Chapter 11

Loving Wisdom: The Rise and Reach of Philosophy

In This Chapter

Questioning the workings of the universe

Crediting the influence of early philosophers

Going Greek with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

Philosophy often gets dismissed as mind games — idle speculations cooked up by eccentrics with overactive imaginations. If that’s all philosophy were, you wouldn’t have to take it into account when considering history. But philosophy keeps bumping into history by getting into religion, politics, and government and influencing how people conduct their lives. Therefore, any overview of world history includes looking at philosophy and where it comes from.

Traditionally, philosophy is thought to come from the ancient Greeks, although they probably picked up on earlier cultures’ philosophical traditions. Wherever they got their inspiration, the Greeks — a culture of thinkers and talkers — made the most of it.

Asking the Big Questions

Philosophy can sound wild, especially when you ponder what the guys trying to practice it more than 2,500 years ago had to say. But they were doing the best they could with the knowledge and tools they had. And most of what they wrote has been lost, which makes it difficult for history to give them a fair shake.

For example, Thales, who was born about 625 BC, said the world floated on water. He also seemed to think that everything was made of water. Actually, he just could have been impressed by how much water there was.

What Thales was talking about with regard to everything being made of water isn’t clear. No complete texts of philosophical works from that far back survive. However, it seems that Thales and the philosophers following him — proposing such things as air and fire and the infinite as the basis of all matter — were thinking about a reality based on observable phenomena.

 What exactly do philosophers do? They tackle the big questions, which include the following:

What is the world?

Who am I?

What am I doing here?

Does reality consist of what people see and experience?

If not, what is reality?

What does it mean?

Founding science in philosophy

Today’s scientists answer questions empirically, or based on physical evidence. But before modern scientific methods, scientists were philosophers: They asked questions and thought about possible answers without hard data to back them up.

In Greece almost 3,000 years ago, few tools were available for conducting scientific experiments. Thales couldn’t take samples of water, marble, fingernail clippings, and olive oil and run tests that would show him that they weren’t all forms of the same thing. So, scientist philosophers did the best they could in formulating theories that seemed to explain the world they observed.

Testing a theory but blowing the methodology

Unlike some early philosophers, Anaximenes, who came along a bit later than Thales (Anaximenes died around 500 BC), conducted experiments. They were flawed experiments, but they had an inkling of scientific method about them.

Anaximenes thought everything was made of air, which could transform into other matter by compression or expansion. He decided clouds were made of condensed air on its way to becoming more condensed. At a certain point, it would become so condensed that it would turn into water. Even more tightly compressed air, he thought, became mud, earth, and stone — in that order. Fire, he said, was extremely rarified air.

Anaximenes thought he had good evidence for his theory in that when you purse your lips and blow, a compressed stream of air comes out cold. If you open your mouth wide and breathe out, the air — now rarified rather than condensed — feels hot. Presumably, by extension, if you could open your mouth really, really wide, you could breathe out fire.

Diverging disciplines

 As thinkers figured out more and better ways to test, prove, or disprove their theories about the physical world, sciences split off from philosophy. Philosophers continued to ask questions about the nature of being (called metaphysics), the nature of knowledge (called epistemology), ethics, and morals; they asked questions that couldn’t be satisfactorily answered by experiments.

Yet despite this split, philosophy and science overlapped in many ways. Until the 1840s, scientists were called natural philosophers.

Mixing philosophy and religion

Just as philosophy and science intermingled, so did philosophy and religion — as they still do. What do I mean by religion? It often means much the same as philosophy — a way of understanding reality. Religion includes publicly shared beliefs, private convictions, and ways that people express faith. The Greek religion focused on a group of gods, the pantheon, who behaved much as human beings do, but who existed in a supernatural realm that interacted with and affected mortal affairs.

Early philosophers apparently weren’t content with taking creation myths and Greek polytheism (the worship of many gods) at face value. However, that doesn’t mean they rejected religion, as evidenced by these examples:

One early Greek philosopher, Pythagoras (about 560–480 BC), founded a religious community and preached about the transmigration of souls. His followers said he was the son of the god Apollo and that he could appear in two places at once.

Xenophanes, a philosopher born around 580 BC, opposed anthropomorphic gods (gods who look and act like people) and polytheism, yet he described a god that he called “the greatest amongst gods and men.”

Legend says that Empedocles, who thought the universe was made of four elements (fire, air, water, and earth), claimed to be a god himself. To prove it, he jumped into a live volcano.

Greeks, and later Romans, worshipped the gods of their pantheon for century after century while philosophical arguments rose, fell out of favor, and rose again. Plotinus, a Greek from Egypt who moved to Rome in 224 AD, mixed popular myths together with the ideas of Plato (discussed later in this chapter). Plato, who lived 500 years before Plotinus, said that the world as people experience it is made of imperfect, temporary reflections of perfect, eternal Ideas, or forms. Plotinus also stirred in bits from Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans and came up with Neoplatonism, a school of thought that flourished for a millennium and came back in new Christian forms in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Tracing Philosophy’s Roots

Greeks weren’t the first to ask basic questions. Supernatural creation stories (see Chapter 10) addressed some of the same things that the first philosophers wondered about: What is the world made of? What are the sun and the moon? What is humankind’s place in nature? Philosophy arose among the Greeks less than 3,000 years ago, yet complex sophisticated civilizations existed long before that, as I explain in Chapters 2 and 4.

Some scholars argue that the Greeks built on a tradition of inquiry that came from the ancient Hindus. In the sixth century BC, an Indian philosopher known as Ajita of the Hair Blanket (catchy name, huh?) said the world consisted of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. More than a century later, a Greek named Empedocles said the same thing. Usually, Empedocles gets credit for thinking up this idea, but nobody knows whether a predecessor influenced him. In the fifth century BC, the Greek Leucippus argued that the world is made up of tiny particles, or atoms. But Pakudha Kacchayana, an Indian of the sixth century BC, walked that path first.

Sumer and Babylon, both in Mesopotamia, had traditions of literacy that long predated the Greeks. So did Persia. Some scholars point to Africa as the original source of intellectual inquiry. The problem with these claims is that there’s no proof. Clues, however, indicate that Greek philosophy benefited from cultural crosscurrents. For example, the first Greek philosophers didn’t live in Greece.

Living on the edges of Greek society

Greeks were colonizers. As they sailed around the Aegean Sea and beyond into the wider Mediterranean, they liked to settle and establish city-states like the ones back home. Their colonies produced the Greeks’ earliest hotshot thinkers.

 Pythagoras was born on an island off the coast of Turkey and moved to Italy. Thales, his student Anaximander, and the younger Anaximenes are called the Milesians or the Ionians, because they lived in Miletus, a city-state in Greek Asia. (That part of the world — in present-day Turkey — was called Ionia.) Xenophanes lived in Colophon, near present-day Izmir, Turkey.

Drawing inspiration from other cultures

You may think of the Greeks of the fifth century BC as an early culture. But they looked back on an honored past embodied in the works of their poets — especially Homer. Greeks held a traditional regard for wisdom (their word for it was sophia) and for skill with words. They also had a tradition of considering what is right and moral and questioning how society should function.

Greeks living on the frontiers of their culture may have found their traditions stimulated by the scholarship of other cultures. For example, Babylonians studied the stars and planets for centuries. Also, writings from Persia and probably Egypt — considerations of natural phenomena such as tides and stars and human inventions, such as mathematics — circulated among the learned in Greek society. Some modern scholars say that when the Greeks got their hands on Babylonian astronomy and started talking about the stars as natural phenomena rather than supernatural personalities,science began.

Traveling broadens the mind

 Thales, a philosopher of the seventh century BC (who was fascinated by water), made at least one visit to Egypt and came up with a way to measure the height of the Great Pyramid. Standing next to the pyramid as the sun rose in the sky, he watched his own shadow. When his shadow exactly matched his own height, he hurried to mark the length of the pyramid’s shadow. By measuring the shadow, he determined the pyramid’s height. Was this novel thinking on Thales’s part, or did an Egyptian surveyor teach it to him?

Living where they did, Thales and his progeny could have seen Indian poetry or accessed Sumerian texts. Could these guys have just taken older Eastern or African ways of looking at the world and talked them up among their fellow Greeks? Nobody knows for sure.

Examining Eastern Philosophies

China developed philosophical traditions around the same time that the Greeks were creating a name for themselves in the field. Chinese philosophies had a widespread impact throughout East Asia.

Confucius and Lao-tzu, China’s most famous early philosophers, were roughly contemporaries of Anaximenes of Miletus (there’s more about him in the earlier section “Testing a theory but blowing the methodology”). The teachings of both Chinese philosophers grew into traditions that came to be considered religious as much as philosophical.

Confucians stress the importance of cultural heritage, family, and society.

Taoists look to the natural world and its underlying path, or way, as the route to peace.

Also in China, the School of Names liked to twist concepts around and play with paradoxes. This group of philosophers theorized that if you took a stick and cut it in half every day, you would never use it all up, because half of any length, no matter how short, is still not zero. This thinking corresponded with the ideas of a fifth-century-BC Greek, Zeno of Elea, who said that to run any distance you must first run half that distance. To run that half-distance, you must first run one-quarter the total distance. But first you must run one-eighth the distance. Carried to extreme, such an argument supposedly proved that you could never run the entire distance.

Another major Chinese tradition, legalism, concerned a ruler’s need to bring forth laws, to set out rewards and punishments, and to build the kingdom’s power against its rivals — basics of a civil society then and now.

Leading to (and from) Socrates

 People who study philosophy draw a line between Eastern traditions and the Greeks. Scholars also draw a line within the Greek tradition — a line that falls right at Socrates (469–399 BC). Like all such lines, it’s arbitrary, but Socrates really did change things.

Socrates began something that his student Plato and Plato’s student Aristotle continued: a tradition founded in a personal understanding of what is true and what is right.

Unlike the Ionians and other colonial philosophers, Socrates, shown in Figure 11-1, lived smack dab in the middle of Greek culture — in the great city-state of Athens at its cultural, economic, and military peak.

Building a tradition of seeking answers

The philosophers who came before Socrates — men such as Pythagoras, Thales, and Anaximenes — are often lumped together as the pre-Socratics.

© Greek School/Getty Images

You can find a few of their ideas (such as Thales’s thoughts about water) at the beginning of this chapter. Many pre-Socratic ideas seem weird, even from the perspective of later Greek philosophers who wrote about them. Here are a couple of gems:

Anaximander of Miletus thought that the earth was shaped like a cylinder and that gigantic, tire-shaped rings full of fire surrounded it. The firelight shone out of various holes of different sizes, which people on earth saw as stars, the moon, and the sun. Anaximander also thought that the first human embryos grew inside fish-like creatures. (He didn’t eat fish.)

Heraclitus, who lived in Ephesus (present-day Turkey) in the early fifth century BC, thought all things were made of fire. He also said that the soul runs around inside the human body the way a spider patrols its web.

As farfetched as their ideas seem now, the importance of the pre-Socratic philosophers was that they started a tradition of observing, thinking, and questioning that would reject Anaximander’s fish embryos and Heraclitus’s spider-like soul and would hang onto their insistence on trying to understand.

Athens as the leading city-state

Greeks who lived in Miletus or other parts of Asia Minor weren’t carefree, even if their theories suggest that they had too much time on their hands. They were on shaky political turf: Persian territory. The Persian Empire had controlled that part of the world since the mid-sixth century BC. Greek residents rebelled in 500 and 499 BC, but Persia’s King Darius crushed the rebellion. Then he decided to teach a lesson to mainland Greeks who had supported the rebellion.

Persia attacked Greece, bringing about the Persian Wars, which lasted from 490–449 BC. Over that time, the sometimes-fractious Greek city-states pooled their resources and won. Athens emerged as the leader of a federation of city-states, including those in Ionia. Called the Delian League, the federation amounted to a far-flung Athenian empire.

Training in the art of persuasion

 By 460 BC, a democratic Athens was the culmination of hard-won government reforms that began in the late sixth century BC. Athenians chose jurists and even magistrates by lottery. All the citizens (a class restricted to free, Athenian men as opposed to slave or foreign-born men or women) were eligible to sit in the popular Assembly, the city-state’s main lawmaking body.

Thanks to the democratic proceedings in Athens, it became important for young men to learn how to speak persuasively. For that, Athens needed teachers. Itinerant instructors came to be known as sophists, men skilled in rhetoric and legal argument. Mostly concerned with teaching privileged youngsters how to plead their cases, sophists were criticized as more concerned with winning arguments than with truth. Sophistry became known as the art of constructing arguments that sound good, despite their flaws.

But some genuine philosophers emerged from among the sophists, paving the way for Socrates by engaging in thoughtful, persuasive dialogues. Still, many Athenians considered Socrates just another sophist. The comic playwright Aristophanes made fun of sophists in general and Socrates in particular in his play The Clouds, which depicts the philosopher walking around with his head literally in the clouds.

Living and thinking in a heady time

After the Persian wars, Athens was alive with new ideas. The thinker Anaxagoras moved from Turkey to Athens. He talked philosophy with Pericles, leader of the city-state, who became his friend and supporter.

Pericles, who built Athens into a monumental city with architecture to fit its new status as imperial capital, also hobnobbed with the new Athenian playwrights such as Sophocles and Aeschylus, men who were inventing the Western theater. The playwright Euripides also studied with Anaxagoras.

His friendship with Pericles helped make Anaxagoras a VIP around town. The philosopher’s ideas also were intriguing on their own: Anaxagoras propounded a kind of proto-Big Bang theory that sounds like modern astrophysics. In his version, everything started out packed inside an infinitely small pebble-like unit that began to spin and expand, throwing out all matter into an ever-expanding universe. He also envisioned an infinite mind (not unlike a god) governing all matter.

Some of what Anaxagoras said was controversial, especially ideas about the sun that contradicted religious orthodoxy. Eventually the philosopher found himself banished. (Athenian citizens voted every year on whom to ostracize, a word that to them included physical banishment.) Before he left town, Anaxagoras may have taught Socrates.

Another war, this one pitting Athens against the Greek city-state Sparta (which had grown tired of being in Athens’s shadow), lasted from 431–404 BC. Early in this conflict, called the Peloponnesian War, Pericles died of a plague. Sickness and lack of leadership in Athens helped the Spartans win (see Chapter 4), and Athens changed dramatically.

Thinking for himself: Socrates’ legacy

Already in his late 30s when the Peloponnesian War broke out, Socrates served bravely in the Athenian infantry. Later in the war, he sat as a member of the Assembly when that lawmaking body judged some Athenian generals accused of abandoning warriors after a victorious sea battle. The lost warriors fell overboard in a sea so stormy that the generals decided to let the high winds blow the ships home, instead of fighting their way back to seek unlikely survivors. The generals arrived expecting to be hailed as heroes but were tossed in the clink instead.

All but one Assembly member voted for conviction. The holdout was Socrates. Why? For one thing, the law said the generals had to be tried as individuals, not in a group. Everybody else conveniently overlooked this point, but Socrates wasn’t one to follow the herd.

 Socrates made up his own mind and saw it as the individual’s responsibility to determine virtue from vice and to act on the resulting knowledge without regard for consequences.

Glimpsing Socrates through Plato’s writings

Socrates didn’t write about his philosophy. His reputation rests on what other people, especially his student Plato, wrote about him.

Plato depicted Socrates as intent on convincing his fellow Athenians to reexamine their ideas about right and wrong. Plato’s writings describe Socrates using a technique that has been called the Socratic method ever since: Socrates asks the person he’s talking to for a definition of a broad concept (such as piety or justice) and then tries to get the person to contradict himself with his answer.

 What Socrates seems to have believed can be summed up in a quote attributed to him: “There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”

Viewing Socrates as the scapegoat

Socrates lived to question and to pick apart assumptions. During the Peloponnesian War, Athenians’ assumptions that they were the best among Greek city-states fell apart just like the city walls that the Spartans pulled down when they finally won the war.

When Athens went looking for a scapegoat after losing the war, its eyes fell on the man who had questioned its earlier ideas about Athenian supremacy. The state charged Socrates with impiety (disrespecting the state religion) and with corrupting the young.

He could have apologized. He could have promised to shut up. He could have saved his own life. But that wasn’t Socrates’ style. He preferred to submit to Athens’s method of execution — drinking a solution prepared from the plant poison hemlock — rather than abandon his principles.

Socrates’ insistence on making up his own mind based on his own understanding of what’s good made him a new kind of hero — not a warrior, but a man of conviction.

Building on Socrates: Plato and Aristotle

While Socrates was alive, Athens lost its imperial greatness. But after Socrates’ death, Athens rebuilt itself as a center of learning. After traveling widely, Socrates’ student Plato returned to Athens to set up a school (at nearby Academia) that would train generations of thinkers.

Tracing Plato’s influence

Plato developed doctrines (including a theory about the immortality of the soul) that would wield incredible influence over philosophers who followed him. The Englishman Alfred North Whitehead, who taught and wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, described the entire tradition of European philosophy as “footnotes to Plato.”

Advancing the theory of Ideas

Perhaps the best-known tenet of Platonism is the theory of Ideas or Forms. Plato thought that elements of the material world, such as a table, a man, or an acorn, were imperfect reflections or shadows of eternal, perfect Ideas, such as the Idea of a table, a man, or an acorn.

In his book The Republic, Plato describes an ideal political state that brings forth philosopher kings trained in the highest levels of knowledge.

Recognizing Aristotle’s advancements

Plato is often seen as the inventor of idealism, whereas Aristotle, his student, is seen as a hands-on realist. Aristotle was a naturalist, a marine biologist ahead of his time who gathered knowledge from studying the real world.

 Aristotle could be down-to-earth about seemingly universal matters. When he made his famous statement, “Man is by nature a political animal,” Aristotle was probably just observing that human beings are more like bees, who live in relation to one another, than like cats, who hunt alone. His ideal state, unlike that in Plato’s The Republic, was based on the Greek city-state, with traditions such as family and even slavery intact. Aristotle wrote about ethics, morality, politics, and much more, often refining Plato’s ideas, which makes sense considering Aristotle was Plato’s student for 20 years. He had opinions on matters from the nature of being (the word metaphysics comes from the title of one of his works) to earning interest by lending money (he opposed it).

Philosophy in the Age of Alexander and After

If it weren’t for Aristotle and a rather special student of his, history may have taken a very different course.

Socrates taught Plato, who taught Aristotle, who taught Alexander the Great, who conquered the world. Okay, not really the world, but Alexander conquered such a large and wide-ranging territory that it seemed like the whole world to the people of his time (see Chapter 4).

Alexander was never a philosopher, but he did collect samples of exotic plants and animals while on his empire-building campaigns. He sent them back to Aristotle so that his old tutor could study them. The philosopher and the emperor later grew apart, especially after Alexander proclaimed himself a god. (If you value your philosophy professor’s good opinion, don’t claim personal divinity.)

The philosophical schools founded by Plato and Aristotle didn’t build Alexander’s empire, but the thinking they nurtured was at the center of what became the dominant culture of the Mediterranean.

Spreading Hellenistic philosophies

The period after Alexander’s conquests is labeled the Hellenistic Age (Greeks called themselves Hellenes) because Hellenistic (Greek-like) philosophies spread and remained influential through the height of the Roman Empire. Some of these philosophies had names still recognized today — not just in the philosophy department’s faculty lounge but also in everyday life. For example, you may call somebody a cynic or stoic. You may find yourself skeptical as you read this sentence. Perhaps you’re an epicure. These terms applied to people behaving or thinking in certain ways emerged from the philosophies of the Hellenistic Age — from the heirs of Plato and Aristotle.

Pleasing yourself: Hedonism

The pleasure principle has been around at least since the fourth century BC, when Aristippus, who studied under Socrates, decided that the sensation of pleasure is the only good. His followers, though they practiced hedonism, were called Cyrenaics after Cyrene in Africa (Aristippus’s birthplace).

Hedonism is not often clearly articulated as a philosophy — at least not by its adherents — because it’s not much fun to articulate a philosophy. As a practice, hedonism sometimes figured in social movements, as with the widespread relaxation of social mores in the United States and Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s.

Looking at original cynicism

If you think everybody’s trying to con you, you may have a reputation as a cynic, but that wasn’t what cynicism used to be. (No, I’m not trying to con you about this.) Antisthenes, a friend of Socrates, started cynicism with the purpose of getting back to nature, ignoring social conventions, and living simply.

Antisthenes’ follower and colleague, Diogenes of Sinope, really got into asceticism — shunning civilization’s pleasures and sleeping in a tub. Legend says he walked around Athens in broad daylight carrying a lantern and saying he was searching for an honest man. If indeed he did this, it was probably his way of commenting on the artificiality of life in the city.

Yet the idea stuck that the cynics thought honesty was hard to come by, so cynicism became a word for distrusting everybody and everything.

Indulging in Epicureanism

The meaning of epicure evolved, too. Nowadays, an epicure (or epicurean) is someone who indulges appetites. But Epicurus, who founded the movement in the early third century BC, believed in moderation.

Epicurus was concerned with logic and physics. He was an atomist, theorizing a universe composed of tiny particles. His name, however, became attached to his teachings about ethics and then to gross distortions of those teachings. He defined pleasure as peace of mind and freedom from pain.

Epicurus saw excessive desire as an enemy of pleasure, not something to be indulged. His ideas got mixed up with other people’s grosser ideas, and the result is Epicureanism that would have appalled Epicurus. Epicureanism flourished in Rome from about 320 BC–200 AD.

Standing together in stoicism

Around 300 BC, students gathered every day where Zeno of Citium taught at the painted colonnade in Athens. A colonnade is a row of columns. The words for painted colonnade were Stoa poikile, so these folks came to be called the Stoics.

Zeno’s students shared a vision of the world as a benevolent, organic whole. If people see evil, it’s because they don’t see or know the entire thing. The Stoics thought, as Socrates had, that human virtue is based in knowledge: The more you know, the more you see the good.

Like Aristotle, the Stoics saw reason as an underlying principle of nature, and they thought individuals should live in harmony with nature. The most famous part of Stoic philosophy is a bit about how pleasure, pain, and even death aren’t really relevant to true happiness, and all these things should be borne with equanimity.

Stoicism spread to Rome, where it competed for followers with Epicureanism and skepticism. The Stoics believed in a brotherhood of humans, making stoicism the philosophy of Roman republicans who opposed a return to monarchy.

Doubting the world: Skepticism

A skeptic is someone who habitually doubts, especially someone who questions accepted assumptions. There was an element of skepticism in the way Socrates rooted out contradictions in conventional wisdom.

Skepticism as a philosophical tradition, however, goes deeper than that, casting doubt on the possibility of any human knowledge at all. Its founder, Pyrrho (360–270 BC), believed that all people are clueless and so it’s best to suspend judgment and stay calm. Skepticism had adherents in Rome.

Putting philosophy to practical use

If you get the impression that Greeks after Alexander the Great didn’t do anything but philosophize, remember that much of what came under the broad heading philosophy (Greek for “love of wisdom”) would today be called math and science.

Philosophy of the time had practical applications. Geometry, for example, came in handy for surveying and building. Incredible buildings went up during the Hellenistic Age. Among them was a fantastic marble lighthouse in the harbor of Alexandria, Egypt.

 Alexandria became a center of Greek-style learning. The library there held 700,000 volumes, and the librarian was a Greek named Eratosthenes, who was also a geographer. He worked out a formula for measuring the circumference of the Earth by measuring shadows in Syene, Egypt, and in Alexandria at the same time — at noon on the summer solstice. Then he took the difference between the shadows and multiplied by the distance between the two cities to calculate the planet’s size.

Another Greek at Alexandria reportedly built some kind of steam engine, although nobody knew what to use it for. That thread of knowledge would be picked up in England quite a few centuries later (see Chapter 15).

Tracking the Centuries

May 28, 585 BC: The sun darkens in an eclipse accurately predicted by the philosopher Thales of Miletus.

Sixth century BC: Indian philosopher Ajita of the Hair Blanket says the world consists of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water.

500 BC: Greeks in Ionia (today’s Turkey) rebel against Persian rule.

449 BC: Athens emerges victorious from the Persian Wars as leader of a federation of city-states, the Delian League.

430 BC: According to legend, the philosopher Empedocles demonstrates his own immortality by jumping into the volcanic crater atop Mount Etna.

423 BC: In his comedy The Clouds, playwright Aristophanes makes fun of Socrates, depicting him with his head literally in the clouds.

399 BC: Condemned to death for his teachings, the imprisoned Socrates drinks a poison hemlock potion and dies, surrounded by his followers.

387 BC: Plato returns to Athens to found a school of philosophy.

384 BC: Aristotle is born in Macedon, the son of the king’s physician.

300 BC: Zeno of Citium teaches philosophy every day at the painted colonnade, or Stoa poikile, in central Athens.

Around 255 BC: Eratosthenes becomes librarian at Alexandria, Egypt, and is in charge of the largest storehouse of knowledge in the world.