CHAPTER V

FREETHOUGHT IN GREECE

The highest of all the ancient civilizations, that of Greece,

was naturally the product of the greatest possible complex of

culture-forces; [396] and its rise to pre-eminence begins after

the contact of the Greek settlers in Æolia and Ionia with the higher

civilizations of Asia Minor. [397] The great Homeric epos itself stands

for the special conditions of Æolic and Ionic life in those colonies;

[398] even Greek religion, spontaneous as were its earlier growths, was

soon influenced by those of the East; [399] and Greek philosophy and

art alike draw their first inspirations from Eastern contact. [400]

Whatever reactions we may make against the tradition of Oriental

origins, [401] it is clear that the higher civilization of antiquity

had Oriental (including in that term Egyptian) roots. [402] At no point

do we find a "pure" Greek civilization. Alike the "Mycenæan" and the

"Minoan" civilizations, as recovered for us by modern excavators,

show a composite basis, in which the East is implicated. [403] And

in the historic period the connection remains obvious. It matters

not whether we hold the Phrygians and Karians of history to have

been originally an Aryan stock, related to the Hellenes, and thus

to have acted as intermediaries between Aryans and Semites, or to

have been originally Semites, with whom Greeks intermingled. [404]

On either view, the intermediaries represented Semitic influences,

which they passed on to the Greek-speaking races, though they in turn

developed their deities in large part on psychological lines common

to them and the Semites. [405]

As to the obvious Asiatic influences on historic Greek

civilization, compare Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, 1872,

p. 64; Von Ihering, Vorgeschichte der Indo-Europäer, Eng. tr. ("The

Evolution of the Aryan"), p. 73; Schömann, Griech. Alterthümer,

2te Aufl. 1861, i, 10; E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alterth. ii, 155;

A. Bertrand, Études de mythol. et d'archéol. grecques, 1858,

pp. 40-41; Bury, introd. p. 3. It seems clear that the Egyptian

influence is greatly overstated by Herodotos (ii. 49-52, etc.),

who indeed avows that he is but repeating what the Egyptians

affirm. The Egyptian priests made their claim in the spirit

in which the Jews later made theirs. Herodotos, besides, would

prefer an Egyptian to an Asiatic derivation, and so would his

audience. But it must not be overlooked that there was an Egyptian

influence in the "Minoan" period.

A Hellenistic enthusiasm has led a series of eminent scholars to carry

so far their resistance to the tradition of Oriental beginnings [406]

as to take up the position that Greek thought is "autochthonous." [407]

If it were, it could not conceivably have progressed as it did. Only

the tenacious psychological prejudice as to race-characters and racial

"genius" could thus long detain so many students at a point of view so

much more nearly related to supernaturalism than to science. It is safe

to say that if any people is ever seen to progress in thought, art, and

life, with measurable rapidity, its progress is due to the reactions of

foreign intercourse. The primary civilizations, or what pass for such,

as those of Akkad and Egypt, are immeasurably slow in accumulating

culture-material; the relatively rapid developments always involve

the stimulus of old cultures upon a new and vigorous civilization,

well-placed for social evolution for the time being. There is no

point in early Greek evolution, so far as we have documentary trace

of it, at which foreign impact or stimulus is not either patent or

inferrible. [408] In the very dawn of history the Greeks are found

to be a composite stock, [409] growing still more composite; and the

very beginnings of its higher culture are traced to the non-Grecian

people of Thrace, [410] who worshipped the Muses. As seen by Herodotos

and Thucydides, "the original Hellenes were a particular conquering

tribe of great prestige, which attracted the surrounding tribes to

follow it, imitate it, and call themselves by its name. The Spartans

were, to Herodotos, Hellenic; the Athenians, on the other hand,

were not. They were Pelasgian, but by a certain time 'changed into

Hellenes and learnt their language.' In historical times we cannot

really find any tribe of pure Hellenes in existence." [411] The later

supremacy of the Greek culture is thus to be explained in terms not

of an abnormal "Greek genius," [412] but of the special evolution of

intelligence in the Greek-speaking stock, firstly through constant

crossing with others, and secondarily through its furtherance by the

special social conditions of the more progressive Greek city-states,

of which conditions the most important were their geographical

dividedness and their own consequent competition and interaction. [413]

The whole problem of Oriental "influence" has been obscured, and

the solution retarded, by the old academic habit of discussing

questions of mental evolution in vacuo. Even the reaction against

idolatrous Hellenism proceeded without due regard to historical

sequence; and the return reaction against that is still somewhat

lacking in breadth of inference. There has been too much on

one side of assumption as to early Oriental achievement; and

too much tendency on the other to assume that the positing of

an "influence" on the Greeks is a disparagement of the "Greek

mind." The superiority of that in its later evolution seems too

obvious to need affirming. But that hardly justifies so able a

writer as Professor Burnet in concluding (Early Greek Philosophy,

2nd ed. introd. pp. 22-23) that "the" Egyptians knew no more

arithmetic than was learned by their children in the schools;

or in saying (id. p. 26) that "the" Babylonians "studied and

recorded celestial phenomena for what we call astrological

purposes, not from any scientific interest." How can we have

the right to say that no Babylonians had a scientific interest

in the data? Such interest would in the nature of the case miss

the popular reproduction given to astrological lore. But it might

very well subsist.

Professor Burnet, albeit a really original investigator, has

not here had due regard to the early usage of collegiate or

corporate culture, in which arcane knowledge was reserved for the

few. Thus he writes (p. 26) concerning the Greeks that "it was not

till the time of Plato that even the names of the planets were

known." Surely they must have been "known" to some adepts long

before: how else came they to be accepted? As Professor Burnet

himself notes (p. 34), "in almost every department of life we find

that the corporation at first is everything and the individual

nothing. The peoples of the East hardly got beyond this stage at

all: their science, such as it is, is anonymous, the inherited

property of a caste or guild, and we still see clearly in some

cases that it was once the same among the Hellenes." Is it not then

probable that astronomical knowledge was so ordered by Easterns,

and passed on to Hellenes?

There still attaches to the investigation of early Greek philosophy

the drawback that the philosophical scholars do not properly posit

the question: What was the early Ionic Greek society like? How did

the Hellenes relate to the older polities and cultures which they

found there? Professor Burnet makes justifiable fun (p. 21, note)

of Dr. Gomperz's theory of the influence of "native brides"; but he

himself seems to argue that the Greeks could learn nothing from the

men they conquered, though he admits (p. 20) their derivation of

"their art and many of their religious ideas from the East." If

religion, why not religious speculation, leading to philosophy

and science? This would be a more fruitful line of inquiry than

one based on the assumption that "the" Babylonians went one way

and "the" Greeks another. After all, only a few in each race

carried on the work of thought and discovery. We do not say that

"the English" wrote Shakespeare. Why affirm always that "the"

Greeks did whatever great Greeks achieved?

On the immediate issue Professor Burnet incidentally concedes what

is required. After arguing that the East perhaps borrowed more

from the West than did the West from the East, he admits (p. 21):

"It would, however, be quite another thing to say that Greek

philosophy originated quite independently of Oriental influence."

§ 1

By the tacit admission of one of the ablest opponents of the theory

of foreign influence, Hellenic religion as fixed by Homer for the

Hellenic world was partly determined by Asiatic influences. Ottfried

Müller decided not only that Homer the man (in whose personality he

believed) was probably a Smyrnean, whether of Æolic or Ionic stock,

[414] but that Homer's religion must have represented a special

selection from the manifold Greek mythology, necessarily representing

his local bias. [415] Now, the Greek cults at Smyrna, as in the other

Æolic and Ionic cities of Asia Minor, would be very likely to reflect

in some degree the influence of the Karian or other Asiatic cults

around them. [416] The early Attic conquerors of Miletos allowed

the worship of the Karian Sun-God there to be carried on by the old

priests; and the Attic settlers of Ephesos in the same way adopted the

neighbouring worship of the Lydian Goddess (who became the Artemis

or "Great Diana" of the Ephesians), and retained the ministry of

the attendant priests and eunuchs. [417] Smyrna was apparently not

like these a mixed community, but one founded by Achaians from the

Peloponnesos; but the genera] Ionic and Æolic religious atmosphere,

set up by common sacrifices, [418] must have been represented in an

epic brought forth in that region. The Karian civilization had at

one time spread over a great part of the Ægean, including Delos and

Cyprus. [419] Such a civilization must have affected that of the Greek

conquerors, who only on that basis became civilized traders. [420]

It is not necessary to ask how far exactly the influence may have

gone in the Iliad: the main point is that even at that stage of

comparatively simple Hellenism the Asiatic environment, Karian

or Phoenician, counted for something, whether in cosmogony or in

furthering the process of God-grouping, or in conveying the cult of

Cyprian Aphrodite, [421] or haply in lending some characteristics to

Zeus and Apollo and Athênê, [422] an influence none the less real

because the genius of the poet or poets of the Iliad has given to

the whole Olympian group the artistic stamp of individuality which

thenceforth distinguishes the Gods of Greece from all others. Indeed,

the very creation of a graded hierarchy out of the independent local

deities of Greece, the marrying of the once isolated Pelasgic Hêrê

to Zeus, the subordination to him of the once isolated Athênê and

Apollo--all this tells of the influence of a Semitic world in which

each Baal had his wife, and in which the monarchic system developed on

earth had been set up in heaven. [423] But soon the Asiatic influence

becomes still more clearly recognizable. There is reason to hold

with Schrader that the belief in a mildly blissful future state,

as seen even in the Odyssey [424] and in the Theogony ascribed to

Hesiod, [425] is "a new belief which is only to be understood in

view of oriental tales and teaching." [426] In the Theogony, again,

the Semitic element increases, [427] Kronos being a Semitic figure;

[428] while Semelê, if not Dionysos, appears to be no less so. [429]

But we may further surmise that in Homer, to begin with, the conception

of Okeanos, the earth-surrounding Ocean-stream, as the origin of all

things, [430] comes from some Semitic source; and that Hesiod's more

complicated scheme of origins from Chaos is a further borrowing of

oriental thought--both notions being found in ancient Babylonian lore,

whence the Hebrews derived their combination of Chaos and Ocean in

the first verses of Genesis. [431] It thus appears that the earlier

oriental [432] influence upon Greek thought was in the direction

of developing religion, [433] with only the germ of rationalism

conveyed in the idea of an existence of matter before the Gods, [434]

which we shall later find scientifically developed. But the case is

obscure. Insofar as the Theogony, for instance, partly moralizes the

more primitively savage myths, [435] it may be that it represents

the spontaneous need of the more highly evolved race to give an

acceptable meaning to divine tales which, coming from another race,

have not a quite sacrosanct prescription, though the tendency is to

accept them. On the other hand, it may have been a further foreign

influence that gave the critical impulse.

"It is plain enough that Homer and Hesiod represent, both

theologically and socially, the close of a long epoch, and

not the youth of the Greek world, as some have supposed. The

real signification of many myths is lost to them, and so is

the import of most of the names and titles of the elder Gods,

which are archaic and strange, while the subordinate personages

generally have purely Greek names" (Professor Mahaffy, History

of Classical Greek Literature, 1880, i, 17).

§ 2

Whatever be the determining conditions, it is clear that the Homeric

epos stands for a new growth of secular song, distinct from the earlier

poetry, which by tradition was "either lyrical or oracular." The

poems ascribed to the pre-Homeric bards "were all short, and they

were all strictly religious. In these features they contrasted

broadly with the epic school of Homer. Even the hexameter metre

seems not to have been used in these old hymns, and was called a new

invention of the Delphic priests. [436] Still further, the majority

of these hymns are connected with mysteries apparently ignored by

Homer, or with the worship of Dionysos, which he hardly knew." [437]

Intermediate between the earlier religious poetry and the Homeric

epic, then, was a hexametric verse, used by the Delphic priesthood;

and to this order of poetry belongs the Theogony which goes under

the name of Hesiod, and which is a sample of other and older works,

[438] probably composed by priests. And the distinctive mark of the

Homeric epos is that, framed as it was to entertain feudal chiefs and

their courts, it turned completely away from the sacerdotal norm and

purpose. "Thus epic poetry, from having been purely religious, became

purely secular. After having treated men and heroes in subordination

to the Gods, it came to treat the Gods in relation to men. Indeed,

it may be said of Homer that in the image of man created he God." [439]

As to the non-religiousness of the Homeric epics, there is a

division of critical opinion. Meyer insists (Gesch. des Alt. ii,

395) that, as contrasted with the earlier religious poetry, "the

epic poetry is throughout secular (profan); it aims at charming

its hearers, not at propitiating the Gods"; and he further sees in

the whole Ionian mood a certain cynical disillusionment (id. ii,

723). Cp. Benn, Philos. of Greece, p. 40, citing Hegel. E. Curtius

(G. G. i, 126) goes so far as to ascribe a certain irony to the

portraiture of the Gods (Ionian Apollo excepted) in Homer, and to

trace this to Ionian levity. To the same cause he assigns the lack

of any expression of a sense of stigma attaching to murder. This

sense he holds the Greek people had, though Homer does not

hint it. (Cp. Grote, i, 24, whose inference Curtius implicitly

impugns.) Girard (Le Sentiment religieux en Grèce, 1869), on the

contrary, appears to have no suspicion of any problem to solve,

treating Homer as unaffectedly religious. The same view is taken

by Prof. Paul Decharme. "On chercherait vainement dans l'Iliade et

dans l'Odyssée les premières traces du scepticisme grec à l'égard

des fables des dieux. C'est avec une foi entière en la réalité

des événements mythiques que les poètes chantent les légendes ...;

c'est en toute simplicité d'âme aussi que les auditeurs de l'épopée

écoutent...." (La critique des traditions religieuses chez les

grecs, 1904, p. 1.) Thus we have a kind of balance of contrary

opinions, German against French. Any verdict on the problem must

recognize on the one hand the possibilities of naïve credulity in

an unlettered age, and on the other the probability of critical

perception on the part of a great poet. I have seen both among

Boers in South Africa. On the general question of the mood of

the Homeric poems compare Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek

Religion, 1912, p. 77, and Hist. of Anc. Greek Lit. pp. 34, 35;

and A. Benn, The Philosophy of Greece in Relation to the Character

of its People, 1898, pp. 29-30.

Still, it cannot be said that in the Iliad there is any clear hint of

religious skepticism, though the Gods are so wholly in the likeness of

men that the lower deities fight with heroes and are worsted, while

Zeus and Hêrê quarrel like any earthly couple. In the Odyssey there

is a bare hint of possible speculation in the use of the word atheos;

but it is applied only in the phrase ouk atheei, "not without a

God," [440] in the sense of similar expressions in other passages

and in the Iliad. [441] The idea was that sometimes the Gods directly

meddled. When Odysseus accuses the suitors of not dreading the Gods,

[442] he has no thought of accusing them of unbelief. [443] Homer

has indeed been supposed to have exercised a measure of relative

freethought in excluding from his song the more offensive myths about

the Gods, [444] but such exclusion may be sufficiently explained on

the score that the epopees were chanted in aristocratic dwellings,

in the presence of womenkind, without surmising any process of doubt

on the poet's part.

On the other hand, it was inevitable that such a free treatment of

things hitherto sacred should not only affect the attitude of the

lay listener towards the current religion, but should react on the

religious consciousness. God-legends so fully thrust on secular

attention were bound to be discussed; and in the adaptations of

myth for liturgical purposes by Stesichoros (fl. circa 600 B.C.) we

appear to have the first open trace of a critical revolt in the

Greek world against immoral or undignified myths. [445] In his

work, it is fair to say, we see "the beginning of rationalism":

"the decisive step is taken: once the understanding criticizes the

sanctified tradition, it raises itself to be the judge thereof;

no longer the common tradition but the individual conviction is the

ground of religious belief." [446] Religious, indeed, the process

still substantially is. It is to preserve the credit of Helena as

a Goddess that Stesichoros repudiates the Homeric account of her,

[447] somewhat in the spirit in which the framers of the Hesiodic

theogony manipulated the myths without rejecting them, or the Hebrew

redactors tampered with their text. But in Stesichoros there is a new

tendency to reject the myth altogether; [448] so that at this stage

freethought is still part of a process in which religious feeling,

pressed by an advancing ethical consciousness, instinctively clears

its standing ground.

It is in Pindar, however (518-442 B.C.), that we first find such a

mental process plainly avowed by a believer. In his first Olympic

Ode he expressly declares the need for bringing afterthought to bear

on poetic lore, that so men may speak nought unfitting of the Gods;

and he protests that he will never tell the tale of the blessed ones

banqueting on human flesh. [449] In the ninth Ode he again protests

that his lips must not speak blasphemously of such a thing as strife

among the immortals. [450] Here the critical motive is ethical, though,

while repudiating one kind of scandal about the Gods, Pindar placidly

accepts others no less startling to the modern sense. His critical

revolt, in fact, is far from thoroughgoing, and suggests rather a

religious man's partial response to pressure from others than any

independent process of reflection. [451]

"He [Pindar] was honestly attached to the national religion and to

its varieties in old local cults. He lived a somewhat sacerdotal

life, labouring in honour of the Gods, and seeking to spread a

reverence for old traditional beliefs. He, moreover, shows an

acquaintance with Orphic rites and Pythagorean mysteries, which

led him to preach the doctrine of immortality, and of rewards

and punishments in the life hereafter. [Note.--The most explicit

fragment (thrênoi, 3), is, however, not considered genuine by

recent critics.]... He is indeed more affected by the advance of

freethinking than he imagines; he borrows from the neologians the

habit of rationalizing myths, and explaining away immoral acts

and motives in the Gods; but these things are isolated attempts

with him, and have no deep effect upon his general thinking"

(Mahaffy, Hist. of Greek Lit. i, 213-14).

For such a development we are not, of course, forced to assume a

foreign influence: mere progress in refinement and in mental activity

could bring it about; yet none the less it is probable that foreign

influence did quicken the process. It is true that from the beginnings

of the literary period Greek thought played with a certain freedom on

myth, partly perhaps because the traditions visibly came from various

races, and there was no strong priesthood to ossify them. After Homer

and Hesiod, men looked back to those poets as shaping theology to

their own minds. [452] But all custom is conservative, and Pindar's

mind had that general cast. On the other hand, external influence was

forthcoming. The period of Pindar and Æschylus [525-455 B.C.] follows

on one in which Greek thought, stimulated on all sides, had taken

the first great stride in its advance beyond all antiquity. Egypt

had been fully thrown open to the Greeks in the reign of Psammetichos

[453] (650 B.C.); and a great historian, who contends that the "sheer

inherent and expansive force" of "the" Greek intellect, "aided but

by no means either impressed or provoked from without," was the true

cause, yet concedes that intercourse with Egypt "enlarged the range

of their thoughts and observations, while it also imparted to them

that vein of mysticism which overgrew the primitive simplicity of the

Homeric religion," and that from Asia Minor in turn they had derived

"musical instruments and new laws of rhythm and melody," as well as

"violent and maddening religious rites." [454] And others making

similar à priori claims for the Greek intelligence are forced likewise

to admit that the mental transition between Homer and Herodotos cannot

be explained save in terms of "the influence of other creeds, and the

necessary operation of altered circumstances and relations." [455]

In the Persae of Æschylus we even catch a glimpse of direct contact

with foreign skepticism; [456] and again in the Agamemnon there is

a reference to some impious one who denied that the Gods deigned

to have care of mortals. [457] It seems unwarrantable to read as

"ridicule of popular polytheism" the passage in the same tragedy:

[458] "Zeus, whosoever he be; if this name be well-pleasing to

himself in invocation, by this do I name him." It may more fitly be

read [459] as an echo of the saying of Herakleitos that "the Wise

[= the Logos?] is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of

Zeus." [460] But in the poet's thought, as revealed in the Prometheus,

and in the Agamemnon on the theme of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, there

has occurred an ethical judgment of the older creeds, an approach to

pantheism, a rejection of anthropomorphism, and a growth of pessimism

that tells of their final insufficiency.

The leaning to pantheism is established by the discovery that

the disputed lines, "Zeus is sky, earth, and heaven: Zeus is all

things, yea, greater than all things" (Frag. 443), belonged to the

lost tragedy of the Heliades (Haigh, Tragic Drama of the Greeks,

1896, p. 88). For the pessimism see the Prometheus, 247-51. The

anti-anthropomorphism is further to be made out from the lines

ascribed to Æschylus by Justin Martyr (De Monarchia, c. 2)

and Clemens Alexandrinus (Stromata, v, 14). They are expressly

pantheistic; but their genuineness is doubtful. The story that

Æschylus was nearly killed by a theatre audience on the score

that he had divulged part of the mysteries in a tragedy (Haigh,

The Attic Theatre, 1889, p. 316; Tragic Drama, pp. 49-50)

does not seem to have suggested to Aristotle, who tells it

(Nicomachean Ethics, iii, 2), any heterodox intention on the

tragedian's part; but it is hard to see an orthodox believer

in the author either of the Prometheus, wherein Zeus is posed

as brutal might crucifying innocence and beneficence, or of

the Agamemnon, where the father, perplexed in the extreme, can

but fall back helplessly on formulas about the all-sufficiency

of Zeus when called upon to sacrifice his daughter. Cp. Haigh,

Tragic Drama, p. 86 sq. "Some critics," says Mr. Haigh (p. 88),

"have been led to imagine that there is in Æschylus a double

Zeus--the ordinary God of the polytheistic religion and the one

omnipotent deity in whom he really believed. They suppose that he

had no genuine faith in the credibility of the popular legends,

but merely used them as a setting for his tragedies; and that his

own convictions were of a more philosophical type," as seen in

the pantheistic lines concerning Zeus. To this Mr. Haigh replies

that it is "most improbable that there was any clear distinction

in the mind of Æschylus" between the two conceptions of Zeus;

going on, however, to admit that "much, no doubt, he regarded

as uncertain, much as false. Even the name 'Zeus' was to him a

mere convention." Mr. Haigh in this discussion does not attempt

to deal with the problem of the Prometheus.

The hesitations of the critics on this head are noteworthy. Karl

Ottfried Müller, who is least himself in dealing with fundamental

issues of creed, evades the problem (Lit. of Anc. Greece, 1847,

p. 329) with the bald suggestion that "Æschylus, in his own

mind, must have felt how this severity [of Zeus], a necessary

accompaniment of the transition from the Titanic period to the

government of the Gods of Olympus, was to be reconciled with the

mild wisdom which he makes an attribute of Zeus in the subsequent

ages of the world. Consequently, the deviation from right ... would

all lie on the side of Prometheus." This nugatory plea--which is

rightly rejected by Burckhardt (Griech. Culturgesch. ii, 25)--is

ineffectually backed by the argument that the friendly Oceanides

recur to the thought, "Those only are wise who humbly reverence

Adrasteia (Fate)"--as if the positing of a supreme Fate were not

a further belittlement of Zeus.

Other critics are similarly evasive. Patin (Eschyle, éd. 1877,

p. 250 sq.), noting the vagaries of past criticism, hostile and

other, avowedly leaves the play an unsolved enigma, affirming only

the commonly asserted "piety" of Æschylus. Girard (Le sentiment

religieux en Grèce, pp. 425-29) does no better, while dogmatically

asserting that the poet is "the Greek faithful to the faith of his

fathers, which he interprets with an intelligent and emotional

(émue) veneration." Meyer (iii, §§ 257-58) draws an elaborate

parallel between Æschylus and Pindar, affirming in turn the "tiefe

Frömmigkeit" of the former--and in turn leaves the enigma of the

Prometheus unsolved. Professor Decharme, rightly rejecting the

fanciful interpretations of Quinet and others who allegorize

Prometheus into humanity revolting against superstition,

offers a very unsatisfying explanation of his own (p. 107),

which practically denies that there is any problem to solve.

Prof. Mahaffy, with his more vivacious habit of thought, comes

to the evaded issue. "How," he asks, "did the Athenian audience,

who vehemently attacked the poet for divulging the mysteries,

tolerate such a drama? And still more, how did Æschylus, a pious

and serious thinker, venture to bring such a subject on the

stage with a moral purpose?" The answers suggested are: (1) that

in all old religions there are tolerated anomalous survivals;

(2) that "a very extreme distortion of their Gods will not

offend many who would feel outraged at any open denial of them";

(3) that all Greeks longed for despotic power for themselves,

and that "no Athenian, however he sympathized with Prometheus,

would think of blaming Zeus for ... crushing all resistance to his

will." But even if these answers--of which the last is the most

questionable--be accepted, "the question of the poet's intention

is far more difficult, and will probably never be satisfactorily

answered." Finally, we have this summing-up: "Æschylus was, indeed,

essentially a theologian ... but, what is more honourable and

exceptional, he was so candid and honest a theologian that he did

not approach men's difficulties for the purpose of refuting them

or showing them weak and groundless. On the contrary, though an

orthodox and pious man, though clearly convinced of the goodness

of Providence, and of the profound truth of the religion of

his fathers, he was ever stating boldly the contradictions and

anomalies in morals and in myths, and thus naturally incurring

the odium and suspicion of the professional advocates of religion

and their followers. He felt, perhaps instinctively, that a vivid

dramatic statement of these problems in his tragedies was better

moral education than vapid platitudes about our ignorance, and

about our difficulties being only caused by the shortness of our

sight" (Hist. of Greek Lit. i, 260-61, 273-74).

Here, despite the intelligent handling, the enigma is merely

transferred from the great tragedian's work to his character: it is

not solved. No solution is offered of the problem of the pantheism

of the fragment above cited, which is quite irreconcilable with

any orthodox belief in Greek religion, though such sayings are

at times repeated by unthinking believers, without recognition

of their bearing. That the pantheism is a philosophical element

imported into the Greek world from the Babylonian through the early

Ionian thinkers seems to be the historical fact (cp. Whittaker,

as last cited): that the importation meant the dissolution of

the national faith for many thinking men seems to be no less

true. It seems finally permissible, then, to suggest that the

"piety" of Æschylus was either discontinuous or a matter of

artistic rhetoric and public spirit, and that the Prometheus is

a work of profound and terrible irony, unburdening his mind of

reveries that religion could not conjure away. The discussion

on the play has unduly ignored the question of its date. It is,

in all probability, one of the latest of the works of Æschylus

(K. O. Müller, Lit. of Anc. Greece, p. 327; Haigh, Tragic Drama,

p. 109). Müller points to the employment of the third actor--a

late development--and Haigh to the overshadowing of the choruses

by the dialogue; also to the mention (ll. 366-72) of the eruption

of Etna, which occurred in 475 B.C. This one circumstance goes

far to solve the dispute. Written near the end of the poet's life

the play belongs to the latest stages of his thinking; and if it

departs widely in its tone from the earlier plays, the reasonable

inference is that his ideas had undergone a change. The Agamemnon,

with its desolating problem, seems to be also one of his later

works. Rationalism, indeed, does not usually emerge in old age,

though Voltaire was deeply shaken in his theism by the earthquake

of Lisbon; but Æschylus is unique even among men of genius; and

the highest flight of Greek drama may well stand for an abnormal

intellectual experience.

In this primary entrance of critical doubt into drama we have one of

the sociological clues to the whole evolution of Greek thought. It

has been truly said that the constant action of the tragic stage, the

dramatic putting of arguments and rejoinders, pros and cons--which

in turn was a fruit of the actual daily pleadings in the Athenian

dikastery--was a manifold stimulus alike to ethical feeling and

to intellectual effort, such as no other ancient civilization ever

knew. "The appropriate subject-matter of tragedy is pregnant not only

with ethical sympathy, but also with ethical debate and speculation,"

to an extent unapproached in the earlier lyric and gnomic poetry

and the literature of aphorism and precept. "In place of unexpanded

results, or the mere communication of single-minded sentiment, we

have even in Æschylus, the earliest of the great tragedians, a large

latitude of dissent and debate--a shifting point of view--a case

better or worse--and a divination of the future advent of sovereign

and instructed reason. It was through the intermediate stage of

tragedy that Grecian literature passed into the Rhetoric, Dialectics,

and Ethical speculation which marked the fifth century B.C." [461]

This development was indeed autochthonous, save insofar as the

germ of the tragic drama may have come from the East in the cult

of Dionysos, with its vinous dithyramb: the "Greek intellect"

assuredly did wonderful things at Athens, being placed, for a time,

in civic conditions peculiarly fitted for the economic evocation of

certain forms of genius. But the above-noted developments in Pindar

and in Æschylus had been preceded by the great florescence of early

Ionian philosophy in the sixth century, a growth which constrains

us to look once more to Asia Minor for a vital fructification of the

Greek inner life, of a kind that Athenian institutions could not in

themselves evoke. For while drama flourished supremely at Athens,

science and philosophy grew up elsewhere, centuries before Athens

had a philosopher of note; and all the notable beginnings of Hellenic

freethought occurred outside of Hellas proper.

§ 3

The Greeks varied from the general type of culture-evolution seen

in India, Persia, Egypt, and Babylon, and approximated somewhat to

that of ancient China, in that their higher thinking was done not by

an order of priests pledged to cults, but by independent laymen. In

Greece, as in China, this line of development is to be understood as a

result of early political conditions--in China, those of a multiplicity

of independent feudal States; in Greece, those of a multiplicity of

City States, set up first by the geographical structure of Hellas,

and reproduced in the colonies of Asia Minor and Magna Graecia by

reason of the acquired ideal and the normal state of commercial

competition. To the last, many Greek cults exhibited their original

character as the sacra of private families. Such conditions prevented

the growth of a priestly caste or organization. [462] Neither China

nor Pagan Greece was imperialized till there had arisen enough of

rationalism to prevent the rise of a powerful priesthood; and the

later growth of a priestly system in Greece in the Christian period

is to be explained in terms first of a positive social degeneration,

accompanying a complete transmutation of political life, and secondly

of the imposition of a new cult, on the popular plane, specially

organized on the model of the political system that adopted it. Under

imperialism, however, the two civilizations ultimately presented a

singular parallel of unprogressiveness.

In the great progressive period, the possible gains from the absence of

a priesthood are seen in course of realization. For the Greek-speaking

world in general there was no dogmatic body of teaching, no written

code of theology and moral law, no Sacred Book. [463] Each local

cult had its own ancient ritual, often ministered by priestesses,

with myths, often of late invention, to explain it; [464] only

Homer and Hesiod, with perhaps some of the now lost epics, serving

as a general treasury of myth-lore. The two great epopees ascribed

to Homer, indeed, had a certain Biblical status; and the Homerids

or other bards who recited them did what in them lay to make the

old poetry the standard of theological opinion; but they too lacked

organized influence, and could not hinder higher thinking. [465] The

special priesthood of Delphi, wielding the oracle, could maintain

their political influence only by holding their function above all

apparent self-seeking or effort at domination. [466] It only needed,

then, such civic conditions as should evolve a leisured class, with

a bent towards study, to make possible a growth of lay philosophy.

Those conditions first arose in the Ionian cities; because there first

did Greek citizens attain commercial wealth, [467] as a result of

adopting the older commercial civilization whose independent cities

they conquered, and of the greater rapidity of development which

belongs to colonies in general. [468] There it was that, in matters

of religion and philosophy, the comparison of their own cults with

those of their foreign neighbours first provoked their critical

reflection, as the age of primitive warfare passed away. And there

it was, accordingly, that on a basis of primitive Babylonian science

there originated with Thales of Miletos (fl. 586 B.C.), a Phoenician by

descent, [469] the higher science and philosophy of the Greek-speaking

race. [470]

It is historically certain that Lydia had an ancient and close

historical connection with Babylonian and Assyrian civilization,

whether through the "Hittites" or otherwise (Sayce, Anc. Emp. of

the East, 1884, pp. 217-19; Curtius, Griech. Gesch. i, 63, 207;

Meyer, Gesch. des Alterth. i, 166, 277, 299, 305-10; Soury,

Bréviaire de l'hist. du matérialisme, 1881, pp. 30, 37 sq. Cp. as

to Armenia, Edwards, The Witness of Assyria, 1893, p. 144); and in

the seventh century the commercial connection between Lydia and

Ionia, long close, was presumably friendly up to the time of the

first attacks of the Lydian Kings, and even afterwards (Herodotos

i, 20-23), Alyattes having made a treaty of peace with Miletos,

which thereafter had peace during his long reign. This brings us

to the time of Thales (640-548 B.C.). At the same time, the Ionian

settlers of Miletos had from the first a close connection with the

Karians (Herod. i, 146, and above pp. 120-21), whose near affinity

with the Semites, at least in religion, is seen in their practice

of cutting their foreheads at festivals (id. ii, 61; cp. Grote,

ed. 1888, i, 27, note; E. Curtius, i, 36, 42; Busolt, i, 33;

and Spiegel, Eranische Alterthumskunde, i, 228). Thales was thus

in the direct sphere of Babylonian culture before the conquest

of Cyrus; and his Milesian pupils or successors, Anaximandros

and Anaximenes, stand for the same influences. Herakleitos in

turn was of Ephesus, an Ionian city in the same culture-sphere;

Anaxagoras was of Klazomenai, another Ionian city, as had been

Hermotimos, of the same philosophic school; the Eleatic school,

founded by Xenophanes and carried on by Parmenides and the elder

Zeno, come from the same matrix, Elea having been founded by

exiles from Ionian Phokaia on its conquest by the Persians; and

Pythagoras, in turn, was of the Ionian city of Samos, in the same

sixth century. Finally, Protagoras and Demokritos were of Abdera,

an Ionian colony in Thrace; Leukippos, the teacher of Demokritos,

was either an Abderite, a Milesian, or an Elean; and Archelaos,

the pupil of Anaxagoras and a teacher of Sokrates, is said to

have been a Milesian. Wellhausen (Israel, p. 473 of vol. of

Prolegomena, Eng. tr.) has spoken of the rise of philosophy

on the "threatened and actual political annihilation of Ionia"

as corresponding to the rise of Hebrew prophecy on the menace

and the consummation of the Assyrian conquest. As regards Ionia,

this may hold in the sense that the stoppage of political freedom

threw men back on philosophy, as happened later at Athens. But

Thales philosophized before the Persian conquest.

§ 4

Thales, like Homer, starts from the Babylonian conception of a

beginning of all things in water; but in Thales the immediate motive

and the sequel are strictly cosmological and neither theological

nor poetical, though we cannot tell whether the worship of a God

of the Waters may not have been the origin of a water-theory of the

cosmos. The phrase attributed to him, "that all things are full of

Gods," [471] clearly meant that in his opinion the forces of things

inhered in the cosmos, and not in personal powers who spasmodically

interfered with it. [472] It is probable that, as was surmised by

Plutarch, a pantheistic conception of Zeus existed for the Ionian

Greeks before Thales. [473] To the later doxographists he "seems to

have lost belief in the Gods." [474] From the mere second-hand and

often unintelligent statements which are all we have in his case,

it is hard to make sure of his system; but that it was pantheistic

[475] and physicist seems clear. He conceived that matter not only

came from but was resolvable into water; that all phenomena were

ruled by law or "necessity"; and that the sun and planets (commonly

regarded as deities) were bodies analogous to the earth, which he

held to be spherical but "resting on water." [476] For the rest, he

speculated in meteorology and in astronomy, and is credited with having

predicted a solar eclipse [477]--a fairly good proof of his knowledge

of Chaldean science [478]--and with having introduced geometry into

Greece from Egypt. [479] To him, too, is ascribed a wise counsel to

the Ionians in the matter of political federation, [480] which, had

it been followed, might have saved them from the Persian conquest;

and he is one of the many early moralists who laid down the Golden

Rule as the essence of the moral law. [481] With his maxim, "Know

thyself," he seems to mark a broadly new departure in ancient thought:

the balance of energy is shifted from myth and theosophy, prophecy

and poesy, to analysis of consciousness and the cosmic process.

From this point Greek rationalism is continuous, despite reactions,

till the Roman conquest, Miletos figuring long as a general source

of skepticism. Anaximandros (610-547 B.C.), pupil and companion

of Thales, was like him an astronomer, geographer, and physicist,

seeking for a first principle (for which he may or may not have

invented the name [482]); rejecting the idea of a single primordial

element such as water; affirming an infinite material cause, without

beginning and indestructible, [483] with an infinite number of worlds;

and--still showing the Chaldean impulse--speculating remarkably on

the descent of man from something aquatic, as well as on the form and

motion of the earth (figured by him as a cylinder [484]), the nature

and motions of the solar system, and thunder and lightning. [485]

It seems doubtful whether, as affirmed by Eudemus, he taught the

doctrine of the earth's motion; but that this doctrine was derived

from the Babylonian schools of astronomy is so probable that it may

have been accepted in Miletos in his day. Only by inferring a prior

scientific development of remarkable energy can we explain the striking

force of the sayings of Anaximandros which have come down to us. His

doctrine of evolution stands out for us to-day like the fragment of a

great ruin, hinting obscurely of a line of active thinkers. The thesis

that man must have descended from a different species because, "while

other animals quickly found food for themselves, man alone requires

a long period of suckling: had he been originally such as he is now,

he could never have survived," is a quite masterly anticipation of

modern evolutionary science. We are left asking, how came an early

Ionian Greek to think thus, outgoing the assimilative power of the

later age of Aristotle? Only a long scientific evolution can readily

account for it; and only in the Mesopotamian world could such an

evolution have taken place. [486]

Anaximenes (fl. 548 B.C.), yet another Milesian, pupil or at least

follower in turn of Anaximandros, speculates similarly, making his

infinite and first principle the air, in which he conceives the earth

to be suspended; theorizes on the rainbow, earthquakes, the nature

and the revolution of the heavenly bodies (which, with the earth, he

supposed to be broad and flat); and affirms the eternity of motion and

the perishableness of the earth. [487] The Ionian thought of the time

seems thus to have been thoroughly absorbed in problems of natural

origins, and only in that connection to have been concerned with the

problems of religion. No dogma of divine creation blocked the way:

the trouble was levity of hypothesis or assent. Thales, following a

Semitic lead, places the source of all things in water. Anaximandros,

perhaps following another, but seeking a more abstract idea, posited

an infinite, the source of all things; and Anaximenes in turn reduces

that infinite to the air, as being the least material of things. He

cannot have anticipated the chemical conception of the reduction

of all solids to gases: the thesis was framed either à priori or in

adaptation of priestly claims for the deities of the elements; and

others were to follow with the guesses of earth and fire and heat and

cold. Still, the speculation is that of bold and far-grasping thinkers,

and for these there can have been no validity in the ordinary God-ideas

of polytheism.

There is reason to think that these early "schools" of thought

were really constituted by men in some way banded together, [488]

thus supporting each other against the conservatism of religious

ignorance. The physicians were so organized; the disciples of

Pythagoras followed the same course; and in later Greece we shall

find the different philosophic sects formed into societies or

corporations. The first model was probably that of the priestly

corporation; and in a world in which many cults were chronically

disendowed it may well have been that the leisured old priesthoods,

philosophizing as we have seen those of India and Egypt and Mesopotamia

doing, played a primary part in initiating the work of rational

secular thought.

The recent work of Mr. F. M. Cornford, From Philosophy to Religion

(1912), puts forth an interesting and ingenious theory to the

effect that early Greek philosophy is a reduction to abstract

terms of the practice of totemistic tribes. On this view, when

the Gods are figured in Homer as subject to Moira (Destiny),

there has taken place an impersonation of Nomos, or Law; and just

as the divine cosmos or polity is a reflection of the earthly,

so the established conception of the absolute compulsoriness of

tribal law is translated into one of a Fate which overrules the

Gods (p. 40 sq.). So, when Anaximandros posits the doctrine of

four elements [he did not use the word, by the way; that comes

later; see Burnet, ch. i, p. 56, citing Diels], "we observe that

this type of cosmic structure corresponds to that of a totemic

tribe containing four clans" (p. 62). On the other hand, the

totemistic stage had long before been broken down. The "notion

of the group-soul" had given rise to the notion of God (p. 90);

and the primitive "magical group" had dissolved into a system of

families (p. 93), with individual souls. On this prior accumulation

of religious material early philosophy works (p. 138).

It does not appear why, thus recognizing that totemism was at

least a long way behind in Thales's day, Mr. Cornford should

trace the Ionian four elements straight back to the problematic

four clans of the totemistic tribe. Dr. Frazer gives him no data

whatever for Aryan totemism; and the Ionian cities, like those

of Mesopotamia and Egypt, belong to the age of commerce and of

monarchies. It would seem more plausible, on Mr. Cornford's own

premises, to trace the rival theories of the four elements to

religious philosophies set up by the priests of four Gods of water,

earth, air, and fire. If the early philosophers "had nothing but

theology behind them" (p. 138), why not infer theologies for the

old-established deities of Mesopotamia? Mr. Cornford adds to the

traditional factors that of "the temperaments of the individual

philosophers, which made one or other of those schemes the more

congenial to them." Following Dr. F. H. Bradley, he pronounces

that "almost all philosophic arguments are invented afterwards, to

recommend, or defend from attack, conclusions which the philosopher

was from the outset bent on believing before he could think of

any arguments at all. That is why philosophical reasonings are

so bad, so artificial, so unconvincing."

Upon this very principle it is much more likely that the

philosophic cults of water, earth, air, and fire originated in

the worships of Gods of those elements, whose priests would tend

to magnify their office. It is hard to see how "temperament"

could determine a man's bias to an air-theory in preference to a

water-theory. But if the priests of Ea the Water-God and those

of Bel the God of Air had framed theories of the kind, it is

conceivable that family or tribal ties and traditions might set

men upon developing the theory quasi-philosophically when the

alien Gods came to be recognized by thinking men as mere names

for the elements. [489] (Compare Flaubert's Salammbô as to the

probable rivalry of priests of the Sun and Moon.) A pantheistic

view, again, arose as we saw among various priesthoods in the

monarchies where syncretism arose out of political aggregations.

What is clear is that the religious or theistic basis had ceased to

exist for many educated Greeks in that environment. The old God-ideas

have disappeared, and a quasi-scientific attitude has been taken

up. It is apparently conditioned, perhaps fatally, by prior modes of

thought; but it operates in disregard of so-called religious needs,

and negates the normal religious conception of earthly government

or providence. Nevertheless, it was not destined to lead to the

rationalization of popular thought; and only in a small number of

cases did the scientific thinkers deeply concern themselves with the

enlightenment of the mass.

In another Ionian thinker of that age, indeed, we find alongside of

physical and philosophical speculation on the universe the most direct

and explicit assault upon popular religion that ancient history

preserves. Xenophanes of Kolophon (? 570-470), a contemporary

of Anaximandros, was forced by a Persian invasion or by some

revolution to leave his native city at the age of twenty-five; and

by his own account his doctrines, and inferribly his life, had gone

"up and down Greece"--in which we are to include Magna Graecia--for

sixty-seven years at the date of writing of one of his poems. [490]

This was presumably composed at Elea (Hyela or Velia), founded

about 536 B.C., on the western Italian coast, south of Paestum, by

unsubduable Phokaians seeking a new home after the Persian conquest,

and after they had been further defeated in the attempt to live as

pirates in Corsica. [491] Thither came the aged Xenophanes, perhaps

also seeking freedom. He seems to have lived hitherto as a rhapsode,

chanting his poems at the courts of tyrants as the Homerids did the

Iliad. It is hard indeed to conceive that his recitations included the

anti-religious passages which have come down to us; but his resort in

old age to the new community of Elea is itself a proof of a craving

and a need for free conditions of life. [492]

Setting out on his travels, doubtless, with the Ionian predilection for

a unitary philosophy, he had somewhere and somehow attained a pantheism

which transcended the concern for a "first principle"--if, indeed,

it was essentially distinct from the doctrine of Anaximandros. [493]

"Looking wistfully upon the whole heavens," says Aristotle, [494]

"he affirms that unity is God." From the scattered quotations which

are all that remain of his lost poem, On Nature (or Natural Things),

[495] it is hard to deduce any full conception of his philosophy;

but it is clear that it was monistic; and though most of his later

interpreters have acclaimed him as the herald of monotheism, it is only

in terms of pantheism that his various utterances can be reconciled. It

is clearly in that sense that Aristotle and Plato [496] commemorate

him as the first of the Eleatic monists. Repeatedly he speaks of

"the Gods" as well as of "God"; and he even inculcates the respectful

worship of them. [497] The solution seems to be that he thinks of the

forces and phenomena of Nature in the early way as Gods or Powers, but

resolves them in turn into a whole which includes all forms of power

and intelligence, but is not to be conceived as either physically or

mentally anthropomorphic. "His contemporaries would have been more

likely to call Xenophanes an atheist than anything else." [498]

The common verdict of the historians of philosophy, who find

in Xenophanes an early and elevated doctrine of "Monotheism,"

is closely tested by J. Freudenthal, Ueber die Theologie des

Xenophanes, 1886. As he shows, the bulk of them (cited by him,

pp. 2-7) do violence to Xenophanes's language in making him

out the proclaimer of a monotheistic doctrine to a polytheistic

world. That he was essentially a pantheist is now recognized by

a number of writers. Cp. Windelband, as cited, p. 48; Decharme,

as cited, p. 46 sq. Bréton, Poésie philos. en Grèce, pp. 47,

64 sq., had maintained the point, against Cousin, in 1882,

before Freudenthal. But Freudenthal in turn glosses part of the

problem in ascribing to Xenophanes an acceptance of polytheism

(cp. Burnet, p. 142), which kept him from molestation throughout

his life; whereas Anaxagoras, who had never attacked popular

belief with the directness of Xenophanes, was prosecuted for

atheism. Anaxagoras was of a later age, dwelling in an Athens in

which popular prejudice took readily to persecution, and political

malice resorted readily to religious pretences. Xenophanes

could hardly have published with impunity in Periklean Athens

his stinging impeachments of current God-ideas; and it remains

problematic whether he ever proclaimed them in face of the

multitude. It is only from long subsequent students that we get

them as quotations from his poetry; there is no record of their

effect on his contemporaries. That his God-idea was pantheistic

is sufficiently established by his attacks on anthropomorphism,

taken in connection with his doctrine of the All.

Whether as teaching meant for public currency or as a philosophic

message for the few, the pantheism of Xenophanes expressed itself in

an attack on anthropomorphic religion, no less direct and much more

ratiocinative than that of any Hebrew prophet upon idolatry. "Mortals,"

he wrote, in a famous passage, "suppose that the Gods are born, and

wear man's clothing, [499] and have voice and body. But if cattle

or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and make works

of art as men do, they would paint their Gods and give them bodies

like their own--horses like horses, cattle like cattle." And again:

"Ethiopians make their Gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say

theirs have reddish hair and blue eyes; so also they conceive the

spirits of the Gods to be like themselves." [500] On Homer and Hesiod,

the myth-singers, his attack is no less stringent: "They attributed

to the Gods all things that with men are of ill-fame and blame;

they told of them countless nefarious things--thefts, adulteries,

and deception of each other." [501] It is recorded of him further

that, like Epicurus, he absolutely rejected all divination. [502]

And when the Eleans, perhaps somewhat shaken by such criticism, asked

him whether they should sacrifice and sing a dirge to Leukothea,

the child-bereft Sea-Goddess, he bade them not to sing a dirge if

they thought her divine, and not to sacrifice if she were human. [503]

Beside this ringing radicalism, not yet out of date, the physics of

the Eleatic freethinker is less noticeable. His resort to earth as a

material first principle was but another guess or disguised theosophy

added to those of his predecessors, and has no philosophic congruity

with his pantheism. It is interesting to find him reasoning from

fossil-marks that what was now land had once been sea-covered, and

been left mud; and that the moon is probably inhabited. [504] Yet,

with all this alertness of speculation, Xenophanes sounds the note

of merely negative skepticism which, for lack of fruitful scientific

research, was to become more and more common in Greek thought: [505]

"no man," he avows in one verse, "knows truly anything, and no man

ever will." [506] More fruitful was his pantheism or pankosmism. "The

All (oulos)" he declared, "sees, thinks, and hears." [507]

"It was thus from Xenophanes that the doctrine of Pankosmism first

obtained introduction into Greek philosophy, recognizing nothing real

except the universe as an indivisible and unchangeable whole." [508]

His negative skepticism might have guarded later Hellenes against

baseless cosmogony-making if they had been capable of a systematic

intellectual development. His sagacity, too, appears in his protest

[509] against that extravagant worship of the athlete which from

first to last kept popular Greek life-philosophy unprogressive. But

here least of all was he listened to.

It is after a generation of such persistent questioning of Nature

and custom by pioneer Greeks that we find in Herakleitos of Ephesus

(fl. 500 B.C.)--still in the Ionian culture-sphere--a positive and

unsparing criticism of the prevailing beliefs. No sage among the

Ionians (who had already produced a series of powerful thinkers) left

a deeper impression than he of massive force and piercing intensity:

above all of the gnomic utterances of his age, his have the ring of

character and the edge of personality; and the gossiping Diogenes,

after setting out by calling him the most arrogant of men, concedes

that the brevity and weight of his expression are not to be matched. It

was due rather to this, probably, than to his metaphysic--though that

has an arresting quality--that there grew up a school of Herakliteans

calling themselves by his name. And though doubt attaches to some of

his sayings, and even to his date, there can be small question that

he was mordantly freethinking, though a man of royal descent. He has

stern sayings about "bringing forth untrustworthy witnesses to confirm

disputed points," and about eyes and ears being "bad witnesses for

men, when their souls lack understanding." [510] "What can be seen,

heard, and learned, this I prize," is one of his declarations; and

he is credited with contemning book-learning as having failed to

give wisdom to Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Hekataios. [511]

The belief in progress, he roundly insists, stops progress. [512] From

his cryptic utterances it maybe gathered that he too was a pantheist;

[513] and from his insistence on the immanence of strife in all things,

[514] as from others of his sayings, that he was of the Stoic mood. It

was doubtless in resentment of immoral religion that he said [515]

Homer and Archilochos deserved flogging; as he is severe on the

phallic worship of Dionysos, [516] on the absurdity of prayer to

images, and on popular pietism in general. [517] One of his sayings,

êthos anthrôpô daimôn, [518] "character is a man's dæmon," seems

to be the definite assertion of rationalism in affairs as against

the creed of special providences.

A confusion of tradition has arisen between the early Herakleitos,

"the Obscure," and the similarly-named writer of the first century

of our era, who was either one Herakleides or one using the

name of Herakleitos. As the later writer certainly allegorized

Homer--reducing Apollo to the Sun, Athenê to Thought, and so

on--and claimed thus to free him from the charge of impiety,

it seems highly probable that it is from him that the scholiast

on the Iliad, xv, 18, cites the passage scolding the atheists

who attacked the Homeric myths. The theme and the tone do not

belong to 500 B.C., when only the boldest--as Herakleitos--would

be likely to attack Homer, and when there is no other literary

trace of atheism. Grote, however (i, 374, note), cites the

passages without comment as referring to the early philosopher,

who is much more probably credited, as above, with denouncing

Homer himself. Concerning the later Herakleitos or Herakleides,

see Dr. Hatch's Hibbert Lectures on The Influence of Greek Ideas

and Usages upon the Christian Church, 1890, pp. 61, 62.

But even apart from the confusion with the late Herakleides,

there is difficulty in settling the period of the Ephesian

thinker. Diogenes Laërtius states that he flourished about

the 69th Olympiad (504-500 B.C.). Another account, preserved by

Eusebius, places him in the 80th or 81st Olympiad, in the infancy

of Sokrates, and for this date there are other grounds (Ueberweg,

i, 40); but yet other evidences carry us back to the earlier. As

Diogenes notes five writers of the name--two being poets, one a

historian, and one a "serio-comic" personage--and there is record

of many other men named Herakleitos and several Herakleides,

there is considerable room for false attributions. The statement

of Diogenes that the Ephesian was "wont to call opinion the

sacred disease" (i, 6, § 7) is commonly relegated to the spurious

sayings of Herakleitos, and it suggests the last mentioned of his

namesakes. But see Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures on Indian Religion,

p. 6, for the opinion that it is genuine, and that by "opinion"

was meant "religion." The saying, says Dr. Müller, "seems to me

to have the massive, full, and noble ring of Herakleitos." It is

hardly for rationalists to demur.

Much discussion has been set up by the common attribution

to Herakleitos in antiquity of the doctrine of the ultimate

conflagration of all things. But for this there is no ground in any

actual passage preserved from his works; and it appears to have

been a mere misconception of his doctrine in regard to Fire. His

monistic doctrine was, in brief, that all the opposing and contrasted

things in the universe, heat and cold, day and night, evil and good,

imply each other, and exist only in the relation of contrast; and he

conceived fire as something in which opposites were solved. [519]

Upon this stroke of mysticism was concentrated the discussion

which might usefully have been turned on his criticism of popular

religion; his negative wisdom was substantially ignored, and his

obscure speculation, treated as his main contribution to thought,

was misunderstood and perverted.

A limit was doubtless soon set to free speech even in Elea; and the

Eleatic school after Xenophanes, in the hands of his pupil Parmenides

(fl. 500 B.C.), Zeno (fl. 464), Melissos of Samos (fl. 444), and

their successors, is found turning first to deep metaphysic and

then to verbal dialectic, to discussion on being and not being,

the impossibility of motion, and the trick-problem of Achilles and

the tortoise. It is conceivable that thought took these lines because

others were socially closed. Parmenides, a notably philosophic spirit

(whom Plato, meeting him in youth, felt to have "an exceptionally

wonderful depth of mind," but regarded as a man to be feared as well

as reverenced), [520] made short work of the counter-sense of not

being, but does not seem to have dealt at close quarters with popular

creeds. Melissos, a man of action, who led a successful sally to

capture the Athenian fleet, [521] was apparently the most pronounced

freethinker of the three named, [522] in that he said of the Gods

"there was no need to define them, since there was no knowledge of

them." [523] Such utterance could not be carried far in any Greek

community; and there lacked the spirit of patient research which

might have fruitfully developed the notable hypothesis of Parmenides

that the earth is spherical in form. [524] But he too was a loose

guesser, adding categories of fire and earth and heat and cold to the

formative and material "principles" of his predecessors; and where he

divagated weaker minds could not but lose themselves. From Melissos

and Parmenides there is accordingly a rapid descent in philosophy

to professional verbalism, popular life the while proceeding on the

old levels.

It was in this epoch of declining energy and declining freedom that

there grew up the nugatory doctrine, associated with the Eleatic

school, [525] that the only realities are mental, [526] a formula

which eluded at once the problems of Nature and the crudities

of religion, and so made its fortune with the idle educated

class. Meant to support the cause of reason, it was soon turned,

as every slackly-held doctrine must be, to a different account. In

the hands of Plato it developed into the doctrine of ideas, which in

the later Christian world was to play so large a part, as "Realism,"

in checking scientific thought; and in Greece it fatally fostered

the indolent evasion of research in physics. [527] Ultimately this

made for supernaturalism, which had never been discarded by the main

body even of rationalizing thinkers. [528] Thus the geographer and

historian Hekataios of Miletos (fl. 500 B.C.), living at the great

centre of rationalism, while rejecting the mass of Greek fables as

"ridiculous," and proceeding in a fashion long popular to translate

them into historical facts, yet affected, in the poetic Greek fashion,

to be of divine descent. [529] At the same time he held by such fables

as that of the floating island in the Nile and that of the supernormal

Hyperboreans. This blending of old and new habits of mind is indeed

perhaps the strongest ground for affirming the genuineness of his

fragments, which has been disputed. [530] But from his time forward

there are many signs of a broad movement of criticism, doubt, inquiry,

and reconstruction, involving an extensive discussion of historical

as well as religious tradition. [531] There had begun, in short,

for the rapidly-developing Greeks, a "discovery of man" such as is

ascribed in later times to the age of the Italian Renaissance. In the

next generation came the father of humanists, Herodotos, who implicitly

carries the process of discrimination still further than did Hekataios;

while Sophocles [496-405 B.C.], without ever challenging popular faith,

whether implicitly as did Æschylus, or explicitly as did Euripides,

"brought down the drama from the skies to the earth; and the drama

still follows the course which Sophocles first marked out for it. It

was on the Gods, the struggles of the Gods, and on destiny that

Æschylus dwelt; it is with man that Sophocles is concerned." [532]

Still, there was only to be a partial enlightenment of the race,

such as we have seen occurring, perhaps about the same period, in

India. Sophocles, even while dramatizing the cruel consequences of

Greek religion, never made any sign of being delivered from the

ordinary Greek conceptions of deity, or gave any help to wiser

thought. The social difference between Greece and the monarchic

civilizations was after all only one of degree: there, as elsewhere,

the social problem was finally unsolved; and the limits to Greek

progress were soon approached. But the evolution went far in many

places, and it is profoundly interesting to trace it.

§ 5

Compared with the early Milesians and with Xenophanes, the elusive

Pythagoras (fl. 540-510 B.C.) is not so much a rationalistic as a

theosophic freethinker; but to freethought his name belongs insofar

as the system connected with it did rationalize, and discarded

mythology. If the biographic data be in any degree trustworthy,

it starts like Milesian speculation from oriental precedents. [533]

Pythagoras was of Samos in the Ægean; and the traditions have it that

he was a pupil of Pherekydes the Syrian, and that before settling at

Krôton, in Italy, he travelled in Egypt, and had intercourse with the

Chaldean Magi. Some parts of the Pythagorean code of life, at least,

point to an eastern derivation.

The striking resemblance between the doctrine and practice of the

Pythagoreans and those of the Jewish Essenes has led Zeller to

argue (Philos. der Griechen, Th. iii, Abth. 2) that the latter were

a branch of the former. Bishop Lightfoot, on the other hand, noting

that the Essenes did not hold the specially prominent Pythagorean

doctrines of numbers and of the transmigration of souls, traces

Essenism to Zoroastrian influence (Ed. of Colossians, App. on

the Essenes, pp. 150-51; rep. in Dissertations on the Apostolic

Age, 1892, pp. 369-72). This raises the issue whether both

Pythagoreanism and Essenism were not of Persian derivation; and

Dr. Schürer (Jewish People in the Time of Jesus, Eng. tr. Div. II,

vol. ii, p. 218) pronounces in favour of an oriental origin for

both. The new connection between Persia and Ionia just at or before

the time of Pythagoras (fl. 530 B.C.) squares with this view;

but it is further to be noted that the phenomenon of monasticism,

common to Pythagoreans and Essenes, arises in Buddhism about the

Pythagorean period; and as it is hardly likely that Buddhism

in the sixth century B.C. reached Asia Minor, there remains

the possibility of some special diffusion of the new ideal

from the Babylonian sphere after the conquest by Cyrus, there

being no trace of a Persian monastic system. The resemblances

to Orphicism likewise suggest a Babylonian source, as does the

doctrine of numbers, which is not Zoroastrian. As to Buddhism,

the argument for a Buddhist origin of Essenism shortly before our

era (cp. A. Lillie, Buddhism in Christendom and The Influence of

Buddhism on Primitive Christianity; E. Bunsen, The Angel-Messiah;

or, Buddhists, Essenes, and Christians--all three to be read

with much caution) does not meet the case of the Pythagorean

precedents for Essenism. Prof. Burnet (Early Greek Philos. 2nd

ed. p. 102) notes close Indian parallels to Pythagoreanism,

but overlooks the intermediate Persian parallels, and falls back

very unnecessarily on the bald notion that "the two systems were

independently evolved from the same primitive systems."

As regards the mystic doctrine that numbers are, as it were, the moving

principle in the cosmos--another thesis not unlikely to arise in that

Babylonian world whence came the whole system of numbers for the later

ancients [534]--we can but pronounce it a development of thought in

vacuo, and look further for the source of Pythagorean influence in

the moral and social code of the movement, in its science, in its

pantheism, [535] its contradictory dualism, [536] and perhaps in its

doctrine of transmigration of souls. On the side of natural science,

its absurdities [537] point to the fatal lack of observation which

so soon stopped progress in Greek physics and biology. [538] Yet in

the fields of astronomy, mathematics, and the science of sound the

school seems to have done good scientific work; being indeed praised

by the critical Aristotle for doing special service in that way. [539]

It is recorded that Philolaos, the successor of Pythagoras, was the

first to teach openly (about 460 B.C.) the doctrine of the motion

of the earth [540]--which, however, as above noted, was also said

to have been previously taught by Anaximandros [541] (from whom some

incline to derive the Pythagorean theory of numbers in general [542])

and by Hiketas or Iketas (or Niketas) of Syracuse. [543] Ekphantos,

of that city, is also credited with asserting the revolution of

the earth on its axis; and he too is grouped with the Pythagoreans,

though he seems to have had a pantheism of his own. [544] Philolaos

in particular is said to have been prosecuted for his teaching, [545]

which for many was a blasphemy; and it may be that this was the reason

of its being specially ascribed to him, though current in the East

long before his day. In the fragments ascribed to him is affirmed,

in divergence from other Pythagoreans, the eternity of the earth; and

in other ways he seems to have been an innovator. [546] In any case,

the Pythagorean conception of the earth's motion was a speculative

one, wide of the facts, and not identical with the modern doctrine,

save insofar as Pythagoras--or Philolaos--had rightly conceived the

earth as a sphere. [547]

It is noteworthy, however, that in conjecturing that the whole

solar system moves round a "central fire," Pythagoras carried his

thought nearly as far as the moderns. The fanciful side of his

system is seen in his hypothesis of a counter-earth (Anti-chthon)

invented to bring up the number of celestial bodies in our system

to ten, the "complete" number. (Berry, as cited.) Narrien (p. 163)

misses this simple explanation of the idea.

As to politics, finally, it seems hard to solve the anomaly that

Pythagoras is pronounced the first teacher of the principle of

community of goods, [548] and that his adherents at Krôton formed an

aristocratic league, so detested by the people for its anti-democratism

that its members were finally massacred in their meeting-place,

their leader, according to one tradition, being slain with them,

while according to a better grounded account he had withdrawn

and died at Metapontion. The solution seems to be that the early

movement was in no way monastic or communistic; that it was, however,

a secret society; that it set up a kind of puritanism or "methodism"

which repelled conservative people; and that, whatever its doctrines,

its members were mostly of the upper class. [549] If they held by the

general rejection of popular religion attributed to Pythagoras, they

would so much the more exasperate the demos; for though at Krôton,

as in the other Grecian colonial cities, there was considerable

freedom of thought and speech, the populace can nowhere have been

freethinking. [550] In any case, it was after its political overthrow,

and still more in the Italian revival of the second century B.C.,

that the mystic and superstitious features of Pythagoreanism were

most multiplied; and doubtless the master's teachings were often much

perverted by his devotees. It was only too easy. He had laid down, as

so many another moralist, that justice consisted in reciprocity; but

he taught of virtue in terms of his theory of numbers [551]--a sure way

of putting conduct out of touch with reality. Thus we find some of the

later Pythagoreans laying it down as a canon that no story once fully

current concerning the Gods was to be disbelieved [552]--the complete

negation of philosophical freethought and a sharp contradiction of the

other view which represented the shade of Pythagoras as saying that he

had seen in Tartaros the shade of Homer hanged to a tree, and that of

Hesiod chained to a pillar of brass, for the monstrous things they had

ascribed to the Gods. [553] It must have taken a good deal of decadence

to bring an innovating sect to that pass; and even about 200 B.C. we

find the freethinking Ennius at Rome calling himself a Pythagorean;

[554] but the course of things in Magna Graecia was mostly downward

after the sixth century; the ferocious destruction of Sybaris by the

Krotoniates helping to promote the decline. [555] Intellectual life,

in Magna Graecia as in Ionia, obeyed the general tendency.

An opposite view of the Pythagorean evolution is taken by

Professor Burnet. He is satisfied that the long list of the

Pythagorean taboos, which he rightly pronounces to be "of a

thoroughly primitive type" (p. 105), and not at all the subtle

"symbols" which they were latterly represented to be, were

really the lore of Pythagoras. It is not easy thus to conceive a

thinker of the great Ionian age as holding by thoroughly primitive

superstitions. Perhaps the solution lies in Aristotle's statement

that Pythagoras was first a mathematician, and only in later

life a Pherekydean miracle-monger (Burnet, p. 107, note 3). He

may actually have started the symbolic view of the taboos which

he imposed.

Before the decadence comes, however, the phenomenon of rationalism

occurs on all sides in the colonial cities, older and younger alike;

and direct criticism of creed kept pace with the indirect. About

520 B.C. Theagenes of Rhegion, in Southern Italy, had begun for

the Greeks the process of reducing the unacceptable God-stories in

Homer and Hesiod--notably the battle of the Gods in the Iliad--to

mere allegories of the cosmic elements [556]--a device natural to

and practised by liberal conservatives in all religious systems

under stress of skeptical attack, and afterwards much employed in

the Hellenic world. [557] Soon the attack became more stringent. At

Syracuse we find the great comic dramatist Epicharmos, about 470

B.C., treating the deities on the stage in a spirit of such audacious

burlesque [558] as must be held to imply unbelief. Aristophanes, at

Athens, indeed, shows a measure of the same spirit while posing as

a conservative in religion; but Epicharmos was professedly something

of a Pythagorean and philosopher, [559] and was doubtless protected by

Hiero, at whose court he lived, against any religious resentment he may

have aroused. The story of Simonides's answer to Hiero's question as

to the nature of the Gods--first asking a day to think, then two days,

then four, then avowing that meditation only made the problem harder

[560]--points to the prevalent tone among the cultured.

§ 6

At last the critical spirit finds utterance, in the great Periklean

period, at Athens, but first by way of importation from Ionia,

where Miletos had fallen in the year 494. Anaxagoras of Klazomenai

(fl. 480-450 B.C.; d. 428) is the first freethinker historically

known to have been legally prosecuted and condemned [561] for his

freethought; and it was in the Athens of Perikles, despite Perikles's

protection, that the attack was made. Coming of the Ionian line

of thinkers, and himself a pupil of Anaximenes of Miletos, he held

firmly by the scientific view of the cosmos, and taught that the sun,

instead of being animated and a deity as the Athenians believed, was

"a red-hot mass many times larger than the Peloponnesos" [562]--and

the moon a fiery (or earthy) solid body having in it plains and

mountains and valleys--this while asserting that infinite mind was

the source and introducer of all the motion in the infinite universe;

[563] infinite in extent and infinitely divisible. This "materialistic"

doctrine as to the heavenly bodies was propounded, as Sokrates tells in

his defence, in books that in his day anyone could buy for a drachma;

and Anaxagoras further taught, like Theagenes, that the mythical

personages of the poets were mere abstractions invested with name

and gender. [564] Withal he was no brawler; and even in pious Athens,

where he taught in peace for many years, he might have died in peace

but for his intimacy with the most renowned of his pupils, Perikles.

The question of the deity of the sun raised an interesting

sociological question. Athenians saw no blasphemy in saying that

Gê (Gaia) or Dêmêter was the earth: they had always understood as

much; and the earth was simply for them a Goddess; a vast living

thing containing the principle of life. They might similarly have

tolerated the description of the sun as a kind of red-hot earth,

provided that its divinity were not challenged. The trouble lay

rather in the negative than in the positive assertion, though

the latter must for many have been shocking, inasmuch as they had

never been wont to think about the sun as they did about the earth.

It is told of Perikles (499-429 B.C.) by the pious Plutarch,

himself something of a believer in portents, that he greatly admired

Anaxagoras, from whom he "seems to have learned to despise those

superstitious fears which the common phenomena of the heavens produce

in those who, ignorant of their cause, and knowing nothing about

them, refer them all to the immediate action of the Gods." [565]

And even the stately eloquence and imperturbable bearing of the great

statesman are said to have been learned from the Ionian master, whom he

followed in "adorning his oratory with apt illustrations from physical

science." [566] The old philosopher, however, whom men called "Nous"

or Intelligence because of the part the name played in his teaching,

left his property to go to ruin in his devotion to ideas; and it is

told, with small probability, that at one time, old and indigent,

he covered his head with his robe and decided to starve to death;

till Perikles, hearing of it, hastened to beseech him to live to give

his pupil counsel. [567]

At length it occurred to the statesman's enemies to strike at him

through his guide, philosopher, and friend. They had already procured

the banishment of another of his teachers, Damon, as "an intriguer and

a friend of despotism"; [568] and one of their fanatics, Diopeithes,

a priest and a violent demagogue, [569] laid the way for an attack

on Anaxagoras by obtaining the enactment of a law that "prosecutions

should be laid against all who disbelieved in religion and held

theories of their own about things on high." [570] Anaxagoras was

thus open to indictment on the score alike of his physics and of his

mythology; though, seeing that his contemporary Diogenes of Apollonia

(who before Demokritos taught "nothing out of nothing: nothing

into nothing," and affirmed the sphericity of the earth) was also

in some danger of his life at Athens, [571] it is probable that the

prosecution was grounded on his physicist teaching. Saved by Perikles

from the death punishment, but by one account fined five talents,

[572] he either was exiled or chose to leave the intolerant city;

and he made his home at Lampsakos, where, as the story runs, he won

from the municipality the favour that every year the children should

have a holiday in the month in which he died. [573] It is significant

of his general originality that he was reputed the first Greek who

wrote a book in prose. [574]

Philosophically, however, he counted for less than he did as an

innovating rationalist. His doctrine of Nous amounted in effect to a

reaffirmation of deity; and he has been not unjustly described [575]

as the philosophic father of the dualistic deism or theism which,

whether from within or from without the Christian system, has been the

prevailing form of religious philosophy in the modern world. It was, in

fact, the only form of theistic philosophy capable of winning any wide

assent among religiously biassed minds; and it is the more remarkable

that such a theist should have been prosecuted because his notion of

deity was mental, and excluded the divinization of the heavenly bodies.

In the memorable episode of his expulsion from Athens we have a

finger-post to the road travelled later by Greek civilization. At

Athens itself the bulk of the free population was ignorant and bigoted

enough to allow of the law being used by any fanatic or malignant

partisan against any professed rationalist; and there is no sign

that Perikles dreamt of applying the one cure for the evil--the

systematic bestowal of rationalistic instruction on all. The fatal

maxim of ancient skepticism, that religion is a necessary restraint

upon the multitude, brought it about that everywhere, in the last

resort, the unenlightened multitude became a restraint upon reason and

freethought. [576] In the more aristocratically ruled colonial cities,

as we have seen, philosophic speech was comparatively free: it was

the ignorant Athenian democracy that brought religious intolerance

into Greek life, playing towards science, in form of law, the part

that the fanatics of Egypt and Palestine had played towards the

worshippers of other Gods than their own.

With a baseness of which the motive may be divided between the

instincts of faction and of faith, the anti-Periklean party carried

their attack yet further; and on their behalf a comic playwright,

Hermippos, brought a charge of impiety against the statesman's unwedded

wife, Aspasia. [577] There can be no doubt that that famous woman

cordially shared the opinions and ideals of her husband, joining as

she habitually did in the philosophic talk of his home circle. As a

Milesian she was likely enough to be a freethinker; and all that was

most rational in Athens acknowledged her culture and her charm. [578]

Perikles, who had not taken the risk of letting Anaxagoras come to

trial, himself defended Aspasia before the dikastery, his indignation

breaking through his habitual restraint in a passion of tears, which,

according to the jealous Æschines, [579] won an acquittal.

Placed as he was, Perikles could but guard his own head and heart,

leaving the evil instrument of a religious inquisition to subsist. How

far he held with Anaxagoras we can but divine. [580] There is probably

no truth in Plutarch's tale that "whenever he ascended the tribune

to speak he used first to pray to the Gods that nothing unfitted for

the occasion might fall from his lips." [581] But as a party leader

he, as a matter of course, observed the conventions; and he may have

reasoned that the prosecutions of Anaxagoras and Aspasia, like that

directed against Pheidias, stood merely for contemporary political

malice, and not for any lasting danger to mental freedom. However

that might be, Athens continued to remain the most aggressively

intolerant and tradition-mongering of Hellenic cities. So marked

is this tendency among the Athenians that for modern students

Herodotos, whose history was published in 445 B.C., is relatively

a rationalist in his treatment of fable, [582] bringing as he did

the spirit of Ionia into things traditional and religious. But even

Herodotos remains wedded to the belief in oracles or prophecies,

claiming fulfilment for those said to have been uttered by Bakis;

[583] and his small measure of spontaneous skepticism could avail

little for critical thought. To no man, apparently, did it occur to

resist the religious spirit by systematic propaganda: that, like the

principle of representative government, was to be hit upon only in a

later age. [584] Not by a purely literary culture, relating life merely

to poetry and myth, tradition and superstition, were men to be made

fit to conduct a stable society. And the spirit of pious persecution,

once generated, went from bad to worse, crowning itself with crime,

till at length the overthrow of Athenian self-government wrought a

forlorn liberty of scientific speech at the cost of the liberty of

political action which is the basis of all sound life.