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2 | The Greeks
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❍ 2 THE GREEKS The real constitution of things is accustomed to hide itself. —Heraclitus n his dedication of Advancement of Learning (1605) to James I, Sir Francis Bacon declared that “of all the persons living that I have known, your Majesty were the best instance to make a man of Plato’s opinion, that all knowledge is but remembrance.” Although Plato may have meant this to express his belief in the immortality of the soul, and Bacon used it as a ploy to obtain the King’s favors (which worked quite well), we can see in it the tremendous importance that Greek thinking has had in the development of Western culture. From architecture to sculpture to theater to philosophy, the Greeks provided lasting foundations. After defeating the Persians in a series of conflicts during the first decades of the fifth century b.c., Greece entered a century and a half of great splendor, inspired by the leadership of Pericles, who ruled Athens for over thirty years (461–429 b.c.). Not even the bitter disputes for power among Athens, Sparta, and other states that triggered the Peloponnesian War from 431 to 404 b.c. detracted from the remarkable level of sophistication achieved in this era. In the words of H. G. Wells, “During this period the thought and the creative and artistic impulse of the Greeks rose to levels that made their achievement a lamp to mankind for all the rest of history.” I That this lamp kept burning through later centuries of religious intolerance and endemic warfare is our debt to those who believed knowledge to be above the blindness caused by greed and fear. The first sparks to light the lamp came from the epic poems of the legendary “blind bard” Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, probably written during the eighth century b.c. By that time there were Greek settlements spread throughout the Mediterranean, from southern Italy and Sicily to the Black Sea and Asia Minor, now Turkey. These epics, together with the Olympic Games, offered a common cultural reference to the many small villages separated by ocean, mountains, and even race. Based on stories about the barbarian conquests of the Greeks around the time of the Trojan War (twelfth century b.c.), the poems served to link the many tribes by language, ancestry, and values . The Universe was described as an oyster-shaped Earth (like the shield of the great hero Achilles), surrounded by an ocean-river, as in earlier Babylonian cosmologies. In the Odyssey, Homer describes the starry heaven as made of bronze or iron, supported by pillars. There are references to several constellations, like Orion and the Pleiades, and to the phases of the Moon. These concepts, however, certainly do not compare with the level of sophistication achieved by Babylonian astronomers, who a thousand years earlier had compiled detailed tables of planetary motion extending over decades. The Venus tablets of Ammizaduga (c. 1580 b.c.) detailed the risings and settings of Venus over a period of twenty-one years. These tablets were calendars used for organizing group activities, such as farming and religious ceremonies, and for astrological forecasting. But, notwithstanding the remarkable achievements of the Babylonians in astronomy, their Universe did not differ from Homer’s in that it was also populated and ruled by gods. The Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma elish, or “When above,” describes the origin of the Universe and the subsequent appearance of order as the work of several gods. There was no attempt to understand the cause of the heavenly motions, as mythic explanations were perfectly satisfactory. This situation would change, at least temporarily, two centuries after Homer, during the so-called pre-Socratic period of Greek philosophy, spanning roughly one century of Greek thought from the early sixth century to the birth of Socrates c. 470 b.c. The gods were then (mostly) banned from the 24 BEGINNINGS [3.93.173.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:53 GMT) picture, for explanations of natural phenomena were sought within nature itself, with physical reasoning replacing myth. THE IONIANS By the sixth century b.c. trade among various Greek states had grown in importance, and wealth led to the improvement of their cities and lifestyle. In those days the center of activity was Miletus, a city-state located in southern Ionia, now the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. It was here that the first school of pre-Socratic philosophy flourished, marking the starting point of the great intellectual...