self-conscious articulation of ethical, political, epistemological and indeed metaphysical questions precedes the development of large-scale political participation in practice. It is for this reason, as well as because of their subsequent importance as texts universally familiar throughout the Greek world, that the longest section of this chapter is devoted to a detailed discussion of certain themes in the works of Homer and Hesiod. Greek philosophy as we define it is, I argue, simply one remarkable fruit of a cultural sophistication which is the product of the rich contacts between Greece and the world of the eastern Mediterranean and of the somewhat precarious conditions of human life within Greece itself, conditions which demanded both determined independence and access to, and relations with, others.

The Greece of the archaic and classical polis belonged to, and was intimately linked with, a wider eastern and central Mediterranean world. The Minoan and Mycenaean palaces of the late Bronze Age had had strong links with Cyprus and with southern Italy; it is increasingly clear that during the period which we know as the Dark Ages, from c.1100 to c.800 BC, when archaeological evidence suggests that human activity in Greece was restricted to a very small number of sites, those wider contacts were maintained, albeit at a rather low level of intensity. During the eighth century that contact seems to have focused upon the exchange of goods, whether by trade or by what might rather be termed piracy, but during the following centuries Greeks were persistently involved in direct hostilities in the eastern Mediterranean, hostilities which culminated, but by no means ended, with the ‘Persian Wars’ of the early fifth century. Contact with that wider world played a major part during the eighth and seventh centuries in stimulating many essential features of the culture of the Greek polis, including alphabetic writing and the development of narrative and figurative art; during the period from 600 to 370 BC direct borrowings from the East are more difficult to detect, but the perceived need for self-definition in the face of the ‘barbarian’ came to be one of the most important factors in shaping the nature and ideology of the Greek city and was an undeniable ingredient in late-sixth and fifth century sensitivity to cultural relativism.

But the Greek polis and its culture were also shaped by conditions that were closely bound up with the lands where Greeks lived, Mediter-ranean lands which are marginal for the cultivation of some cereals and many vegetable crops, but which also enjoy widely varying ecological conditions within restricted geographical areas. To farm is to run serious risks of crop failure, and the farmer who isolates himself ends by starving himself.³ These, then, are lands which compel people to move and make contact with others if they are to survive, but they are also lands (and this is particularly true of the Greek mainland itself) in which mountainous terrain renders movement difficult. The political history of Greece is marked by a constant tension between isolation and independence on the one hand—the Greek world as a world made up of hundreds of selfgoverning cities tiny in area and in population -and a sense of a common identity and dependence on the other—a world where cities are linked for survival, in empires, leagues, and confederacies which are often at war with one another. This tension between independence and common identity also marks the cultural history of Greece.

GREEKS AND THE EAST

Greeks of the late Bronze Age wrote in a syllabary, known as Linear B, the decipherment of which in the 1950s has enormously increased our knowledge of the political and social organization of Mycenaean palace society, of the Mycenaean economy, and of Mycenaean religion. Linear B was, however, a means by which scribes could keep detailed records rather than a means of general, let alone mass, communication. Like all syllabaries it required a large number of separate symbols; with the fall of the palaces the motivation for record-keeping disappeared, and Linear B disappeared with it, although a (different) syllabary is found in use in classical Cyprus. As far as we know, between c.1200 and a little after 800 BC Greeks possessed no means of written communication. Then in the eighth century writing reappears in the Greek world, but now it is alphabetic rather than syllabic and the letters of the alphabet are largely those of the Semitic alphabet used by the Phoenicians. There is no doubt that Greeks borrowed not only the idea but the very means of alphabetic writing from the East. However, the Greek alphabet differs crucially from its eastern Mediterranean model: Greek from the beginning represents vowels, as well as consonants, with full letters. The invention of the vowel made Greek writing both more flexible and more straightforward than Phoenician, but it did not, as is sometimes claimed, mean that there was a different symbol for every different sound; the earliest alphabets do not, for instance, distinguish between long and short vowels. Given this limitation, it is unclear whether representing vowels was a stroke of individual genius on the part of the Greek who first took up the idea of an alphabet, or was simply a happy accident of someone who translated the initial sounds of some Phoenician letter names into Greek vowel sounds.⁴

The distinction between Phoenician and Greek alphabets rests not simply on the representation of vowels, but also on what the alphabet was used for. Many of the earliest examples of writing in Greek are metrical, their purpose more to entertain than to inform. So a graffito on a pottery jug from Athens of c.750 BC declares that jug to be a prize for the person ‘who dances most friskily’, another, of slightly later date, on a cup found in a grave of the Greek community on Ischia, plays on the epic tradition about Nestor and declares itself to be Nestor’s cup, expressing the wish that whoever drinks from it might be visited with desire by the goddess of love, Aphrodite. The frequency with which verse occurs in early Greek writing has led some to suggest that it was the desire to make a permanent record of oral epic poetry that led to the invention of the Greek alphabet.⁵ That the script local to Ionia, the homeland of epic poetry, was the earliest to distinguish long and short vowels might be held to suggest that the first Greek scripts needed adaptation to be truly useful for quantitative verse. But in any case it is clear that early Greek uses of writing were not at all limited by Phoenician practice.

Early Greek writing illustrates well the unity and at the same time the diversity of the Greek world. Writing is early attested from a very large number of cities in the Greek world, and always the fundamental character of the alphabet, the representation of vowel sounds, is the same; indeed the use of the Greek alphabet served as one way of defining who was and who was not Greek (Crete is, Cyprus not). But the symbols that were added to the core of twenty-two symbols borrowed directly from Phoenician, and the symbols adopted for particular sounds, differ, showing particular localized groupings. What is more, the purposes to which writing was put varied from area to area: written laws (on which see below) figure prominently in Crete, for example, but not at all in Attica. Greek cities had common interests, but they also had differing priorities and were as little constrained by what neighbours were doing as by what Phoenicians did.⁶

A similar picture can be painted with regard to artistic innovation. That archaic and classical Greek art owed a great deal to the Near East there can be no doubt. One of the skills lost at the end of the Mycenaean era was figurative art. We have little Dark Age sculpture (all we have are small bronzes) and decoration on pottery vessels took the form of geometric decoration, initially dominated by circular motifs against a dark background and then increasingly dominated by rectilinear patterns over the whole surface of the pot. When animal and human figures made their appearance they too took on very geometric shapes. Near-Eastern art of this period had no such devotion to geometric patterns: it was rich in motifs drawn from the natural world. These natural motifs, and with them a much more curvilinear and living approach to the depiction of animal and human figures, came to take the place of the geometric in Greek art, but they were not adopted wholesale and they were adopted in different media and in different places at different times. Purely geometric designs were first supplemented and then largely replaced with motifs drawn from the natural world by the potters of Crete in the second half of the ninth century BC, plausibly under the influence of the Phoenician goldsmiths for whose products and residence on Crete there is some evidence; on the Greek mainland too, at Athens, metalwork showed oriental borrowings, and perhaps oriental presence, by the middle of the eighth century, although it was another fifty years before potters found a use for and took up the possibilities offered by the eastern artists.

With the motifs which Greek artists took up from the East came whole new possibilities for art as a means of communication. The geometric figures of eighth-century pottery from the Greek mainland could very satisfactorily conjure up scenes of a particular type, with many figures involved in identical or similar activities, and were used in particular to conjure up funerary scenes and battle scenes. But the stick figures were not well adapted to telling a particular story or highlighting individual roles in group activities. The richer evocation of natural forms in Near-Eastern art made possible the portrayal of particular stories, stories which can be followed by the viewer even in the absence of guidance from a text. With the adoption of such richer forms the Greek artist took on this possibility of creating a sense of the particular unique combination of circumstances. But again, the Near-Eastern means were not used simply to replicate Near-Eastern narrative techniques, rather the most ambitious of seventh-century Greek artists chose to exploit the fact that invoking a story by pictorial means demands the viewer’s interpretative involvement and to juxtapose quite different scenes in ways which challenge the viewer to make, or to resist making, a particular interpretation. Even when we may suspect that particular compositional gambits have been taken over wholesale from Near-Eastern precedents, the application of the gambit to a different story context produces very different effects.

One further, striking, instance of Greek adaptation of ideas from the East deserves mention because of its religious significance. At the end of the seventh century the Greeks began, for the first time, to produce monumental sculpture in stone. There can be no doubt, from analysis of the proportions of these statues, that the ancient tradition that Greek sculptures of standing male figures were based on Egyptian prototypes is correct.⁷ But where the Egyptian figures which serve as models are figures of rulers and are clothed in loin cloths, the Greek male figures, known as kouroi, are from the beginning naked, and beardless, and stand in no simply representative relationship to any particular man. And from the beginning too, Greeks sculpt figures of (clothed) women (korai) as well as men. Kouroi and korai are primarily found in sanctuaries and although (or perhaps better because) they do not themselves simply represent either the gods or their worshippers, there is little doubt that they came to be a way of thinking about relations between men and gods: the variable scale of these statues (some kouroi are monumental, reaching 3, 6, or almost 10 metres in height) drew attention to human inability to determine their own physical bulk; the unvarying appearance of the statues raised issues of human, and divine, mutability; the way their frontal gaze mirrored that of the viewer insistently turned these general questions of the limits of human, and divine, power back on the individual viewer, and, in the case of korai, their nubile status and gestures of offering served to query whether exchanges of women and of fruitfulness within human society were images for men’s proper relationship with the gods. Such questions about the form of the gods and the ways in which men relate to them are questions which exercised such thinkers as Heraclitus and Xenophanes also. Both kouroi and korai, in versions of human scale, came to be used also in cemeteries, figuring the life that had been lost, sometimes with epitaphs explicitly inviting the viewer whose gaze met that of the statue to ‘stand and mourn’, using the mirroring gaze of the statue to emphasize the life shared by viewer and deceased. Conventions which in Egypt translated political power into permanent images of domination were thus adapted in the Greek world to stir up reflection about what people shared with each other and with the gods, and about how people should relate to gods.⁸

This consistent pattern in which Greeks borrow the means from the East but use those means to distinctly different ends, is one that can be seen in the realm of the history of ideas also, where a case can be made for Ionian thinkers taking advantage of the new proximity of the Iranian world with the Persian conquest of Lydia in order to take up ideas and use them in their arguments against each other. Extensive cosmological and cosmogonical writings are known from various peoples in the Near East which can plausibly be held to date from the early first millennium BC or before. The case for taking up eastern ideas is perhaps clearest in the work of Pherecydes of Syros, active in the middle of the sixth century, who wrote a book obscurely entitled ‘Seven (or Five) Recesses’ (Heptamukhos or Pentemukbos). His account of creation and of struggles for mastery among the gods, although in some ways in the tradition of Hesoid’s Theogony (see below), differs crucially in the order of presentation of material and may have been directly indebted to oriental sources.⁹ Similar claims have also been made for the Milesian Anaximander whose order of the heavenly bodies, with the stars nearest to the earth, is found in the East but not otherwise in Greece, and whose view of the heavenly bodies as turning on wheels has similarities with the visions of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel. Pherecydes was individualist in his treatment of traditional stories, Anaximander highly eclectic in any borrowings; such eclectic, individualist, and often directly critical, attitudes towards the ideas of others, other Greeks as well as non-Greeks, is indeed a remarkable feature of the Greek world.¹⁰ But this is not to suggest that transformation in the borrowing is unique to Greeks: it is found too in what la...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• General editors’ preface
• Notes on contributors
• Chronology
• List of Sources
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The polis and its culture
• Chapter 2: The Ionians
• Chapter 3: Heraclitus
• Chapter 4: Pythagoreans and Eleatics
• Chapter 5: Empedocles
• Chapter 6: Anaxagoras and the atomists
• Chapter 7: The sophists
• Chapter 8: Greek arithmetic, geometry and harmonics: Thales to Plato
• Chapter 9: Socrates and the beginnings of moral philosophy
• Chapter 10: Plato: metaphysics and epistemology
• Chapter 11: Plato: ethics and politics
• Chapter 12: Plato: aesthetics and psychology
• Glossary