by E R Dodds
Astrology is the most familiar example.49 It has been said that it "fell upon the Hellenistic mind as a new disease falls upon some remote island people."50 But the comparison does not quite fit the facts, so far as they are known. Invented in Babylonia, it spread to Egypt, where Herodotus appears to have met with it.5I In the fourth century, Eudoxus reported its existence in Babylonia, along with the achievements of Babylonian astronomy; but he viewed it with scepticism,52 and there is no evidence that it was taken up, although in the Phaedrus myth Plato amused himself by playing his own variation on an astrological theme.53 About 280 b.c. more detailed information was made available to Greek readers in the writings of the Babylonian priest Berossus, without (it would seem) causing any great excitement. The real vogue of astrology seems to start in the second century b.c., when a number of popular manuals—especially one composed in the name of an imaginary Pharaoh, the Revelations of Nechepso and Petosiris54—began to circulate widely, and practising astrologers appeared as far afield as Rome.55 Why did it occur then and not sooner? The idea was by then no novelty, and the intellectual ground for its reception had long been prepared in the astral theology which was taught alike by Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics, though Epicurus warned the world of its dangers.56 One may guess that its spread was favoured by political conditions: in the troubled half-century that preceded the Roman conquest of Greece it was particularly important to know what was going to happen. One may guess also that the Babylonian Greek who at this time occupied the Chair of Zeno57 encouraged a sort of "trahison des clercs" (the Stoa had already used its influence to kill the heliocentric hypothesis of Aristarchus which, if accepted, would have upset the foundations both of astrology and of Stoic religion).58 But behind such immediate causes we may perhaps suspect something deeper and less conscious: for a century or more the individual had been face to face with his own intellectual freedom, and now he turned tail and bolted from the horrid prospect—better the rigid determinism of the astrological Fate than that terrifying burden of daily responsibility. Rational men like Panaetius and Cicero tried to check the retreat by argument, as Plotinus was to do later,59 but without perceptible effect; certain motives are beyond the reach of argument.
Besides astrology, the second century b.c. saw the development of another irrational doctrine which deeply influenced the thought of later antiquity and the whole Middle Age—the theory of occult properties or forces immanent in certain animals, plants, and precious stones. Though its beginnings are probably much older, this was first systematically set forth by one Bolus of Mendes, called "the Democritean," who appears to have written about 200 b.c.60 His system was closely linked with magical medicine and with alchemy; it was also soon combined with astrology, to which it formed a convenient supplement. The awkward thing about the stars had always been their inaccessibility, alike to prayer and to magic.61 But if each planet had its representative in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, linked to it by an occult "sympathy," as was now asserted, one could get at them magically by manipulating these earthly counterparts.62 Resting as they did on the primitive conception of the world as a magical unity, Bolus' ideas were fatally attractive to the Stoics, who already conceived the cosmos as an organism whose parts had community of experience From the first century b.c. onwards Bolus begins to be quoted as a scientific authority comparable in status with Aristotle and Theophrastus,64 and his doctrines become incorporated in the generally accepted world picture.
Many students of the subject have seen in the first century b.c. the decisive period of Weltwende, the period when the tide of rationalism, which for the past hundred years had flowed ever more sluggishly, has finally expended its force and begins to retreat. There is no doubt that all the philosophical schools save the Epicurean took a new direction at this time. The old religious dualism of mind and matter, God and Nature, the soul and the appetites, which rationalist thought had striven to overcome, reasserts itself in fresh forms and with a fresh vigour. In the new unorthodox Stoicism of Posidonius this dualism appears as a tension of opposites within the unified cosmos and unified human nature of the old Stoa.65 About the same time an internal revolution in the Academy puts an end to the purely critical phase in the development of Platonism, makes it once more a speculative philosophy, and sets it on the road that will lead eventually to Plotinus.66 Equally significant is the revival, after two centuries of apparent abeyance, of Pythagoreanism, not as a formal teaching school, but as a cult and as a way of life.67 It relied frankly on authority, not on logic: Pythagoras was presented as an inspired Sage, the Greek counterpart of Zoroaster or Ostanes, and numerous apocrypha were fathered on him or on his immediate disciples. What was taught in his name was the old belief in a detachable magic self, in the world as a place of darkness and penance, and in the necessity of catharsis; but this was now combined with ideas derived from astral religion (which had in fact certain links with old Pythagoreanism),68 from Plato (who was represented as a Pythagorean), from the occultism of Bolus,69 and from other forms of magical tradition.70
All these developments are perhaps symptoms, rather than causes, of a general change in the intellectual climate of the Mediterranean world—something whose nearest historical analogue may be the romantic reaction against rationalist "natural theology" which set in at the beginning of the nineteenth century and is still a powerful influence to-day.71 The adoration of the visible cosmos, and the sense of unity with it which had found expression in early Stoicism, began to be replaced in many minds72 by a feeling that the physical world— at any rate the part of it below the moon—is under the sway of evil powers, and that what the soul needs is not unity with it but escape from it. The thoughts of men were increasingly preoccupied with techniques of individual salvation, some relying on holy books allegedly discovered in Eastern temples or dictated by the voice of God to some inspired prophet,73 others seeking a personal revelation by oracle, dream, or waking vision;74 others again looking for security in ritual, whether by initiation in one or more of the now numerous "mysteria" or by employing the services of a private magician.75 There was a growing demand for occultism, which is essentially an attempt to capture the Kingdom of Heaven by material means —it has been well described as "the vulgar form of transcendentalism."76 And philosophy followed a parallel path on a higher level. Most of the schools had long since ceased to value the truth for its own sake,77 but in the Imperial Age they abandon, with certain exceptions,78 any pretence of disinterested curiosity and present themselves frankly as dealers in salvation. It is not only that the philosopher conceives his lecture-room as a dispensary for sick souls;79 in principle, that was nothing new. But the philosopher is not merely a psychotherapist; he is also, as Marcus Aurelius put it, "a kind of priest and minister of the gods,"80 and his teachings claim to have religious rather than scientific worth. "The aim of Platonism," says a Christian observer in the second century a.d., "is to see God face to face."81 And profane knowledge was valued only so far as it contributed to such aims. Seneca, for example, quotes with approval the view that we should not trouble to investigate things that it is neither possible nor useful to know, such as the cause of the tides or the principle of perspective.82 In such sayings we already feel the intellectual climate of the Middle Ages. It is the climate in which Christianity grew up; it made the triumph of the new religion possible, and it left its mark on Christian teaching;83 but it was not created by Christians.
What, then, did create it? One difficulty in the way of attempting any answer at the present time is the lack of a comprehensive and balanced survey of all the relevant facts which might help us to grasp the relationship between the trees and the wood. We have brilliant studies of many individual trees, though not of all; but of the wood we have only impressionistic sketches. When the second volume of Nilsson's Geschichte appears,84 when Nock has published his long-awaited Gifford Lectures on Hellenistic Religion, and when Festugière has completed the important series of studies in the history of religious though
t misleadingly entitled La Revelation d'Hermès Trismégiste,85 the ordinary nonspecialist like myself may be in a better position to make up his mind; meanwhile he had better abstain from snap judgements. I should like, however, to conclude by saying a word about some suggested explanations of the failure of Greek rationalism.
Certain of these merely restate the problem which they claim to solve. It is not helpful to be told that the Greeks had become decadent, or that the Greek mind had succumbed to Oriental influences, unless we are also told why this happened. Both statements may be true in some sense, though I think the best scholars to-day would hesitate to accord to either the unqualified acceptance which was usual in the last century.86 But even if true, such sweeping assertions will not advance matters until the nature and causes of the alleged degeneration are made clear. Nor shall I be content to accept the fact of racial interbreeding as a sufficient explanation until it is established either that cultural attitudes are transmitted in the germ-plasm or that cross-bred strains are necessarily inferior to "pure" ones.87
If we are to attempt more precise answers, we must try to be sure that they really square with the facts and are not dictated solely by our own prejudices. This is not always done. When a well-known British scholar assures me that "there can be little doubt that the over-specialisation of science and the development of popular education in the Hellenistic Age led to the decline of mental activity,"88 I fear he is merely projecting into the past his personal diagnosis of certain contemporary ills. The sort of specialisation we have to-day was quite unknown to Greek science at any period, and some of the greatest names at all periods are those of nonspecialists, as may be seen if you look at a list of the works of Theophrastus or Eratosthenes, Posidonius, Galen, or Ptolemy. And universal education was equally unknown: there is a better case for the view that Hellenistic thought suffered from too little popular education rather than too much.
Again, some favourite sociological explanations have the drawback of not quite fitting the historical facts.89 Thus the loss of political freedom may have helped to discourage intellectual enterprise, but it was hardly the determining factor; for the great age of rationalism, from the late fourth to the late third century, was certainly not an age of political freedom. Nor is it quite easy to put the whole blame on war and economic impoverishment. There is indeed some evidence that such conditions do favour an increased resort to magic and divination90 (very recent examples are the vogue of spiritualism during and after the First World War, of astrology during and after the Second);91 and I am willing to believe that the disturbed conditions of the first century b.c. helped to start the direct retreat from reason, while those of the third century a.d. helped to make it final. But if this were the only force at work, we should expect the two intervening centuries—an exceptionally long period of domestic peace, personal security, and, on the whole, decent government—to show a reversal of this tendency instead of its gradual accentuation.
Other scholars have emphasised the internal breakdown of Greek rationalism. It "wasted away," says Nilsson, "as a fire burns itself out for lack of fuel. While science ended in fruitless logomachies and soulless compilations, the religious will to believe got fresh vitality."92 As Festugière puts it, "on avait trop discuté, on était las des mots. Il ne restait que la technique."93 To a modern ear the description has a familiar and disquieting ring, but there is much ancient evidence to support it. If we go on to ask why fresh fuel was lacking, the answer of both authors is the old one, that Greek science had failed to develop the experimental method.94 And if we ask further why it failed to do so, we are usually told that the Greek habit of mind was deductive—which I do not find very illuminating. Here Marxist analysis has hit on a cleverer answer: experiment failed to develop because there was no serious technology; there was no serious technology because human labour was cheap; human labour was cheap because slaves were abundant.95 Thus by a neat chain of inference the rise of the mediaeval world-view is shown to depend on the institution of slavery. Some of its links, I suspect, may need testing; but this is a task for which I am not qualified. I will, however, venture to make two rather obvious comments. One is that the economic argument explains better the stagnation of mechanics after Archimedes than it does the stagnation of medicine after Galen or of astronomy after Ptolemy. The other is that the paralysis of scientific thought in general may very well account for the boredom and restlessness of the intellectuals, but what it does not so well account for is the new attitude of the masses. The vast majority of those who turned to astrology or magic, the vast majority of the devotees of Mithraism or Christianity, were evidently not the sort of people to whom the stagnation of science was a direct and conscious concern; and I find it hard to be certain that their religious outlook would have been fundamentally different even if some scientist had changed their economic lives by inventing the steam engine.
If future historians are to reach a more complete explanation of what happened, I think that, without ignoring either the intellectual or the economic factor, they will have to take account of another sort of motive, less conscious and less tidily rational. I have already suggested that behind the acceptance of astral determinism there lay, among other things, the fear of freedom —the unconscious flight from the heavy burden of individual choice which an open society lays upon its members. If such a motive is accepted as a vera causa (and there is pretty strong evidence that it is a vera causa to-day),96 we may suspect its operation in a good many places. We may suspect it in the hardening of philosophical speculation into quasi-religious dogma which provided the individual with an unchanging rule of life; in the dread of inconvenient research expressed even by a Cleanthes or an Epicurus; later, and on a more popular level, in the demand for a prophet or a scripture; and more generally, in the pathetic reverence for the written word characteristic of late Roman and mediaeval times—a readiness, as Nock puts it, "to accept statements because they were in books, or even because they were said to be in books."97
When a people has travelled as far towards the open society as the Greeks had by the third century B.C., such a retreat does not happen quickly or uniformly. Nor is it painless for the individual. For the refusal of responsibility in any sphere there is always a price to be paid, usually in the form of neurosis. And we may find collateral evidence that the fear of freedom is not a mere phrase in the increase of irrational anxieties and the striking manifestations of neurotic guilt-feeling observable in the later98 stages of the retreat. These things were not new in the religious experience of the Greeks: we encountered them in studying the Archaic Age. But the centuries of rationalism had weakened their social influence and thus, indirectly, their power over the individual. Now they show themselves in new forms and with a new intensity. I cannot here go into the evidence; but we can get some measure of the change by comparing the "Superstitious Man" of Theophrastus, who is hardly more than an old-fashioned observer of traditional taboos, with Plutarch's idea of a superstitious man as one who "sits in a public place clad in sackcloth or filthy rags, or wallows naked in the mire, proclaiming what he calls his sins."99 Plutarch's picture of religious neurosis can be amplified from a good many other sources: striking individual documents are Lucian's portrait of Peregrinus, who turned from his sins first to Christianity, then to pagan philosophy, and after a spectacular suicide became a miracle-working pagan saint;100 and the self-portrait of another interesting neurotic, Aelius Aristides.101 Again, the presence of a diffused anxiety among the masses shows itself clearly, not only in the reviving dread of postmortem punishments102 but in the more immediate terrors revealed by extant prayers and amulets.103 Pagan and Christian alike prayed in the later Imperial Age for protection against invisible perils—against the evil eye and daemonic possession, against "the deceiving demon" or "the headless dog."104 One amulet promises protection "against every malice of a frightening dream or of beings in the air"; a second, "against enemies, accusers, robbers, terrors, and apparitions in dreams"; a third— a Chris
tian one—against "unclean spirits" hiding under your bed or in the rafters or even in the rubbish-pit.105 The Return of the Irrational was, as may be seen from these few examples, pretty complete.
There I must leave the problem. But I will not end this book without making a further confession. I have purposely been sparing in the use of modern parallels, for I know that such parallels mislead quite as often as they illuminate.106 But as a man cannot escape from his own shadow, so no generation can pass judgement on the problems of history without reference, conscious or unconscious, to its own problems. And I will not pretend to hide from the reader that in writing these chapters, and especially this last one, I have had our own situation constantly in mind. We too have witnessed the slow disintegration of an inherited conglomerate, starting among the educated class but now affecting the masses almost everywhere, yet still very far from complete. We too have experienced a great age of rationalism, marked by scientific advances beyond anything that earlier times had thought possible, and confronting mankind with the prospect of a society more open than any it has ever known. And in the last forty years we have also experienced something else—the unmistakable symptoms of a recoil from that prospect. It would appear that, in the words used recently by Andre Malraux, "Western civilisation has begun to doubt its own credentials."107