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Conclusion
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As I note in the introduction, the impetus behind this investigation was a detailed analysis of Book 10 of Plato’s Laws. While I believe this volume can stand on its own, it must be supplemented with a second volume to complete this investigation. The natural theology and the society premised on it that Plato presents in Laws, is a reaction to those who wrote works of the peri phuseo\s type and also to the sophists. The subject of a second volume will be the sophists and their movement and Plato’s reaction to both the pre-Socratics and the sophists in the form of his own historia of the peri phuseo\s type: the first “creationist” schema. Of course, there is nothing to indicate that any pre-Socratics were impious . Indeed, the contrary position is closer to the truth. But the situation is more complex. Although the notion of divinity is inherent in the concept of phusis from the very first Greek cosmogonies (thus Anaximander and Heraclitus did not hesitate to use a vocabulary with moral connotations to describe the order that governs the universe), the fact remains that for the phusiologoi in general, the order that makes our world a cosmos is natural, that is, immanent in nature (phusis). It could thus be interpreted that for preSocratics in general, the destiny of the universe and the destiny of humanity (and even the destiny of society) can only be determined by phusis; phusis understood as blind necessity (ananke\), without any recourse to intentional cause. This explains why natural theology and its arguments are, in certain measure, a reaction to pre-Socratic writings of the peri phuseo\s type. The comic poet Aristophanes (Clouds 376f; 1036–82) aptly captures their influence on the moral, political, and religious thinking of his time in his parody of the jargon of the “physicists” in Clouds (ca. 424 BCE). He introduces the notion of ananke\ (blind necessity identified with phusis itself) to trivialize the importance of Zeus and to show Zeus does not care for us. And in the famous exchange between Just and Unjust Reasoning, Aristophanes gives an example of the antilogical method of the Sophists and the moral problems that it raises (the weaker argument aptly defeats the stronger). Plato, in his analysis of the accusations raised against Socrates in Apology (18b, 19b), 163 Conclusion does not miss the intimate relation between the Sophistic method and preSocratic physics. Criticism of the gods on moral grounds emerged very early. Xenophanes reproached Homer and Hesiod for attributing to the gods all that which in mortals is blameworthy and shameful. Aeschylus (ca. 525–456), for his part, employed all of his genius to transform the ancient conception of an unjust, impetuous and violent Zeus, that is, Zeus the tyrant, into a Zeus who assures the democratic ideal of justice on which the new Greek state was built. On the other hand, Euripides (480–406) asserted in his Heracles (339–46) that even the most exalted god was morally inferior to a human in an analogous situation . And in the Ion (436–51), Euripides rebuked the gods for holding humans to a standard they themselves failed to live up to. Euripides went even further. In a fit of rage in Bellerophon (frag. 286), he exclaims: There are no gods in heaven. To believe in such old wives’tales is folly. You have only to look around you. Tyrants murder, rob, cheat and ravage, and are happier than the pious and peaceful. Small god-fearing states are quickly overwhelmed by the military might of those larger and more wicked. (trans. Guthrie)1 The fact that Euripides linked poets with the origin of most of the stories (muthoi) that are neither true, nor worthy of the gods is one thing (see Heracles , 1341–46), but his refusal to believe in the existence of gods in the face of the prosperity of the wicked and the suffering of the just, indicates a profound and troubling change, which is in stark contrast with Aeschylus’ time. The Athens of Aeschylus was marked by deep optimism. Its citizens had just experienced the favor of the gods of the city who defended them from the Barbarians (Aeschylus, Suppliant Women, 1018f). Furthermore, the gods were the guardians of human laws and there was a belief in providence and in the traditional values whose principle was the justice of gods. In contrast, Euripides’ Athens was the Athens of the Peloponnesian war (431–404 BCE...