Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

by Thomas Cahill

  That the Greeks consecrated so much time to such a god suggests they had some inkling of the dark forces that could conquer their best strivings, their quest for aretē, and they meant to pay these forces sufficient homage to keep them at bay. The lost utopias of cloud-bound Ithaca and lofty Troy had been replaced by a real-life ideal, a polis of visionary perfection, democratic Athens and its many imitators, a system in which all the inevitable political tensions were kept in balance by “agreements that profit no one to violate.” The symposium and the Dionysia were two of several characteristically Greek safety valves for blowing off the social steam that might otherwise build to an explosion. But the libations, the choruses, and the processions were also pleas to the gods to leave their ideal polis intact, not visit it with the ills that had destroyed so many others:

  How often have whole cities had to pay

  for choosing one who can but evil do.

  On them far-seeing Zeus sends heav’nly woes—

  twinned plague and famine—till the people die.

  Their army or their walls he may cast down

  or, wreaking vengeance, sink their ships at sea.

  Anxious Hesiod spoke in these lines what all Greece knew about divine justice and single rule by self-seeking tyrants. By all means, let us bow sufficiently in Dionysus’s direction, but let us with fervent pleas especially implore Zeus and his divine minister of heavenly justice, Lord Apollo.

  Another safety valve was the annual Lenaia, held each January in honor of Dionysus Lenaios, Dionysus of the Wine Vat. Unlike the springtime Dionysia, a magnet for spectators from all over Greece as well as for foreign tourists, the Lenaia, which took place in the month when travel was most difficult and sea voyage impossible, was a festival for Athenians, a citywide family party in which playwrights were encouraged to speak aloud their most outrageous thoughts. Thus, the Lenaia became the principal showcase for Greece’s comic poets, who took just as seriously as their tragic brethren the mandate to engage their political moment.

  Aristophanes, the king of Athenian comedy, in fact went further than any tragedian dared go in criticizing his city’s leading citizens and pointing out political absurdities. His comedy Ekklēsiazousai (Assembly Women), for instance, imagines the hallowed Athenian Assembly being taken over by women, who introduce economic communism—community of goods—as well as community of persons, the old and the ugly now being able to get as much sex as the young and the beautiful. A young couple are parted when three old crones assert their prior rights to the young man and leave his sweetheart in the dust. The play concludes with the chorus hurrying off to a communal dinner, where preposterously novel dishes will be served.

  In Lysistrata, Aristophanes went even further, imagining a strike by the women of Athens, who refuse to have sex with their husbands till peace is made. They conspire with women of enemy city-states, who boycott their husbands as well, setting off a universal outbreak of priapism, as clumsy male choruses show up, attempting to sing and dance while sporting painful erections. The Athenian women secure the Acropolis and its treasury, bringing to a halt Athens’s ability to wage war. A very beautiful and very naked Goddess of Peace appears, sending the men into paroxysms of pain. Peace negotiations between Athens and Sparta are quickly concluded and, as the play ends, a banquet of peace begins.

  Males mocked, war mocked, Athens and its sacred institutions mercilessly satirized, while the Greeks laughed delightedly. Beyond the West, there are many parts of our contemporary world where such humor could still win you torture and execution; and even the Western world would not again see such exuberant self-confidence till two millennia had passed and the spirit of the Renaissance would issue in a new Age of Discovery. The Greeks called their spirit to hellenikon, the Greek Thing, a freewheeling, argy-bargy brilliance that may be easy to fault but remains relentlessly engaging and colorful, always reaching for more. As Aristophanes himself advised other dramatists through the culinary advice of the women’s chorus in Ekklēsiazousai:

  You’ll come up with something brand new

  if you’re hoping to launch a real winner.

  The banqueters won’t fail to boo

  if you dare serve them yesterday’s dinner.

  SOMETHING BRAND NEW. Beyond the social, political, and artistic innovations we have been considering, the most influential of all Greek intellectual innovations is undoubtedly the development over the course of two centuries of philosophy as a systematic study. Philo-sophia is a Greek word, meaning “love of wisdom”; and the first philosophers were relatively traditional sages who gradually (and probably painfully) created a new job description for themselves. These were men whose reputation as magi gave them at first an oracular aura, though they were actually engaged in a pursuit we might more readily call science.

  They wanted to find out what made the universe work. In the Greek cities of sixth-century Ionia—the west coast of Asia from Smyrna to Miletus, which had been settled by Athenians—there rose a series of thinkers who inquired into the nature of things. Having no Book of Genesis to consult and only the sketchiest of myths about cosmic origins (in which they placed no confidence), they assumed that the world—or kosmos (their word, meaning “elegant order”)—was, in some profound sense, eternal: it had always been there, so far as they could determine, and always would be. (“World without end,” the phrase that concludes many old-fashioned Christian prayers is not a Judeo-Christian concept but a Greek one.) What faced them every day, however, was not the eternal but the mutable—all the multiplicity, diversity, motion, and change they perceived in individual beings that go from nonexistence to birth and life and, finally, to death, decay, and nonexistence. Likewise, the earth beneath their feet and even the sky above their heads presented them with panoramas of constant change. It is not possible, they reasoned, to make sense of what is mutable, what is becoming, what passes so fleetingly into existence and then is gone forever. But because there is also in our experience a quality of permanence—individuals die but humanity remains, the crops return each year, the orchards bloom once more, the zodiac comes full circle—we do not live in an arbitrary universe but a patterned one. If this is so, there must be an underlying … thing that never changes, never has changed, and never will change, the uncreated material out of which all the mutable things spring.

  Thales of Miletus said this “thing”—naturally, they had trouble inventing terminology, words for elements yet to be discovered and defined—was water, a good guess, since almost everything seems to have some water in it. His Milesian successor Anaximander, the first Greek to write in prose (and, for quite some time, the only one not to avail himself of the ringing authority that meter can convey), thought this a little crude and proposed that the universal … um … substance was something unnameable, indeterminate, without specific qualities. His fellow Milesian Anaximenes decided the “substance” must be air.

  Heraclitus of Ephesus, “the weeping philosopher” as he was afterwards remembered, said they had all got it wrong because their question presumed an answer: there is no ultimate “substance”; at the heart of the universe is fire, the ultimate impermanence, always in flux. “Panta rhei,” spoke Heraclitus oracularly. “All things flow.” What you see is what you get. “You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.” But because of this, “the road up and the road down is one and the same”—another gnomic way of stating that all we have is change, change that is ultimately unintelligible because there is no changeless “ultimate” to be grasped.

  A little later, Parmenides of Elea (on the southwest coast of Italy), claiming Heraclitus had got it exactly backward, asserted that of course the universe had to be stable and permanent—otherwise it would make no sense at all—and that the constant changes we experience are only accidents, that is, appearances. Our faulty senses misperceive the true nature of things because we have no direct access to ultimate and unchangeable reality. For Heraclitus, change was the only true reality; f
or Parmenides, it was immutable permanence. Parmenides’s long-lasting teacher, the Ionian Xenophanes of Colophon, who lived to be about a hundred and ten, though he made no contribution to these philosophical dialogues about substance and accidents, attacked belief in a multiplicity of gods, as well as Homer’s presentation of the gods as having human faults and passions. God was one, said Xenophanes, eternal, effecting things by mind alone and bearing no resemblance whatsoever to flip-flopping mankind. On another front entirely, his observations of seashells in the mountains and fossil fish in the quarries of Syracuse convinced Xenophanes that the earth had once been covered in water and would be so again—since, as the Greeks assumed, reality was like a great wheel and all things return. What has been will be again.

  A group of fifth-century philosophers, headed by Empedocles of Acragas in Sicily, returned to the pursuit of the eternal substance and proposed that there were actually four basic elements out of which everything is composed in varying proportions. These elements are earth, air, fire, and water—a system of categories that science, medicine, and psychology would continue to rely on right into the early modern period. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, another Ionian, refining Empedocles’s solution, proposed that everything is composed of different kinds of “seeds” and that the beings we perceive as separate and distinct from one another are simply different kinds of composites, all made up in differing proportions of these same seeds. “Everything has a share in everything,” proclaimed Anaxagoras. In order to explain how this seemingly random mixture of seeds was apportioned into the patterned universe we behold, he reasoned that there must be a nous (mind), a principle powerful enough to direct the patterning. But unlike Xenophanes, Anaxagoras did not bother to personalize nous or call it God. Like Xenophanes, Anaxagoras was also a close observer of natural phenomena—in his case of the stars and planets—and came to realize that the celestial bodies rotated and that the moon received its light from the sun, which gave firm foundation to a theory of eclipses that weakened one of the premises of polytheism (in which each planet, star, and satellite was taken to be the manifestation of a different god).

  Leucippus and his student Democritus, another long-lived philosopher, took up the idea of cosmic seeds and pushed it further. What is at the heart of the universe is indeed single and unchanging: a-toma (uncuttables), indivisible particles too small to be seen. These “atoms,” differentiated from each other only by shape and size, are combined in different arrangements and densities to form the variety of compounds in the universe, which we misperceive as different beings. Our world or kosmos, they also speculated, is not unique but one of many, all of which came to be by accident and then developed by necessity. We do not need to posit the existence of gods to explain the workings of the world. Even human consciousness, thought Democritus, is an entirely physical process, as perishable as the body. He urged that men should aim at cheerfulness and wrote a treatise on the subject, Peri euthymiēs (On Cheerfulness). Cheerfulness is to be achieved by avoiding violence and disturbances of all kinds and by understanding that life is not full of impenetrable mystery, just full of atoms. He was remembered as “the laughing philosopher.”

  Generations before the great blossoming of Athenian philosophy under Socrates and his student Plato, these Presocratics were already sketching out the program that all Greek philosophy would subsequently follow. It was built on three assumptions: the phenomena we experience immediately possess no ultimate importance; there must be an ultimate, eternal, and (despite Heraclitus) unchanging reality; it is the task of the philosopher to … well … attain that reality and then direct others to the correct path. This was the strictly philosophical strand of their enterprise, which also lent the philosopher the mantle of a religious sage.

  But there was also the scientific strand, which they pursued without telescopes, microscopes, or lab experiments. Such paraphernalia would never have occurred to the Ionian philosophers and their successors. Though some of them did find it useful to make simple observations of the visible world, they all believed they could think their way to the truth by way of what Albert Einstein would call das Gedankenexperiment, the thought experiment—that is, just sitting there and thinking about things. Einstein, indeed, would approach the tasks of science with a methodology strikingly similar to that of the laboratory-less Greeks. “The whole of science,” he would declare in Physics and Reality, “is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.”

  There are even more startling parallels between Einstein and many of the Presocratics. Like his ancient colleagues, Einstein believed in a patterned universe that made sense. “I shall never believe,” he once remarked, “that God plays dice with the world.” Even the way Einstein talked about the universe has a Presocratic ring to it: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.… To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in the most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of the devoutly religious men.” “Something deeply hidden,” he left in a handwritten note, “had to be behind things.”

  Like many of the Presocratics, whose theories questioned and weakened conventional Greek religion, Einstein’s sense of mystery had little in common with the orthodox beliefs and practices of the surrounding society. But his confidence that the world made sense—even if its sense eludes us (“The Lord God is subtle, but malicious he is not”)—put him at odds with his younger colleague Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg’s famous “uncertainty principle”—that all our observations are unreliable because we cannot “observe nature in itself but [only] nature exposed to our method of questioning”—bears more than a little resemblance to Heraclitus’s insistence on the ultimate unintelligibility of reality.

  Despite these parallels, much of what the Presocratics had to say is likely to strike contemporary readers as distant from our concerns. With effort we may be able to see why they assumed that ultimate reality, in order to be intelligible, must be One and that multiplicity implies unintelligibility—this is not so far removed, after all, from Einstein’s futile attempts to uncover a “grand unified theory” that would explain the universe—but our profoundest anxieties and obsessions tend to run in very different channels. So it is important to bracket the various answers of these groundbreaking philosophers and to recall that the underlying question for all of them—“What is the nature of reality?”—remains to this day a fundamental question that each of us must attempt to answer in our lives. When we recall this—and acknowledge how little progress we have made in formulating a satisfactory answer—we gain a measure of sympathy for them and the single-minded spunk with which they approached their daunting task. Because they had no guidelines to follow, they poked their noses into everything in the hopes of finding an adequate answer; and in the process they helped to invent the disciplines of philosophy, theology, the physical sciences, medicine, psychology, political science, and ethics.

  Thales, for instance, is credited not only with being the first philosopher but with bringing back from a trip to North Africa the essentials of Egyptian land measurement; then, by considering this practical craft more deeply than the Egyptians had and abstracting the principles implicit in it, Thales invented geō-metria, geometry (literally land measurement, but actually a branch of abstract mathematics). He is also credited with predicting the exact time and place for an eclipse of the sun in the year 585 B.C. This story must have been embellished subsequently since it is scarcely possible that a sixth-century Greek had the means of predicting an eclipse at a precise geographical latitude. But Thales’s ability to make some such prediction was afterwards remembered as bolstering his contention that the general workings of the kosmos are predictable and that therefore a principle of immutability lies at the heart of the universe. Beyond philoso
phy, mathematics, and astronomy, Thales certainly touched on theology. If there is a single eternal substance, reasoned Thales, it must be—of its very nature—divine, so that, concluded he, “all things are full of gods.”

  In company with Solon, Thales headed the list of the Seven Sages of antiquity, whose crucial sayings were inscribed on the facade of Apollo’s temple at the great oracular1 sanctuary of Delphi. “Gnōthi sauton,” went one saying: “Know thyself.” “Mēden agan,” went the other: “Nothing in excess.” The first, which has echoed down the ages, is certainly a step in the direction of psychology, but it is also meant as humbling spiritual advice: know how low your human hamartia places you in contrast to the powers of heaven. The second is a similar reminder to the ever-striving Greeks that excess—political, social, sexual—is the constant temptation and that Solonian balance is what we must strive for. It is certainly political advice, but medical, psychological, and ethical, too. The third and last inscription is the strangest of all, the single letter “E.” According to the prolific Plutarch (writing in the late first and early second centuries of our era), this was meant as the second person singular, present tense, of the verb to be, meaning “Thou art”—a gnostic assertion attributed to the philosopher Pythagoras.

  Pythagoras was a thinker of a very different stripe from all the others, more guru than philosopher. Admired for his long, lustrous hair and masculine beauty, he wrote nothing down, was reputed to possess magical powers, and was rumored to have—please lower your voice and whisper this one—a golden thigh. Born probably at Samos early in the sixth century, he immigrated to Croton in Southern Italy, where, attracting a multitude of followers, he formed a community of men and women who lived apart from other human beings according to his rule. He taught, among many other things, a doctrine of metempsychōsis (transmigration of souls, or reincarnation). He claimed to remember his own previous incarnations: as a son of the god Mercury, then as a Trojan hero, then as a prophet, and, more recently, as a fisherman. Another doctrine was the immortality of the human soul, which Pythagoras imagined to be an immortal and unchanging divinity fallen from heaven and imprisoned in the corruption of the fleshly body as in a tomb. (“Sōma sēma” [Body-tomb] was an aphorism of the Pythagoreans, who detected profound significance in similarities of sounds.) The choices for good or ill that a soul makes in one life determine what kind of body it will find itself inhabiting in its next incarnation. “The most momentous thing in life,” taught the sententious guru, “is the art of winning the soul to good or to evil”—just what Pythagoras was confident he could do for you.