The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

by Charles Freeman

  There are still historians who quote this eulogy uncritically as if it represented some kind of historical truth. In fact, it seems to have been a rhetorical statement that conflicts with other assessments Plutarch himself made of Alexander. One can find little evidence of “reasoned persuasion” in Alexander’s unprovoked attack on the Persian empire or in the obsessional way he tracked down Darius. The unrestrained massacres in the Far East hardly speak of men united “in a loving cup,” and, as has been seen, the attempt to marry his rough commanders to the elegant ladies of the Persian court was a disaster. Homer may have been Alexander’s model, but an appreciation of the pity of war, so movingly expressed in the Iliad (as, for example, when Priam comes to seek the body of his son Hector from Achilles), seems to have been beyond Alexander’s grasp. His commitment to Greek culture was shallow, and in fact his whole life involved an abuse of the values of reasoned argument, planning and respect for the natural order which, as we have seen, were central to Greek intellectual life. He took a historian, Callisthenes, from the city of Olynthos, with him, but after Callisthenes had bravely articulated opposition to proskynesis on the grounds that it was impious to offer Alexander divine honours and the practice of proskynesis was an insult to the Greek sense of liberty, he was executed for “conspiracy.” The Greek world was outraged. It was not only that Alexander bypassed rational thinking; his elevation of himself to monarch and to godhead brought irrationality and absolutism to the core of government. The extinction of Athenian democracy in 322 at the hands of Macedonian troops after his death comes as no surprise in this context. Although the momentum of Greek intellectual life proved considerable, Alexander’s model of absolutism represented a threat to it.7

  That the Greek intellectual tradition survived at this stage was, paradoxically, partly thanks to Alexander’s successors. An important feature of the period was the use of patronage by monarchs as a means of boosting their own status and of maintaining the support of their Greek subjects. It could be shown in flamboyant display and opulent festivals, and by the building of great palaces and new temples both in their capitals and in other favoured cities. The Attalids made Pergamum into one of the great showcase cities of the eastern Mediterranean, and one of them, Attalus II, also honoured Athens with a resplendent new stoa (roofed colonnade). The Ptolemies, able to draw on the considerable resources of the Nile valley, made Alexandria the grandest city of the Mediterranean. It was not only the palaces (each ruler building his own when he succeeded to the throne) and the massive temple complex in honour of Serapis that impressed; it was the Ptolemies’ investment in preserving and sustaining Greek culture. They can be credited with the famous library, the greatest ever known in the ancient world, with perhaps some 500,000 rolls of papyrus and with the museum (literally “shrine of the Muses”) as a centre of academic debate.

  Alexandria’s most important cultural role in the Hellenistic period was as a centre for science and mathematics, while Athens maintained its preeminence in philosophy. The continuing breadth of the Greek achievement in the Hellenistic centuries provides evidence that intellectual and artistic achievement was not stifled by the demise of the independent city state and that the barriers between what are now seen as distinct academic disciplines were fluid. While Herophilus, working in Alexandria in the first half of the third century, was able to isolate the nerves and show that they ran back to the brain, a major breakthrough in medical history, his fellow Alexandrian Apollonius Rhodios was writing, for the first time, it seems, of the agonies of adolescent love in his epic Argonautika, incorporating Herophilus’ findings into his text. As the young Medea sets eyes on Jason:

  . . . her virgin heart now beat a

  Tattoo on her ribs, her eyes shed tears of pity, constant

  Anguish ran smouldering through her flesh, hotwired her finespun

  Nerve ends, needles in the skull’s base, the deep spinal

  Cord where pain pierces sharpest when the unresting

  Passions inject their agony into the senses...8

  When Eratosthenes attempted to measure the circumference of the earth in the late third century, he was combining the use of geography, astronomy and geometry. Archimedes (c. 287–212 B.C.) laid the foundations of integral calculus, applied mathematics and hydrostatics as well as formulated the means for the calculation of areas and volumes (such as cones) and the computing of very large numbers. His work is characterized by an extraordinary imagination, through which he conceptualized the problems in hand, allied to a technical ingenuity that allowed him to work them out practically. The two came together in his alleged discovery of a way of determining the proportions of gold and silver in a crown while meditating in his bath. His cry of “Eureka” as he rushed through the streets perhaps best symbolizes this age of excited intellectual discovery.9

  Older cities such as Athens were honoured for their cultural heritage, and Athens remained the most important centre for philosophy throughout the period. Two major new movements, Epicureanism and Stoicism, were born there. 10 What they had in common was to offer a philosophy of life that was open to everyone, not only to an intellectual elite (Plato) or the male citizen (Aristotle)—but here the similarity ended. The Epicureans preached what seemed a heresy to many Greeks, that the individual should withdraw from society and cultivate peace of mind through the avoidance of stress. With the gods no more than models of good behaviour without the power to harm human beings, it was up to the individual to find his own equilibrium. The goal was to maximize pleasure, by which Epicurus, its founder, did not mean any frenzied search for sensual enjoyment but rather the cultivation of more refined pursuits, predominant among them friendship (extended to include the sharing of women among devotees). If involvement in political life proved stressful, then it should be abandoned. Stoicism was altogether more demanding intellectually and more influential. The name Stoicism comes from the Athenian stoa, where its founder, Zeno of Citium (in Cyprus), began teaching in about 311. It was his successor, Chrysippus, who was responsible for developing Stoicism into a coherent and profound philosophy. Chrysippus’ teachings can be reconstructed only with difficulty from later commentaries on them, and Stoicism was never a closed system— internal debate was acceptable and often conducted with great intellectual sophistication. In so far as one can generalize, the Stoics saw all matter as having a fundamental unity, as if it was a single web with each part linked to the rest, but this web was never at rest—it was in a continuous cycle of change. Each cycle would come to an end in fire but then restart itself with new matter being born out of the fire. Matter was not only that which could be seen and touched; it was suffused by an invisible rational principle that could not exist independently of it. This principle is what drove the cosmos through its never-ending cycles, and the ubiquitous term logos was used to describe it. Here logos was seen as an entity in itself, rooted in nature as it were; this was a transition of some importance in the history of the concept.

  The problem that taxed the Stoics was how to fit human beings into their cosmos. If Stoicism was taken to its logical conclusion, human beings were simply part of the cosmos and could not act freely outside it or influence its inexorable unfolding. Yet human beings did appear to be able to act freely, make choices, and think through issues rationally for themselves. (The Stoics stressed that it was this ability to think rationally that marked them out from the rest of the natural world.) The Stoics were challenged to settle this contradiction by Carneades, head of Plato’s Academy, whose energy was now focused on making sceptical assessments of rival philosophies. The Stoic response was sophisticated and finally led to the acceptance of the view that human beings could and should act freely, even if within a narrow margin, to improve their health, accumulate money for basic needs and even to act morally within this world as it existed. A rational response by an individual to external events could be accommodated within “the web” without breaking it. Stoic morality consisted of controlling one’s passions and irrational impulse
s so that the individual lived a self-sufficient life that was aligned with the unfolding of the cosmos and accepting of its inexorable progress (hence the conventional meaning of the word “stoical” to refer to the impassive acceptance of the fate the world brings one’s way). This was the path to virtue, and when the Stoics talked of freedom, they meant freedom from passion or irrational responses to events. In contrast to the Epicureans, the Stoics did not rule out taking an active part in public life, and so Stoics are found in Roman government and doggedly doing their duty as soldiers.

  None of these intellectual developments would have been possible if the Hellenistic monarchs had not succeeded (where Alexander had so conspicuously failed) in maintaining stable administrations and finding a secure way of passing on their rule to successors. They drew heavily on old allegiances and existing administrative structures; the Ptolemies effectively used traditional images of the pharaohs to sustain themselves among the Egyptian population, even building temples in the local style. (Among those whose ruins survive to this day are the temple to Horus at Edfu and that to Isis on the Nile island of Philae.) Like the more effective pharaohs they worked hard to maximize their revenue from taxation through the centuries-old Egyptian bureaucracy. The Seleucids appropriated and developed the royal estates left by the Persian kings and adopted the structure of satrapies, through which each region of the empire was given considerable autonomy so long as tax revenue was maintained. 11 Succession was secured by stressing the divine nature of the dynasty and by ensuring that the son of the king had effective power before his father died. Seleucus I, for instance, the founder of the dynasty, made his son Antiochus a provincial governor before his death, the proclamation being made before his assembled army, and he strengthened Antiochus’ position by passing on one of his wives to him. Antiochus I ruled for thirty-six years, Seleucus I for twenty-four, and Seleucus II and Antiochus II another thirty-five years between them. The contrast with Alexander’s brief rule need hardly be stressed.

  Traditionally the Hellenistic age has been seen as showy and vulgar, even decadent, after the glories of classical Greece. This was after all an age where wealth was concentrated in fewer hands and deliberately flaunted as a means of creating and maintaining status. Its literary achievements cannot be compared with those of Aeschylus and Sophocles. But the Hellenistic achievement in science and mathematics was remarkable, and this was also an age of growing, if still very limited, technological achievement. Pergamum, high on its rock, survived only because water from a spring twenty-five metres higher on a neighbouring hill was piped down and then up again into the city through some 240,000 linked lead pipes. Considering the poor foundations on which they built, the dynasties sustained themselves well. A descendant of the first Ptolemy, Cleopatra, was still in place in Egypt nearly 300 years after her ancestor’s seizure of power. Many of the political barriers that had isolated the Greek cities from each other had been dissolved, so that after stability had been restored by Alexander’s successors, the Greeks could now see themselves as citizens of a wider world. Greeks from over 200 different cities, some of them as far north as the Black Sea, are recorded as having made their home in Egypt during these years, and the old dialects of Greece were dissolved into a shared koine, which was to be the standard Greek of the Gospels and the letters of Paul. They could never have spread if the narrow allegiances to a single city state had continued.

  5

  ABSORBING THE EAST, ROME AND THE INTEGRATION OF GREEK CULTURE

  Alexander had expanded the Greek world far beyond its original limits. No one could have imagined that his empire in its turn would be conquered by what was, in the fourth century, still a small city occupying the centre of the Latin plain in central Italy. From its beginnings in the eighth century Rome’s survival had depended on the successful defence of its exposed territory from neighbouring peoples of the plains, and from the mountain peoples who could raid downwards and then retreat to their impregnable strongholds. 1 As the city successfully consolidated its territory on the plain, war became integral to the system of Roman government. From 509, when the city became a republic, the prime role of its leading magistrates, the two consuls, was military command, and, although all magistrates were now elected, there was no path to political power without successful military service.

  The secret of Rome’s resilience lay in a psychology of aggression married to policies that were dedicated to increasing its fighting manpower. The emerging state was always prepared to give citizenship or, failing that, a favoured status (known as Latin rights) to loyal communities. Their manpower became Rome’s own, and defeated cities were usually required to become allies so that their men too would be available for Rome’s future wars. The Greek cities had never proved able to share citizenship so easily, one reason why none had created a sustainable empire. The Roman armies were also imbued with a gritty determination honed in the tough wars of the fourth and third centuries against the Samnites, the most formidable of the mountain peoples. This meant that when outsiders such as the brilliant Carthaginian general Hannibal invaded Italy across the Alps in 218, Rome hung on and, despite humiliating defeats in the field, wore him down. Rome also learned, through the copying and improvement of captured Carthaginian ships, how to create a navy and use it effectively. By 200 B.C. Italy and the former Carthaginian empire itself, which had included Sicily, north Africa and Spain, had been conquered and made up a Roman empire in the western Mediterranean.

  By this time the Romans were already intruding into the eastern Mediterranean. Despite its unique constitution and culture, Rome had never been isolated from the Greek world. Wealthy Greek cities dotted the coastline of southern Italy and Sicily, and there was early trade between Greeks and the city. Rome itself had adopted a foundation myth that linked it, through Aeneas (a refugee from Troy), with the east. Rome’s first history was written by a Roman, Fabius Pictor, in Greek— as if it were the Greeks, rather than the neighbouring Latins, who had to be impressed by the city’s growing status. As early as 433 B.C., when Athens was at the height of its power, Apollo, the Greek god of reason and deliverer from disease, had been adopted by the city of Rome when plague broke out there. His presence underlined the fact that, like the Greeks, the Romans were at ease with anthropomorphic gods. Indeed, Roman and Greek gods were to prove easily assimilated with each other: Jupiter absorbed Zeus, the father of the gods; Venus, Aphrodite, the goddess of love; and Ceres, Demeter, the goddess of corn. By the time of the poet Ovid in the late first century B.C., the mythologies of the two cultures had become inextricably mingled.2

  So when in the third century B.C. Rome began to conquer the Greek cities of the peninsula and bring back vast quantities of statuary and other plunder, there was already some appreciation of what was being appropriated. It is hard to know to what extent this early plunder was used as a symbol of Roman victory and to what extent as art appreciated in its own right, but certainly by the middle of the second century the more cultured commanders were using some discrimination in choosing what they took home. After a victory over the Macedonians in 168, Aemilius Paullus brought back the royal library of Macedonia, while, on the final crushing of Macedonia in 148, the victor, Quintus Caecilius Metellus, selected a group of sculptures by Lysippus of Alexander and his companions. They were set up in Rome under a portico designed specially for them by a Greek architect. However, much of the Greek intellectual tradition remained alien to Rome. Romans proved impatient with philosophy and relatively indifferent to Greek science and mathematics. When the Skeptic Carneades appeared in Rome in 155 as one of a group of philosophers and argued on one day that justice was an indispensable part of government and the next day that it was not, traditional Romans (though not the younger generation) were shocked, and the group was sent back to Athens. The Romans considered the Greek tradition of competing in games naked undignified, and while Greek-style basilicas and temples were acceptable in Rome, gymnasia (literally “places of nakedness”) appear only later, and then
as additions to that quintessential Roman invention, the monumental public bath.3

  If there was one Greek skill that was adopted by the Romans with enthusiasm, it was rhetoric. All the magistrates in Rome were elected by the citizen body, and while military prowess was important, so was the ability to speak well before the mass of citizenry, which would flock into the city for the elections. By the first century a career could be built through public speaking alone, not only at election time but also as an advocate at the public trials that had become a feature of political life. Marcus Tullius Cicero was supreme in the art, the first man to achieve the post of quaestor, the lowest of the senior magistracies, without having served the normal ten years of military service. He had spent two years in Greece undertaking an intensive study of the art of rhetoric, and he made his name in 70 B.C. with a devastating opening speech as prosecutor in the trial of Gaius Verres, a former governor of Sicily notorious for having used his position to ransack the province. Verres, who had himself employed a leading advocate to defend him, went into exile. Only seven years later, in 63 B.C., Cicero was elected consul.4

  By the time of Cicero, however, the Roman republic was proving to be unstable. A century before, the authority of the Senate, the ruling council of Rome on which senior magistrates served for life after their term of office, had been unquestioned. The Senate had successfully maintained the stability of the state at a time of rapid imperial expansion and had vigorously enforced the convention that no man, however successful he may have been in war, should be able to use his success to achieve lasting influence in political affairs. But over time its authority had waned as it proved itself unable to deal creatively with tensions over landownership in Italy or to maintain control of its commanders while they were overseas. While earlier consuls had served for a single year of office, fought those battles that needed to be fought and then retired to the Senate, now the demands of a growing empire meant that many were retained overseas year after year on campaign. One commander stayed nine years in Spain, another served eight continuous years in the east. It had long been accepted that a commander was free to make what settlements he could while abroad (while also helping himself and his men to plunder) and then have them ratified by the Senate when he returned. However, long periods of service overseas enabled an ambitious commander to accumulate considerable wealth, an army whose loyalty to him had been cemented by their own share of plunder, and the habit of acting like a dictator. So long as a commander was successfully bringing glory to the empire and remained absent from Rome itself, such a role could be tolerated. But the return to the capital of such a figure could pose an obvious threat to the Senate if he were to disregard the convention that a successful commander should retire quietly. The increasing volatility of the large citizen body of Rome and widespread unrest in the Italian countryside only served to increase the potential threat to the stability of the republic.