IV. THE IONIAN DODECAPOLIS

1. Miletus and the Birth of Greek Philosophy

Running northwest of Caria for some ninety miles was the strip of mountainous coastland, twenty to thirty miles wide, anciently known as Ionia. Here, said Herodotus, “the air and climate are the most beautiful in the whole world.”¹⁹ Its cities lay for the most part at the mouths of rivers, or at the ends of roads, that carried the goods of the hinterland down to the Mediterranean for shipment everywhere.

Miletus, southernmost of the Ionian Twelve, was in the sixth century the richest city of the Greek world. The site had been inhabited by Carians from Minoan days; and when, about 1000 B.C., the Ionians came there from Attica, they found the old Aegean culture, though in a decadent form, waiting to serve as the advanced starting point of their civilization. They brought no women with them to Miletus, but merely killed the native males and married the widows;²⁰ the fusion of cultures began with a fusion of blood. Like most of the Ionian cities, Miletus submitted at first to kings who led them in war, then to aristocrats who owned the land, then to “tyrants” representing the middle class. Under the dictator Thrasybulus, at the beginning of the sixth century, industry and trade reached their peak, and the growing-wealth of Miletus flowered forth in literature, philosophy, and art. Wool was brought down from the rich pasture lands of the interior, and turned into clothing in the textile mills of the city. Taking a lesson from the Phoenicians and gradually bettering their instruction, Ionian merchants established colonies as trading posts in Egypt, Italy, thePropontis, and the Euxine. Miletus alone had eighty such colonies, sixty of them in the north. From Abydos, Cyzicus, Sinope, Olbia, Trapezus, and Dioscurias, Miletus drew flax, timber, fruit, and metals, and paid for these with the products of her handicrafts. The wealth and luxury of the city became a proverb and a scandal throughout Greece. Milesian merchants, overflowing with profits, lent money to enterprises far and wide, and to the municipality itself. They were the Medici of the Ionian Renaissance.

It was in this stimulating environment that Greece first developed two of its most characteristic gifts to the world—science and philosophy. The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought; superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins. Here in Miletus, as later in Athens, were men from a hundred scattered states; mentally active through competitive commerce, and freed from the bondage of tradition by long absences from their native altars and homes. Milesians themselves traveled to distant cities, and had their eyes opened by the civilizations of Lydia, Babylonia, Phoenicia, and Egypt; in this way, among others, Egyptian geometry and Babylonian astronomy entered the Greek mind. Trade and mathematics, foreign commerce and geography, navigation and astronomy, developed hand in hand. Meanwhile wealth had created leisure; an aristocracy of culture was growing up in which freedom of thought was tolerated because only a small minority could read. No powerful priesthood, no ancient and inspired text limited men’s thinking; even the Homeric poems, which were to become in some sense the Bible of the Greeks, had hardly taken yet a definite form; and in that final form their mythology was to bear the imprint of Ionian skepticism and scandalous merriment. Here for the first time thought became secular, and sought rational and consistent answers to the problems of the world and man.*

Nevertheless the new plant, mutation though it was, had its roots and ancestry. The hoary wisdom of Egyptian priests and Persian Magi, perhaps even of Hindu seers, the sacerdotal science of the Chaldeans, the poetically personified cosmogony of Hesiod, were mingled with the natural realism of Phoenician and Greek merchants to produce Ionian philosophy. Greek religion itself had paved the way by talking of Moira, or Fate, as ruler of both gods and men: here was that idea of law, as superior to incalculable personal decree, which would mark the essential difference between science and mythology, as well as between despotism and democracy. Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law. That the Greeks, so far as our knowledge goes, were the first to achieve this recognition and this freedom in both philosophy and government is the secret of their accomplishment, and of their importance in history.

Since life proceeds by heredity as well as by variation, by stabilizing custom as well as by experimental innovation, it was to be expected that the religious roots of philosophy would form as well as feed it, and there should remain in it, to the very end, a vigorous element of theology. Two currents run side by side in the history of Greek philosophy: one naturalistic, the other mystical. The latter stemmed from Pythagoras, and ran through Parmenides, Heracleitus, Plato, and Cleanthes to Plotinus and St. Paul; the other had its first world figure in Thales, and passed down through Anaximander, Xenophanes, Protagoras, Hippocrates, and Democritus to Epicurus and Lucretius. Now and then some great spirit—Socrates, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius—merged the two currents in an attempt to do justice to the unformulable complexity of life. But even in these men the dominant strain, characteristic of Greek thought, was the love and pursuit of reason.

Thales was born about 640, probably at Miletus, reputedly of Phoenician parentage,²¹ and derived much of his education from Egypt and the Near East; here, as if personified, we see the transit of culture from East to West. He appears to have engaged in business only so far as to provide himself with the ordinary goods of life; everyone knows the story of his successful speculation in oil presses.* For the rest he gave himself to study, with the absorbed devotion suggested by the tale of his falling into a ditch while watching the stars. Despite his solitude, he interested himself in the affairs of his city, knew the dictator Thrasybulus intimately, and advocated the federation of the Ionian states for united defense against Lydia and Persia.²²

To him tradition unanimously ascribed the introduction of mathematical and astronomical science into Greece. Antiquity told how, in Egypt, he calculated the heights of the pyramids by measuring their shadows when a man’s shadow equaled his height. Returning to Ionia, Thales pursued the fascinatingly logical study of geometry as a deductive science, and demonstrated several of the theorems later collected by Euclid.* As these theorems founded Greek geometry, so his studies of astronomy established that science for Western civilization, and disentangled it from its Oriental associations with astrology. He made several minor observations, and startled all Ionia by successfully predicting an eclipse of the sun for May 28, 585 B.C.,²⁵ probably on the basis of Egyptian records and Babylonian calculations. For the rest his theory of the universe was not appreciably superior to the current cosmology of the Egyptians and the Jews. The world, he thought, was a hemisphere resting on an endless expanse of water, and the earth was a flat disk floating on the flat side of the interior of this hemisphere. We are reminded of Goethe’s remark that a man’s vices (or errors) are common to him with his epoch, but his virtues (or insights) are his own.

As some Greek myths made Oceanus the father of all creation,²⁶ so Thales made water the first principle of all things, their original form and their final destiny. Perhaps, says Aristotle, he had come to this opinion from observing “that the nutriment of everything is moist, and that . . . the seeds of everything have a moist nature;. . . and that from which everything is generated is always its first principle.”²⁷ Or perhaps he believed that water was the most primitive or fundamental of the three forms—gas, liquid, solid—into which, theoretically, all substances may be changed. The significance of his thought lay not in reducing all things to water, but in reducing all things to one; here was the first monism in recorded history. Aristotle describes Thales’ view as materialistic; but Thales adds that every particle of the world is alive, that matter and life are inseparable and one, that there is an immortal “soul” in plants and metals as well as in animals and men; the vital power changes form, but never dies.²⁸ Thales was wont to say that there is no essential difference between living and dead. When someone sought to nettle him by asking why, then, he chose life instead of death, he answered, “Because there is no difference.”²⁹

In his old age he received by common consent the title of sophos, or sage; and when Greece came to name its Seven Wise Men it placed Thales first. Being asked what was very difficult, he answered, in a famous apophthegm, “To know thyself.” Asked what was very easy, he answered, “To give advice.” To the question, what is God? he replied, “That which has neither beginning nor end.” Asked how men might live most virtuously and justly, he answered, “If we never do ourselves what we blame in others.”³⁰ He died, says Diogenes Laertius,³¹ “while present as a spectator at a gymnastic contest, being worn out with heat and thirst and weakness, for he was very old.”

Thales, says Strabo,³² was the first of those who wrote on physiologia—i.e., on the science of nature (physis), or on the principle of being and development in things. His work was vigorously advanced by his pupil Anaximander, who, though he lived from 611 to 549 B.C., expounded a philosophy surprisingly like that which Herbert Spencer, trembling before his own originality, published in A.D. 1860. The first principle, says Anaximander, was a vast Indefinite-Infinite (apeiron), a boundless mass possessing no specific qualities, but developing, by its inherent forces, into all the varied realities of the universe.* This animate and eternal but impersonal and unmoral Infinite is the only God in Anaximander’s system; it is the unvarying and everlasting One, as distinguished from the mutable evanescent Many of the world of things. (Here stems the metaphysics of the Eleatic School—that only the eternal One is real.) From this characterless Infinite are born new worlds in endless succession, and to it in endless succession they return as they evolve and die. In the primordial Infinite all opposites are contained—hot and cold, moist and dry, liquid and solid and gas . . . ; in development these potential qualities become actual, and make diverse and definite things; in dissolution these opposed qualities are again resolved into the Infinite. (A source for Heracleitus as well as for Spencer.) In this rise and fall of worlds the various elements struggle with one another, and encroach upon each other as hostile opposites. For this opposition they pay with dissolution; “Things perish into those from which they have been born.”

Anaximander, though he too can be guilty of astronomic bizarferies forgivable in an age without instruments, advanced on Thales by conceiving the earth as a cylinder freely suspended in the center of the universe, and sustained only by being equidistant from all things.³⁴ The sun, moon, and stars, he thought, moved in circles around the earth. To illustrate all this Anaximander, probably on Babylonian models, constructed at Sparta a gnomon, or sundial, on which he showed the movement of the planets, the obliquity of the ecliptic,* and the succession of solstices, equinoxes, and seasons.³⁵ With the collaboration of his fellow Milesian, Hecataeus, he established geography as a science by drawing—apparently upon a tablet of brass—the first known map of the inhabited world.†

In its earliest form, said Anaximander, the earth was in a fluid state; external heat dried some of it into land, and evaporated some of it into clouds; while the variations of heat in the atmosphere so formed caused the motions of the winds. Living organisms arose by gradual stages from the original moisture; land animals were at first fishes, and only with the drying’of the earth did they acquire their present shape. Man too was once a fish; he could not at his earliest appearance have been born as now, for he would have been too helpless to secure his food, and would have been destroyed.³⁶

A slighter figure is Anaximander’s pupil Anaximenes, whose first principle was air. All other elements are produced from air by rarefaction, which gives fire, or by condensation, which forms progressively wind, cloud, water, earth, and stone. As the soul, which is air, holds us together, so the air, or pneuma, of the world is its pervasive spirit, breath, or God.³⁷ Here was an idea that would ride out all the storms of Greek philosophy, and find a haven in Stoicism and Christianity.

This heyday of Miletus produced not only the earliest philosophy, but the earliest prose, and the first historiography, in Greece.‡ Poetry seems natural to a nation’s adolescence, when imagination is greater than knowledge, and a strong faith gives personality to the forces of nature in field, wood, sea, and sky; it is hard for poetry to avoid animism, or for animism to avoid poetry. Prose is the voice of knowledge freeing itself from imagination and faith; it is the language of secular, mundane, “prosaic” affairs; it is the emblem of a nation’s maturity, and the epitaph of its youth. Up to this time (600) nearly all Greek literature had taken a poetic form; education had transmitted in verse the lore and morals of the race; even early philosophers, like Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles, gave their systems a poetic dress. Just as science was at first a form of philosophy, struggling to free itself from the general, the speculative, the unverifiable, so philosophy was at first a form of poetry, striving to free itself from mythology, animism, and metaphor.

It was therefore an event when Pherecydes and Anaximander expounded their doctrines in prose. Other men of the age, whom the Greeks called logographoi—reason writers, prose writers—began to chronicle in the new medium the annals of their states; so Cadmus (550) wrote a chronicle of Miletus, Eugaeon wrote of Samos, Xanthus wrote of Lydia. Towards the end of the century Hecataeus of Miletus advanced both history and geography in epochal works—the Historiai, or Inquiries, and the Ges periodos, or Circuit of the Earth. The latter divided the known planet into two continents, Europe and Asia, and included Egypt in Asia; if (as many doubt) the existing fragments are genuine, it was especially informative about Egypt, and provided a rich field for unacknowledged poaching by Herodotus. The Histories began with a skeptical blast: “I write what I consider to be the truth; for the traditions of the Greeks seem to me many and ridiculous.” Hecataeus accepted Homer as history, and swallowed some tales with his eyes shut; nevertheless he made an honest effort to distinguish fact from myth, to trace real genealogies, and to arrive at a credible history of the Greeks. Greek historiography was old when the “Father of History” was born.

To Hecataeus and the other logographoi who appeared in this age in most of the cities and colonies of Hellas, historia* meant any inquiry into the facts of any matter, and was applied to science and philosophy as well as to historiography in the modern sense. The term had a skeptical connotation in Ionia; it signified that the miracle stories of gods and demigod heroes were to be replaced with secular records of events, and rational interpretations of causes and effects. In Hecataeus the process begins; in Herodotus it advances; in Thucydides it is complete.

The poverty of Greek prose before Herodotus is bound up with the conquest and impoverishment of Miletus in the very generation in which prose literature began. Internal decay followed the custom of history in smoothing the path of the conqueror. The growth of wealth and luxury made epicureanism fashionable, while stoicism and patriotism seemed antiquated and absurd; it became a byword among the Greeks that “once upon a time the Milesians were brave.”³⁸ Competition for the goods of the earth became keener as the old faith lost its power to mitigate class strife by giving scruples to the strong and consolations to the weak. The rich, supporting an oligarchic dictatorship, became a united party against the poor, who wanted a democracy. The poor secured control of the government, expelled the rich, collected the remaining children of the rich on threshing floors, set oxen upon them, and had them trampled to death. The rich returned, recaptured power, coated the leaders of the democracy with pitch, and then burnt them alive.³⁹De nobis fabula narrabitur. When, about 560, Croesus began to subject to Lydian rule the Greek coast of Asia from Cnidus to the Hellespont, Miletus saved its independence by refusing to help her sister states. But in 546 Cyrus conquered Lydia, and without much difficulty absorbed the faction-torn cities of Ionia into the Persian Empire. The great age of Miletus was over. Science and philosophy, in the history of states, reach their height after decadence has set in; wisdom is a harbinger of death.