Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

by Thomas Cahill

  For Plato, ultimate reality is the World of the Forms, the dwelling place of the One—the Good, the True, the Beautiful, the Just. Plato never makes quite clear whether these essences are simply qualities of the One or separate entities (or, most likely, occupy some middle ground). Rather, he reasons, if there are examples of good men in the world (and there are), this can only be because they have a share in Goodness itself, which must therefore exist somewhere beyond all mortal instances of goodness. So it goes with all the other abstractions—as we saw, for instance, in Diotima’s explanation of how beautiful boys participate in some aspect of Beauty itself, as well as in Socrates’s hope of encountering after his death the Justice that exists beyond all our faulty attempts to establish just procedures in this world. For that matter, all the things we know in this world are but feeble examples of their ultimate Forms, which exist beyond all physical instances. Thus, in the World of the Forms, there must be the Form of Tableness and Chairness, the exemplars for all the tables and chairs we find in our world. It is to this World of the Forms, the ultimate reality beyond the top of Diotima’s ladder, that Plato points in Raphael’s circular fresco.

  Pointing downward, Aristotle says that no such world exists and that even broad-browed Plato has never glimpsed such a “reality,” except in fantasy. The World of the Forms is the result of a mistake in logic. Forms do not exist apart from the beings they inform. Every table does indeed have a form, that is, a principle of organization by which the carpenter constructs a wooden platform supported by four legs or by three legs or by whatever he has in mind. This form, which exists in the carpenter’s mind, is the formal cause of the table—but it can have no existence except in the carpenter’s mind and at length in his work. To speak otherwise—to say that there is an absolute Tableness floating somewhere that gives form to all particular tables—is “to speak abstractly and idly,” said Aristotle. Plato was an idealist, that is, someone who believes that ideas constitute a higher reality, separate from material things. Aristotle was a materialist—a qualified materialist, however, since he believed with Plato that the rational part of a human being, the psyche, is immortal.

  But more than being a philosopher—it must be confessed, of lesser creativity and inherent interest than his master—Aristotle was a categorizer, in fact the greatest categorizer who ever lived. It was he who divided different forms of knowledge from one another—especially, philosophy from the physical sciences—and gave us the academic categories we still use today. He is responsible for the filing cabinet of the Western world—all those -ologies, -ses, and -ics—every term from analysis to biology (which science he invented outright), from metaphysics (the term is his alone) to meteorology, from politics (that is, the theory and practice of the polis) to zoology.

  He was especially drawn to the study of logic—he was, indeed, its formal inventor—and he laid out all the basic rules for rational thinking and enumerated all the fallacies by which we may fall into logical error. He divided causes into four kinds: the efficient cause (which produces the effect; say, the carpenter), the material cause (the “matter” to be worked; say, the wood), the formal cause (the essence or “form” introduced by the efficient cause; say, the idea in the carpenter’s mind), and the final cause (the purpose for which the thing exists; say, to serve food). God, thought Aristotle, was the ultimate final cause, though his god, the Unmoved Mover, was quite unlike ours, a being with no interest in the universe that depended on him. Aristotle invented the syllogism and pointed out the difference between a priori and a posteriori reasoning.6

  In the words of the great British classicist Paul Harvey, “Aristotelian logic more than any other single influence formed the European mind.” Many of Aristotle’s observations—especially the scientific ones about, for instance, the movements of celestial bodies and about procreation as the sole purpose of human sexuality—have not weathered the test of time. (Galileo’s trouble with the Catholic hierarchy was caused by his unraveling the Aristotelian cosmology to which the hierarchs had wedded themselves. Everyone’s trouble with the Catholic hierarchy in our day is caused by its continued adherence to Aristotelian observations on human sexuality that everyone else knows are inadequate.) But the principal problem in reading Aristotle today is that, unlike the far more eloquent Plato, he is so very dull.

  One could make a good case that Aristotle’s real intellectual father—not of his tiresome prose but of the universality of his interests—was not so much Plato as Herodotus of Halicarnassus. Born early in the fifth century B.C. in an Ionian-influenced city on the southwest coast of Asia, Herodotus, in common with the Presocratics, was a figure of insatiable curiosity. He wrote a nine-book account of the Persian Wars—the Greek term for the long struggle between the feisty little Greek city-states and the endlessly powerful empire that lay to their east, the supposedly unbeatable Persians, who occupied most of the known world. This epic struggle, which began on the plain of Marathon and encompassed the tragic defeat of the Spartan Legion at Thermopylae,7 ended eleven years later in 479 B.C. with decisive victory for the Greek forces and solidified their consciousness of themselves as a nation, a nation superior even to the most powerful empire of all time. Herodotus called his accounts historiai (investigations), a word that soon took on the connotation it retains to this day. Herodotus indeed was called by subsequent generations “the father of history.” But his nine books range far and wide, Book 2, for instance, being devoted almost solely to a description of exotic Egypt, which the Persians had invaded. Within his historical narrative Herodotus pursued matters scientific, archaeological, anthropological, ethnographic; and in this way—in his astonishing diversity of interests—he was the predecessor of Aristotle.

  Thucydides, the masterful Athenian historian of the generation after Herodotus, took Herodotus’s techniques—his endless strings of gossipy inquiries—and raised them to a new level of seriousness. His subject was the Peloponnesian War, the war between Athens and Sparta. Seafaring Athens, perfectly positioned to maintain ties throughout the Aegean and into the Black Sea, over to the Mediterranean, into the Adriatic, and as far as the Tyrrhenian Sea, had turned out to be the principal beneficiary of the Persian defeat, coming to control the alliance of diverse city-states that had coalesced to save Greece. But as Athens gained more and more power, the sheer threat of its seemingly global influence made war with threatened, landlocked Sparta inevitable; after many skirmishes and attempts at peace, war was joined decisively in 431 and lasted nearly thirty years. Thucydides in his high seriousness wished his work to become a “possession for all time,” not a clever bauble “written for display, to make an immediate impression.” In his tightly compressed prose, he eschewed altogether the impressionistic effects of the storyteller; he saw himself, rather, as a scientist or physician who searches below surface phenomena to determine exact underlying causes. He distinguished sharply between the immediate pretexts for the war—quarrels about Athens’s alliances with lesser cities—and the principal cause, which Thucydides saw clearly as Sparta’s fear of Athens’s never-ending expansion. Men go to war, he concluded, out of “honor, fear, and interest”—a conclusion that has never been improved on. Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides had no truck with oracles and omens; gods are entirely absent from his narrative.

  His determination to look reality in the face was unswerving, even to the point of showing how war—this war and all wars—causes the degeneration of society:

  Practically the whole of the Hellenic world was convulsed, with rival parties in every state—democratic leaders trying to bring in the Athenians, and oligarchs trying to bring in the Spartans.… To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a
question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect.… As a result … there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The plain way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow.

  Thucydides, always looking for the skull beneath the skin, employs abstractions—aggression, courage, moderation, fanatical enthusiasm—as if they were actors in his drama. Though he attempts complete impartiality (and largely succeeds), his admiration for Pericles, Athens’s embattled, larger-than-life leader, shines through, as does his love for his ancestral city.

  In 404 B.C., Athens lost the war, from which it would never entirely recover. For a short time, it even lost its democracy and had to bow to Spartan tyranny. But its brilliant son Thucydides, following the path blazed by Herodotus, had succeeded in creating an entirely new mode of knowledge, independent of philosophical inquiry. No longer would knowledge be the sole province of scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers, those who observed natural phemomena or tried to discover the essences of things or contemplated a world beyond the world. Close attention to human action—society and politics, war and peace—could yield another kind of knowledge. And this knowledge, the result of meditation on the past and close consideration of human affairs, could yield new principles, quite unlike anything established by philosophy or the sciences, to guide humanity in the future.

  1 The priestess of Apollo at Delphi was famed for her oracles. Recently, archaeologists have uncovered, under the sanctuary where she made her ambiguous pronouncements, a chasm that was known in the ancient world and from which intoxicating fumes escaped. There is every likelihood that the priestess was high.

  2 Most translations of Plato make him sound like your old philosophy prof, the one whose sere notes flaked like the last leaves of autumn as he drew them delicately from his battered portfolio. But in Greek, Plato still sounds fresh, piquant, and provocative. He is even a sly mimic, able to reproduce the characteristic speech of each of his players—the earnest hesitations of Polymarchus, for instance, the bull-in-a-china-shop huffings of Thrasymachus, the foxy subtleties of Socrates. Robin Waterfield is, so far as I know, the first English-language translator to give each of Plato’s players a characteristic voice with a contemporary ring, while at the same time capturing many of the ambiguities and allusions of Plato’s argument (if, necessarily, abandoning an attempt to reproduce the knotted eloquence of Plato’s Greek). I use his translations throughout this section.

  3 Plato published about twenty-five dialogues of widely differing lengths over a period of fifty years, as well as the Apology, the speech given by Socrates in his own defense. Though the authenticity of a few of these dialogues is disputed, there is no reason to doubt that we have them all. There are also extant thirteen letters, though whether these should be attributed to Plato or to his circle is still hotly debated. The vagaries of history by which we came to possess some but not all the books of the Greco-Roman library are the subject of How the Irish Saved Civilization, the introductory volume in this series. Despite the depredations of time and barbarians, however, all (or nearly all) the works of certain authors—especially Plato, Virgil, and Cicero—were saved because their texts came to be thought of as quasi-sacred scriptures, penned by specimen homines naturaliter Christiani. The complete works of Homer, who certainly didn’t fit this category, were saved because he was the inventor of literary Greek (and innumerable passages in subsequent Greek texts would be almost impenetrable without reference to the Iliad and the Odyssey). The saving or loss of works by most other authors, however, must be chalked up to such circumstances as which collections of books were torched by barbarians. Surely no copyist in any age would have chosen to save, say, the mounds of Pindar’s athletic odes that we still possess in preference to the few sad scraps of Sappho that are her only legacy.

  4 These verses are my condensed version of Agathon’s peroration. The actual text in Plato goes on and on. Agathon’s cheap use of rhyme is intended by Plato as evidence of airheadedness.

  5 In the common Greek view, the passions that move us are instances of divine possession, even if, like anger or eros, they can lead to destruction. Other Greek words are also translated into English as “love”: philia, which implies filial respect (as in philosophia), and agapē, which indicates an affectionate kindness (as between siblings) but lacks erotic coloring. Agapē was the word Jews chose to translate the Hebrew ahava (in earliest times, pronounced “ahaba”) into Greek (as in the commandment “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”); and Christians would employ it with similar force. When God is called “love” in the New Testament, the word used is not eros but agapē. Ahava and agapē are so close phonetically as to lead one to suspect that the Greeks may have borrowed the word from the Jews and then altered it slightly to suit their sense of sound.

  6 Many of Greece’s historical events have entered our language as symbolic milestones. Before the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., the Athenian runner Phidippides was sent to ask Sparta’s help. He ran the first “marathon” by covering the distance between Athens and Sparta, about 125 miles, in one day and then by running back to Athens. According to legend, he then ran on (26 miles farther) to join the battle at Marathon, then ran back to Athens to announce the Greek victory and then dropped dead. The valor of the Greek soldiers who fought at Marathon—the Marathonomachoi, as they were called—so inspired Greece that Aeschylus, for one, asked that his epitaph not speak of his plays but state that his only glory was that he fought at Marathon.

  A decade later, a small force of Spartans perished at Thermopylae, a supposedly indefensible pass between steep cliffs and sea, but their deaths proved the decisive turning point of the war, preventing the Persian army from descending on Greece—which would have spelled the end of everything that came later. It would, in a real sense, have spelled the end of Western history. The touching epitaph for the Spartans, who called themselves Lacedaemonians, was written by the lyric poet Simonides and carved in stone on the walls of the pass:

  Tell them in Lacedaemon, passer-by,

  That here obedient to their words we lie.

  John Ruskin thought these the noblest words ever uttered by man.

  7 In a priori (“from what went before”) reasoning, we deduce an effect from a cause or a result from a principle—as we always do, for instance, in mathematical proofs. In a posteriori (“from what came after”) reasoning, we argue from the effect to the cause—which is how court cases are argued, inferring, for instance, the interior disposition of malice from the act of murder.

  VI

  THE ARTIST

  HOW TO SEE

  Daedalus was Greece’s fabled artist, an Athenian architect and sculptor who may have lived in the late Bronze Age. He was hired by King Minos of Crete to design a tortuous maze, called the Labyrinth, in which to imprison the Minotaur, a powerful monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man. The Minotaur, insatiable for human blood, had to be regularly fed boys and girls, who were left in the Labyrinth, from whose confounding complex of corridors there could be no escape. In what seems the essential childhood nightmare, each child was hunted down and eaten by the Minotaur. At last, one boy, Theseus, was able to slay the monster and escape the Labyrinth, retracing his steps by means of a thread given him by Minos’s daughter, the princess Ariadne.

  Theseus went on to serve as king of Athens, where his graciousness and courage became the stuff of legend. He gave asylum to the blind outcast Oedipus; and even after Theseus’s death, his spirit was thought to animate the Athenians in their wars. As late as the fifth century B.C. he was believed to be the ghostly giant seen fighting with the Athenians
at the battle of Marathon. The Cretan Labyrinth appears repeatedly in Western art and literature—in expressions as diverse as the labyrinth laid out on the medieval floor of Chartres cathedral and Stephen King’s The Shining, in which a boy outwits a mad bull of a father by escaping from a modern labyrinth. Those who have seen the film version will have no trouble imagining Jack Nicholson as the Minotaur.

  Daedalus in his old age was forced by Minos to remain on Crete, but he devised a novel means of escape: a pair of wings with which to fly away.

  He lays out feathers—all in order, first

  the shorter, then the longer (you’d have said

  they’d grown along a slope); just like the kind

  of pipes that country people used to fashion,

  where from unequal reed to reed the rise

  is gradual. And these he held together

  with twine around the center; at the base

  he fastened them with wax; and thus arranged—

  he’d bent them slightly—they could imitate

  the wings of true birds.

  This is from Ovid’s retelling of the story of Daedalus, whose name means “cunning fabricator,” a man able “to work on unknown arts, to alter nature”—that is, to be an artist of unfathomable power. Daedalus made a smaller pair of wings for his beloved son Icarus and warned him to “fly a middle course,” avoiding both the sea’s spray and the sun’s scorching heat.

  The old man worked and warned; his cheeks grew damp