Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

by Edith Hall

littoral

the paradoxical link between the Greeks’ independent streak and their ownership of slaves. The word for freedom, eleutheria, means the opposite of the word for slavery. It meant collective freedom from rule by another people, such as the Persians, but it also meant individual liberty. Even the poorest citizens of Greek states possessed precious rights as free men, eleutheroi, which they would lose if enslaved. Moreover, the fear of slavery was an ever-present reality for everybody in antiquity;

authority. In some Greek city-states a radical new idea emerged of the free male who was fundamentally equal in status to his peers, even if he possessed no inherited wealth or aristocratic identity whatsoever. The free Greek man was able to call, moreover, upon men of the same status to show solidarity with him in defense of his rights and privileges. By the late sixth century this vision of the ideal citizen of the polis (city-state) was to lead, after grueling struggles, to democracy.

The outlook of the Greeks of this era is crystallized in the earliest Greek literature: four long poems. They are the Iliad and the Odyssey, epic narratives that have come down to us under the name of Homer, and Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony. The rebellious, independent element of the Greek character is fundamental to all of them.

But all four poems offer unforgettable scenes of fighting, sailing, and farming—the three activities central to the archaic economy and to the archaic Greek male experience of life. They were performed at festivals where self-governing Greeks, from diverse communities, met as equals in shared sacred spaces to worship their shared gods and, in doing so, invented the competitive athletics festivals of which we possess a descendant in the Olympics. The poems recited at these gatherings were the collective cultural property of the independent-minded Greek warrior peasants wherever they sailed and were fundamental to the transmission of their values. They remained so until the end of pagan antiquity.

between 800 and 750 BC, Greek culture changed forever.

Hesiod and Homer composed in a distinctive meter, the dactylic hexameter, consisting of lines of six feet, or emphases. These long lines create a rolling, insistent rhythm,

translation of line 8 of the Iliad:

“Who of the great gods caused these heroes to wra...

The Iliad’s list of forces mustered to defend Troy includes the Bronze Age residents of the areas in Asia Minor in which the Greeks later built cities, but it describes them as they were retrospectively visualized in the eighth century. The largest contingent by far is furnished by the Trojans and their immediate neighbors the Dardanians, both of whom share language, culture, religion, and protocols with the Greeks. The Phrygians, Lydians, and Thracians who lived farther away, but also in the northern part of Asia Minor and across the Hellespont, fight for Troy. But the poet of the Iliad carefully includes allies who “speak other tongues” from regions that lay to the south of Troy down the coast—Mysia, Caria, and Lycia—which his audience knew were in their own day heavily populated by Greeks. Listening to the Iliad required them to engage in the act of remembering, or more likely imagining, Asia before the Greeks came. Perhaps, for them, the Greek conquest of Troy, regardless of its historicity, symbolically represented the Ionian forefathers’ arrival on the Asiatic seaboard, during the putatively dark centuries, from the Greek mainland and islands. The ambiguous ethnicity of the Iliadic Trojans themselves, similarly, may have functioned to represent the fusion of cultures, Greek and Asiatic, that had necessarily resulted.

Hittites, who from the eighteenth to the twelfth centuries BC ran a massive empire approximately coextensive with modern Turkey.

But the concerns addressed in the Homeric epics are those that occupied the minds of the Greeks of the eighth century, transposed into their fictionalized prehistory.

The other portrait of the fiercely independent farmer in the earliest Greek poetry is Hesiod’s self-portrait in his agricultural poem Works and Days. Hesiod is the first author in world literature we feel we can understand as an individual. He exemplifies several of the ten characteristics that I think collectively constituted the distinctive ancient Greek mind-set, especially his strong authorial “I” voice and the emotional directness and mordant humor of his advice. “Do not let a flaunting woman coax and flatter and deceive you: she is after your barn.” He despises his idle, litigious brother, Perses, and scathingly suggests that he stop worrying about legal disputes and do some work: “the man who has not laid up a year’s store of food, Demeter’s grain, has no business concerning himself with quarrels and courts of law.”

undergone sea voyages, deracination, and transplantation, and he was a farmer. The leitmotif of his Works and Days, from which we learn about his personal situation, and which furnished the Greeks with seminal aspects of their collective identity, was the ever-present threat of hunger.

The Iliad gave Greek men images of iconic warriors, battles, and military funerals that sustained them in their constant fighting. But it also offered them a poetic idiom of melancholy and grandeur, a picture of their shared heroic past and—however mediated by myth and fantasy—their

sense that they had achieved conquests in Asia. The Odyssey gave them scenes of sailing and a charismatic quest hero who embodied an idealized version of the self-reliant, versatile farmer-seafarer of the archaic period, sufficient unto himself and equipped with advanced mental, practical, and social skills. Hesiod’s psychologically astute poems outlined the Greeks’ joint family tree leading back to Hellen, but also crystallized their relations with the gods, their ethical outlook, the power of hatred, revenge, and sex, their identity as farmers who might have to move because of poverty, their wit, and their contentious streak. Above all, the archaic period put human experience—of sea and land, war and travel, sex and work, food and drink—at the center of its cultural output.

Greek colonizing activity intensified in the seventh and sixth centuries BC and is inseparable from the developments outlined in the previous chapter, especially the increasing determination of less wealthy Greeks, at a time of scarce resources, to secure themselves economic independence and political self-determination. The drive for independence—the rebellious quality in the Greek character—was in turn tied up with their developed sense of individuality.

The age of colonization is also an age of Greek individualism.

river Phasis [the Rioni,

Heraclitus, asserted the principle that the physical universe was constantly changing because of the action of a cosmic fire: Panta rhei, he said—“Everything is in flux.” It is not possible for one river to be entered twice by the same man, according to Heraclitus, because the water that constitutes the river is constantly changing, and men never remain in exactly the same state, either.

In this chapter we shall ask how and why Thales’s intellectual descendants in Ionia, Italy, and then Athens harnessed his spirit of nonreligious inquiry to the investigation of the unseen structures and causes of change not only in land, sea, and sky but also in human experience and human activities. They asked about the invisible inner workings of our bodies; they probed the relationship between the worlds we see in our mind’s eye and those our senses tell us are physically there, how we make decisions about right and wrong, how we collect information, why different peoples speak different languages and worship diverse gods, why we fight one another or come together in cities, and how the past became the present—how the world’s empires came into existence.

Because they now had the phonetic alphabet, they were able, for the first time, to write the results of their inquiries down. These intellectuals included men with names still famous today—Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Herodotus—and equally seminal figures whose names are now less well known: As we shall see, Xenophanes of Colophon was one of the most influential thinkers of all time. They had used the revolutionary technology of writing they had adapted from the Phoenicians not only to invent physical science and write about it in both poetry and prose; they also developed rational medicine, philosophy, mathematics, political theory, ethnography, geography, and the writing of history. Before analyzing in detail these awe-inspiring achievements and the men responsible for them, it is essential to inquire into the complicated set of circumstances on the Maeander estuary that made them possible in the first place.

Ionians, invented rational philosophy, science, history, and medicine.

Hippocrates’ brilliance needs to be understood as a consummation of many decades, even centuries, of medical practice and accumulated lore.

The first ancient Greek to use the term philosophos, “wisdom-loving,” was Heraclitus, the late sixth-century Greek obsessed with change, a resident of the silting-up city of Ephesus. As we have seen, he said no river stayed the same. He placed fire at the center of the cosmic order and decreed that everything was in flux. Like Thales, later Greeks assumed that Heraclitus had learned from “the barbarian philosophy.” Perhaps he had been stimulated by the sanctity of fire in the Persians’ religion, Zoroastrianism.

But regardless of the source of his ideas, he deserves to be called the first philosopher in the modern sense, because along with proposing that fire was the central principle of the physical world, he considered abstract forces beyond the physical (the metaphysical), aspects of perception, and principles of human behavior. The challenge he faced in finding language to express his novel ideas meant that his books were far from easy reads. This first philosopher immediately gave philosophy its reputation for being abstruse and confusing. His fragments are sometimes maddeningly obscure, to the extent that the Greeks told a story in which the tragedian Euripides gave a copy of Heraclitus’s book—written several decades earlier—to Socrates to read; when asked his opinion of the book, Socrates replied, “The part I understand is excellent, and so too is, I dare say, the part I do not understand; but it needs a Delian diver to get to the bottom of it.” But Heraclitus, arcane or not, was the first man who thought hard about what philosophy entailed—a self-conscious process of inquiry into the nature of existence. The increasing breadth of his interests stemmed from his theory of permanent change, which helped him to explain the confusing tension between sameness and otherness in the universe and society. Things that are opposites at one time can become unities at other times or in other circumstances: “As the same things in us are living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old...

ceaseless “exchange” of gold into goods and vice versa. The universe was in flux. It could be measured, but only b...

The Milesians and Ephesians lived adjacent to Lydia, where, in the seventh century BC, the first coins...

Blank discs of metal (flans) of the required weight were heated and placed between two dies. These were the bronze concave molds that had the designs for the coin’s sculptures carved in reverse. The smith would place the dies flat and strike the top one hard with a hammer to stamp the carved images onto the flan, producing the coin. This momentous technological advance was one impetus behind Ionian innovative thinking, and especially behind Anaximander’s abstract conception of the Unlim...

Coins represent timeless value, which can be divided into fractions of tiny denomination but can also be accumulated limitlessly. Coins make it possible to imagine an amount of money too huge to be spent in a lifetime. This underlies money’s connection with philosophy. Coins are different from portable chunks of bullion. The value they represent need not be the same as the value of the metal as a commodity. In extreme cases the coins may be counterfeit. In many ancient cities, coins of small denominations were issued in bronze. Their face value bore little relation to their intrinsic worth. But the slippage between the two values—the nominal and the actual—began the minute the first coin was struck in archaic Lydia. Karl Marx described this in the first volume of Das Kapital. The circulation of coins always reduces them to a semblance of the value they symbolize. What starts out as actually being made of gold, and worth the numerical weight stamped upon it, always ends up being replaced by coins or banknotes that symbolize a numerical value but are themselves physically worthless. Marx calls this process the transformation of money from “actually being gold,” Goldsein, to “appearing to be gold,” Goldschein. Coins are concrete. They are made out of matter. But they signify a quantity in the self-contained world of purely abstract symbolic value. All human labor and real-world objects can be measured by money and converted into it. This new, self-contained abstract world, ex...

The most undervalued of all ancient philosophers was the brilliant Xenophanes, who had seen the Lydian kingdom in action firsthand, and regarded its invention of coinage as momentous. Like Heraclitus, he was interested in change and in the relationship between sameness and difference, but he focused on how change was manifested in human communities rather than the physical constitution of the universe, thus laying

the groundwork for the invention of pol...

Xenophanes was a foundational figure. He was the first philosopher to use ridicule as a formal device for critiquing other thinkers’ positions. He was also the first ancient Greek author who clearly espoused a relativist position. That is, he denied that any proposition could be absolutely true, since whether it was regarded as true or false depended on the subjective outlook of the individual assessing it—an important principle that holders of dogmatic opinions today still

find hard to accept. Xenophanes is so sure of the difficulties involved in acquiring true knowledge that he has been called the first Skeptic. He was the first to argue systematically that there is a difference between belief and knowledge. He proposed that aiming for certain knowledge in the case of matters that were not evident was hazardous—indeed, even if humans do accidentally hit on the truth about such matters, they have no way of knowing for certain that it is true. He does not, however, deny that it is worth trying, by persistent inquiry, to increase human knowledge.

It is not that Xenophanes did not have a god, or rather God. His supreme God was to be identified with the entire universe, a single, motionless entity. This God has neither human form nor a mind like a human’s. He does not speak to humans directly and does not make appearances in their circles. This leads to one of Xenophanes’ most profound inferences—profound since many subsequent Greeks who doubted the existence of the Olympians nevertheless participated in all the rituals of their cities. Xenophanes despised a ritual in which houses were decorated with pine branches because they were supposed to have a numinous power. He derided prophets and miracle workers. He did not believe that divination

worked. This thorough-going skepticism about religious practice resulted from his understanding of the physical properties of the universe. Some spectacular events that occurred in nature, popularly believed to be signs from the gods, were, he scoffed, no such thing. The rainbow, which the Greeks knew as the goddess Iris, was just a cloud with colorful streaks. When sailors saw purple lights flashing from the top of their masts (St. Elmo’s fire, caused by freak electrical charges, often after thunder), it was not the Dioscuri pledging their protection but clouds generating light as they moved. God did not communicate with man.

Apparent physical miracles, insisted Xenophanes, must be caused by non-miraculous causes ...

Pythagoras, inquired into the secrets that the pure science of invisible numbers could reveal about the structure of the discernible world. Pythagoras was born on the Ionian island of Samos but abandoned it, perhaps fleeing the tyranny of Polycra...

He was attracted by the ideas of metempsychosis and reincarnation. He made important advances in the relationship between music and mathematics; harmony was conceptually important in his cosmic theories. He is of course best known for the theorem that goes under his name: In a right-angled triangle, the area of the square of the side opposite the right angle is the same as the sum of the areas of the two squares made from the other side of the triangle. But in this case, there is no doubt that the Greek thinker was drawing on “barbarian lore,” for the Babylonians had cracked the fundamental relationship of the “Pythagorean” triples as early as 1800 BC.

Once Xenophanes and Pythagoras brought philosophy westward, Italy and Sicily soon produced their own thinkers. Pythagoras influenced Empedocles of Akragas, perhaps the most famous Sicilian of antiquity and a colorful character. Like Pythagoras, he believed in reincarnation and was said to have hurled himself into the volcano of Mount Etna in order to persuade the world by disappearing that he had turned into God (unfortunately, his sandal was spewed back out, thus undermining his claim). Where the Milesians had argued about which substance was primary, Empedocles identified all four classical elements—water, earth, fire, and air—as jointly constituting the universe. These elements were perpetually brought together and drawn apart by the competing forces of Love and Strife, which explains the changing nature of the world, plants and animals, in the course of evolution.

Parmenides,

his poem Way of Truth are some of the most contested in the history of philosophy. Yet they do show his significance as the founder of the study of the nature of existence itself, of Being (ontology) as a defined and separate topic for serious debate. Parmenides rejected the Heraclitan idea that everything was in flux. He insisted that existence was unchanging and formed a single whole. It was therefore knowable. Things cannot come into being from nothing and cannot pass away. There is no change or plurality, which means that motion is illusory. Existence has no past and no future. It just is. Modern philosophers sometimes claim that Parmenides was the father of Western philosophy in the technical sense, because he argued systematically. His thesis was general and offered a coherent explanation for how everything in the universe worked as a totality. It identified and built on some of the central planks of rational thought—concepts such as truth and continuity.

Parmenides also used argumentative methods that Socrates later developed at length, such as the identification of contradiction. Parmenides’ argument that motion is illusory was defended by a younger Eleatic, Zeno, in a series of colorful paradoxes. These are fascinating because they show the classroom training that a young philosopher might have experienced in Parmenides’ school. Even today, they are often the first philosophical bones that undergraduates are given to chew on. The term paradox technically means “demonstrations that absurd consequences can follow from seemingly reasonable assumptions.” The most famous is known as “Achilles and the tortoise.” The majority of people assume that because Achilles can run faster than the tortoise, he will overtake it if he chases it. But Zeno said that every time Achilles is just about to catch up with the tortoise, the tortoise has a chance to progress forward very slightly. If taken to infinity, this means that Achilles can never actually get to the place the tortoise is in before the tortoise leaves it. A sec...

By the fifth century, the inquiring Greeks of Ionia and Italy had essentially formulated the great questions that underpin ancient and much modern science and philosophy: What is the nature of the world and of existence? How do we learn things and know them for certain? How do we explain human behavior? They had questioned the existence of the Olympian gods, at least as Homer and Hesiod portrayed them, and the effectiveness of traditional ritual; they had invented natural science and advanced the understanding of mathematics. A fascinating combination of circumstances made sixth-century Ionian culture produce men who articulated these questions head-on, without wait...

with the cerebral god Apollo; the confidence and intellectual equipment they had acquired as mariners; their eastern-facing outlook; their intensive contact and cultural exchange with other peoples, especially the Phoenicians, Lydians, and Persians; and their re...

The third and last act of the drama of the Ionian Enlightenment, which ultimately brought the center of intellectual endeavor to classical Athens to produce the political theory of Protagoras and the Histories of Herodotus...

After the retreat of the Persians from mainland Greece in 479, the center of intellectual innovation shifted westward to Athens (itself an Ionian city), which had emphatically put itself on the map as one of the two leading city-states of the free Greek world.

But in the figures of Anaxagoras, Democritus, and Protagoras, who visited or migrated to Athens, we can see the link with the older Ionian tradition being maintained. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, an Asiatic city of the Ionian League, was regarded as having introduced philosophy to Athens after the Persian Wars. Like the Milesians before him, Anaxagoras maintained that the world consisted of a material substance, consisting in his case of infinite and indestructible primary elements, which could not multiply or vanish but only mingle and separate. Anaxagoras’s material universe was, however, governed by the principle of Mind, or divine Reason, which he called Nous (Intelligence).

Democritus had connections with Miletus but came from a fascinating colony of Clazomenae—Abdera, in the far northern Aegean on the Thracian coast, where we earlier encountered the patient who had undergone skull surgery. Democritus’s ideas were of incalculable importance to ancient science and to the philosophical school of Epicureanism. Unlike Anaxagoras, he dispensed with the idea that the universe had any purpose or governing principle to which its material constituents were subordinated. He was the first kn...

in an infinite void. The changes humans can see are caused by atoms eternally combining, separating, colliding, and relocating. The movements are all caused mechanically by previous movements and are unavoidable and random. All worlds, including the world humans experience, are created by atoms whirling around each other and form...