The West has never ceased to admire the extraordinary vitality and profundity of the Greek mind, even when subsequent intellectual developments have placed in question one aspect or another of Hellenic thought. The Greeks were supremely articulate in the service of their evolving vision, and in cases beyond counting, what may have long been considered a peculiar error or confusion in Greek thought has later, in the light of new evidence, been discovered to be an astonishingly accurate intuition. Perhaps the Greeks, coming at the dawn of our civilization, perceived the world with a certain innate clarity that authentically reflected the universal order they were seeking. Certainly the West continues to turn again and again to its ancient progenitors, as to a fount of immortal insight. As Finley remarked, “Whether the Greeks saw things most freshly because they came first or it is pure good luck that, having come first, they answered life with unmatched alertness, they in either case keep ageless sparkle, as of the world lit by a kind of six-o’clock-in-the-morning light and the dew imperishably on the grass. The Greek mind remains in ours, because this untarnished freshness leaves it, like youth itself, our first exemplar.”10
It is as if, for the Greeks, heaven and earth had not yet been fully rent asunder. But instead of our now attempting to sort out what is permanently valuable and what problematic in the Hellenic vision, let us observe history engage that task as the Western culture that Greece initiated moved forward—building upon the Greek legacy, transforming it, criticizing it, amplifying it, disregarding it, reintegrating it, negating it … yet never, in the end, truly leaving it.
II
The Transformation of the Classical Era
Just when the Greek intellectual achievement had reached its climax during the fourth century B.C., Alexander the Great swept down from Macedonia through Greece and onward to Persia, conquering lands and peoples from Egypt to India and creating an empire that was to encompass most of the known world. The very qualities that had served Greece’s brilliant evolution—restless individualism, proud humanism, critical rationalism—now helped precipitate its downfall, for the divisiveness, arrogance, and opportunism that shadowed the Greeks’ nobler qualities left them myopic and fatally unprepared for the Macedonian challenge. Yet the Hellenic achievement was not fated for extinction. Tutored by Aristotle as a youth in his father’s court and inspired by the Homeric epics and Athenian ideals, Alexander carried with him and disseminated the Greek culture and language throughout the vast world he conquered. Thus Greece fell just as it culminated, yet spread triumphantly just as it submitted.
As planned by Alexander, the large cosmopolitan cities of the empire—above all Alexandria, which he founded in Egypt—became vital centers of cultural learning, in whose libraries and academies the classical Greek inheritance survived and flourished. Alexander seems also to have been inspired by a vision of mankind’s universal kinship beyond all political divisions, and he attempted to bring about such a unity, a massive cultural fusion, by means of his immense military ambition. After his early death, however, Alexander’s empire did not hold together. Following a long period of dynastic struggles and shifting sovereignties, Rome emerged as the center of a new empire, with both its focal point and its outlying regions now further west.
Despite the Roman conquest, Greek high culture still presided over the educated classes of the greater Mediterranean world and was rapidly absorbed by the Romans. The most significant scientists and philosophers continued to work within the Greek intellectual framework. The Romans modeled their Latin works on the Greek masterpieces and carried on the development and expansion of a sophisticated civilization, but their more pragmatic genius lay in the realm of law, political administration, and military strategy. In philosophy, literature, science, art, and education, Greece remained the most compelling cultural force in the ancient world. As the Roman poet Horace noted, the Greeks, captive, took the victors captive.
Crosscurrents of the Hellenistic Matrix
The Decline and Preservation of the Greek Mind
Despite Greece’s continuing cultural power after Alexander’s conquest and throughout the period of Roman hegemony, the original cast of the classical Greek mind did not hold under the impact of so many new forces. With the Hellenistic world extending all the way from the western Mediterranean to central Asia, the reflective individual of the later classical era was exposed to an enormous multiplicity of viewpoints. The initial expansion of Greek culture eastward was in time complemented by a strong influx of Oriental (from east of the Mediterranean) religious and political currents to the West. In important respects Greek culture was as enriched by this new influx as were the non-Greek cultures by the Hellenic expansion. Yet in other respects the polis-centered Greek mind lost something of its earlier confident lucidity and bold originality. Just as the critical individualism of classical Greece had produced its great art and thought yet also contributed to the disintegration of its social order, rendering it vulnerable to Macedonian subjugation, so too did the centrifugal vitality of Greek culture lead not only to its successful propagation but also to its eventual dilution and fragmenting as the classical polis was opened to the contrasting influences of a much larger, heterogeneous cultural environment. The unprecedented cosmopolitanism of the new civilization, the breakup of the old order of small city-states, and the succeeding centuries of constant political and social upheaval were profoundly disorienting. Both individual freedom in and responsibility to the polis community were undermined by the massiveness and confusion of the new political world. Personal destinies appeared to be determined more by large impersonal forces than by individual volition. The old clarity no longer seemed available, and many felt they had lost their bearings.
Philosophy reflected and attempted to address these changes. While Plato and Aristotle continued to be studied and followed, the two dominant philosophical schools originating in the Hellenistic era, the Stoic and Epicurean, were of a different character. Though owing much to the earlier Greeks, these new schools were primarily ethical and exhortatory, noble philosophical defenses with which to endure troubled and uncertain times. This shift in the nature and function of philosophy was partly a consequence of a new intellectual specialization in the wake of Aristotle’s expansion and classification of the sciences, a specialization that gradually separated science from philosophy, narrowing the latter to moral positions backed by relevant metaphysical or physical doctrines. Yet beyond this insulation of philosophy from broader intellectual concerns, the characteristic philosophical impulse of the Hellenistic schools arose less from the passion to comprehend the world in its mystery and magnitude, and more from the need to give human beings some stable belief system and inner peace in the face of a hostile and chaotic environment. The result of this new impulse was the emergence of philosophies more limited in scope and more prone to fatalism than their classical predecessors. Disengagement from the world or from one’s own passions was the principal choice, and in either case philosophy took on a more dogmatic tone.
Yet Stoicism, the most broadly representative of the Hellenistic philosophies, possessed a loftiness of vision and moral temper that would long leave its mark on the Western spirit. Founded in Athens in the early third century B.C. by Zeno of Citium, who had studied at the Platonic Academy, and later systematized by Chrysippus, Stoicism would be especially influential in the Roman world of Cicero and Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. In the Stoic view, all reality was pervaded by an intelligent divine force, the Logos or universal reason which ordered all things. Man could achieve genuine happiness only by attuning his life and character to this all-powerful providential wisdom. To be free was to live in conformity with God’s will, and what mattered finally in life was the virtuous state of the soul, not the circumstances of the outer life. The Stoic sage, marked by inner serenity, sternness in self-discipline, and conscientious performance of duty, was indifferent to the vagaries of external events. The existence of the world-governing reason had another important consequence for t
he Stoic. Because all human beings shared in the divine Logos, all were members of a universal human community, a brotherhood of mankind that constituted the World City, or Cosmopolis, and each individual was called upon to participate actively in the affairs of the world and thereby fulfill his duty to this great community.
At heart, Stoicism was a development of central elements of Socratic and Heraclitean philosophy, transposed to the less circumscribed and more ecumenical Hellenistic period. By contrast, its contemporary rival Epicureanism distinguished itself from the Stoic devotion to moral virtue and the world-governing Logos, as well as from traditional religious notions, by asserting the primary value of human pleasure—defined as freedom from pain and fear. Mankind must overcome its superstitious belief in the fickle, anthropomorphic gods of popular tradition, Epicurus taught, for it is above all this belief, and the anxiety about divine retribution after death, that caused human misery. One need not fear the gods, for they do not concern themselves with the human world. Nor need one fear death, for it is merely the extinction of consciousness and not a prelude to a painful punishment. Happiness in this life can best be achieved through withdrawal from the world of affairs to cultivate a quiet existence of simple pleasure in the company of friends. The physical cosmology from which the Epicurean system drew was Democritus’s atomism, with material particles forming the substance of the world, including the mortal human soul. Such a cosmology and contemporary human experience were not unrelated, for citizens of the Hellenistic era, deprived of the defined, centered, organically ordered world of the polis—the general character of which was not unlike the Aristotelian cosmos—may well have sensed a certain parallel between their own fate and that of Democritean atoms, moving randomly at the behest of impersonal forces in the centerless void of a disorientingly expanded universe.
A more radical reflection of the era’s intellectual shift was the systematic Skepticism represented by thinkers such as Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus, who held that no truths could be known to be certain and that the only appropriate philosophical stance was the complete suspension of judgment. Developing powerful arguments to refute all dogmatic claims to philosophical knowledge, Skeptics pointed out that any conflict between two apparent truths could be settled only by appeal to some criterion; yet that criterion could itself be justified only by appeal to some further criterion, which would thereby require an infinite regress of such criteria, none foundational. “Nothing is certain, not even that,” said Arcesilaus, a member of the Platonic Academy (which, significantly, also embraced Skepticism at this time, renewing a central aspect of its Socratic origins). It is true that in Hellenistic philosophy, logic was often skillfully employed to demonstrate the futility of much of the human enterprise, particularly the pursuit of metaphysical truth. Yet Skeptics such as Sextus argued that people who believed they could know reality were subject to constant frustration and unhappiness in life. If they would genuinely suspend judgment, recognizing that their beliefs about reality were not necessarily valid, they would achieve peace of mind. Neither affirming nor denying the possibility of knowledge, they should remain in a state of open-minded equanimity, waiting to see what might emerge.
While important and attractive in their different ways, these several philosophies did not entirely satisfy the Hellenistic spirit. Divine reality was seen as either insensitive and irrelevant to human affairs (Epicureanism), implacably deterministic if providential (Stoicism), or altogether beyond human cognition (Skepticism). Science too became more thoroughly rationalistic, shedding the virtually religious impetus and goal of divine comprehension formerly visible in Pythagoras, Plato, and even Aristotle. Hence the culture’s emotional and religious demands were met most directly by the various mystery religions—Greek, Egyptian, Oriental—which offered salvation from the imprisonment of the world, and which flourished throughout the empire with ever-increasing popularity. But these religions, with their festivals and secret rites devoted to their different deities, failed to compel the allegiance of many in the educated classes. For them, the old myths were dying, good at best as allegorical instruments for reasonable discourse. And yet the austere rationalism of the dominant philosophies left a certain spiritual hunger. That uniquely creative unity of intellect and feeling of earlier times had now bifurcated. In the midst of an extraordinarily sophisticated cultural milieu—busy, urbanized, refined, cosmopolitan—the reflective individual was often without compelling motivation. The classical synthesis of pre-Alexandrian Greece had come apart, its potency spent in the process of diffusion.
Yet the Hellenistic era was an exceptionally rich age with several remarkable and, from the perspective of the modern West, indispensable cultural accomplishments to its credit. Not least was its recognition of the earlier Greek achievement and its consequent preservation of the classics from Homer to Aristotle. The texts were now collected, systematically examined, and painstakingly edited to prepare a definitive canon of masterworks. Humanistic scholarship was founded. New disciplines of textual and literary criticism were developed, interpretive analyses and commentaries produced, and the great works set forth as revered cultural ideals for the enrichment of future generations. In Alexandria, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, was similarly compiled, edited, and canonized with the same meticulous scholarship as that accorded to the Homeric epics and Platonic dialogues.
Education itself became systematized and widespread. Large and elaborately organized academic institutions were established for the pursuit of scholarly research in the major cities—Alexandria with its Museum, Pergamum with its Library, and Athens with its still-thriving philosophical academies. The royal rulers of the major Hellenistic empire-states subsidized the public institutions of learning, employing scientists and scholars as salaried officials of the state. Public educational systems existed in almost every Hellenistic city, gymnasia and theaters were plentiful, and advanced instruction in Greek philosophy, literature, and rhetoric became widely available. The Greek paideia flourished. Thus the earlier Hellenic achievement was scholastically consolidated, geographically extended, and vitally sustained for the remainder of the classical era.
Astronomy
As for original contributions, it was in the field of natural science that the Hellenistic period especially excelled. The geometer Euclid, the geometer-astronomer Apollonius, the mathematical physicist Archimedes, the astronomer Hipparchus, the geographer Strabo, the physician Galen, and the geographer-astronomer Ptolemy all produced scientific advances and codifications that would remain paradigmatic for many centuries. The development of mathematical astronomy was particularly consequential. The problem of the planets had found its first solution in Eudoxus’s interconnected homocentric spheres, which both explained retrograde motion and gave approximately accurate predictions. It did not, however, explain the variations of brightness when the planets were retrograde, since the rotating spheres necessarily kept the planets at constant distance from the Earth. It was this theoretical failing that provoked subsequent mathematicians and astronomers to explore alternative geometrical systems.
A few, such as the Pythagoreans, made the radical suggestion that the Earth moved. Heraclides, a member of Plato’s Academy, proposed that the diurnal movement of the heavens was actually caused by the Earth’s rotating on its axis, and that Mercury and Venus, which always appeared close to the Sun, did so because they revolved about the Sun rather than the Earth. A century later, Aristarchus went so far as to hypothesize that the Earth and all the planets revolved around the Sun, and that the Sun, like the outer sphere of stars, remained stationary.1
These various models were generally rejected, however, for sound mathematical and physical reasons. No annual stellar parallax was ever observed, and such a shift should have occurred if the Earth revolved around the Sun and thus traveled such vast distances relative to the stars (unless, as Aristarchus suggested, the outer sphere of stars was inconceivably large). Moreover, a moving Earth would entirely
disrupt the comprehensive coherence of Aristotelian cosmology. Aristotle had definitively treated the physics of falling bodies, demonstrating that heavy objects move toward the Earth because it is the universe’s fixed center. If the Earth moved, then this well-reasoned and virtually self-evident account of falling bodies would be undermined with no theory of comparable power to replace it. Perhaps even more fundamentally, a planetary Earth would contravene the ancient and also self-evident terrestrial-celestial dichotomy based on the transcendent majesty of the heavens. Finally, theoretical and religious issues aside, common sense dictated that a moving Earth would force objects and persons on it to be knocked about, clouds and birds would be left behind, and so forth. The unambiguous evidence of the senses argued for a stable Earth.
On the basis of such considerations, the majority of Hellenistic astronomers decided in favor of an Earth-centered universe, and continued working with various geometrical models for explaining the planetary positions. The cumulative result of these efforts was codified in the second century A.D. by Ptolemy, whose synthesis established the working paradigm for astronomers from that time through the Renaissance. The essential challenge presented to Ptolemy remained as before: how to account for the numerous discrepancies between, on the one hand, the basic structure of the Aristotelian cosmology, which demanded that the planets move uniformly in perfect circles around a central immobile Earth, and, on the other hand, astronomers’ actual observations of the planets, which appeared to move with varying speeds, directions, and degrees of brightness. Building on the recent advances of Greek geometry, on the Babylonians’ continued observations and linear computational techniques, and on the work of the Greek astronomers Apollonius and Hipparchus, Ptolemy outlined the following scheme: The outermost revolving sphere of the fixed stars daily carried the entire heavens westward about the Earth. Within that sphere, however, each planet, including the Sun and Moon, revolved eastward at varying slower rates, each in its own large circle called a deferent. For the more complex movements of the planets other than the Sun and Moon, another smaller circle, called an epicycle, was introduced, which rotated uniformly around a point that continued to rotate on the deferent. The epicycle solved what Eudoxus’s spheres could not, since the rotating epicycle automatically brought the planet closer to the Earth whenever it was retrograde, and thus made the planet appear brighter. By adjusting the different rates of revolution for each deferent and epicycle, astronomers could approximate the variable movements of each planet. The simplicity of the deferent-epicycle scheme, plus its explanation of variable brightness, made it the acknowledged victor in the quest for a viable astronomical model.
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