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The religious and mythological background of Greek thought was profoundly pluralistic in character. When successive waves of Greek-speaking Indo-European nomadic warriors began sweeping into the lands of the Aegean around the turn of the second millennium B.C ., they brought with them their heroic patriarchal mythology, presided over by the great sky-god Zeus. Although the ancient matriarchal mythologies of the indigenous pre-Hellenic societies, including the highly developed Minoan goddess-worshiping civilization on Crete, were eventually subordinated to the religion of the conquerors, they were not entirely suppressed. For the northern male deities mated with and married the ancient southern goddesses, as Zeus did Hera, and this complex amalgamation which came to constitute the Olympian pantheon did much to ensure the dynamism and vitality of classical Greek myth. Moreover, this pluralism in the Hellenic inheritance was further expressed in the continuing dichotomy between, on the one hand, Greek public religion, with its polis festivals and civic rituals focused on the major Olympian deities, and, on the other, the widely popular mystery religions—Orphic, Dionysian, Eleusinian—whose esoteric rites drew on pre-Greek and Oriental religious traditions: death-rebirth initiations, agricultural fertility cults, and worship of the Great Mother Goddess.
Given the oath-bound secrecy of the mystery religions, it is difficult from the present vantage point to judge the relative significance of the various forms of Hellenic religious belief for individual Greeks. What is evident, however, is the pervasive archetypal resonance of the archaic Greek vision, expressed above all in the foundational epic poems of Greek culture that have come down to us, the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey . Here, at the luminous dawn of the Western literary tradition, was captured the primordial mythological sensibility in which the events of human existence were perceived as intimately related to and informed by the eternal realm of gods and goddesses. The archaic Greek vision reflected an intrinsic unity of immediate sense perception and timeless meaning, of particular circumstance and universal drama, of human activity and divine motivation. Historical persons lived out a mythic heroism in war and wandering, while Olympian deities watched and intervened over the plain of Troy. The play of the senses on an outflung world bright with color and drama was never separated from a comprehension of the world’s meaning that was both ordered and mythic. Keen apprehension of the physical world—of seas and mountains and dawns, of banquets and battles, of bows, helmets, and chariots—was permeated with the felt presence of the gods in nature and human destiny. The immediacy and freshness of the Homeric vision was paradoxically tied to a virtually conceptual understanding of the world governed by an ancient and venerable mythology.
Even the towering figure of Homer himself suggested a peculiarly indivisible synthesis of the individual and the universal. The monumental epic poems were brought forth from a greater collective psyche, creations of the Hellenic racial imagination passed on, developed, and refined generation after generation, bard after bard. Yet within the established formulaic patterns of oral tradition that governed the epics’ composition there also lived an unmistakably personal particularity, a flexible individualism and spontaneity of style and vision. Thus “Homer” was ambiguously both an individual human poet and a collective personification of the entire ancient Greek memory.
The values expressed in the Homeric epics, composed around the eighth century B.C ., continued to inspire successive generations of Greeks throughout antiquity, and the many figures of the Olympian pantheon, systematically delineated somewhat later in Hesiod’s Theogony, informed and pervaded the Greek cultural vision. In the various divinities and their powers lay a sense of the universe as an ordered whole, a cosmos rather than a chaos. The natural world and the human world were not distinguishable domains in the archaic Greek universe, for a single fundamental order structured both nature and society, and embodied the divine justice that empowered Zeus, the ruler of the gods. Although the universal order was especially represented in Zeus, even he was ultimately bound by an impersonal fate ( moira ) that governed all and that maintained a certain equilibrium of forces. The gods were indeed often capricious in their actions, with human destinies in the balance. Yet the whole cohered, and the forces of order prevailed over those of chaos—just as the Olympians led by Zeus had defeated the Giants in the primeval struggle for rulership of the world, and just as Odysseus after his long and perilous wanderings at last triumphantly achieved home. 2
By the fifth century B.C ., the great Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were employing the ancient myths to explore the deeper themes of the human condition. Courage, cunning and strength, nobility and the striving for immortal glory were the characteristic virtues of the epic heroes. Yet however great the individual, man’s lot was circumscribed by fate and the fact of his mortality. It was above all the superior man whose actions could draw the destructive wrath of the gods upon him, often because of his hubris, sometimes seemingly unjustly. Against the backdrop of that opposition between human endeavor and divine stricture, between free will and fate, sin and retribution, the moral struggle of the protagonist unfolded. In the hands of the tragedians, the conflicts and sufferings that had been straightforwardly and unreflectively portrayed in Homer and Hesiod were now subjected to the psychological and existential probings of a later, more critical temperament. What had been long-accepted absolutes were now searched, questioned, suffered through with a new consciousness of the human predicament. On the stage of the Dionysian religious festivals in Athens, the pronounced Greek sense of the heroic, balanced against and in integral relation to an equally acute awareness of pain, death, and fate, discharged itself in the context of mythic drama. And just as Homer was called the educator of Greece, so too were the tragedians expressive of the culture’s deepening spirit and shapers of its moral character, with the theatrical performances as much communal religious sacrament as artistic event.
For both archaic poet and classical tragedian, the world of myth endowed human experience with an ennobling clarity of vision, a higher order that redeemed the wayward pathos of life. The universal gave comprehensibility to the concrete. If, in the tragic vision, character determined fate, yet both were mythically perceived. Compared with the Homeric epics, Athenian tragedy reflected a more conscious sense of the gods’ metaphorical significance and a more poignant appreciation of human self-awareness and suffering. Yet through profound suffering came profound learning, and the history and drama of human existence, for all its harsh conflict and wrenching contradiction, still held overarching purpose and meaning. The myths were the living body of that meaning, constituting a language that both reflected and illuminated the essential processes of life.
With its Olympian order, the mythic world of Homer and Sophocles possessed a complex intelligibility, but this persistent desire for system and clarity in the Greek vision, as well as the growing humanism visible in the tragedies, was beginning to take new forms. The great shift had already commenced in the early sixth century B.C . in the large and prosperous Ionian city of Miletus, situated in the eastern part of the Greek world on the coast of Asia Minor. Here Thales and his successors Anaximander and Anaximenes, endowed with both leisure and curiosity, initiated an approach to understanding the world that was radically novel and extraordinarily consequential. Perhaps they were impelled by their Ionian location, where they were confronted with neighboring civilizations that possessed mythologies differing both from each other and from the Greek. Perhaps, too, they were influenced by the social organization of the Greek polis, which was governed by impersonal, uniform laws rather than the arbitrary acts of a despot. Yet whatever their immediate inspiration, these prototypical scientists made the remarkable assumption that an underlying rational unity and order existed within the flux and variety of the world, and established for themselves the task of discovering a simple fundamental principle, or arche, that both governed nature and composed its basic substance. In so doing, they began to complement their traditional mythological understanding with more impersonal and conceptual explanations based on their observations of natural phenomena.
At this pivotal stage, there was a distinct overlap of the mythic and scientific modes, visible in the principal statement attributed to Thales in which he affirmed both a single unifying primary substance and a divine omnipresence: “All is water, and the world is full of gods.” Thales and his successors proposed that nature arose from a self-animated substance that continued to move and change itself into various forms. 3 Because it was author of its own ordered motions and transmutations, and because it was everlasting, this primary substance was considered to be not only material but also alive and divine. Much like Homer, these earliest philosophers perceived nature and divinity as yet intertwined. They also maintained something of the old Homeric sense of a moral order governing the cosmos, an impersonal fate that preserved the world’s equilibrium amidst all its changes.
But the decisive step had been taken. The Greek mind now strove to discover a natural explanation for the cosmos by means of observation and reasoning, and these explanations soon began to shed their residual mythological components. Ultimate, universal questions were being asked, and answers were being sought from a new quarter—the human mind’s critical analysis of material phenomena. Nature was to be explained in terms of nature itself, not of something fundamentally beyond nature, and in impersonal terms rather than by means of personal gods and goddesses. The primitive universe ruled by anthropomorphic deities began to give way to a world whose source and substance was a primary natural element such as water, air, or fire. In time, these primary substances would cease to be endowed with divinity or intelligence, and would instead be understood as purely material entities mechanically moved by chance or blind necessity. But already a rudimentary naturalistic empiricism was being born. And as man’s independent intelligence grew stronger, the sovereign power of the old gods grew weak.
The next step in this philosophical revolution, a step no less consequential than that of Thales a century earlier, was taken in the western part of the Greek world in southern Italy (Magna Graecia) when Parmenides of Elea approached the problem of what was genuinely real by means of a purely abstract rational logic. Again, as with the early Ionians, Parmenides’s thought possessed a peculiar combination of traditional religious and novel secular elements. From what he described as a divine revelation emerged his achievement of an unprecedentedly rigorous deductive logic. In their search for simplicity in explaining nature, the Ionian philosophers had stated that the world was one thing, but had become many. But in Parmenides’s early struggle with language and logic, “to be” something made it impossible for it to change into something it is not, for what “is not” cannot be said to exist at all. Similarly, he argued that “what is” can never have come into being or pass away, since something cannot come from nothing or turn into nothing if nothing cannot exist at all. Things cannot be as they appear to the senses: the familiar world of change, motion, and multiplicity must be mere opinion, for the true reality by logical necessity is changeless and unitary.
These rudimentary but foundational developments in logic necessitated thinking through for the first time such matters as the difference between the real and the apparent, between rational truth and sensory perception, and between being and becoming. Of equal importance, Parmenides’s logic eventually forced into the open the distinction between a static material substance and a dynamic ordering life-force (which had been presumed identical by the Ionians), and thereby highlighted the basic problem of what caused motion in the universe. But most significant was Parmenides’s declaration of the autonomy and superiority of the human reason as judge of reality. For what was real was intelligible—an object of intellectual apprehension, not of sense perception.
These two advancing trends of naturalism and rationalism impelled the development of a series of increasingly sophisticated theories to explain the natural world. Obliged to reconcile the conflicting demands of sensory observation with the new logical rigor, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and finally the atomists attempted to explain the world’s apparent change and multiplicity by reinterpreting and modifying Parmenides’s absolute monism—reality as one, motionless, and changeless—in terms of more pluralistic systems. Each of these systems adhered to Parmenides’s view that what was real could not ultimately come into being or pass away, but they interpreted the apparent birth and destruction of natural objects as being the consequence of a multiplicity of fundamental unchanging elements which alone were truly real, and which moved into and out of various combinations to form the objects of the world. The elements themselves did not come into being or pass away. Only their constantly shifting combinations were subject to such change. Empedocles posited four ultimate root elements—earth, water, air, and fire—which were eternal, and which were moved together and apart by the primary forces of Love and Strife. Anaxagoras proposed that the universe was constituted by an infinite number of minute, qualitatively different seeds. But instead of explaining matter’s movement in terms of blind semimythic forces (such as Love and Strife), he postulated a transcendent primordial Mind ( Nous ), which set the material universe into motion and gave it form and order.
But the most comprehensive system in this development was that of atomism. In an attempt to fulfill the Ionians’ search for an elementary substance constituting the material world, while also overcoming the Parmenidean argument against change and multiplicity, Leucippus and his successor Democritus constructed a complex explanation of all phenomena in purely materialistic terms: The world was composed exclusively of uncaused and immutable material atoms—a unitary changeless substance, as Parmenides required, though of infinite number. These invisibly minute and indivisible particles perpetually moved about in a boundless void and by their random collisions and varying combinations produced the phenomena of the visible world. The atoms were qualitatively identical, different only in shape and size—i.e., in quantitative and hence measurable terms. Democritus further answered Parmenides’s objection by stating that what “is not” could indeed exist, in the sense of a void—an empty but real space which made room for the atoms to move and combine. The atoms were moved mechanically, not by any cosmic intelligence such as the Nous , but by the blind chance of natural necessity ( anankē ). All human knowledge was derived simply from the impact of the material atoms on the senses. Much of human experience, however, such as that of hot and cold or bitter and sweet, derived not from the atoms’ inherent qualities but from human “convention.” Qualities were subjective human perceptions, for the atoms possessed only quantitative differences. What was real was matter in space, atoms moving randomly in the void. When a man died, his soul perished; matter, however, was conserved and did not perish. Only the specific combinations of atoms changed, with the same atoms constantly colliding and forming different bodies in various stages of increase and decrease, conglomerating and breaking apart, thereby creating and dissolving over time an infinite number of worlds throughout the void.
In atomism, the mythological residue of the earliest philosophers’ self-animated substance was now fully removed: the void alone caused the random motions of the atoms, which were entirely material and possessed neither divine order nor purpose. For some, this explanation succeeded as the most lucid rational effort to escape the distortions of human subjectivity and desire, and to grasp the unadorned mechanisms of the universe. For others, however, much was left unresolved—the issue of forms and their duration, the question of purpose in the world, the need for a more satisfying answer to the problem of a first cause of motion. Significant advances in understanding the world seemed to be developing, yet much that had been certain for the primitive, pre-philosophical mind was now problematic. By implication of these early philosophical forays, not only the gods but the immediate evidence of one’s own senses might be an illusion, and the human mind alone must be relied upon to discover rationally what is real.
There was one major exception to this intellectual progress among the Greeks away from the mythic and toward the naturalistic, and this was Pythagoras. The dichotomy of religion and reason seems to have not so much pressed Pythagoras antithetically away from one in favor of the other, but rather provided for him an impetus toward synthesis. Indeed, his reputation among the ancients was that of a man whose genius was as much religious as scientific. Yet little can be said about Pythagoras with any definiteness. A rule of strict secrecy was maintained by his school, and an aura of legend surrounded it from its beginnings. Originally from the Ionian island of Samos, Pythagoras probably traveled and studied in Egypt and Mesopotamia before migrating westward to the Greek colony of Croton in southern Italy. There he established a philosophical school and religious brotherhood centered on the cult of Apollo and the Muses, and dedicated to the pursuit of moral purification, spiritual salvation, and the intellectual penetration of nature—all of which were understood as intimately interconnected.
Where the Ionian physicists were interested in the material substance of phenomena, the Pythagoreans focused on the forms, particularly mathematical, that governed and ordered those phenomena. And while the main current of Greek thought was breaking away from the mythological and religious ground of archaic Greek culture, Pythagoras and his followers conducted philosophy and science in a framework permeated by the beliefs of the mystery religions, especially Orphism. To comprehend scientifically the order of the natural universe was the Pythagorean via regia to spiritual illumination. The forms of mathematics, the harmonies of music, the motions of the planets, and the gods of the mysteries were all essentially related for Pythagoreans, and the meaning of that relation was revealed in an education that culminated in the human soul’s assimilation to the world soul, and thence to the divine creative mind of the universe. Because of the Pythagorean commitment to cultic secrecy, the specifics of that meaning and of the process by which that meaning was disclosed remain largely unknown. What is certain is that the Pythagorean school charted its independent philosophical course according to a belief system that decisively maintained the ancient structures of myth and the mystery religions while advancing scientific discoveries of immense consequence for later Western thought.
But the general tenor of Greek intellectual evolution was otherwise, as from Thales and Anaximander to Leucippus and Democritus a naturalistic science matured in step with an increasingly skeptical rationalism. Although none of these philosophers commanded universal cultural influence, and although for most Greeks the Olympian gods were never seriously in doubt, the gradual rise of these different strands of early philosophy—Ionian physics, Eleatic rationalism, Democritean atomism—represented the seminal vanguard of Greek thought in its development out of the era of traditional belief into the era of reason. With the exception of the relatively autonomous Pythagoreans, the Hellenic mind before Socrates followed a definite, if at times ambiguous, direction away from the supernatural and toward the natural: from the divine to the mundane, from the mythical to the conceptual, from poetry and story to prose and analysis. To the more critical intellects of this later age, the gods of the ancient poets’ stories seemed all too human, made in man’s own image, and increasingly dubious as real divine entities. Already near the start of the fifth century B.C . the poet-philosopher Xenophanes had disparaged the popular acceptance of Homeric mythology, with its anthropomorphic gods engaged in immoral activities: if oxen, lions, or horses had hands with which to make images, they would undoubtedly form gods with bodies and shapes like their own. A generation later, Anaxagoras declared that the Sun was not the god Helios but was rather an incandescent stone larger than the Peloponnese, and that the Moon was composed of an earthy substance which received its light from the Sun. Democritus considered that human belief in gods was no more than an attempt to explain extraordinary events like thunderstorms or earthquakes by means of imagined supernatural forces. An equivocal skepticism toward the ancient myths could be seen even in Euripides, the last of the great tragedians, while the comic dramatist Aristophanes openly parodied them. In the face of such diverging speculations, the time-honored cosmology was no longer self-evident.
Yet the more the Greek developed a sense of individual critical judgment and emerged from the collective primordial vision of earlier generations, the more conjectural became his understanding, the more narrow the compass of infallible knowledge. “As for certain truth,” Xenophanes asserted, “no man has known it, nor will he know it.” Philosophical contributions such as the irresolvable logical paradoxes of Zeno of Elea, or Heraclitus’s doctrine of the world as constant flux, often seemed only to exacerbate the new uncertainties. With the advent of reason, everything seemed open to doubt, and each succeeding philosopher offered solutions differing from his predecessor’s. If the world was governed exclusively by mechanical natural forces, then there remained no evident basis upon which firm moral judgments could be founded. And if the true reality was entirely divorced from common experience, then the very foundations of human knowledge were called into question. It seemed that the more man became freely and consciously self-determining, the less sure was his footing. Still, that price appeared well worth paying if human beings could be emancipated from the superstitious fears and beliefs of conventional piety and allowed insight, however provisional, into the genuine order of things. Despite the continual emergence of new problems and new attempted solutions, a heartening sense of intellectual progress seemed to override the various confusions accompanying it. Thus Xenophanes could affirm: “The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to us; but in the course of time, through seeking, men find that which is the better.…” 4
This intellectual development reached its climax in Athens as the various streams of Greek thought and art converged there during the fifth century B.C . The age of Pericles and the building of the Parthenon saw Athens at the peak of its cultural creativity and political influence in Greece, and Athenian man asserted himself within his world with a new sense of his own power and intelligence. After its triumph over the Persian invaders and its establishment as leader of the Greek states, Athens rapidly emerged as an expansive commercial and maritime city with imperial ambitions. Its burgeoning activities provided Athenian citizens with increased contact with other cultures and outlooks and a new urban sophistication Athens had become the first Greek metropolis. The development of democratic self-government and technical advances in agriculture and navigation both expressed and encouraged the new humanistic spirit. Earlier philosophers had been relatively isolated in their speculations, with one or perhaps a few disciples to carry on their work. Now in Athens such speculation became more representative of the city’s intellectual life as a whole, which continued to move toward conceptual thought, critical analysis, reflection, and dialectic.
In the course of the fifth century, Hellenic culture attained a delicate and fertile balance between the ancient mythological tradition and the modern secular rationalism. Temples to the gods were erected with an unprecedented zeal to capture a timeless Olympian grandeur. Yet in the monumental buildings, sculptures, and paintings of the Parthenon, in the artistic creations of Phideas and Polyclitus, this grandeur was accomplished not least through meticulous analysis and theory, through a vigorous effort to combine human rationality with the mythic order in concrete form. The temples to Zeus, Athena, and Apollo seemed to celebrate man’s triumph of rational clarity and mathematical elegance as much as they offered homage to the divine. Similarly, the Greek artists’ renderings of gods and goddesses were renderings of Greek men and women—ideal, spiritualized, yet manifestly human and individual. Still, the characteristic object of artistic aspiration continued to be the gods, and there remained a sense of man’s proper limits in the universal scheme. The new creative treatment of myth by Aeschylus and Sophocles, or the odes of the great choral poet Pindar, who saw intimations of the gods in the athletic feats of the Olympic games, suggested that man’s own developing abilities could enhance and give exalted expression to the divine powers. Yet both tragedies and choral hymns upheld the boundaries of human ambition, beyond which lay danger and impossibility.
As the fifth century advanced, the balance continued to shift in favor of man. Hippocrates’s seminal work in medicine, Herodotus’s observant histories and travel descriptions, Meton’s new calendrical system, Thucydides’s penetrating historical analyses, the bold scientific speculations of Anaxagoras and Democritus—all extended the scope of the Hellenic mind and forwarded its grasp of things in terms of rationally comprehensible natural causes. Pericles himself was intimate with the rationalist philosopher and physicist Anaxagoras, and a new intellectual rigor, skeptical of the old supernatural explanations, was widespread. Contemporary man now perceived himself as more a civilized product of progress from savagery than a degeneration from a mythical golden age. 5 The commercial and political rise of an active middle class further moved against the aristocratic hierarchy of the old gods and heroes. The long-stable society celebrated by Pindar for his aristocratic patrons was giving way to a new order that was more fluidly egalitarian and aggressively competitive. With that change was also left behind Pindar’s conservative maintenance of the old religious values and sanctions against uninhibited human endeavor. Belief in the traditional deities of the Athenian polis was being undermined, and a more critical and secular spirit was strongly on the ascent.
The most acute stage in this evolution was reached in the latter half of the fifth century with the emergence of the Sophists. The leading protagonists of the new intellectual milieu, the Sophists were itinerant professional teachers, secular humanists of a liberal spirit who offered both intellectual instruction and guidance for success in practical affairs. With the expanded possibilities for political participation in the democratic polis, the services of the Sophists were in high demand. The general tenor of their thought was marked by the same rationalism and naturalism that had characterized the development of philosophy before them, and that increasingly reflected the spirit of the age. But with the Sophists, a new element of skeptical pragmatism entered Greek thought, turning philosophy away from its earlier, more speculative and cosmological concerns. According to Sophists such as Protagoras, man was the measure of all things, and his own individual judgments concerning everyday human life should form the basis of his personal beliefs and conduct—not naive conformity to traditional religion nor indulgence in far-flung abstract speculation. Truth was relative, not absolute, and differed from culture to culture, from person to person, and from situation to situation. Claims to the contrary, whether religious or philosophical, could not stand up to critical argument. The ultimate value of any belief or opinion could be judged only by its practical utility in serving an individual’s needs in life.
This decisive shift in the character of Greek thought, encouraged by the contemporary social and political situation, owed as much to the problematic condition of natural philosophy at that time as to the decline in traditional religious belief. Not only were the old mythologies losing their hold on the Greek mind, but the current state of scientific explanation was reaching a point of crisis. The extremes of Parmenidean logic with its obscure paradoxes, and of atomistic physics with its hypothetical atoms, both of which controverted the tangible reality of common human experience, were beginning to make the entire practice of theoretical philosophy seem irrelevant. In the Sophists’ view, the speculative cosmologies neither spoke to practical human needs nor appeared plausible to common sense. From Thales on, each philosopher had proposed his particular theory as to what was the true nature of the world, with each theory contradicting the others, and with a growing tendency to reject the reality of more and more of the phenomenal world revealed by the senses. The result was a chaos of conflicting ideas, with no basis upon which to certify one above the rest. Moreover, the natural philosophers seemed to have been constructing their theories about the external world without adequately taking into account the human observer, the subjective element. By contrast, the Sophists recognized that each person had his own experience, and therefore his own reality. In the end, they argued, all understanding is subjective opinion. Genuine objectivity is impossible. All a person can legitimately claim to know is probabilities, not absolute truth.
Yet, according to the Sophists, it did not matter if man had no certain insight into the world outside him. He could know only the contents of his own mind—appearances rather than essences—but these constituted the only reality that could be of valid concern to him. Other than appearances, a deeper stable reality could not be known, not only on account of man’s limited faculties, but more fundamentally because such a reality could not be said to exist outside of human conjecture. Yet the true aim of human thought was to serve human needs, and only individual experience could provide a basis for achieving that aim. Each person should rely on his own wits to make his way through the world. Acknowledgment of the individual’s intellectual limitations would therefore be a liberation, for only in that way could a man seek to make his thought stand on its own, sovereign, serving himself rather than illusory absolutes arbitrarily defined by unreliable sources external to his own judgment.
The Sophists proposed that the critical rationalism that had previously been directed toward the physical world could now more fruitfully be applied to human affairs, to ethics and politics. The evidence of travelers’ reports, for example, suggested that social practices and religious beliefs were not absolutes but merely local human conventions, received pieties varying according to each nation’s customs with no fundamental relation either to nature or to divine commandment. The recent physical theories were drawn on to suggest the same conclusion: If the experience of hot and cold had no objective existence in nature but was merely an individual person’s subjective impression created by a temporary arrangement of interacting atoms, then so too might the standards of right and wrong be equally insubstantial, conventional, and subjectively determined.
The existence of the gods could similarly be recognized as an undemonstrable assumption. As Protagoras said, “Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not, nor of what form they are; for there are many obstacles to such knowledge, including the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.” Another Sophist, Critias, suggested that the gods were invented to instill fear in those who would otherwise have acted in an evil manner. Much like the physicists with their mechanistic naturalism, the Sophists considered nature an impersonal phenomenon whose laws of chance and necessity bore little concern for human affairs. The evidence of unbiased common sense suggested that the world was constituted by visible matter, not invisible deities. The world was therefore best viewed apart from religious prejudices.
Hence the Sophists concluded in favor of a flexible atheism or agnosticism in metaphysics and a situational morality in ethics. Since religious beliefs, political structures, and rules of moral conduct were now seen to be humanly created conventions, these were all open to fundamental questioning and change. After centuries of blind obedience to restrictive traditional attitudes, man could now free himself to pursue a program of enlightened self-interest. To discover by rational means what was most useful for man seemed a more intelligent strategy than to base one’s actions on belief in mythological deities or the absolutist assumptions of unprovable metaphysics. Since it was futile to seek absolute truth, the Sophists recommended that young men learn from them the practical arts of rhetorical persuasion and logical dexterity, as well as a broad spectrum of other subjects ranging from social history and ethics to mathematics and music. The citizen could thereby be best prepared to play an effective role in the polis democracy and, more generally, assure for himself a successful life in the world. Because the skills for achieving excellence in life could be taught and learned, a man was free to expand his opportunities through education. He was not limited by traditional assumptions such as the conventional belief that one’s abilities were forever fixed as a result of chance endowment or the status of one’s birth. Through such a program as that offered by the Sophists, both the individual and the society could better themselves.
Thus the Sophists mediated the transition from an age of myth to an age of practical reason. Man and society were to be studied, methodically and empirically, without theological preconceptions. Myths were to be understood as allegorical fables, not revelations of a divine reality. Rational acuity, grammatical precision, and oratorical prowess were the prime virtues in the new ideal man. The proper molding of a man’s character for successful participation in polis life required a sound education in the various arts and sciences, and thus was established the paideia —the classical Greek system of education and training, which came to include gymnastics, grammar, rhetoric, poetry, music, mathematics, geography, natural history, astronomy and the physical sciences, history of society and ethics, and philosophy—the complete pedagogical course of study necessary to produce a well-rounded, fully educated citizen.
The Sophists’ systematic doubting of human beliefs—whether the traditional belief in the gods or the more recent but, in their view, equally naive faith in human reason’s capacity genuinely to know the nature of something as immense and indeterminate as the cosmos—was freeing thought to take new and unexplored paths. As a result, man’s status was greater than ever before. He was increasingly free and self-determining, aware of a larger world containing cultures and beliefs besides his own, aware of the relativity and plasticity of human values and customs, aware of his own role in creating his reality. Yet he was no longer so significant in the cosmic scheme, which, if it existed at all, had its own logic heedless of man and Greek cultural values.
Other problems were presented by the Sophists’ views. Despite the positive effects of their intellectual training and establishment of a liberal education as a basis for effective character formation, a radical skepticism toward all values led some to advocate an explicitly amoral opportunism. Students were instructed how to devise ostensibly plausible arguments supporting virtually any claim. More concretely disturbing was the concurrent deterioration of the political and ethical situation in Athens to the point of crisis—the democracy turning fickle and corrupt, the consequent takeover by a ruthless oligarchy, the Athenian leadership of Greece becoming tyrannical, wars begun in arrogance ending in disaster. Daily life in Athens saw minimally humane ethical standards unscrupulously violated—visible not least in the exclusively male Athenian citizenry’s routine and often cruel exploitation of women, slaves, and foreigners. All these developments had their own origins and motives, and could hardly be laid at the feet of the Sophists. Yet in such critical circumstances, the philosophical denial of absolute values and sophistical commendation of stark opportunism seemed both to reflect and to exacerbate the problematic spirit of the times.
The Sophists’ relativistic humanism, for all its progressive and liberal character, was not proving wholly benign. The larger world opened by Athens’s earlier triumphs had destabilized its ancient certainties and now seemed to require a larger order—universal, yet conceptual—within which events could be comprehended. The Sophists’ teachings provided no such order, but rather a method for success. How success itself was to be defined remained moot. Their bold assertion of human intellectual sovereignty—that through its own power man’s thought could provide him with sufficient wisdom to live his life well, that the human mind could independently produce the strength of equilibrium—now seemed to require reevaluation. To more conservative sensibilities, the foundations of the traditional Hellenic belief system and its previously timeless values were being dangerously eroded, while reason and verbal skill were coming to have a less than impeccable reputation. Indeed, the whole development of reason now seemed to have undercut its own basis, with the human mind denying itself the capacity for genuine knowledge of the world.
It was in this highly charged cultural climate that Socrates began his philosophical search, as skeptical and individualistic as any Sophist. A younger contemporary of Pericles, Euripides, Herodotus, and Protagoras, and growing up in an era when he could see the Parthenon built on the Acropolis from start to finish, Socrates entered the philosophical arena at the height of tension between the ancient Olympian tradition and the vigorous new intellectualism. By virtue of his extraordinary life and death, he would leave the Greek mind radically transformed, establishing not only a new method and new ideal for the pursuit of truth, but also, in his own person, an enduring model and inspiration for all subsequent philosophy.
Despite the magnitude of Socrates’s influence, little is known with certainty about his life. Socrates himself wrote nothing. The richest and most coherent portrait of the man is that contained in Plato’s Dialogues , but precisely to what extent the words and ideas attributed there to Socrates reflect the subsequent evolution of Plato’s own thought remains unclear (a problem we shall address at the end of the chapter). The extant reports of other contemporaries and followers—Xenophon, Aeschines, Aristophanes, Aristotle, later Platonists—though helpful, are generally secondhand or fragmentary, often ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory. Nevertheless, a reasonably reliable picture can be pieced together by drawing on the early Platonic dialogues in combination with the other sources.
It is evident from these that Socrates was a man of singular character and intelligence, who was imbued with a passion for intellectual honesty and moral integrity rare for his or any other age. He insistently sought answers to questions that had not before been asked, attempted to undermine conventional assumptions and beliefs to provoke more careful thinking about ethical matters, and tirelessly compelled both himself and those with whom he conversed to seek a deeper understanding of what constituted a good life. His words and deeds embodied an abiding conviction that the act of rational self-criticism could free the human mind from the bondage of false opinion. Because of his dedication to the task of discovering wisdom and drawing it forth from others, Socrates neglected his private affairs, spending all his time instead in earnest discussion with his fellow citizens. Unlike the Sophists, he did not charge for his instruction. Although intimate with the elite of Athens, he was altogether indifferent to material wealth and conventional standards of success. Socrates gave the impression of being a man unusually at one with himself, though his personal character was full of paradoxical contrasts. Disarmingly humble yet presumptuously confident, puckishly witty yet morally urgent, engaging and gregarious yet solitary and contemplative, Socrates was above all a man consumed by a passion for truth.
As a young man Socrates appears to have studied the natural science of his time with some enthusiasm, examining the various contemporary philosophies concerned with speculative analysis of the physical world. Eventually, however, he found these unsatisfying. The welter of conflicting theories brought more confusion than clarity, and their explanations of the universe solely in terms of material causation, ignoring the evidence of purposive intelligence in the world, seemed to him inadequate. Such theories, he judged, were neither conceptually coherent nor morally useful. He therefore turned from physics and cosmology to ethics and logic. How one should live, and how to think clearly about how one should live, became his overriding concern. As Cicero would declare three centuries later, Socrates “called down philosophy from the skies and implanted it in the cities and homes of men.”
Such a shift was indeed already reflected in the ideas of the Sophists, who also resembled Socrates in their concern with education, language, rhetoric, and argument. But the character of Socrates’s moral and intellectual aspirations was sharply different. The Sophists offered to teach others how to live a successful life, in a world in which all moral standards were conventions and all human knowledge was relative. Socrates believed such an educational philosophy was both intellectually misconceived and morally detrimental. In opposition to the Sophist view, Socrates saw his own task as that of finding a way to a knowledge that transcended mere opinion, to inform a morality that transcended mere convention.
At an early date in the young philosopher’s life, the oracle of Apollo at Delphi had declared that no man was wiser than Socrates. Seeking, as he later put it with characteristic irony, to disprove the oracle, Socrates assiduously examined the beliefs and thinking of all who considered themselves wise—concluding that he was indeed wiser than all others, for he alone recognized his own ignorance. But while the Sophists had held genuine knowledge to be unattainable, Socrates held rather that genuine knowledge had not yet been achieved. His repeated demonstrations of human ignorance, both his own and that of others, were intended to elicit not intellectual despair but rather intellectual humility. The discovery of ignorance was for Socrates the beginning rather than the end of the philosophical task, for only through that discovery could one begin to overcome those received assumptions that obscured the true nature of what it was to be a human being. Socrates conceived it his personal mission to convince others of their ignorance so that they might better search for a knowledge of how life should best be lived.
In Socrates’s view, any attempt to foster true success and excellence in human life had to take account of the innermost reality of a human being, his soul or psyche. Perhaps on the basis of his own highly developed sense of individual selfhood and self-control, Socrates brought to the Greek mind a new awareness of the central significance of the soul, establishing it for the first time as the seat of the individual waking consciousness and of the moral and intellectual character. He affirmed the Delphic motto “Know thyself,” for he believed that it was only through self-knowledge, through an understanding of one’s own psyche and its proper condition, that one could find genuine happiness. All human beings seek happiness by their very nature, and happiness, Socrates taught, is achieved through living the kind of life that best serves the nature of the soul. Happiness is the consequence not of physical or external circumstances, of wealth or power or reputation, but of living a life that is good for the soul.
Yet to live a genuinely good life, one must know what is the nature and essence of the good. Otherwise one will be acting blindly, on the basis of mere convention or expediency, calling something good or virtuous whenever it conforms to popular opinion or serves the pleasure of the moment. By contrast, Socrates argued, if a man does know what is truly good—what is beneficial for him in the deepest sense—then he will naturally and inevitably act in a good manner. Knowing what is good will necessarily cause one to act on that basis, for no man deliberately chooses that which he knows would harm himself. It is only when he mistakes an illusory good for a genuine good that he falls into erroneous conduct. No one ever does wrong knowingly, for it is the very nature of the good that when it is known, it is desired. In this sense, Socrates held, virtue is knowledge. A truly happy life is a life of right action directed according to reason. The key to human happiness, therefore, is the development of a rational moral character.
But for a person to discover what is genuine virtue, hard questions must be asked. To know virtue, one has to discover the common element in all virtuous acts: i.e., the essence of virtue. One has to take apart, analyze, test the worth of every statement about the nature of virtue in order to find its true character. It is not enough to cite examples of various kinds of virtuous actions and say that this is virtue itself, for such an answer does not reveal the single essential quality within all the examples that makes them genuine instances of virtue. So also with goodness, justice, courage, piety, beauty. Socrates criticized the Sophist belief that such terms were ultimately only words, mere names for currently established human conventions. Words could indeed distort and deceive, giving the impression of truth when actually they lacked solid foundation. But words could also point, as to a precious invisible mystery, to something genuine and enduring. To find one’s way to that genuine reality was the task confronting the philosopher.
It was in the course of pursuing this task that Socrates developed his famous dialectical form of argument that would become fundamental to the character and evolution of the Western mind: reasoning through rigorous dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation intended to expose false beliefs and elicit truth. Socrates’s characteristic strategy was to take up a sequence of questions with whomever he was in discussion, relentlessly analyzing one by one the implications of the answers in such a way as to bring out the flaws and inconsistencies inherent in a given belief or statement. Attempts to define the essence of something were rejected one after another as being either too wide or too narrow, or as missing the mark altogether. Often it happened that such an analysis ended in complete perplexity, with Socrates’s fellow discussants feeling as if they had been numbed by a stingray. Yet at such times it was clear that philosophy for Socrates was concerned less with knowing the right answers than with the strenuous attempt to discover those answers. Philosophy was a process, a discipline, a lifelong quest. To practice philosophy in the Socratic manner was continually to subject one’s thoughts to the criticism of reason in earnest dialogue with others. Genuine knowledge was not something that could simply be received from another secondhand like a purchased commodity, as with the Sophists, but was rather a personal achievement, won only at the cost of constant intellectual struggle and self-critical reflection. “The life not tested by criticism,” Socrates declared, “is not worth living.”
Because of his incessant questioning of others, however, Socrates was not universally popular, and his active encouraging of a critical skepticism among his pupils was regarded by some as a dangerously unsettling influence which undermined the proper authority of tradition and the state. In his painstaking effort to find certain knowledge, Socrates had spent much of his life outdoing the Sophists at their own game, but ironically it was with the Sophists that Socrates was classed when, in the politically unstable period in Athens following the disastrous Peloponnesian War, two citizens accused him of impiety and of corrupting the young. Caught in a backlash against a number of political figures, some of whom had once been in his circle, Socrates was sentenced to death. In such a situation it would have been customary to propose an alternative punishment of exile, and this was probably what his accusers desired. But Socrates refused at every stage of the trial to compromise his principles, and rejected all efforts to escape or modify the consequences of the verdict. He affirmed the Tightness of the life he had led, even if his mission to awaken others now brought him death—which he did not fear, but rather welcomed as a portal to eternity. Cheerfully drinking the poison hemlock, Socrates became an unreluctant martyr to the ideal of philosophy that he had so long championed.
The friends and disciples who gathered around Socrates in his last days were drawn to a man who, to a singular degree, had embodied his own ideal. With its unique synthesis of eros and logos —of passion and mind, friendship and argument, desire and truth—Socrates’s philosophy appears to have been a direct expression of his personality. Each Socratic idea and its articulation bore the mark of, and seemed to have been born of, the very core of his personal character. Indeed, as he was portrayed in the full course of Plato’s dialogues, it was this very fact—that Socrates spoke and thought with an intellectual and moral confidence based on profound self-knowledge, rooted as it were in the depths of his psyche—that gave him the capacity to express a truth that was in some sense universal, grounded in divine truth itself.
Yet it was not only this charismatic profundity of mind and soul that Plato emphasized in his portrait of the master. The Socrates commemorated by Plato also developed and set forth a specific epistemological position that in effect brought the dialectical Socratic strategy to its metaphysical fulfillment. And here we shall extend our discussion of this pivotal figure by drawing on the more elaborated—and more decisively “Platonic”—interpretation of Socrates contained in the great middle dialogues of Plato. Beginning with the Phaedo , and in fully developed form in such dialogues as the Symposium and the Republic , the character of Socrates increasingly voices positions that move beyond those attributed to him in the earlier dialogues and by other sources such as Xenophon and Aristotle. Although the evidence may be interpreted in several ways, it would appear that Plato, in reflecting upon the legacy of his teacher in the course of his own intellectual evolution, gradually made explicit in these more developed positions what he understood to be implicit in both Socrates’s life and his arguments.
As the dialogues progress (and their exact order is not entirely clear), the earlier account of Socrates—pressing hard his demands for logical coherence and meaningful definitions, criticizing all the presumed certainties of human belief—begins to move forward to a new level of philosophical argument. After having investigated every current system of thought, from the scientific philosophies of nature to the subtle arguments of the Sophists, Socrates had concluded that all of them lacked sound critical method. To clarify his own approach, he decided to concern himself not with facts but with statements about facts. These propositions he would analyze by treating each as a hypothesis, deducing its consequences, and thereby judging its value. A hypothesis whose consequences were found to be true and consistent would be provisionally affirmed, though not proved, since it in turn could be certified only by appeal to a more ultimate accepted hypothesis.
Finally, according to Plato’s middle dialogues, after exhaustive argument and meditation on these matters, Socrates put forth his own fundamental postulate to serve as that ultimate foundation for knowledge and moral standards: When something is good or beautiful, it is so because that thing partakes of an archetypal essence of goodness or beauty that is absolute and perfect, that exists on a timeless level that transcends its passing particular manifestation, and that is ultimately accessible only to the intellect, not to the senses. Such universals have a real nature beyond mere human convention or opinion, and an independent existence beyond the phenomena they inform. The human mind can discover and know these timeless universals, through the supreme discipline of philosophy.
As described by Plato, this hypothesis of the “Forms” or “Ideas,” though never proved, seems to have represented something more than a plausible result of logical discussion, standing rather as an apodictic—absolutely certain and necessary—reality beyond all the conjectures, obscurities, and illusions of human experience. Its philosophical justification was finally epiphanic, self-evident to the lover of truth who had attained the distant goal of illumination. Plato’s implication seemed to be that in Socrates’s resolute attention to his mind and soul, to moral virtue as well as intellectual truth, the world order itself had been contacted and revealed. In Plato’s Socrates, human thought no longer stood precariously on its own, but had found a confidence and certainty grounded in something more fundamental. Thus, as dramatically set forth by Plato, the paradoxical denouement of Socrates’s skeptical pursuit of truth was his final arrival at the conception, or vision, of the eternal Ideas—absolute Good, Truth, Beauty, and the rest—in contemplation of which he ended his long philosophical search and fulfilled it.
The age of mythic heroes and gods seemed long past for the modern urban Athenians, but in Plato’s Socrates the Homeric hero was reborn, now as hero of the intellectual and spiritual quest for absolutes in a realm endangered by the Scylla of sophistry and the Charybdis of traditionalism. It was a new form of immortal glory that Socrates revealed as he faced his death, and it was in this act of philosophical heroism that the Homeric ideal took on fresh significance for Plato and his followers. For through Socrates’s intellectual labor had been born a spiritual reality apparently so fundamental and all-comprehensive that even death did not dim its existence, but on the contrary served as its gateway. The transcendent world unveiled in Plato’s dialogues—themselves great works of literature like the epic poems and dramas already gracing Hellenic culture—bespoke a new Olympian realm, a realm that reflected the new sense of rational order while also recalling the exalted grandeur of the ancient mythic deities. The Socrates of Plato’s report had remained true to the Greek development of reason and individualistic humanism. But in the course of his intellectual odyssey, critically employing and synthesizing his predecessors’ insights, he had forged a new connection to a timeless reality, one now endowed with philosophical significance as well as mythic numinosity. In Socrates, thought was confidently embraced as a vital force of life and an indispensable instrument of the spirit. Intellect was not just a profitable tool of Sophists and politicians, nor just the remote preserve of physical speculation and obscure paradox. It was, rather, the divine faculty by which the human soul could discover both its own essence and the world’s meaning. That faculty required only awakening. However arduous the path of awakening, such divine intellectual power lay potentially resident in humble and great alike.
Thus stood the figure of Socrates for Plato—the resolution and climax of the Greek quest for truth, the restorer of the world’s divine foundation, the awakener of the human intellect. What for Homer and the archaic mind had been an inseparable connection between the empirical and the archetypal, a connection that was increasingly challenged in the naturalism of the Ionian physicists and the rationalism of the Eleatics, and eliminated altogether in the materialism of the atomists and the skepticism of the Sophists, was now reformulated and restored on a new level by Socrates and Plato. In contrast to the undifferentiated archaic vision, the perceived relation between the archetypal and the empirical had now become more problematic, dichotomized, and dualistic. This step was a crucial one. But the underlying, rediscovered commonality with the primordial mythic vision was equally crucial. In the Platonic understanding, the world was again illuminated by universal themes and figures. Its governing principles were again knowable by the human mind. Divine absolutes once more ruled the cosmos and provided a foundation for human conduct. Existence was again endowed with transcendent purpose. Intellectual rigor and Olympian inspiration no longer stood opposed. Human values were again rooted in nature’s order, both of which were informed by divine intelligence.
With Socrates and Plato, the Greek search for clarity, order, and meaning in the manifold of human experience had come full circle, bringing an intellectual restoration of the numinous reality known in Hellenic culture’s distant Homeric childhood. Thus Plato joined his conception with, and gave new life and significance to, the archaic archetypal vision of the ancient Greek sensibility.
Socrates is the paradigmatic figure of Greek philosophy—indeed, of all Western philosophy—yet we possess nothing written by him that could represent his ideas directly. It was largely through the powerful prism of Plato’s understanding that his life and thought were passed on to posterity. Socrates’s impact on the young Plato was potent enough that the Platonic dialogues seem to bear the Socratic imprint on almost every page, carrying in their very form the dialectical spirit of Socratic philosophy, and making any final distinctions between the two philosophers’ thought virtually impossible. The character of Socrates plays the major role and expresses the central themes in most of the important dialogues, and does so with a large degree of what appears to be faithfully portrayed personal idiosyncrasy. Where the historical Socrates ends and the Platonic Socrates begins is notoriously ambiguous. His self-effacing claim of ignorance seemingly contrasts with the Platonic knowledge of absolutes; yet the latter appears to have grown directly from the former, as if an unconditional intellectual humility were the eye of the needle giving passage to universal wisdom. Certainly Socrates’s lifelong pursuit of truth and order would seem to have implicitly depended on a faith in the ultimate existence of that truth and order. 6 Moreover, the character and direction of his arguments, as represented not only in the early Platonic dialogues but also in the reports of others, strongly suggest that Socrates was at least logically committed to what would later be seen to be a theory of universals.
The trial and execution of Socrates by the Athenian democracy left a profound impression on Plato, persuading him of the untrustworthiness of both a rudderless democracy and a standardless philosophy: hence the necessity of an absolute foundation for values if any political or philosophical system was to be successful and wise. On the basis of the available historical and literary evidence, it would appear that Socrates’s personal search for absolute definitions and moral certainty, and very possibly his suggestion of some early form of the doctrine of Ideas, was developed and extended through Plato’s more encompassing sensibility into a comprehensive system. Additional insights were incorporated by Plato from the various Presocratics, particularly Parmenides (the changeless and unitary nature of intelligible reality), Heraclitus (the constant flux of the sensible world), and above all the Pythagoreans (the intelligibility of reality via mathematical forms). Socrates’s more focused concerns and strategies thereby became the basis for Plato’s broader enunciation of the major outlines and problems for subsequent Western philosophy in all its diverse areas—logic, ethics, politics, epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, psychology, cosmology.
Plato expressed that deepening and expansion by using the figure of Socrates to articulate the philosophy that he believed Socrates’s life had nobly exampled. For in Plato’s vision, Socrates appeared as a living embodiment of goodness and wisdom, the very qualities Plato considered to be the foundational principles of the world and the highest goals of human aspiration. Socrates thus became not only the inspiration for but also the personification of the Platonic philosophy. From Plato’s art emerged the archetypal Socrates, the avatar of Platonism.
In this view, Plato did not provide a verbatim documentary of Socrates’s thought; nor, in the opposite extreme, did he use Socrates merely as a mouthpiece for his own completely independent ideas. Rather, Plato’s relationship to Socrates appears to have been more complicated, more mysterious, more interpretive and creative, as he elaborated and transformed his master’s ideas to bring them to what he understood to be their inherent, systematically argued, metaphysically articulate conclusions. Socrates often referred to himself as an intellectual midwife, through his dialectical skill bringing to birth the latent truth in another’s mind. Perhaps Platonic philosophy itself was the final and fullest fruit of that labor.