CULTURAL CHANGE IN THE ARCHAIC GREEK AGE

When specialists began classifying the pottery of Greece, they labelled the material produced between 620 and 480 BC, the period between the Orientalizing and the Classical period, as Archaic (from the Greek archaois, old). The term has gradually been extended, first to describe the wider cultural developments of the period and then as one for the age as a whole. Conventionally, the Archaic age has been seen as a prelude to the Classical period, offering hints of what was to come, but now it is increasingly valued in its own right as one of the more fascinating periods of Greek political and cultural history.

The age was one when, although they continued to draw on influences from the east, the Greeks increasingly determined their own patterns of development. Perhaps the dominant feel of the period is the gradual coming of order and control. "The overriding and enduring impulse of Archaic art", writes Jeffrey Hurwit, 'was to formalise, to pattern, to remake nature in order to make it intelligible.' This can be seen in the growing naturalism of statues and the increasing control over subject-matter in vase painting, with the chaotic animal parades of the Corinthian vases replaced by ordered depictions of myths. On the Ionian coast there is an intellectual revolution, with the first systematic application of rational thought to the physical world. These changes run alongside those political developments described in the last chapter. Solon and Cleisthenes, for instance, were both applying abstract principles of justice to the practical problems of human beings living in society, very much in the spirit of the cultural changes which will be described here.

The First Coinage

The sixth century was one of increasing wealth in the Greek world as trading contacts multiplied and cities, particularly those on the Ionian coast and in Italy, became more settled and prosperous. Traditionally, the appearance of coinage has been taken as a symbol of this commercial expansion. As an easily carried and stored means of establishing value and facilitating exchange, coinage has proved a fundamental part of every economy to the present day, only under challenge from other forms of transfer of wealth (cheques, and now the electronic transmission of funds) since the last century. The advantages it gave over barter are obvious when the dealings of the Egyptian scribe Penanouqit are recalled. In order to sell his ox he had to take a varied selection of goods in return. Every transaction which involved barter must have been cumbersome.

The historian Herodotus attributed the invention of coinage to Lydia, the wealthy state of western Anatolia which neighboured the Greek cities of the eastern Aegean, and archaeological evidence supports him. The sequence by which Lydian coins developed has been found preserved in the foundation deposit of the temple of Artemis at Ephesus (about 600 BC). The deposit includes metal lumps of a standard size. With them are similar lumps stamped on one side and others stamped on both. It appears that the Lydian kings handed their mercenaries their payment once a year in a single lump of metal (electrum, an alloy of silver and gold). Here are the forerunners of coins, thin circular pieces of metal of standard size stamped by the issuing state. When the first Greek coins appear (on the trading island of Aegina about 595 BC, in Athens about 575, and in Corinth shortly afterwards), they are already stamped on both sides, a clear indication that the Greeks adopted the practice only after it had been fully developed by the Lydians.

Originally coins had the value of the metal in which they were made. There was thus no problem in offering them for exchange because they could always be melted down without losing value. The weight and purity of each coin could be guaranteed by the stamp of the city or kingdom it came from, and an unblemished design on both signs confirmed that it had not been scraped down. Denominations remained large until the fifth century, and most coinage is found in or near the city of its origin. For these reasons it is now believed that the main use for early coins was state accounting. Coins were probably used for paying officials and mercenaries, and for expenditure on public buildings, while recipients could pay taxes, fines, or harbour dues in return. There is some evidence that cities saw their own coinage as a precious resource which should not be 'lost' overseas (though Athens, with her own large reserves of silver, was not so fussy and Athenian coins are more widely scattered than those of any other city). It was probably not until the late fifth century that coinage became used in everyday commercial transactions.

Temples and Sculpture: The Influence of Egypt

Even if coinage may not have played a major part in commercial expansion, there is no doubt that this was an age of growing prosperity. The more successful cities flaunted their wealth through their temples, now seen as the showcases of a proud polis. Between 575 and 560 a vast sanctuary to the goddess Hera was laid out on the island of Samos. It was entered by a monumental gateway, and within, beside the altar (altars were always kept outside temples so that sacrifices would be accessible to a large audience and the mess and smoke kept in the open air), was a vast temple. It was 100 metres long and 50 metres wide, with a double colonnade, twenty-one columns along each side, eight at the front, and ten at the back. As was now typical of Greek temples, it had a deep porch, and this led into the cella where the cult statue of the god or goddess would stand. The temple at Ephesus, where the Lydian coin deposits were found, was even larger, some 115 metres long. Again it had a double row of columns. At Didyma on the coast of Asia Minor there was another vast temple, dedicated to Apollo.

These eastern temples carried the scrolled columns of the so-called Ionic order. The development of orders of architecture, particularly through the provision of a model which can be copied, is a typically Archaic achievement. The Ionic order appears to be a Greek invention, though the foliage and decoration that goes with the order still suggests the influence of the east. On the Greek mainland and in the west the Doric order was supreme. In this order the columns are topped by square stone slabs and the whole design is simpler. In the west the richer cities, determined to show off their new-found wealth, built their Doric temples in groups, often along ridges. There were four great sixth-century temples at Selinus in western Sicily, for instance, and two at Posidonia (Paestum) which are still in fine condition.

What were the influences on the development of these huge temples? The Greeks initiated their own tradition of building in stone. The Corinthians were carving limestone by the end of the eighth century, and there are Corinthian temples with limestone walls by the early seventh. The inspiration to be more creative and ambitious with the material possibly came from Egypt. The opening of Egypt by King Psamtek I (Psammetichus) ( 664-610 BC) encouraged the first major incursion of Greeks, both as traders and visitors, into his country. Inevitably they came into direct contact with its vast array of stone monuments. The pyramids of Giza, for instance, were only 120 kilometres from the Greek trading-post at Naucratis, and visitors would also have had the opportunity to see Psammetichus' own massive building programme in action. It is interesting that the majority of Greeks who settled Naucratis were Ionians, and a taste for monumental art seems to be found largely in the Ionian cities. The temple of Artemis at Ephesus with its double row of columns may be an echo of the columned halls of Egypt, while the famous row of marble lions at Delos seems an almost direct copy of the traditional sacred processional routes of the Egyptian temples.

The Ionians may not have been the only Greeks who borrowed from the Egyptians. Much of the ornament in the Doric order seems to develop directly from earlier Greek timber models (the triglyphs, for instance, are reproductions in stone of the ends of roof-beams), but a comparison can be made between the columns of the shrine of Anubis at the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri and the temples to Hera at Olympia ( 590 BC) and to Apollo at Corinth ( 540 BC). Some decorative mouldings on Doric temples, the cavetto, a hollowed moulding in the shape of a quarter-circle, also appear to be Egyptian in origin. The example may have spread to Greece via Corinthian traders.

Another Egyptian influence may be seen in sculpture. In the seventh century small terracotta and bronze statues, with wigged hair, a triangular face, and a flat skull, became common in Greece. They face forward in a rigid pose with both feet together. The style is called Daedalic, after a legendary Greek sculptor, Daedalus, although it originated, with so much else, from the east. By the second half of the seventh century, Greek sculptors begin making life-size Daedalic figures in marble. A famous one is the statue of Nikandre from Naxos, possibly carved as early as 650, another the ' Auxerre goddess' of 630, found in France but probably of Cretan origin. "The origins of the Nikandre kore", writes Jeffrey Hurwit Hurwit, 'are complex: she owes her shape to a native [Greek] tradition of largescale sculpture in wood, her style to a popular Orientalizing fashion, and her proportions to Egypt. It was probably also the Greek experience in Egypt that gave her sculptor the inspiration and confidence to transpose a large-scale wooden image into marble.'

Marble was to become the preferred material for the sculpture of the period (at least until bronze casting was perfected later in the century) and it also became popular as a building material for temples and other prominent buildings. It can be assumed that the Greeks learnt how to fashion marble after seeing Egyptians working on their native hard stones, granite and diorite. The most common sculptural form now became the kouros, a life-size (or even larger) nude male carved in marble, typically with the left leg in front of the right. (The female form, the kore, was rarer and always clothed.) It has been demonstrated that these statues were planned out on stone blocks using a similar grid to the Egyptians, but the kourol are normally nude (unlike the clothed Egyptian statues) and their poses are more relaxed and natural than those of their Egyptian counterparts. The kouroi stood on sacred sites, often as grave-markers, but also as apparent offerings to the gods. They are most commonly found in the more aristocratic Greek cities. When an aristocratic élite is overthrown, the kouroi disappear. It could be said that the kouros is an immortalization of a hero at the height of his powers and that he represents the aristocratic male at his most confident.

Among the most engaging buildings of the Archaic age are the city treasuries given by cities, as offerings or evidence of their reverence, to the great sanctuaries of the Greek world. They were simple buildings, normally no more than a marble rectangle faced by two columns. The best known are at Delphi (see p. 193), the site of the Pythian oracle, on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. Here fragments of sculpture or walls survive from treasuries given by Sicyon (in the northern Peloponnese), Athens, and the island of Siphnos. On the sculptured friezes which run around these treasuries were portrayed the myths of the Greek world, often in narrative form. The finest, dating from about 530 Bc, are from the Treasury of the Siphnians. They include a three-scene depiction of the Judgement of Paris ( Paris was asked to judge who was the most beautiful of the goddesses, Hera, Athena, or Aphrodite), a discussion by the gods of the fate of the defeated Trojans, and a long frieze showing a battle between gods and giants. The last was a favourite theme, symbolizing the triumph of good over evil, Greek over barbarian.

The Revival of Athenian Pottery

The emergence of a new interest in myth can also be seen in the pottery of sixthcentury Athens. In the seventh century, as has been seen, Corinthian pottery, with its riot of animal life, reigned supreme in the Greek world. The Athenian Geometric style had been completely displaced by it, and in the early sixth century even the Athenian potters were adapting Corinthian styles, letting their animals run in disorder round the vases. By 570, however, the Athenians had resumed control of their pottery. On the Francois vase (exported to Italy and named after its finder) of this date, the painter Cleitias composed over two hundred figures. There are some unrelated animals prancing around one band of the vase which echo the style absorbed from Corinth. However, most of the figures are related to each other and portray the myths surrounding the life of the hero Achilles, including the marriage of his parents, Peleus and Thetis, and the games held in honour of his dead companion, Patroclus. There seem to be two simultaneous developments. First, the painter is imposing a unity of theme. (By the 530s, painters such as Exechias are concentrating on a single event-a game of dice between the two heroes Ajax and Achilles, for instance, or the moment when the mast of the boat bearing the god Dionysus sprouts into a fruitful vine.) Secondly, there is the preoccupation with myth. On these fine pots portrayals of daily life are rare. As with the sculptures of the treasuries, this is the world of the gods and heroes. Traditionally it has been believed that the pots themselves were used for the drinking parties of the aristocracies, the symposia, and they reflect the interests of this class. More recently, it has been suggested that participants in the symposia used vessels of gold and silver and that the pots were poorer imitations of these.

In about 525 there is another development. Instead of the figures on a vase being painted in black on an orange background, the process is reversed. Figures are now left in orange/red with the background being painted black. While the details of black figures had to be engraved in the silhouette with a sharp tool, red figures could be drawn on. By the end of the sixth century, when red-figure painting was adopted by a group of Athenian potters known as the Pioneers, the new freedom given to painters was being exploited to the full. Not only are the details of each figure more exact, the figures themselves take on a new lease of life. They jump, tumble, and race across the whole surface of the pots. The concern of the patrons of this pottery remains, however, largely the same -- representations of myth or of scenes of aristocratic life. No one would have guessed from them that the Greek world was one which depended so totally on the labour of farmers.

The phrase 'a new lease of life' is suitable for explaining what happened next. The kouroi gradually become more natural and relaxed in their pose. The temple sculptures become less wooden and exploit the spaces they are given -- on the triangular pediments, for instance -- more successfully. The sculptures of the great temple of Zeus at Olympia of about 460 BC show a real understanding of the feelings and moods of the participants. This is the dawning of a new age, when, in the famous words of the fifth-century philosopher Protagoras, 'man is he measure of all things'. It is tied in with the victory of Greece over the Persians and, in Athens, with the triumph of democracy. However, it could not have happened if there had not also been a revolution in intellectual thought, a revolution which saw the birth of Western philosophy.

The Birth of Western Philosophy

In 585, according to the historian Herodotus, a battle between the Medes and the Lydians had been brought to a sudden halt when the sky darkened with an eclipse of the sun. The combatants were so overawed that they made peace with each other. An equally remarkable fact, however, was that the eclipse was said to have been predicted by one Thales, a citizen of the Ionian city of Miletus. It is impossible to say now, from the fragmentary sources, whether Thales had genuinely predicted the eclipse or simply provided an explanation for it after it had happened. He may have been simply passing on material gathered by Babylonian astronomers, and his own picture of the cosmos, described below, would hardly have provided him with a means of prediction. However, the moment is often seen as the birth of Greek philosophy, with Thales, for Aristotle at least, its founding father.

There is no one reason why Greek philosophy should have begun in the Ionian world. The cities of the Asian coast were the most prosperous of the sixthcentury Greek world. Miletus was the richest of all and, like many of the others, had had a tyrant. After he had been overthrown a civil war had broken out. One of the factions in the war was known as 'The Perpetual Sailors', and this underlines the fact that many Milesians must have travelled abroad in search of trade -- to Egypt, for instance, and equally to some of the opulent and sophisticated civilizations of the east. Here they would have had the opportunity to observe different cultures and absorb the varying intellectual traditions of these surrounding peoples. This in itself may have shaken conventional assumptions and liberated fresh ways of thinking.

The names of three early thinkers of Miletus survive: Thales and two followers, Anaximander and Anaximenes. All were recorded as practical men. Thales had been involved in politics and had some engineering skills. Anaximander made a map of the known world. Anaximenes was remembered for his skills of observation of everyday things, such as how an oar broke through water and scattered phosphorescence. Philosophy, in fact, may have been only a secondary interest for them. What survives of their thought is very fragmentary and subject to continuing debate. They appear to have shared a belief that the worldsystem, the kosmos, was subject to a divine force which gave it an underlying and orderly background. Where they got this idea, which is a far cry from the Homeric world of gods, is unknown -- possibly from eastern mythology. It proved fundamental to the speculations which followed.

Thales is known for his prediction of the eclipse, but he also seems to have been the first man to look for the origins of the kosmos. For Thales the basis of all things was water, on which the earth itself floated. There were Egyptian and Semitic creation stories in which the initial state was a waste of waters, but Thales may also have picked water because of its demonstrable importance to all human life. What Thales appears to have been suggesting is that everything stems from this one originating source. It is not clear, however, whether Thales thought that all existing things could be broken down back into water or whether they had changed irreversibly into their new forms.

This attempt to give a single, rational account of the natural order can be seen as a key moment in the evolution of Western culture with implications which still excite scientists and philosophers today. Even as the first draft of this chapter was being written in April 1994, American scientists announced the discovery of the 'top quark', the last of that level of sub-particle matter to be defined. Essentially they were working in the same tradition that was defined by Thales over 2,500 years ago (although there were long interruptions in between).

Anaximander, a contemporary of Thales', concentrated on a problem which arose directly from Thales' speculation, the difficulty of understanding how a particular physical entity (fire is an example given) can possibly come from something which seems to be an opposite to it, water. The very fact that he spotted the problem and tried to find a reasoned solution to it is significant in itself. Anaximander's solution was to imagine an indeterminate substance from which everything developed. He called it 'the Boundless' Anaximander saw 'the Boundless' not only as the origin of all material but with the separate function of surrounding the earth and keeping everything in balance. He seems to have believed that not only could water and fire never merge into each other but that they, like other opposites such as 'the dry' and 'the wet', were actually in conflict with each other, and only an overriding force, 'the Boundless', could keep them in check.

Anaximander's other contribution was to propose how the earth existed as a stable and unmoving object in space. Thales had argued that the earth rested on water, but this left the problem of what the water rested on. Anaximander proposed that there is no reason why anything which exists at the centre should necessarily move from that position. It cannot move in opposite directions at the same time and will thus always remain suspended in the centre. If this is Anaximander's argument (it is only recorded as such by Aristotle two hundred years later), then it is the first instance in natural science of what is known as the principle of sufficient reason (the principle that nothing happens without a reason).

What Anaximander did not explain was the process by which one form of matter, 'the Boundless', became another. Was there a boundary between 'the Boundless' and the rest of the physical world or was 'the Boundless' in some form identical with the physical world? It was left to the third of the Milesian thinkers, Anaximenes, to suggest a solution. Anaximenes argued that the world consisted of one interchangeable matter, air, from which all physical objects derived. The transition of steam into water and then into ice provided an example. Harder substances, such as rock, consisted of air which had been condensed even further. For Anaximenes, air also had a spiritual quality. It was a substance which existed eternally whatever it might be temporarily transmuted into. Its special position could be seen from its importance in sustaining life, and here Anaximenes drew on a popular conception that death occurred because air had withdrawn from the human body.

If the universe did originate from one substance, the problem was how to reconcile this with the enormous diversity and sense of constant change that any observer of the physical world is confronted with. The question of diversity and disorder was posed by one of the most complex of the early philosophers, Heraclitus, who, like his forerunners, was an Ionian, from the city of Ephesus to the north of Miletus. He was active about 500 BC.

Heraclitus' work survives in about a hundred fragments, as if he wrote not in continuous prose or verse as other philosophers did but in a series of short and penetrating observations. (The more recent example of Wittgenstein comes to mind.) Many of the fragments are obscure and give the impression that Heraclitus was deliberately trying to disturb conventional views and show off his own brilliance. Certainly he was seen as an unsettling and unpopular figure by his contemporaries. He explored the contradictions he perceived in the physical world. Salt water is drinkable for fish but undrinkable and deadly for men. Two very different properties exist in the same substance. The road which leads upwards also leads downwards. A stream remains a single entity even while the water which makes it up is constantly changing. In many cases a concept is intelligible only because there is an opposite to it. The concept of war is only meaningful if there is also one of peace. They are mutually dependent on each other, as also are night and day, winter and summer. Heraclitus went on, however, to argue that there was an overall coherence, harmonie (the Greek word meant the coming together of two different components to make a structure greater than its parts), in this world. What appears to be diversity in nature is in fact part of a natural unity. The opposites provide tensions but all is reconciled by a divine force, God. 'God is day, night, winter, summer, war, peace, surfeit, famine.'

Heraclitus was one of those who was happy to derive his ideas from the world he could observe around him. 'All that can be learnt by seeing and hearing, this I value highest', as he put it in one fragment. The approach taken by his contemporary and philosophical rival Parmenides could not have been more different. Parmenides was born about 515 BC in Elea, a city in southern Italy which had been founded by exiles from another Ionian city, Phocaea. He may have been consciously challenging Heraclitus when he discarded observation about the

physical world in favour of taking a lonely path towards finding truths based only on reason. The physical world, Parmenides argues, in the earliest piece of sustained philosophical argument to have survived, is made up only of what can be conceived in the mind. That and that alone exists. (This is fine for something which does exist, like a piece of rock, but is less helpful for concepts which can be imagined but which do not actually exist, such as a unicorn. It is assumed that Parmenides did not intend to include them in his system.) What cannot be thought of has no existence whatsoever and nothing more can or need be said about it. Parmenides goes on from here to argue that what exists -- a piece of rock, for instance -- can only exist in that state. It cannot be conceived of in any pre- or post-rock state because then it would not have existed as it does now and what did not exist cannot be spoken of. Therefore, the rock and by analogy all existing things are unchangeable, caught in a perpetual present. Parmenides goes further to argue that as nothing cannot exist there cannot be empty space between objects -- all things that exist are joined as one indivisible substance. The logical conclusion, therefore, is that the world is composed of one unchanging substance. This immediately contradicts what the senses have to say and opens up a chasm between the findings of reason and those of observation.

Parmenides' pupil Zeno went on to explore the paradoxes exposed by Parmenides' reasoning. One is that of the arrow in flight. To the senses the arrow appears to be moving. Yet logically, Zeno argued, it was not. The argument goes as follows. Everything is at rest when it is 'at a place equal to itself'. At each moment of time the arrow is always at 'a place equal to itself'. Therefore the arrow is always at rest. Equally a runner cannot run across a stadium until he has crossed half its length. He cannot reach half its length until he has covered a quarter and a quarter until he has covered an eighth and so on. Logically, he can never reach the end of the stadium.

Parmenides had shown that if a single incontrovertible starting-point can be taken, then it is possible to proceed deductively to demonstrate some contingent truth. This was a crucial step in the development of philosophical argument. His conclusions were deeply unsettling in themselves and acted to stimulate further thought across the Greek world. Plato, for instance, acknowledged the influence of Parmenides when he argued that there are unchanging entities, the Forms, which can only be approached through reason.

One reaction to Parmenides was to enquire more closely into what it was that actually made up material objects. Empedocles of Acragas, for instance, who was at work in the mid-fifth century, aimed to reinstate the senses as a valid source for knowledge. Objects, he suggested, were not unchanging as Parmenides had argued. They come into being in their different forms according to a different mix of four elements, earth, water, air, and fire. Forces of what he called love and hate caused the perpetual disintegration and reformation of different materials but the four elements remain constant. (This theory continued to be influential in Europe as late as the seventeenth century.)

An alternative explanation to the problem of material objects was to assume that they could be divided into tiny particles which were themselves indivisible. (The Greeks used the word atomos for such a particle, hence 'atom'). The concept originated with the mid-fifth-century Leucippus, a native of Abdera, a small town in the northern Aegean founded by settlers from Ionia Leucippus broke completely with Parmenides to assert that 'nothing' could exist (a good statement then as now from which to start a philosophical argument) in the sense that there could be empty space between things. If this was accepted, matter did not have to be joined together in one undifferentiated mass and objects could move as there was empty space to move through. Leucippus and his younger contemporary Democritus, also from Abdera, went on to argue that the physical world was made up of atoms which were of the same substance but differed in shape and size. These atoms move at random (exploiting the empty spaces), but atoms of like size or shape tend to be attracted to each other and form material objects ( Democritus even postulated that some were conveniently provided with hooks). So the world as it exists takes shape. Every object is made of the same substance arranged differently according to the form of its constituent atoms. Where the Atomists differed from earlier cosmologists was in their belief that the formation of the world was random. There is no mention of a guiding force behind it. The only things that exist are atoms and the empty spaces between them. This was the first developed statement of materialism, the theory that nothing which can be directly grasped by the senses exists beyond the material world. It made the Atomists Marx's favourite Greek philosophers.

A very different approach was provided by Pythagoras, another Ionian in origin, a native of the island of Samos. He was forced into exile in southern Italy, probably about 525 BC. Very little is known about Pythagoras' life, although a mass of later legend attaches to it. He was clearly a charismatic figure and drew around him a band of devoted followers who continued in existence long after his death and who inspired other similar groups in the cities of southern Italy. It has proved virtually impossible to distinguish between what Pythagoras himself taught and what was added later by the Pythagoreans. 'Pythagoras' theorem' of the right-angled triangle, for instance, seems to have had no direct connection with him (and was probably known, in essence, to the Babylonians many hundreds of years earlier).

The one teaching which is most likely to have been Pythagoras' own is that of the transmigration of the soul. Pythagoras appears to have believed that the soul exists as an immortal entity separately from the body. The body is simply its temporary home, and on the death of one body it moves on to another. What kind of body it moves on to depends on its behaviour in each life, for the soul is not only immortal, it is rational and responsible for its own actions. It must never let itself be conquered by the desires of the body. If it does then it will suffer in the next. Likewise, through correct behaviour it can move on to a happier existence. The Pythagoreans were therefore ascetics, but unlike many with this leaning they never cut themselves off from the world. In fact, many Pythagoreans became deeply involved in politics, though the austerity of their beliefs often aroused opposition.

Although direct proof of any association of Pythagoras with mathematics is lacking, he is often linked with the theory that the structure of things rests on numbers. A single string spanning a sounding-box sounds a note when plucked. Halve the length of the string and pluck it again. The note is one octave higher. Metals mixed in certain proportions form new metals. The relationship between the parts of a 'perfect' human body can be calculated mathematically. Is it possible to argue from this that mathematical forms exist unseen behind all physical structures? The possibility that they do and can be grasped by a reasoning soul was to be taken up by Plato. The study of mathematics was to be the core of the education given to his aspiring philosophers.

The varied arguments of the early Greek thinkers were invigorating but deeply unsettling. Faced with the seeming absurdities of Parmenides' deductions, philosophy could be dismissed as no more than an intellectual game. It could be argued that 'truth', if the concept could be said to exist at all, was something relative, dependent on the inadequate senses of individual observers or the ways in which they constructed their reasoned arguments. In the sixth century another Ionian, Xenophanes, had already made a similar point in a famous statement about the gods:

Immortal men imagine that gods are begotten and that they have human dress and speech and shape . . . If oxen or horses or lions had hands to draw with and to make works of art as men do, the horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, oxen like oxen, and they would make their gods' bodies similar to the bodily shape they themselves each had. (Translation: E. Hussey)

If the gods, to take Xenophanes' example, are the construction of human minds, it is a short step to argue that other concepts -- goodness or justice, for instance -- might also be. The fundamental question is then raised as to whether there could ever be any agreement over what the gods, or justice or goodness, might be. This was to be the central issue tackled by Socrates and Plato in the late fifth and early fourth centuries.

The achievements of these early philosophers need to be placed in context. They had not invented rational thought, which is an intrinsic element of human society, found in every culture. As the African philosopher K. Wiredu puts it succinctly in his Philosophy and an African Culture.

No society would survive for any length of time without basing a large part of its daily activities on beliefs derived from the evidence. You cannot farm without some rationally based knowledge of soils, seeds and climate; and no society can achieve any reasonable degree of harmony in human relations without the basic ability to assess claims and allegations by the method of objective investigation. The truth then is that rational knowledge is not the preserve of the modern 'West' nor is superstition a peculiarity of the African.

The study of southern African cave communities of 70,000 years ago shows that during a prolonged period of drought different kinds of stone tools were evolved to hunt the diminished supply of animals. When the drought was over the tools were discarded. The environment was being manipulated in an intelligent way even as early as this. In the Odyssey Odysseus fights his way through the waves after his shipwreck. He weighs up the alternative methods of getting safely to shore -- going straight in and being smashed by rocks or swimming further along the shore and risking being swept off by a gust of wind. Faced with changing physical circumstances, human beings have always contemplated the alternatives for survival and made conscious decisions as to the best way forward.

The achievement of Greek philosophy was to go beyond these everyday decisions and use rational thought to deal with abstract problems. An example can be taken from mathematics. The Egyptians and Babylonians had evolved a number of mathematical procedures to deal with the practical problems of building, calculating rations, and so on. These procedures had reached their final form in Babylon about 1600 BC. What was missing was any ability to use numbers in an abstract way. This was the breakthrough achieved by the Greeks. Although a systematic outline of mathematical knowledge was not produced until Euclid's in about 300 BC, it is dear that Greeks were thinking as pure mathematicians by the fifth century, able to work with axioms, definitions, proofs, and theorems. In this way, general principles could be formulated which could then be used to explore a wider range of other issues. It was the ability to work in the abstract that inspired intellectual progress, not just in mathematics but in science, metaphysics, ethics, even in politics. The reforms of Cleisthenes in Athens in the late sixth century (see p. 132) depended on a plan of bringing together a set of communities into the artificial structure of the trittys, a plan he must have constructed in an abstract form.

What caused this intellectual breakthrough in Greece? In a famous article of 1963 Goody and Watt related it to the coming of literacy:

A great many individuals found in the written record so many inconsistencies in the beliefs and categories of understanding handed down to them that they were impelled to a much more conscious, comparative and critical attitude to the accepted world picture and notably to the notions of Gods, the universe and the past.

The argument suggests that once evidence had been written down and a variety of different accounts of an event or a belief could be compared, then rational thinking developed as a way of dealing with the inconsistencies.

Goody and Watt's argument, like so many interpretations of the past, was rooted in contemporary debates, those of the 1960s. The guru of the period was the Canadian Marshall McLuhan with his stress on the medium (book, film, or television, for instance) as the conditioner of the message sent out. Television, argued McLuhan with some justification, imposed its own form on the information or programmes it transmitted. The use of writing in the world's first literate society, Greece, could, similarly, have had as significant an impact on ways of thinking. Goody and Watt's view is now out of favour. The written word is as likely to be a force for conservatism as for liberation. What was written downin ancient Egypt, for example -- often achieved a sacred quality simply because it was in written form. The Egyptian doctor would allow his own observations and recommendations for treatment to be guided by the texts he had inherited. They certainly did not encourage him to think rationally about the diseases he was treating.

Goody and Watt's view also implies that the early Greek philosophers had access to a variety of different texts. This certainly seems to be well beyond the truth. The scholar who sits down and masters a number of different texts before coming to his own conclusions appears only in Hellenistic times. Aristotle ( 384-322 BC) is the first human being recorded as having a library. In the sixth and fifth century BC the number of texts available was very limited. They could not be read easily. Public inscriptions, for instance, were often produced with no word-spacing or punctuation, and when a law was changed the new version was simply tacked on to the end of the old. Longer texts, of poetry or history, seem to have been composed as aids to memory, and were seen as inferior to the spoken word with all the emotional possibilities it offers in performance. Both Socrates and Plato vastly preferred the cut and thrust of oral debate as an appropriate way to conduct argument.

In her Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece Rosalind Thomas stresses the continuing primacy of the spoken word, in the sixth and fifth century at least. It may be more productive to look within Greek society itself for the development of rational thought and, in particular, at the way that the Greeks interacted with each other orally. This brings the discussion back to the polis. From its inception the polis acted as a cockpit for argument. The process of decision-making through debate was established well before Thales' eclipse. In 630, when the people of Thera, faced with starvation, decided to send their surplus men to found a new colony, the assembly on the island made detailed arrangements, including the choice of a leader for the colony, the methods of choosing colonists, and the penalties for those who refused to sail. It can be assumed that all this must have been established through debate, with the pros and cons of each course of action rationally discussed. The decree is a lucky survival, but must have been one of many proclaimed by city assemblies in this age. Another, later example of the use of rational thought in debate concerns Themistocles' interpretation of the oracle received by Athens before the battle of Salamis. At first sight the oracle looked unfavourable, but in an inspired piece of textual analysis Themistocles successfully showed how Salamis would prove to be the saviour of the city and that 'the wooden walls' mentioned in the text were not those of the city but those of Themistocles' own creation, the Athenian navy. The use of reason proved essential for the survival of the polis.

It was not only in their assemblies that the Greeks took to argument. As Geoffrey Lloyd has pointed out, the lawcourts provided another arena for establishing the truth through argument. Each side would be forced to develop strong and compelling arguments in support of its case. Lloyd argues that much of the same adversarial cut and thrust can be found in Greek philosophical debate, with the possibility that the model was directly adopted by philosophers from the courts.

There must also have been an incentive, in these debates, for the contesting parties to appeal to abstract principles such as justice. The process can, perhaps, be picked up in the verse of Solon in Athens (see p. 127) in roughly the same period that Thales was beginning his speculations in Miletus. Solon talks of justice as an abstract principle which can be discussed rationally and introduced into a political system through the actions of men. Abstract ideas are not only becoming accessible, but are being debated without fear of inciting the wrath of the gods.

The end result, and one which was fundamental, was that there were few inhibitions on enquiry. The success of Greek philosophy lay in its critical and argumentative approach to an extraordinary range of questions. As Bernard Williams has pointed out:

In philosophy the Greeks initiated almost all its major fields -- metaphysics, logic, the philosophy of language, the theory of knowledge, ethics, political philosophy and the philosophy of art. [ Williams here is only referring to the concerns of modern philosophers -- he might have added mathematics and science, included as 'philosophy' by the Greeks.] Not only did they start these areas of enquiry but they progressively distinguished what would still be recognised as many of the most basic questions in those areas.

It is worth noting that Williams concentrates on the Greeks as question askers. They did not always come up with very effective answers. There were good reasons for this. First, their speculations often ran far ahead of what their senses could cope with. It is sobering to realize that no Greek astronomer had any means of exploring the heavens other than his own eyes. (There were instruments developed for measuring angles, but they still depended on the naked eye for their use.) Aristotle's theory of spontaneous generation, the idea that life could come from nowhere, which lingered on as a misconception until the seventeenth century, arose largely because he had no way of seeing small objects. Not the least of the Greeks' philosophical achievements was, however, to recognize this inadequacy of the senses. The fifth-century philosopher Democritus got to the core of the problem when he constructed a dialogue between a mind and the senses. 'Wretched mind, taking your proofs from us (the senses), do you overthrow us? Our overthrow will be your fall.'

"Early Greek philosophy", writes Martin West:

was not a single vessel which a succession of pilots commanded and tried to steer towards an agreed destination, one tacking one way, the next altering course in the light of his own perceptions. It was more like a flotilla of small craft whose navigators did not all start from the same point or at the same time, nor all aim for the same goal; some went in groups, some were influenced by the movements of others, some trayelled out of sight of each other.

In short, the Greek world of the sixth century fostered an intellectual curiosity and creativity which took many forms. The Archaic age deserves to be seen as one where a particular attitude of mind took root, perhaps, as has been suggested, because of the intensity of life in the polis. It involved the search for an understanding of the physical world free of the restraints imposed by those cultures which still lived in the shadow of threatening gods. It was still a fragmented world, however, one in which cities survived precariously on the limited resources available. Its vulnerability was now to be tested by attack from the east by the largest empire the world had yet seen, that of Persia.

By Charles Freeman in "Egypt, Greece, and Rome: Civilizations of the Mediterranean", Oxford University Press, UK, 1999, excerpts chapter 9 pp. 134-149. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.