The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  He begins, like Parmenides, with a critique of the senses. For practical purposes we may trust them; but the moment we begin to analyze their evidence we find ourselves taking away from the external world layer after layer of the color, temperature, flavor, savor, sweetness, bitterness, and sound that the senses lay upon it; these “secondary qualities” are in ourselves or in the total process of perception, not in the objective thing; in an earless world a falling forest would make no noise, and the ocean, however angry, would never roar. “By convention (nomos) sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.”29 Hence the senses give us only obscure knowledge, or opinion; genuine knowledge comes only by investigation and thought. “Verily, we know nothing. Truth is buried deep. . . . We know nothing for certain, but only the changes produced in our body by the forces that impinge upon it.”30 All sensations are due to atoms discharged by the object and falling upon our sense organs.31 All senses are forms of touch.32

  The atoms that constitute the world differ in figure, size, and weight; all have a tendency downward; in the resultant rotatory motion like atoms combine with like and produce the planets and the stars. No nows, or intelligence, guides the atoms, no Empedoclean “love” or “hate” assorts them, but necessity—the natural operation of inherent causes—rules over all.33 There is no chance; chance is a fiction invented to disguise our ignorance.34 The quantity of matter remains always the same; none is ever created, none ever destroyed;35 only the atom combinations change. Forms, however, are innumerable; even of worlds there is probably an “infinite” number, coming into being and passing away in an interminable pageantry.36 Organic beings arose originally from the moist earth.37 Everything in man is made of atoms; the soul is composed of tiny, smooth, round atoms, like those of fire. Mind, soul, vital heat, vital principle, are all one and the same thing; they are not confined to men or animals, but are diffused throughout the world; and in man and other animals the mental atoms whereby we think are distributed throughout the body.*38

  Nevertheless these fine atoms that constitute the soul are the noblest and most wonderful part of the body. The wise man will cultivate thought, will free himself from passion, superstition, and fear, and will seek in contemplation and understanding the modest happiness available to human life. Happiness does not come from external goods; a man “must become accustomed to finding within himself the sources of his enjoyment.”42 “Culture is better than riches. . . . No power and no treasure can outweigh the extension of our knowledge.”43 Happiness is fitful, and “sensual pleasure affords only a brief satisfaction”; one comes to a more lasting content by acquiring peace and serenity of soul (ataraxia), good cheer (euthumia), moderation (metriotes), and a certain order and symmetry of life (biou symmetria)).44 We may learn much from the animals—“spinning from the spider, building from the swallow, singing from the nightingale and the swan”;45 but “strength of body is nobility only in beasts of burden, strength of character is nobility in man.”46 So, like the heretics of Victorian England, Democritus raises upon his scandalous metaphysics a most presentable ethic. “Good actions should be done not out of compulsion but from conviction; not from hope of reward, but for their own sake. . . . A man should feel more shame in doing evil before himself than before all the world.”47

  He illustrated his own precepts, and perhaps justified his counsels, by living to the age of a hundred and nine, or, as some say, to merely ninety, years.48 Diogenes Laertius relates that when Democritus read in public his most important work, the megas diakosmos, or Great World, the city of Abdera presented him with a hundred talents ($600,000); but perhaps Abdera had depreciated its currency. When someone asked the secret of his longevity, he answered that he ate honey daily, and bathed his body with oil.49 Finally, having lived long enough, he reduced his food each day, determined to starve himself by easy degrees.50 “He was exceedingly old,” says Diogenes,51

  and appeared to be at the point of death. His sister lamented that he would die during the festival of the Thesmophoria, which would prevent her from discharging her duties to the goddess. So he bade her be of good cheer, and to bring him hot loaves (or a little honey52) every day. And by applying these to his nostrils he kept himself alive over the festival. But when the three days of the feast were passed he expired without any pain, as Hipparchus assures us, having lived one hundred and nine years.

  His city gave him a public funeral, and Timon of Athens praised him.53 He founded no school; but he formulated for science its most famous hypothesis, and gave to philosophy a system which, denounced by every other, has survived them all, and reappears in every generation.

  III. EMPEDOCLES

  Idealism offends the senses, materialism offends the soul; the one explains everything but the world, the other everything but life. To merge these half-truths it was necessary to find some dynamic principle that could mediate between structure and growth, between things and thought. Anaxagoras sought such a principle in a cosmic Mind; Empedocles sought it in the inherent forces that made for evolution.

  This Leonardo of Acragas was born in the year of Marathon, of a wealthy family whose passion for horse racing gave no promise of philosophy. He studied for a while with the Pythagoreans, but in his exuberance he divulged some of their esoteric doctrine, and was expelled.54 He took very much to heart the notion of transmigration, and announced with poetic sympathy that he had been “in bygone times a youth, a maiden, and a flowering shrub; a bird, yes, and a fish that swims in silence through the deep sea.”55 He condemned the eating of animal food as a form of cannibalism; for were not these animals the reincarnation of human beings?56 All men, he believed, had once been gods, but had forfeited their heavenly place by some impurity or violence; and he was certain that he felt in his own soul intimations of a prenatal divinity. “From what glory, from what immeasurable bliss, have I now sunk to roam with mortals on this earth!”57 Convinced of his divine origin, he put golden sandals upon his feet, clothed his body with purple robes, and crowned his head with laurel; he was, as he modestly explained to his countrymen, a favorite of Apollo; only to his friends did he confess that he was a god. He claimed supernatural powers, performed magic rites, and sought by incantations to wrest from the other world the secrets of human destiny. He offered to cure diseases by the enchantment of his words, and cured so many that the populace half believed his claims. Actually he was a learned physician fertile in suggestions to medical science, and skilled in the psychology of the medical art. He was a brilliant orator; he “invented,” says Aristotle,58 the principles of rhetoric, and taught them to Gorgias, who peddled them in Athens. He was an engineer who freed Selinus from pestilence by draining marshes and changing the courses of streams.59 He was a courageous statesman who, though himself an aristocrat, led a popular revolution against a narrow aristocracy, refused the dictatorship, and established a moderate democracy.60 He was a poet, and wrote On Nature and On Purifications in such excellent verse that Aristotle and Cicero ranked him high among the poets, and Lucretius complimented him with imitation. “When he went to the Olympic games,” says Diogenes Laertius, “he was the object of general attention, so that there was no mention made of anybody else in comparison with him.”61 Perhaps, after all, he was a god.

  The 470 lines that survive give us only hazardous intimations of his philosophy. He was an eclectic, and saw some wisdom in every system. He deprecated Parmenides’ wholesale rejection of the senses, and welcomed each sense as an “avenue to understanding.”63 Sensation is due to effluxes of particles proceeding from the object and falling upon the “pores” (poroi) of the senses; therefore light needs time to come from the sun to us.64 Night is caused by the earth intercepting the rays of the sun.65 All things are composed of four elements—air, fire, water, and earth. Operating upon these are two basic forces, attraction and repulsion, Love and Hate. The endless combinations and separations of the elements by these forces produce the world of things an
d history. When Love or the tendency to combine is dominant, matter develops into plants, and organisms take higher and higher forms. Just as transmigration weaves all souls into one biography, so in nature there is no sharp distinction between one species or genus and another; e.g., “Hair and leaves and the thick feathers of birds, and the scales that form on tough limbs, are the same thing.”68 Nature produces every kind of organ and form; Love unites them, sometimes into monstrosities that perish through maladaptation, sometimes into organisms capable of propagating themselves and meeting the conditions of survival.69 All higher forms develop from lower forms.70 At first both sexes are in the same body; then they become separated, and each longs to be reunited with the other.*71 To this process of evolution corresponds a process of dissolution, in which Hate, or the force of division, tears down the complex structure that Love has built. Slowly organisms and planets revert to more and more primitive forms, until all things are merged again in a primeval and amorphous mass.72 These alternating processes of development and decay go on endlessly, in each part and in the whole; the two forces of combination and separation, Love and Hate, Good and Evil, fight and balance each other in a vast universal rhythm of Life and Death. So old is the philosophy of Herbert Spencer.73

  The place of God in this process is not clear, for in Empedocles it is difficult to separate fact from metaphor, philosophy from poetry. Sometimes he identifies deity with the cosmic sphere itself, sometimes with the life of all life, or the mind of all mind; but he knows that we shall never be able to form a just idea of the basic and original creative power. “We cannot bring God near so as to reach him with our eyes and lay hold of him with our hands. . . . For he has no human head attached to bodily members, nor do two branching arms dangle from his shoulders; he has neither feet nor knees nor any hairy parts. No; he is only mind, sacred and ineffable mind, flashing through the whole universe with swift thoughts.”74 And Empedocles concludes with the wise and weary counsel of old age:

  Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edge of thought; short is the measure of the life in death through which they toil. Then are they borne away; like smoke they vanish into air; and what they dream they know is but the little that each hath stumbled upon in wandering about the world. Yet boast they all that they have learned the whole. Vain fools! For what that is, no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, nor can it be conceived by the mind of man.75

  In his last years he became more distinctly a preacher and prophet, absorbed in the theory of reincarnation, and imploring his fellow men to purge away the guilt that had exiled them from heaven. With the assorted wisdom of Buddha, Pythagoras, and Schopenhauer he warned the human race to abstain from marriage, procreation,76 and beans.77 When, in 415, the Athenians besieged Syracuse, Empedocles did what he could to help its resistance, and thereby offended Acragas, which hated Syracuse with all the animosity of kinship. Banished from his native city, he went to the mainland of Greece and died, some say, in Megara.78 But Hippobotus, says Diogenes Laertius,79 tells how Empedocles, after bringing back to full life a woman who had been given up for dead, rose from the feast that celebrated her recovery, disappeared, and was never seen again. Legend said that he had leaped into Etna’s fiery mouth so that he might die without leaving a trace behind him, and thereby confirm his divinity. But the elemental fire betrayed him; it flung up his brazen slippers and left them, like heavy symbols of mortality, upon the crater’s edge.80

  IV. THE SOPHISTS

  It is a reproof to those who think of Greece as synonymous with Athens, that none of the great Hellenic thinkers before Socrates belonged to that city, and only Plato after him. The fate of Anaxagoras and Socrates indicates that religious conservatism was stronger in Athens than in the colonies, where geographical separation had broken some of the bonds of tradition. Perhaps Athens would have remained obscurantist and intolerant to the point of stupidity had it not been for the growth of a cosmopolitan trading class, and the coming of the Sophists to Athens.

  The debates in the Assembly, the trials before the heliaea, and the rising need for the ability to think with the appearance of logic and to speak with clarity and persuasion, conspired with the wealth and curiosity of an imperial society to create a demand for something unknown in Athens before Pericles—formal higher education in letters, oratory, science, philosophy, and statesmanship. The demand was met at first not by the organization of universities but by wandering scholars who engaged lecture halls, gave there their courses of instruction, and then passed on to other cities to repeat them. Some of these men, like Protagoras, called themselves sophistai—i.e., teachers of wisdom.81 The word was accepted as equivalent to our “university professor,” and bore no derogatory connotation until the conflict between religion and philosophy led to conservative attacks upon the Sophists, and the commercialism of certain of them provoked Plato to darken their name with the imputations of venal sophistry that now cling to it. Perhaps the general public entertained a vague dislike for these teachers from their first appearance, since their costly instruction in logic and rhetoric could be bought only by the well to do, and gave these an advantage in trying their cases before the courts.82 It is true that the more famous Sophists, like most skilled practitioners in any field, charged all that their patrons could be persuaded to pay; this is the final law of prices everywhere. Protagoras and Gorgias, we are told, demanded ten thousand drachmas ($10,000) for the education of a single pupil. But lesser Sophists were content with reasonably moderate fees; Prodicus, famous throughout Greece, asked from one to fifty drachmas for admission to his courses.83

  Protagoras, the most renowned of the Sophists, was born in Abdera a generation before Democritus. In his lifetime he was the better known of the two, and the more influential; we surmise his repute from the furore created by his visits to Athens.*84 Even Plato, who was not often intentionally fair to the Sophists, respected him, and described him as a man of high character. In the Platonic dialogue that is named after him Protagoras makes a much better showing than the argumentative young Socrates; here it is Socrates who talks like a Sophist, and Protagoras who behaves like a gentleman and a philosopher, never losing his temper, never jealous of another’s brilliance, never taking the argument too seriously, and never anxious to speak. He admits that he undertakes to teach his pupils prudence in private and public matters, the orderly management of home and family, the art of rhetoric or persuasive speaking, and the ability to understand and direct affairs of state.86 He defends his high fees by saying that it is his custom, when a pupil objects to the sum asked, to agree to receive as adequate whatever amount the pupil may name as just in a solemn statement before some sacred shrine87—a rash procedure for a teacher who doubted the existence of the gods. Diogenes Laertius accuses him of being the first to “arm disputants with the weapon of sophism,” a charge that would have pleased Socrates; but Diogenes adds that Protagoras “was also the first to invent that sort of argument which is called Socratic”88—which might not have pleased Socrates.

  It was but one of his many distinctions that he founded European grammar and philology. He treated of the right use of words, says Plato,89 and was the first to distinguish the three genders of nouns, and certain tenses and moods of verbs.90 But his chief significance lay in this, that with him, rather than with Socrates, began the subjective standpoint in philosophy. Unlike the Ionians he was less interested in things than in thought—i.e., in the whole process of sensation, perception, understanding, and expression. Whereas Parmenides rejected sensation as a guide to truth, Protagoras, like Locke, accepted it as the only means of knowledge, and refused to admit any transcendental—suprasensual—reality. No absolute truth can be found, said Protagoras, but only such truths as hold for given men under given conditions; contradictory assertions can be equally true for different persons or at different times.91 All truth, goodness, and beauty are relative and subjective; “man is the measure of all things—of those that
are, that they are, and of those that are not, that they are not.”92 To the historical eye a whole world begins to tremble when Protagoras announces this simple principle of humanism and relativity; all established truths and sacred principles crack; individualism has found a voice and a philosophy; and the supernatural bases of social order threaten to melt away.

  The far-reaching skepticism implicit in this famous pronouncement might have remained theoretical and safe had not Protagoras applied it for a moment to theology. Among a group of distinguished men in the home of the unpopular freethinker, Euripides, Protagoras read a treatise whose first sentence made a stir in Athens. “With regard to the gods I know not whether they exist or not, or what they are like. Many things prevent our knowing: the subject is obscure, and brief is the span of our mortal life.”93 The Athenian Assembly, frightened by that ominous prelude, banished Protagoras, ordered all Athenians to surrender any copies they might have of his writings, and burned the books in the market place. Protagoras fled to Sicily, and, story tells us, was drowned on the way.94