The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  Well, perhaps we have to accept that. And looking at it from the other end of history, after the attempts at European colonization on Islamic soil, the historian may conclude that no conquering civilization can ever succeed in countries with a very ancient cultural identity. Impenetrable ‘walls’ prevent acculturation taking place. Perhaps the expansion of civilizations is only possible when they encounter primitive cultures.

  It was in order to emphasize this long-term problem that the title of this section referred rather condescendingly to ‘Alexander’s mistake’. If Hellenism, with all the vigour and critical mass it possessed at that moment, had turned towards the west and its comparatively unknown lands, might it not have pre-empted the destiny of Rome?

  Greece is conquered in 146 bc

  Let us move on several centuries. In 148 BC, Macedonia had been reduced to a Roman province. Two years later, following agitation from Corinth and the Achaean trouble-makers yet again, Rome intervened, Corinth was razed to the ground, and Greece too was reduced to the status of a province. Only Sparta, Athens and Delphi had the privileged status of federated cities.

  This subjugation to Rome was simply one link in a long chain. Syracuse was captured by Marcellus in 212; Tarentum was occupied by Fabius Maximus in 209. And the last stages in this chronology were to be the reduction to the status of Roman provinces of Syria in 63 and Egypt in 31.

  By the end of this protracted process, the Greek sphere of influence had been incorporated by Rome into a Mediterranean unit which was for centuries to come to be the basis of Rome’s might and its daily existence. Gradually, sooner or later, the men from Italy established their rule, administering and governing, putting an end to the freedoms and turbulence of the old city-states and the pretensions of former kingdoms. The Mediterranean became a calmer place, lulled into somnolence by the benefits and the dangers of the ‘heavy uniformity of the Pax Romana’. Yet at the same time, Greek immigrants flocked to Rome, as the capital of the world was ‘Hellenized’. The vanquished were taking their revenge.

  III Greek science and thought (eighth to second centuries BC)

  In what follows, special emphasis will be placed on science, the road to the future which the Greeks so brilliantly opened. But science was part of a greater whole: it was contained and surrounded and transcended by Greek thought in a more general sense, and that in its turn was part of a complex ‘set of sets’: what we would today call Greek civilization. In this galaxy, everything was connected.

  But this very coherence is problematic. It is concealed under a great mass of scholarship, and a huge literature, which tackles only one sector at a time. We have many histories of Greek literature (one can still consult with profit that by A. and M. Croiset dating from 1887–93); and there are plenty of histories of philosophy – every generation rewrites this for itself. Histories of Greek art, thanks to today’s improved technology, captivate us with their magnificent illustrations; there are some excellent histories of religion, and even histories of everyday life. But what is lacking in the end is an overall work, a comprehensive synthesis – and perhaps it is impossible even to envisage any such, since we cannot yet grasp what its underlying concept would be.

  Claude Levi-Strauss once joked to me that a few minutes’ conversation with Plato would tell him more about Greek thought than all the books on his shelves. Well, I am not so sure: to find out about it on the spot would mean a hundred interviews. What one would really like to do is spend a year in Miletus in about 600 BC, another in Samos in 550 and so on, jumping across time and space. My own preferences go to the early stages of Greek thought – long before Herodotus, Socrates or Phidias, or even Thales of Miletus. Perhaps this is a matter of taste: the great compositions of classical art are not my favourites. But it is also a question of tactics. The most obscure problem about Greek civilization is how did it all begin?

  Origins and periodization

  To distinguish between the different periods is of course a necessary step, although a somewhat tedious one. The historian always prefers to divide up the difficulty and find security in what Benjamin Farrington (1965) calls ‘a kind of scaffolding’. He distinguishes between three stages in the general development of Greek science: from 600 to 400 BC, when for the first time in human history, ‘a scientific conception of the world and of science was elaborated’; the years from 400 to 320, with Plato and Aristotle, which saw the major flowering of philosophy; and finally the years from 3 20 to 120, under the patronage of the Ptolemies in the great city of Alexandria in Egypt, when the various branches of the sciences set up their ‘state of the art’ compendia: this was the time of the encyclopedia, the summa and the textbook, the time for final reckonings which is so often a signal that something is coming to an end.

  This periodization is debatable of course. The dates chosen (especially the first one: I would myself prefer to take 800 BC rather than 600) could be different. But its value lies in setting up an easily understood dialectic from one period to another, which allows us to detect the overall process, with the very beginning, the ‘Greek spring’ so to speak, being in my view the key moment.

  The centuries from 800 to 400 saw the rise of the cities and the flowering of art, with a succession of styles: from the geometrical to the orientalizing and the classical; it was the time of grand sculpture and architecture, the time when the Doric and Ionian orders were defined, by the sixth century, to be followed by the Corinthian. And it was also the great age of literature. During these four centuries, every kind of writing appeared and flourished, starting with the epic. First came Homer, then Hesiod; lyric verse was scarcely present at first but reached a pinnacle with Pindar (514-438), by which time we have already reached the fifth century with the aristocratic poet of Thebes and the passionate devotee of Delphi. It was only long after Hesiod that the religious festivals in Athens gave birth to tragedy and comedy, during the reign (glorious in spite of everything) of Pisistratus (560-517).

  This order of succession was the regular pattern one finds in many national literatures. In the case of France for instance, our national literature starts more or less with the Song of Roland, and our theatre was born out of mysteries and passion plays.

  But what does this development tell us? It is at this point that, consciously or not, all commentators begin to introduce value judgements about the merits of Greek art and philosophy. Would Nietzsche have caused such a scandal today as he did in 1871 by pronouncing that the decadence of Greece started at least with Euripides and was clear to see with Socrates? He puts the high point at the moment of the birth of tragedy when Apollo and Dionysus were reconciled: ‘the Apollonian notion of beauty’ which is a clear consciousness, a translation of the ‘world as it appears’ into an aesthetic and rational vision, and the Dionysiac spirit of mystic ecstasy and intoxication, with the orgiastic music of the Bacchanalian choruses overcoming clarity and self-consciousness. But this reconciliation only lasted for a while. In the end, ‘the ambiguous god of wine and death yielded the stage to Apollo and the triumph of rationality, to theoretical and practical utilitarianism [in other words science] as well as democracy, which was a contemporary phenomenon’: these were the ‘symptoms of [the] ageing’ of Greek civilization and for Nietzsche they foreshadowed the depressing spectacle of the modern western world.

  The language he used may have aged itself, but not perhaps the idea that Greek thought was most vigorous in its youth. ‘Everything I write’, says Aubrey de Selincourt, ‘tends to reject the very widespread idea that the pinnacle of Hellenic civilization coincided with the “Age of Pericles”. Brilliant though that age may have been, I consider it on the contrary to mark the end of many things which were among the most precious characteristics of that remarkable race’. I am strongly inclined to share this view. Hence my choices of periodization. I would prefer not to extend the golden age far beyond Herodotus, the extraordinary father of history who was also the founding father of geography and anthropology; and to set aside Thucydides, the sci
entific historian of the short term, despite his exceptional talents; I would include in those marvellous springtime years (despite a little problem with the chronology) Hippocrates of Cos (?46o-?377), the father of scientific medicine, and even Protagoras of Abdera, the first of the Sophists (those travelling orators who claimed to teach the art of government and whom Plato so disliked, but in whom we might detect the very first sociologists, marginal though they were); and I would finally draw a line before Plato and Aristotle. I may be burnt as a heretic for saying so, but in my view by the time they came on the scene, everything worthwhile had been accomplished.

  The legacy of the east

  Greece in Asia, where Greek science first began in the sixth century, was closely linked to an Asia Minor which had recovered quickly from the Scythian and Cimmerian invasions, as well as to neo-Hittite Syria, to Palestine, Egypt, which could be reached by sea, and to Assyria, the new and violent but very lively incarnation of ancient Mesopotamia. Thales of Miletus was reputed, rightly or wrongly, to be the son of a Phoenician woman, and to have travelled in Egypt and Mesopotamia where he learned geometry and astronomy.

  These details might not matter if we did not now know for certain that Egypt and Mesopotamia, and before them the varied cultures of the Middle East, already had solid foundations in scientific enquiry. The measuring of fields in Egypt (which had to be done every year after the floods) and the astronomy of the Babylonians, based on a ritual and meticulous observation of the stars and planets, gave rise to substantial progress in both algebra and geometry. We might amuse ourselves by trying to solve the problems which the Egyptians solved, but using other means. What number comes to 19 if you add one seventh to it? answer: 16 + ½ + ⅛ (try it with decimals). Prove that the sides of a hexagon inscribed within a circle are equal to the radius of the circle. A piece of string divided into three parts in the proportions 3, 4 and 5 will form a right-angled triangle. For the value of pi, while they originally adopted 3, which meant identifying the circle with the perimeter of the hexagon, they finally arrived at a pretty close approximation, 3.1604. The Babylonians also resolved problems relating to surface area: given the surface area of 600 units of any size, what is their length and breadth, if their difference, squared and multiplied by 9, is equal to the square of the length? Answer: length 30 by width 2.0. It is doubtful whether one could arrive unaided at the method of reasoning adopted by the Egyptians or the Babylonians. But the detail of these complex calculations is less important than the knowledge and reasoning lying behind them.

  Alongside this early mathematics, there was some pioneering chemistry in Babylon, medicine in Egypt, and astronomy in Mesopotamia, where the sky had been observed for centuries from the ziggurats. The documents amassed there were of great help to Thales and probably enabled him to predict the eclipse of the sun on 28 May 585, fortunately visible from Asia Minor.

  In short, the Greek miracle was founded on a solid basis established long before. But Greek science did not simply develop the work of its predecessors. It had to invent a new cast of thought, a new way of asking questions about the world and interpreting observations, and to claim the right to decide between competing explanations. The Greek miracle – which we might identify with the acceptance of the world of hypotheses – was part of the demystification of the sacred which had occurred within the Greek world view. But as in all cases of intellectual innovation – which often scandalize contemporaries– this did not happen overnight or even in a clear and fully conscious manner.

  The birth of science obviously involved a whole society and its technology. Egyptian society had been built in the age of bronze and great empires. Greek science was born in the age of iron and city-states.

  The Ionian breakthrough

  It was Miletus (rather than Ephesus, although the remarkable philosopher Heraclitus was born in the latter city) that saw the first pioneering form of Greek science. Since the sixth century, the city had had a hundred or so trading posts on the shores of the Black Sea. In Italy it had a powerful colony in Sybaris, which re-exported its industrial merchandise, and it was also present in Egypt in the vital trading centre of Naucratis. So Miletus was an important commercial city, one of the most significant of the Hellenic constellation in the sixth century. Science is always the daughter of leisure, possible only in a society where there are privileged people with free time on their hands, notably in great cities. All the Ionian giants of philosophy – Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes – are examples of this rule.

  Unfortunately we know very little about their work, which is why they are always mentioned in the same breath rather than individually. They were all indeed concerned with attempting to explain the universe, the problem that every civilization encounters from the start. The question has either to be dismissed or answered to the best of one’s ability. Egypt and Babylonia handled the question by appealing to miraculous explanations, the gods always being there to back up their reasoning. Ionian ‘positivism’ got rid of the gods, expelling them from the natural world and relying rather on the elements which were thought of as acting in themselves, being living matter. For Thales, everything derived from a single principle: Water. After all, the Babylonians used to say that Marduk had drawn mud and earth out of the original mighty waters. ‘But Thales ignored Marduk and imagined a universe formed out of water by a natural process’.

  Anaximander’s creation hypothesis is better known: he imagined four elements: Earth, Fire, Water and Vapour (not Air as is sometimes said), which were disposed one on top of the other. Fire, on the outside surrounding the rest, made some of the water evaporate, then the earth split apart and turned into wheels of fire. This view is sometimes described as comparing the creation of the world with a blacksmith’s forge or a potter’s furnace.

  In fact Anaximander had a geometric image of the universe. The elements, however they struggled and whatever forms they assumed, had to be in some kind of equilibrium, an ‘equality of power’. All of them derived ultimately from the infinite indeterminate substance which he called apeiron, a neutral material from which binary oppositions emerged: dark and light, hot and cold, dry and wet, thick and thin, as well as Water, Vapour and Fire. These elements in turn combined to give rise to living creatures, plants, animals, humans, according to a natural order whereby no one element dominated the others in any form of dunasteia or monarchia. A doctor and Pythagorean philosopher, Alcmeon, repeated in the early fifth century the image which by then had become commonplace that ‘health was a balance of powers, isonomia ton dunameon, while sickness resulted on the contrary from the domination of one element over the others’ (J.-P. Vernant).

  In short, this was a view of a cosmos without a hierarchy, where no one element fully obeyed another, a world in which conflicts balanced out, reminding us irresistibly of the social and political structure of the polis. Government was no longer in the hands of gods or kings but in the hands of men who had equal rights. Anaximander’s universe reflected the idealized equilibrium of the city-state. The world view changed because the world had changed and it became possible to project the everyday world on to the cosmos. J.-P. Vernant sums it up as follows: ‘When Aristotle defines man as a political animal, he is pointing to something that differentiates Reason in the Greek sense from that of our time. If in his eyes Homo sapiens was Homo politicus, that was because Reason was itself political in essence.’

  There is little here of course which relates to the ‘empirical reasoning’ of modern science, based on methodical observation from which the laws of nature can be deduced. But Ionian physics, based on theory rather than on experimental truth, was nevertheless the first step towards modern science, for two reasons. In the first place it was looking for a reasonable explanation and was experimenting with the language of mathematics which is itself a form of rationality. If the earth, in Anaximander’s system, was in perfect balance at the centre of the cosmos, and did not need to be supported (by water, as Thales claimed, or by a cushion of air, which was Anaximenes�
�� explanation) that was because it was truly in the centre, and sustained by equal pressure from every quarter.

  Secondly, once the gods had vacated the field as the explanation of the universe, every hypothesis could be entertained: humans had become free to seek and imagine; and from now on they would not cease to do so. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, who apart from his own merits was the man who introduced Milesian thought to Athens (from 460), believed he had confirmed the earthly nature of the stars by studying the huge meteorite which fell at Aigos Potamos in 468 or 467 and which was still being studied in the age of Pausanias.

  At the heart of all this, one would like to know more about the obvious role experimental technology must have played in the ‘new’ city of Miletus, whether the furnace or potter’s kiln, the trading ship, or the money-changer’s shop! One can at least marvel at the first overall map of the Mediterranean drawn up for mariners by Hecataeus of Miletus who had sailed in 500 as far as the Pillars of Hercules. Allthe good fairies stood around the cradle of Greek science. Their gifts were: foreign influence, mathematics, technological experiment, a certain absence of religious constraints and a taste for generalization.

  Heraclitus of Ephesus

  From now on all the Greek thinkers would try to come up with an explanation of the origins of the world, and their solutions followed on and contradicted one another, from one city to the next. Interpreting them is often very difficult. Who would dare say he has understood Heraclitus of Ephesus, poet, prophet, philosopher, and well-deserving of his nickname ‘the Obscure’? Socrates is supposed to have said that to venture into this deliberately complex thought sytem, one ought to be a ‘diver of Delos’ and have the same agility! What is more, only a few more or less authentic fragments have come down to us, often strangely beautiful in ‘their oracular brevity, [not unlike] Pascal’s Pensées’. One could wonder for ever, when reading these fragments or the commentaries on them by ancient philosophers and historians of thought, what it was that Heraclitus really thought, or even what direction his thought was taking. Was he a physicist, a mystic, an initiate of the Orphic and Dionysiac mysteries, a logician or a natural philosopher? Every interpretation has been put on his thought.