Transcriber’s Note:

Footnotes have been renumbered consecutively and are collected at the end of each chapter. They have been linked to their references. References to notes in the index and elsewhere have been changed to reflect the revised numbers.

Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any textual issues encountered during its preparation.

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It has been no easy task to revise this volume in such a way as to make it more worthy of the favour with which it has been received. Most of it has had to be rewritten in the light of certain discoveries made since the publication of the first edition, above all, that of the extracts from Menon’s Ἰατρικά, which have furnished, as I believe, a clue to the history of Pythagoreanism. I trust that all other obligations are duly acknowledged in the proper place.

It did not seem worth while to eliminate all traces of a certain youthful assurance which marked the first edition. I should not write now as I wrote at the age of twenty-five; but I still feel that the main contentions of the book were sound, so I have not tried to amend the style. The references to Zeller and “Ritter and Preller” are adapted throughout to the latest editions. The Aristotelian commentators are referred to by the pages and verses of the Berlin Academy edition, and Stobaeus by those of Wachsmuth.

St. Andrews, 1908.

No apology is needed for the appearance of a work dealing with Early Greek Philosophy. The want of one has long been felt; for there are few branches of philology in which more progress has been made in the last twenty years, and the results of that progress have not yet been made accessible to the English reader. My original intention was simply to report these results; but I soon found that I was obliged to dissent from some of them, and it seemed best to say so distinctly. Very likely I am wrong in most of these cases, but my mistakes may be of use in calling attention to unobserved points. In any case, I hope no one will think I have been wanting in the respect due to the great authority of Zeller, who was the first to recall the history of philosophy from the extravagances into which it had wandered earlier in the century. I am glad to find that all my divergences from his account have only led me a little further in the path that he struck out.

I am very sensible of the imperfect execution of some parts of this work; but the subject has become so large, and the number of authorities whose testimony must be weighed is so great, that it is not easy for any viiione writer to be equally at home in all parts of the field.

I have consulted the student’s convenience by giving references to the seventh edition of Ritter and Preller (ed. Schultess) throughout. The references to Zeller are to the fourth German edition, from which the English translation was made. I have been able to make some use also of the recently published fifth edition (1892), and all references to it are distinguished by the symbol Z⁵. I can only wish that it had appeared in time for me to incorporate its results more thoroughly.

I have to thank many friends for advice and suggestions, and, above all, Mr. Harold H. Joachim, Fellow of Merton College, who read most of the work before it went to press.

Oxford, 1892.

I. It was not till the primitive view of the world and the customary rules of life had broken down, that the Greeks, began to feel the needs which philosophies of nature and of conduct seek to satisfy. Nor were those needs felt all at once. The traditional maxims of conduct were not seriously questioned till the old view of nature had passed away; and, for this reason, the earliest philosophers busied themselves mainly with speculations about the world around them. In due season, Logic was called into being to meet a fresh want. The pursuit of cosmological inquiry beyond a certain point inevitably brought to light a wide divergence between science and common sense, which was itself a problem that demanded solution, and moreover constrained philosophers to study the means of defending their paradoxes against the prejudices of the unscientific many. Later still, the prevailing interest in logical matters raised the question of the origin and validity of knowledge; while, about the same time, the breakdown of traditional morality gave rise to Ethics. The period which precedes the rise of Logic and Ethics has 2thus a distinctive character of its own, and may fitly be treated apart.^[1]

II. Even in the earliest times of which we have any record, the primitive view of the world is fast passing away. We are left to gather what manner of thing it was from the stray glimpses we get of it here and there in the older literature, to which it forms a sort of sombre background, and from the many strange myths and stranger rites that lived on, as if to bear witness of it to later times, not only in out-of-the-way parts of Hellas, but even in the “mysteries” of the more cultivated states. So far as we can see, it must have been essentially a thing of shreds and patches, ready to fall in pieces as soon as stirred by the fresh breeze of a larger experience and a more fearless curiosity. The only explanation of the world it could offer was a wild tale of the origin of things. Such a story as that of Ouranos, Gaia, and Kronos belongs plainly, as Mr. Lang has shown in Custom and Myth, to the same level of thought as the Maori tale of Papa and Rangi; while in its details the Greek myth is, if anything, the more savage of the two.

We must not allow ourselves to be misled by metaphors about “the childhood of the race,” though even these, if properly understood, are suggestive enough. Our ideas of the true state of a child’s mind are apt to be coloured by that theory of antenatal existence which has found, perhaps, its highest expression in Wordsworth’s 3Ode on the Intimations of Immortality. We transfer these ideas to the race generally, and are thus led to think of the men who made and repeated myths as simple, innocent creatures who were somehow nearer than we are to the beginning of things, and so, perhaps, saw with a clearer vision. A truer view of what a child’s thoughts really are will help to put us on the right track. Left to themselves, children are often tormented by vague terrors of surrounding objects which they fear to confide to any one. Their games are based upon an animistic theory of things, and they are great believers in luck and in the lot. They are devotees, too, of that “cult of odds and ends” which is fetishism; and the unsightly old dolls which they often cherish more fondly than the choicest products of the toy-shop, remind us forcibly of the ungainly stocks and stones which Pausanias found in the Holy of Holies of many a stately Greek temple. At Sparta the Tyndaridai were a couple of boards, while the old image of Hera at Samos was a roughly-hewn log.^[2]

On the other hand, we must remember that, even in the earliest times of which we have any record, the world was already very old. Those Greeks who first tried to understand nature were not at all in the position of men setting out on a hitherto untrodden path. There was already in the field a tolerably consistent view of the world, though no doubt it was rather implied and assumed in ritual and myth than distinctly realised as such. The early thinkers did a far greater thing than merely to make a beginning. By turning their backs on the savage view of things, 4they renewed their youth, and with it, as it proved, the youth of the world, at a time when the world seemed in its dotage.

The marvel is that they were able to do this so thoroughly as they did. A savage myth might be preserved here and there to the scandal of philosophers; fetishes, totems, and magic rites might lurk in holes and corners with the moles and with the bats, to be unearthed long afterwards by the curious in such matters. But the all-pervading superstition, which we call primitive because we know not how or whence it came, was gone for ever; and we find Herodotos noting with unfeigned surprise the existence among “barbarians” of beliefs and customs which, not so long ago, his own forefathers had taught and practised quite as zealously as ever did Libyan or Scyth. Even then, he might have found most of them surviving on the “high places” of Hellas.

III. In one respect the way had been prepared already. Long before history begins, the colonisation of the islands and the coasts of Asia Minor had brought about a state of things that was not favourable to the rigid maintenance of traditional customs and ways of thought. A myth is essentially a local thing, and though the emigrants might give the names of ancestral sanctuaries to similar spots in their new homes, they could not transfer with the names the old sentiment of awe. Besides, these were, on the whole, stirring and joyful times. The spirit of adventure is not favourable to superstition, and men whose chief occupation is fighting are not apt to be oppressed by that “fear of the world” which some tell us is the normal state of the savage mind. Even the savage 5becomes in great measure free from it when he is really happy.

That is why we find so few traces of the primitive view of the world in Homer. The gods have become frankly human, and everything savage is, so far as may be, kept out of sight. There are, of course, vestiges of early beliefs and practices, but they are exceptional. In that strange episode of the Fourteenth Book of the Iliad known as The Deceiving of Zeus we find a number of theogonical ideas which are otherwise quite foreign to Homer, but they are treated with so little seriousness that the whole thing has even been regarded as a parody or burlesque of some primitive poem on the birth of the gods. That, however, is to mistake the spirit of Homer. He finds the old myth ready to his hand, and sees in it matter for a “joyous tale,” just as Demodokos did in the loves of Ares and Aphrodite. There is no antagonism to traditional views, but rather a complete detachment from them.

It has often been noted that Homer never speaks of the primitive custom of purification for bloodshed. The dead heroes are burned, not buried, as the kings of continental Hellas were. Ghosts play hardly any part. In the Iliad we have, to be sure, the ghost of Patroklos, in close connexion with the solitary instance of human sacrifice in Homer. All that was part of the traditional story, and Homer says as little about it as he can. There is also the Nekyia in the Eleventh Book of the Odyssey, which has been assigned to a late date on the ground that it contains Orphic ideas. The reasoning does not appear cogent. As we shall see, the Orphics did not so much invent new ideas as revive old ones, and if the legend took Odysseus to the abode of the 6dead, that had to be described in accordance with the accepted views about it.

In fact, we are never entitled to infer from Homer’s silence that the primitive view was unknown to him. The absence of certain things from the poems is due to reticence rather than ignorance; for, wherever anything to his purpose was to be got from an old story, he did not hesitate to use it. On the other hand, when the tradition necessarily brought him into contact with savage ideas, he prefers to treat them with reserve. We may infer, then, that at least in a certain society, that of the princes for whom Homer sang, the primitive view of the world was already discredited by a comparatively early date.^[3]

IV. When we come to Hesiod, we seem to be in another world. We hear stories of the gods which are not only irrational but repulsive, and these stories are told quite seriously. Hesiod makes the Muses say: “We know how to tell many false things that are like the truth; but we know too, when we will, to utter what is true.”^[4] This means that he was quite conscious of the difference between the Homeric spirit and his own. The old light-heartedness is gone, and it is important to tell the truth about the gods. Hesiod knows, too, that he belongs to a later and a sadder time than Homer. In describing the Ages of the World, he inserts a fifth age between those of Bronze and Iron. That is the Age of the Heroes, the age Homer sang of. It was better than the Bronze Age which came before it, 7and far better than that which followed it, the Age of Iron, in which Hesiod lives.^[5] He also feels that he is singing for another class. It is to shepherds and husbandmen he addresses himself, and the princes for whom Homer sang have become remote persons who give “crooked dooms.” For common men there is no hope but in hard, unceasing toil. It is the voice of the people we now hear for the first time, and of a people for whom the romance and splendour of the Greek Middle Ages meant nothing. The primitive view of the world had never really died out among them; so it was natural for their first spokesman to assume it in his poems. That is why we find in Hesiod these old, savage tales, which Homer disdained to speak of.

Yet it would be wrong to see in the Theogony a mere revival of the old superstition. Nothing can ever be revived just as it was; for in every reaction there is a polemical element which differentiates it completely from the earlier stage it vainly seeks to reproduce. Hesiod could not help being affected by the new spirit which trade and adventure had awakened over the sea, and he became a pioneer in spite of himself. The rudiments of what grew into Ionic science and history are to be found in his poems, and he really did more than any one to hasten that decay of the old ideas which he was seeking to arrest. The Theogony is an attempt to reduce all the stories about the gods into a single system, and system is necessarily fatal to so wayward a thing as mythology. Hesiod, no less than Homer, teaches a panhellenic polytheism; the only difference 8is that with him this is more directly based on the legends attached to the local cults, which he thus sought to invest with a national significance. The result is that the myth becomes primary and the cult secondary, a complete inversion of the primitive relation. Herodotos tells us that it was Homer and Hesiod who made a theogony for the Hellenes, who gave the gods their names, and distributed among them their offices and arts,^[6] and it is perfectly true. The Olympian pantheon took the place of the old local gods in men’s minds, and this was as much the doing of Hesiod as of Homer. The ordinary man had no ties to this company of gods, but at most to one or two of them; and even these he would hardly recognise in the humanised figures, detached from all local associations, which poetry had substituted for the older objects of worship. The gods of Greece had become a splendid subject for art; but they came between the Hellenes and their ancestral religions. They were incapable of satisfying the needs of the people, and that is the secret of the religious revival which we shall have to consider in the sequel.

V. Nor is it only in this way that Hesiod shows himself a child of his time. His Theogony is at the same time a Cosmogony, though it would seem that here he was following others rather than working out a thought of his own. At any rate, he only mentions the two great cosmogonical figures, Chaos and Eros, and does not really bring them into connexion with his system. The conception of Chaos represents a distinct effort to picture the beginning of things. It is not a formless mixture, but rather, as its etymology indicates, the yawning gulf or gap where nothing is as 9yet.^[7] We may be sure that this is not primitive. Savage man does not feel called upon to form an idea of the very beginning of all things; he takes for granted that there was something to begin with. The other figure, that of Eros, was doubtless intended to explain the impulse to production which gave rise to the whole process. That, at least, is what the Maoris mean by it, as may be seen from the following remarkable passage^[8]:—

Hesiod must have had some such primitive speculation to work on, but he does not tell us anything clearly on the subject.

We have records of great activity in the production of cosmogonies during the whole of the sixth century B.C., and we know something of the systems of Epimenides, Pherekydes,^[9] and Akousilaos. As there were speculations of this kind even before Hesiod, we need have no hesitation in believing that the earliest Orphic cosmogony goes back to that century too.^[10] 10The feature which is common to all these systems is the attempt to get behind the gap, and to put Kronos or Zeus in the first place. This is what Aristotle has in view when he distinguishes the “theologians” from those who were half theologians and half philosophers, and who put what was best in the beginning.^[11] It is obvious, however, that this process is the very reverse of scientific, and might be carried on indefinitely; so we have nothing to do with the cosmogonists in our present inquiry, except so far as they can be shown to have influenced the course of more sober investigations. Indeed, these speculations are still based on the primitive view of the world, and so fall outside the limits we have traced for ourselves.

VI. What, then, was the step that placed the Ionian cosmologists once for all above the level of the Maoris? Grote and Zeller make it consist in the substitution of impersonal causes acting according to law for personal causes acting arbitrarily. But the distinction between personal and impersonal was not really felt in antiquity, and it is a mistake to lay much stress on it. It seems rather that the real advance made by the scientific men of Miletos was that they left off telling tales. They gave up the hopeless task of describing what was when as yet there was nothing, and asked instead what all things really are now.

The great principle which underlies all their thinking, though it is first put into words by Parmenides, is that Nothing comes into being out of nothing, and nothing passes away into nothing. They saw, however, that particular things were always 11coming into being and passing away again, and from this it followed that their existence was no true or stable one. The only things that were real and eternal were the original matter which passed through all these changes and the motion which gave rise to them, to which was soon added that law of proportion or compensation which, despite the continual becoming and passing away of things, secured the relative permanence and stability of the various forms of existence that go to make up the world. That these were, in fact, the leading ideas of the early cosmologists, cannot, of course, be proved till we have given a detailed exposition of their systems; but we can show at once how natural it was for such thoughts to come to them. It is always the problem of change and decay that first excites the wonder which, as Plato says, is the starting-point of all philosophy. Besides this, there was in the Ionic nature a vein of melancholy which led it to brood upon the instability of things. Even before the time of Thales, Mimnermos of Kolophon sings the sadness of change; and, at a later date, the lament of Simonides, that the generations of men fall like the leaves of the forest, touches a chord already struck by the earliest singer of Ionia.^[12] Now, so long as men could believe everything they saw was alive like themselves, the spectacle of the unceasing death and new birth of nature would only tinge their thoughts with a certain mournfulness, which would find its expression in such things as the Linos dirges which the Greeks borrowed from their Asiatic neighbours;^[13] but when 12primitive animism, which had seen conscious life everywhere, was gone, and polytheistic mythology, which had personified at least the more striking natural phenomena, was going, it must have seemed that there was nowhere any abiding reality. Nowadays we are accustomed, for good and for ill, to the notion of dead things, obedient, not to inner impulses, but solely to mechanical laws. But that is not the view of the natural man, and we may be sure that, when first it forced itself on him, it must have provoked a strong sense of dissatisfaction. Relief was only to be had from the reflexion that as nothing comes from nothing, nothing can pass away into nothing. There must, then, be something which always is, something fundamental which persists throughout all change, and ceases to exist in one form only that it may reappear in another. It is significant that this something is spoken of as “deathless” and “ageless.”^[14]

VII. So far as I know, no historian of Greek philosophy has clearly laid it down that the word which was used by the early cosmologists to express this idea of a permanent and primary substance was none other than φύσις; and that the title Περὶ φύσεως, so commonly given to philosophical works of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.,^[15] means simply Concerning the Primary Substance. Both Plato and Aristotle use the term in this sense when they are 13discussing the earlier philosophy,^[16] and its history shows clearly enough what its original meaning must have been. In Greek philosophical language, φύσις always means that which is primary, fundamental, and persistent, as opposed to what is secondary, derivative, and transient; what is “given,” as opposed to that which is made or becomes. It is what is there to begin with. It is true that Plato and his successors also identify φύσις with the best or most normal condition of a thing; but that is just because they held the goal of any development to be prior to the process by which it is reached. Such an idea was wholly unknown to the pioneers of philosophy. They sought the explanation of the incomplete world we know, not in the end, but in the beginning. It seemed to them that, if only they could strip off all the modifications which Art and Chance had introduced, they would get at the ultimately real; and so the search after φύσις, first in the world at large and afterwards in human society, became the chief interest of the age we have to deal with.

The word ἀρχή, by which the early cosmologists are usually said to have designated the object of their search, is in this sense purely Aristotelian. It is quite natural that it should be employed in the well-known historical sketch of the First Book of the Metaphysics; for Aristotle is there testing the theories of earlier thinkers by his own doctrine of the four causes. But Plato never uses the term in this connexion, and it does not occur once in the genuine fragments of the 14early philosophers. It is confined to the Stoic and Peripatetic handbooks from which most of our knowledge is derived, and these simply repeat Aristotle. Zeller has pointed out in a footnote^[17] that it would be an anachronism to refer the subtle Aristotelian use of the word to the beginnings of speculation. To Anaximander ἀρχή could only have meant “beginning,” and it was far more than a beginning that the early cosmologists were looking for: it was the eternal ground of all things.

There is one very important conclusion that follows at once from the account just given of the meaning of φύσις, and it is, that the search for the primary substance really was the thing that interested the Ionian philosophers. Had their main object been, as Teichmüller held it was, the explanation of celestial and meteorological phenomena, their researches would not have been called Περὶ φύσεως ἱστορίη,^[18] but rather Περὶ οὐρανοῦ or Περὶ μετεώρων. And this we shall find confirmed by a study of the way in which Greek cosmology developed. The growing thought which may be traced through the successive representatives of any school is always that which concerns the primary substance, while the astronomical and other theories are, in the main, peculiar to the individual thinkers. Teichmüller undoubtedly did good service by his protest against the treatment of these theories as mere isolated curiosities. They form, on the contrary, 15coherent systems which must be looked at as wholes. But it is none the less true that Greek philosophy began, as it ended, with the search for what was abiding in the flux of things.

VIII. But how could this give back to nature the life of which it had been robbed by advancing knowledge? Simply by making it possible for the life that had hitherto been supposed to reside in each particular thing to be transferred to the one thing of which all others were passing forms. The very process of birth, growth, and decay might now be regarded as the unceasing activity of the one ultimate reality. Aristotle and his followers expressed this by saying that the early cosmologists believed in an “eternal motion,” and in substance this is correct, though it is not probable that they said anything about the eternal motion in their writings. It is more likely that they simply took it for granted. In early times, it is not movement but rest that has to be accounted for, and we may be sure that the eternity of motion was not asserted till it had been denied. As we shall see, it was Parmenides who first denied it. The idea of a single ultimate substance, when thoroughly worked out, seemed to leave no room for motion; and after the time of Parmenides, we do find that philosophers were concerned to show how it began. At first, this would not seem to require explanation at all.

Modern writers sometimes give the name of Hylozoism to this way of thinking, but the term is apt to be misleading. It suggests theories which deny the separate reality of life and spirit, whereas, in the days of Thales, and even far later, the distinction 16between matter and spirit had not been felt, still less formulated in such a way that it could be denied. The uncreated, indestructible reality of which these early thinkers tell us was a body, or even matter, if we choose to call it so; but it was not matter in the sense in which matter is opposed to spirit.

IX. We have indicated the main characteristics of the primitive view of the world, and we have sketched in outline the view which displaced it; we must now consider the causes which led to the downfall of the one and the rise of the other. Foremost among these was undoubtedly the widening of the Greek horizon occasioned by the great extension of maritime enterprise which followed the decay of the Phoenician naval supremacy. The scene of the old stories had, as a rule, been laid just outside the boundaries of the world known to the men who believed them. Odysseus does not meet with Kirke or the Kyklops or the Sirens in the familiar Aegean, but in regions which lay beyond the ken of the Greeks at the time the Odyssey was composed. Now, however, the West was beginning to be familiar too, and the fancy of the Greek explorers led them to identify the lands which they discovered with the places which the hero of the national fairy-tale had come to in his wanderings. It was soon discovered that the monstrous beings in question were no longer to be found there, and the belief grew up that they had never been there at all. So, too, the Milesians had settled colonies all round the Euxine. The colonists went out with Ἀργὼ πᾶσι μέλουσα in their minds; and, at the same time as they changed the name of the Inhospitable to the Hospitable Sea, they localised the “far country” (αἶα) of the 17primitive tale, and made Jason fetch the Golden Fleece from Kolchis. Above all, the Phokaians had explored the Mediterranean as far as the Pillars of Herakles,^[19] and the new knowledge that the “endless paths” of the sea had boundaries must have moved men’s minds in much the same way as the discovery of America did in later days. A single example will illustrate the process which was always going on. According to the primitive view, the heavens were supported by a giant called Atlas. No one had ever seen him, though he was supposed to live in Arkadia. The Phokaian explorers identified him with a cloud-capped mountain in Africa, and once they had done this, the old belief was doomed. It was impossible to go on believing in a god who was also a mountain, conveniently situated for the trader to steer by, as he sailed to Tarshish in quest of silver.

X. But by far the most important question we have to face is that of the nature and extent of the influence exercised by what we call Eastern wisdom on the Greek mind. It is a common idea even now that the Greeks in some way derived their philosophy from Egypt and Babylon, and we must therefore try to understand as clearly as possible what such a statement really means. To begin with, we must observe that no writer of the period during which Greek philosophy flourished knows anything at all of its having come from the East. Herodotos would not have omitted to say so, had he ever heard of it; for it would have confirmed his own belief in the Egyptian origin of Greek religion and civilisation.^[20] Plato, who 18had a very great respect for the Egyptians on other grounds, distinctly implies that they were a businesslike rather than a philosophical people.^[21] Aristotle speaks only of the origin of mathematics in Egypt^[22] (a point to which we shall return), though, if he had known of an Egyptian philosophy, it would have suited his argument better to mention that. It is not till a far later date, when Egyptian priests and Alexandrian Jews began to vie with one another in discovering the sources of Greek philosophy in their own past, that we first have definite statements to the effect that it came from Phoenicia or Egypt. Here, however, we must carefully note two things. In the first place, the word “philosophy” had come by that time to include theology of a more or less mystical type, and was even applied to various forms of asceticism.^[23] In the second place, the so-called Egyptian philosophy was only arrived at by a process of turning primitive myths into allegories. We are still able to judge Philo’s Old Testament interpretation for ourselves, and we may be sure that the Egyptian allegorists were even more arbitrary; for they had far less promising material to work on. Nothing can be more savage than the myth of Isis and Osiris;^[24] yet it is first interpreted according 19to the ideas of later Greek philosophy, and then declared to be the original source of that philosophy.

This method of interpretation may be said to culminate with the Neopythagorean Noumenios, from whom it passed to the Christian Apologists. It is Noumenios who asks, “What is Plato, but Moses speaking Attic?”^[25] It seems likely, indeed, that he was thinking of certain marked resemblances between Plato’s Laws and the Levitical Code when he said this—resemblances due to the fact that certain primitive legal ideas are similarly modified in both; but in any case Clement and Eusebios give the remark a far wider application.^[26] At the Renaissance, this absurd farrago was revived along with everything else, and certain ideas derived from the Praeparatio Evangelica continued for long to colour accepted views on the subject. Even Cudworth speaks complacently of the ancient “Moschical or Mosaical philosophy” taught by Thales and Pythagoras.^[27] It is important to realise the true origin of this deeply-rooted prejudice against the originality of the Greeks. It does not come from modern researches into the beliefs of ancient peoples; for these have disclosed absolutely nothing in the way of evidence for a Phoenician or Egyptian philosophy. It is a mere residuum of the Alexandrian passion for allegory.

20Of course no one nowadays would rest the case for the Oriental origin of Greek philosophy on the evidence of Clement or Eusebios; the favourite argument in recent times has been the analogy of the arts and religion. We are seeing more and more, it is said, that the Greeks derived their art and many of their religious ideas from the East; and it is urged that the same will in all probability prove true of their philosophy. This is a specious argument, but not in the least conclusive. It ignores altogether the essential difference in the way these things are transmitted from people to people. Material civilisation and the arts may pass easily from one people to another, though they have not a common language, and certain simple religious ideas can be conveyed by ritual better than in any other way. Philosophy, on the other hand, can only be expressed in abstract language, and it can only be transmitted by educated men, whether by means of books or oral teaching. Now we know of no Greek, in the times we are dealing with, who knew enough of any Oriental language to read an Egyptian book or even to listen to the discourse of an Egyptian priest, and we never hear till a late date of Oriental teachers who wrote or spoke in Greek. The Greek traveller in Egypt would no doubt pick up a few words of Egyptian, and it is certain that somehow or other the priests could make themselves understood by the Greeks. They were able to rebuke Hekataios for his family pride, and Plato tells a story of the same sort at the beginning of the Timaeus.^[28] But they must have made use of interpreters, and it is impossible to conceive of 21philosophical ideas being communicated through an uneducated dragoman.^[29]

But really it is not worth while to ask whether the communication of philosophical ideas was possible or not, till some evidence has been produced that any of these peoples had a philosophy to communicate. No such evidence has yet been discovered, and, so far as we know, the Indians were the only people besides the Greeks who ever had anything that deserves the name. No one now will suggest that Greek philosophy came from India, and indeed everything points to the conclusion that Indian philosophy came from Greece. The chronology of Sanskrit literature is an extremely difficult subject; but, so far as we can see, the great Indian systems are later in date than the Greek philosophies which they most nearly resemble. Of course the mysticism of the Upanishads and of Buddhism were of native growth and profoundly influenced philosophy, but they were not themselves philosophy in any true sense of the word.^[30]

XI. It would, however, be another thing to say that Greek philosophy originated quite independently of Oriental influences. The Greeks themselves believed 22their mathematical science to be of Egyptian origin, and they must also have known something of Babylonian astronomy. It cannot be an accident that philosophy originated in Ionia just at the time when communication with these two countries was easiest, and it is significant that the very man who was said to have introduced geometry from Egypt is also regarded as the first of the philosophers. It thus becomes very important for us to discover, if we can, what Egyptian mathematics meant. We shall see that, even here, the Greeks were really original.

There is a papyrus in the Rhind collection at the British Museum^[31] which gives us an instructive glimpse of arithmetic and geometry as these sciences were understood on the banks of the Nile. It is the work of one Aahmes, and contains rules for calculations both of an arithmetical and a geometrical character. The arithmetical problems mostly concern measures of corn and fruit, and deal particularly with such questions as the division of a number of measures among a given number of persons, the number of loaves or jars of beer that certain measures will yield, and the wages due to the workmen for a certain piece of work. It corresponds exactly, in fact, to the description of Egyptian arithmetic which Plato has given us in the Laws, where he tells us that the children learnt along with their letters to solve problems in the distribution of apples and wreaths to greater or smaller numbers of 23people, the pairing of boxers and wrestlers, and so forth.^[32] This is clearly the origin of the art which the Greeks called λογιστική, and they certainly borrowed that from Egypt; but there is not the slightest trace of what the Greeks called ἀριθμητική, or the scientific study of numbers.

The geometry of the Rhind papyrus is of a similarly utilitarian character, and Herodotos, who tells us that Egyptian geometry arose from the necessity of measuring the land afresh after the inundations, is obviously far nearer the mark than Aristotle, who says that it grew out of the leisure enjoyed by the priestly caste.^[33] We find, accordingly, that the rules given for calculating areas are only exact when these are rectangular. As fields are usually more or less rectangular, this would be sufficient for practical purposes. The rule for finding what is called the seqt of a pyramid is, however, on a rather higher level, as we should expect; for the angles of the Egyptian pyramids really are equal, and there must have been some method for obtaining this result. It comes to this. Given the “length across the sole of the foot,” that is, the diagonal of the base, and that of the piremus or “ridge,” to find a number which represents the ratio between them. This is done by dividing half the diagonal of the base by the “ridge,” and it is obvious that such a method might quite well be discovered empirically. It seems an anachronism to speak of elementary trigonometry in connexion with 24a rule like this, and there is nothing to suggest that the Egyptians went any further.^[34] That the Greeks learnt as much from them, we shall see to be highly probable, though we shall see also that, from a comparatively early period, they generalised it so as to make it of use in measuring the distances of inaccessible objects, such as ships at sea. It was probably this generalisation that suggested the idea of a science of geometry, which was really the creation of the Pythagoreans, and we can see how far the Greeks soon surpassed their teachers from a remark of Demokritos which has been preserved. He says (fr. 299): “I have listened to many learned men, but no one has yet surpassed me in the construction of figures out of lines accompanied by demonstration, not even the Egyptian harpedonapts, as they call them.”^[35] Now the word ἁρπεδονάπτης is not Egyptian but Greek. It means “cord-fastener,”^[36] and it is a striking coincidence that the oldest Indian geometrical treatise is called the Çulvasutras or “rules of the cord.” These things point to the use of the triangle of which the sides are 3, 4, 5, and which has always a right angle. We know that this triangle was used from an early date among the Chinese and the Hindus, who doubtless got it from Babylon, and we shall see that Thales probably learnt the use of it in Egypt.^[37] There is no reason whatever for supposing that any of these peoples had in any degree troubled themselves to give a theoretical 25demonstration of its properties, though Demokritos would certainly have been able to do so. Finally, we must note the highly significant fact that all mathematical terms are of purely Greek origin.^[38]

XII. The other source from which the Ionians directly or indirectly derived material for their cosmology was the Babylonian astronomy. There is no doubt that the Babylonians from a very early date had recorded all celestial phenomena like eclipses. They had also studied the planetary motions, and determined the signs of the zodiac. Further, they were able to predict the recurrence of the phenomena they had observed with considerable accuracy by means of cycles based on their recorded observations. I can see no reason for doubting that they had observed the phenomenon of precession. Indeed, they could hardly have failed to notice it; for their observations went back over so many centuries, that it would be quite appreciable. We know that, at a later date, Ptolemy estimated the precession of the equinoxes at one degree in a hundred years, and it is extremely probable that this is just the Babylonian value. At any rate, it agrees very well with their division of the celestial circle into 360 degrees, and made it possible for a century to be regarded as a day in the “Great Year,” a conception we shall meet with later on.^[39]

26We shall see that Thales probably knew the cycle which the Babylonians used to predict eclipses (§ 3); but it would be a mistake to suppose that the pioneers of Greek science had any detailed knowledge of the Babylonian astronomy. It was not till the time of Plato that even the names of the planets were known,^[40] and the recorded observations were only made available in Alexandrian times. But, even if they had known these, their originality would remain. The Babylonians studied and recorded celestial phenomena for what we call astrological purposes, not from any scientific interest. There is no evidence at all that their accumulated observations ever suggested to them the least dissatisfaction with the primitive view of the world, or that they attempted to account for what they saw in any but the crudest way. The Greeks, on the other hand, with far fewer data to go upon, made at least three discoveries of capital importance in the course of two or three generations. In the first place, they discovered that the earth is a sphere and does not rest on anything. In the second 27place, they discovered the true theory of lunar and solar eclipses; and, in close connexion with this, they came to see, in the third place, that the earth is not the centre of our system, but revolves round it like the other planets. Not very much later, certain Greeks even took, at least tentatively, the final step of identifying the centre round which the earth and the planets revolve with the sun. These discoveries will be discussed in their proper place; they are only mentioned here to show the gulf between Greek astronomy and everything that had preceded it. The Babylonians had as many thousand years as the Greeks had centuries to make these discoveries, and it does not appear that they ever thought of one of them. The originality of the Greeks cannot be successfully questioned till it can be shown that the Babylonians had even an incorrect idea of what we call the solar system.

We may sum up all this by saying that the Greeks did not borrow either their philosophy or their science from the East. They did, however, get from Egypt certain rules of mensuration which, when generalised, gave birth to geometry; while from Babylon they learnt that the phenomena of the heavens recur in cycles with the greatest regularity. This piece of knowledge undoubtedly had a great deal to do with the rise of science; for to the Greek it suggested further questions such as the Babylonian did not dream of.^[41]

28XIII. It is necessary to say something as to the scientific worth of the philosophy we are about to study. We have just seen that the Eastern peoples were, at the time of which we write, considerably richer than the Greeks in accumulated facts, though these facts had certainly not been observed for any scientific purpose, and their possession never suggested a revision of the primitive view of the world. The Greeks, however, saw in them something that could be turned to account, and they were never as a people slow to act on the maxim, Chacun prend son bien partout où il le trouve. The most striking monument of this spirit which has come down to us is the work of Herodotos; and the visit of Solon to Croesus which he describes, however unhistorical it may be, gives a very lively and faithful picture of it. Croesus tells Solon that he has heard much of “his wisdom and his wanderings,” and how, from love of knowledge (φιλοσοφέων), he has travelled over much land for the purpose of seeing what was to be seen (θεωρίης εἵνεκεν). The words θεωρίη, φιλοσοφίη, and ἱστορίη are, in fact, the catchwords of the time, though they had, we must remember, a somewhat different meaning from that which they were afterwards made to bear at Athens.^[42] The idea that underlies them all may, perhaps, be best rendered in English by the word Curiosity; and it was just this 29great gift of curiosity, and the desire to see all the wonderful things—pyramids, inundations, and so forth—that were to be seen, which enabled the Greeks to pick up and turn to their own use such scraps of knowledge as they could come by among the barbarians. No sooner did a Greek philosopher learn half a dozen geometrical propositions, and hear that the phenomena of the heavens recur in cycles, than he set to work to look for law everywhere in nature, and, with a splendid audacity, almost amounting to ὕβρις, to construct a system of the universe. We may smile, if we please, at the strange medley of childish fancy and true scientific insight which these Titanic efforts display, and sometimes we feel disposed to sympathise with the sages of the day who warned their more daring contemporaries “to think the thoughts befitting man’s estate” (ἀνθρώπινα φρονεῖν). But we shall do well to remember at the same time that even now it is just such hardy anticipations of experience that make scientific progress possible, and that nearly every one of the early inquirers whom we are about to study made some permanent addition to the store of positive knowledge, besides opening up new views of the world in every direction.

There is no justification either for the idea that Greek science was built up solely by more or less lucky guesswork, instead of by observation and experiment. The nature of our tradition, which mostly consists of Placita—that is, of what we call “results”—tends, no doubt, to create this impression. We are seldom told why any early philosopher held the views he did, and the appearance of a string of “opinions” suggests dogmatism. There are, however, certain exceptions to the general character of the tradition; and we may 30reasonably suppose that, if the later Greeks had been interested in the matter, there would have been many more. We shall see that Anaximander made some remarkable discoveries in marine biology, which the researches of the nineteenth century have fully confirmed (§ 21), and even Xenophanes supported one of his theories by referring to the fossils and petrifactions of such widely separated places as Malta, Paros, and Syracuse (§ 59). This is enough to show that the theory, so commonly held by the earlier philosophers, that the earth had been originally in a moist state, was not mythological in origin, but was based on, or at any rate confirmed by, biological and palaeontological observations of a thoroughly modern and scientific type. It would surely be absurd to imagine that the men who could make these observations had not the curiosity or the ability to make many others of which the memory is lost. Indeed, the idea that the Greeks were not observers is almost ludicrously wrong, as is proved by two simple considerations. The anatomical accuracy of Greek sculpture bears witness to trained habits of observation, and those of the highest order, while the fixing of the seasons by the heliacal rising and setting of the stars shows a familiarity with celestial phenomena which is by no means common at the present day.^[43] We know, then, that the Greeks could observe well in matters affecting agriculture, navigation, and the arts, and we know that they were curious about the world. Is it conceivable that they did not use their powers of observation to gratify that curiosity? It is true, of course, that they had not our 31instruments of precision; but a great deal can be discovered by the help of very simple apparatus. It is not to be supposed that Anaximander erected his gnomon merely that the Spartans might know the seasons.^[44]

Nor is it true that the Greeks made no use of experiment. The rise of the experimental method dates from the time when the medical schools began to influence the development of philosophy, and accordingly we find that the first recorded experiment of a modern type is that of Empedokles with the klepsydra. We have his own account of this (fr. 100), and we can see how it brought him to the verge of anticipating both Harvey and Torricelli. It is once more inconceivable that an inquisitive people should have applied the experimental method in a single case without extending it to the elucidation of other problems.

Of course the great difficulty for us is the geocentric hypothesis from which science inevitably started, though only to outgrow it in a surprisingly short time. So long as the earth is supposed to be in the centre of the world, meteorology, in the later sense of the word, is necessarily identified with astronomy. It is difficult for us to feel at home in this point of view, and indeed we have no suitable word to express what the Greeks at first called an οὐρανός. It will be convenient to use the word “world” for it; but then we must remember that it does not refer solely, or even chiefly, 32to the earth. The later word κόσμος bears witness to the growth of scientific ideas. It meant at first the marshalling of an army, and next the ordered constitution of a state. It was transferred from this to the world because in early days the regularity and constancy of human life was far more clearly seen than the uniformity of nature. Man lived in a charmed circle of law and custom, but the world around him still seemed lawless. That, too, is why, when the regular course of nature was first realised, no better word for it could be found than δίκη. It is the same metaphor which still lives on in the expression “natural law.”^[45]

The science of the sixth century was mainly concerned, then, with those parts of the world that are “aloft” (τὰ μετέωρα), and these include, along with the heavenly bodies, such things as clouds, rainbows, and lightning. That is how the heavenly bodies came sometimes to be explained as ignited clouds, an idea which seems astonishing to us. But we must bear in mind that science inevitably and rightly began with the most obvious hypothesis, and that it was only the thorough working out of this that could show its inadequacy. It is just because the Greeks were the first people to take the geocentric hypothesis seriously that they were able to go beyond it. Of course the pioneers of Greek thought had no clear idea of the nature of scientific hypothesis, and supposed themselves to be dealing with ultimate reality. That was inevitable before the rise of Logic. At the same 33time, a sure instinct guided them to the right method, and we can see how it was the effort to “save appearances”^[46] that really operated from the first. It is, therefore, to those men that we owe the conception of an exact science which should ultimately take in the whole world as its object. They fancied—absurdly enough, no doubt—that they could work out this science at once. We sometimes make the same mistake nowadays; and it can no more rob the Greeks of the honour of having been the first to see the true, though perhaps unattainable, end of all science than it can rob our own scientific men of the honour of having brought that end nearer than it was. It is still knowledge of the kind foreseen and attempted by the Greeks that they are in search of.

XIV. Theophrastos, the first writer to treat the history of Greek philosophy in a systematic way,^[47] represented the early cosmologists as standing to one another in the relation of master and scholar, and as members of regular societies. This has been regarded by many modern writers as an anachronism, and some have even denied the existence of “schools” of philosophy altogether. Such a reaction against the older view was quite justified in so far as it was directed against arbitrary classifications like the “Ionic” and “Italian” schools, which are derived through Laertios Diogenes from the Alexandrian writers of “Successions.” But the express statements of Theophrastos are not 34to be so lightly set aside. As this point is of great importance, it will be necessary to elucidate it still further before we enter upon our story.

The modern view really rests upon a mistaken idea of the way in which civilisation develops. In almost every department of life, we find that the corporation at first is everything and the individual nothing. The peoples of the East hardly got beyond this stage at all; their science, such as it is, is anonymous, the inherited property of a caste or guild, and we still see clearly in some cases that it was once the same among the Hellenes. Medicine, for instance, was originally the “mystery” of the Asklepiads, and it is to be supposed that all craftsmen (δημιουργοί), amongst whom Homer classes the bards (ἀοιδοί), were at first organised in a similar way. What distinguished the Hellenes from other peoples was that at a comparatively early date these crafts came under the influence of outstanding individuals, who gave them a fresh direction and a new impulse. It is doubtless in some such way that we should understand the relation of Homer to the Homeridai. The Asklepiads at a later date produced Hippokrates, and if we knew more of such guilds as the Daidalids, it is likely we should find something of the same kind. But this does not destroy the corporate character of the craft; indeed, it rather intensifies it. The guild becomes what we call a “school,” and the disciple takes the place of the apprentice. That is a vital change. A close guild with none but official heads is essentially conservative, while a band of disciples attached to a master they revere is the greatest progressive force the world knows.

It is certain that the later Athenian schools were 35organised corporations, the oldest of which, the Academy, maintained its existence as such for some nine hundred years, and the only question we have to decide is whether this was an innovation made in the fourth century B.C., or rather the continuance of an old tradition. As it happens, we have the authority of Plato for speaking of the chief early systems as handed down in schools. He makes Sokrates speak of “the men of Ephesos,” the Herakleiteans, as forming a strong body in his own day,^[48] and the stranger of the Sophist and the Statesman speaks of his school as still in existence at Elea.^[49] We also hear of “Anaxagoreans,”^[50] and no one, of course, can doubt that the Pythagoreans were a society. In fact, there is hardly any school but that of Miletos for which we have not external evidence of the strongest kind; and even as regards it, we have the significant fact that Theophrastos speaks of philosophers of a later date as having been “associates of the philosophy of Anaximenes.”^[51] We shall see too in the first chapter that the internal evidence in favour of the existence of a Milesian school is very strong indeed. It is from this point of view, then, that we shall now proceed to consider the men who created Hellenic science.

1. It was at Miletos that the earliest school of scientific cosmology had its home. At the time it arose, the Milesians were in an exceptionally favourable position for scientific as well as commercial pursuits. They had, indeed, come into conflict more than once with the neighbouring Lydians, whose rulers were now bent upon extending their dominion to the coast; but, towards the end of the seventh century B.C., Thrasyboulos, tyrant of Miletos, had succeeded in making terms with King Alyattes, and an alliance was concluded between them, which not only saved Miletos for the present from a disaster like that which befell Smyrna, but secured it against molestation for the future. Even half a century later, when Croesus, resuming his father’s forward policy, made war upon and conquered Ephesos, Miletos was still able to maintain the old treaty-relation, and never, strictly speaking, became subject to the Lydians at all. We can hardly doubt that the sense of security which this exceptional position would foster had something to do with the rise of scientific inquiry. Material prosperity is necessary as a foundation for the highest intellectual effort; and at this 38time Miletos was in possession of all the refinements of life to a degree unknown in continental Hellas.

Nor was it only in this way that the Lydian connexion would favour the growth of science at Miletos. What was called Hellenism at a later date seems to have been traditional in the dynasty of the Mermnadai. There may well be some truth in the statement of Herodotos, that all the “sophists” of the time flocked to the court of Sardeis.^[52] The tradition which represents Croesus as what we should call the “patron” of Greek wisdom, was fully developed in the fifth century; and, however unhistorical its details may be, it must clearly have some sort of foundation in fact. Particularly noteworthy is “the common tale among the Greeks,” that Thales accompanied him on his luckless campaign against Pteria, apparently in the capacity of military engineer. Herodotos, indeed, disbelieves the story that he diverted the course of the Halys;^[53] but he does not attack it on the ground of any antecedent improbability, and it is quite clear that those who reported it found no difficulty in accepting the relation which it presupposes between the philosopher and the king.

39It should be added that the Lydian alliance would greatly facilitate intercourse with Babylon and Egypt. Lydia was an advanced post of Babylonian culture, and Croesus was on friendly terms with the kings of both Egypt and Babylon. It is noteworthy, too, that Amasis of Egypt had the same Hellenic sympathies as Croesus, and that the Milesians possessed a temple of their own at Naukratis.^[54]

I. Thales

2. There can be no doubt that the founder of the Milesian school, and therefore the first of the cosmologists, was Thales;^[55] but all we can really be said to know of him comes from Herodotos, and the romance of the Seven Wise Men was already in existence when he wrote. He tells us, in the first place, that Thales was of Phoenician descent, a statement which other writers explained by saying he belonged to the Thelidai, a noble house descended from Kadmos and Agenor.^[56] This is clearly connected with the view of Herodotos that there were “Kadmeians” from Boiotia among the original Ionian colonists, and it is certain that there really were people called Kadmeians in several Ionic cities.^[57] Whether they were of Semitic origin is, of 40course, another matter. Herodotos probably mentions the supposed descent of Thales simply because he was believed to have introduced certain improvements in navigation from Phoenicia.^[58] At any rate, the name Examyes, which his father bore, lends no support to the view that he was a Semite. It is a Karian name, and the Karians had been almost completely assimilated by the Ionians. On the monuments, we find Greek and Karian names alternating in the same families, and there is therefore no reason to suppose that Thales was anything else than an ordinary Milesian citizen, though perhaps with Karian blood in his veins.^[59]

3. By far the most remarkable statement that Herodotos makes about Thales is that he foretold the eclipse of the sun which put an end to the war between the Lydians and the Medes.^[60] Now, we may be sure that he was quite ignorant of the true cause of eclipses. Anaximander and his successors certainly were so,^[61] and it is incredible that the right explanation should once have been given and then forgotten so soon. Even supposing, however, Thales had known the cause of eclipses, no one can believe that such scraps of elementary geometry as he picked up in Egypt would enable him to calculate one from the elements of the moon’s path. Yet the evidence for the prediction is 41too strong to be rejected off-hand. The testimony of Herodotos to an event which must have happened about a hundred years before his own birth may, perhaps, be deemed insufficient; but that of Xenophanes is a very different matter, and it is this we have really to deal with.^[62] According to Theophrastos, Xenophanes was a disciple of Anaximander, and he may quite well have seen and spoken with Thales. In any case, he must have known scores of people who were able to remember what happened, and he had no conceivable interest in misrepresenting it. The prediction of the eclipse is really better attested than any other fact about Thales whatsoever, and the evidence for it is about as strong as for anything that happened in the early part of the sixth century B.C.

Now it is quite possible to predict eclipses without knowing their true cause, and there is no doubt that the Babylonians actually did so. On the basis of their astronomical observations, they had made out a cycle of 223 lunar months, within which eclipses of the sun and moon recurred at equal intervals of time.^[63] This, it is true, would not enable them to predict eclipses of the sun for a given spot on the earth’s surface; for these phenomena are not visible at all places where the sun is above the horizon at the time. We do not occupy a position at the centre of the earth, and what astronomers call the geocentric parallax has to be 42taken into account. It would only, therefore, be possible to tell by means of the cycle that an eclipse of the sun would be visible somewhere, and that it might be worth while to look out for it. Now, if we may judge from a report by a Chaldaean astronomer which has been preserved, this was just the position of the Babylonians. They watched for eclipses at the proper dates; and, if they did not occur, they announced the fact as a good omen.^[64] To explain what we are told about Thales no more than this is required. He simply said there would be an eclipse; and, as good luck would have it, it was visible in Asia Minor, and on a striking occasion.

4. The prediction of the eclipse does not, then, throw much light upon the scientific attainments of Thales; but, if we can fix its date, it will give us a point from which to start in trying to determine the time at which he lived. Modern astronomers have calculated that there was an eclipse of the sun, probably visible in Asia Minor, on May 28 (O.S.), 585 B.C.,^[65] while Pliny gives the date of the eclipse foretold by Thales as Ol. XLVIII. 4 (585/4 B.C.).^[66] This, it is true, does not 43exactly tally; for May 585 belongs to the year 586/5 B.C. It is sufficiently near, however, to justify us in identifying the eclipse as that of Thales, and this is confirmed by Apollodoros, who fixed his floruit in the same year.^[67] The further statement that, according to Demetrios Phalereus, Thales “received the name of wise” in the archonship of Damasias at Athens, agrees very well with this, and is doubtless based on the story of the Delphic tripod; for the archonship of Damasias is the era of the restoration of the Pythian Games.^[68]

5. The introduction of Egyptian geometry into Hellas is universally ascribed to Thales, and it is extremely probable that he did visit Egypt; for he had a theory of the inundations of the Nile. In a well-known passage,^[69] Herodotos gives three explanations 44of the fact that this alone of all rivers rises in summer and falls in winter; but, as his custom is in such cases, he does not name their authors. The first of them, however, that which attributes the floods to the Etesian winds, is ascribed to Thales in the Placita,^[70] and also by many later writers. Now, those statements are derived from a treatise on the Rise of the Nile attributed to Aristotle and known to the Greek commentators, but now extant only in a Latin epitome of the thirteenth century.^[71] In this work the first of the three theories mentioned by Herodotos is ascribed to Thales, the second to Euthymenes of Massalia, and the third to Anaxagoras. Where did Aristotle, or whoever wrote the book, get these names? We think naturally once more of Hekataios, whom Herodotos so often reproduces without mentioning his name; and this conjecture is much strengthened when we find that Hekataios actually mentioned Euthymenes.^[72] We may conclude, then, that Thales really was in Egypt; and, perhaps, that Hekataios, in describing the Nile, took account, as was only natural, of his distinguished fellow-citizen’s views.

6. As to the nature and extent of the mathematical knowledge brought back by Thales from Egypt, it seems desirable to point out that many writers have seriously misunderstood the character of the tradition.^[73] In his commentary on the First Book of Euclid, Proclus enumerates, on the authority of Eudemos, 45certain propositions which he says were known to Thales.^[74] One of the theorems with which he credits him is that two triangles are equal when they have one side and the two adjacent angles equal. This he must have known, said Eudemos, as otherwise he could not have measured the distances of ships at sea from a watch-tower in the way he was said to have done.^[75] Here we see how all these statements arose. Certain remarkable feats in the way of measurement were traditionally ascribed to Thales, and it was assumed that he must have known all the propositions which these imply. But this is quite an illusory method of inference. Both the measurement of the distance of ships at sea, and that of the height of the pyramids, which is also ascribed to him,^[76] are easy applications of 46what Aahmes calls the seqt. These rules of mensuration may well have been brought from Egypt by Thales, but we have no ground for supposing that he knew any more about their rationale than did the author of the Rhind papyrus. Perhaps, indeed, he gave them a wider application than the Egyptians had done. Still, mathematics, properly so called, did not come into existence till some time after Thales.

7. Thales appears once more in the pages of Herodotos some time before the fall of the Lydian empire. He is said to have urged the Ionian Greeks to unite in a federal state with its capital at Teos.^[77] We shall have occasion to notice more than once in the sequel that the early schools of philosophy were in the habit of trying to influence the course of political events; and there are many things, for instance the part played by Hekataios in the Ionian revolt, which point to the conclusion that the scientific men of Miletos took up a very decided position in the stirring times that followed the death of Thales. It is this political action which has gained the founder of the Milesian school his undisputed place among the Seven Wise Men; and it is owing mainly to his inclusion among those worthies that the numerous anecdotes which were told of him in later days attached themselves to his name.^[78]

8. If Thales ever wrote anything, it soon was lost, and the works which were written in his name did not, as a rule, deceive even the ancients.^[79] Aristotle 47professes to know something about the views of Thales; but he does not pretend to know how they were arrived at, nor the arguments by which they were supported. He does, indeed, make certain suggestions, which are repeated by later writers as statements of fact; but he himself simply gives them for what they are worth.^[80] There is another difficulty in connexion with the tradition. Many a precise-looking statement in the Placita has no other foundation than the habit of ascribing any doctrine which was, roughly speaking, characteristic of the whole Ionic “Succession” to “Thales and his followers,” and so producing the appearance of a definite statement about Thales. But, in spite of all this, we need not doubt that Aristotle was correctly informed with regard to the leading points. We have seen traces of reference to Thales in Hekataios, and nothing can be more likely than that later writers of the school should have quoted the views of its founder. We may venture, therefore, upon a conjectural restoration of his cosmology, in which we shall be guided by what we know for certain of the subsequent development of the Milesian school; for we should naturally expect to find its characteristic doctrines at least foreshadowed in the teaching of its earliest representative. But all this must be taken for just what it is worth; speaking strictly, we do not know anything about the teaching of Thales at all.

9. The statements of Aristotle may be reduced to three:

The first of these statements must be understood in the light of the second, which is expressed in Aristotelian terminology, but would undoubtedly mean that Thales had said water was the fundamental or primary thing, of which all other things were mere transient forms. It was, we shall see, just such a primary substance that the Milesian school as a whole was seeking, and it is unlikely that the earliest answer to the great question of the day should have been the comparatively subtle one given by Anaximander. We are, perhaps, justified in holding that the greatness of Thales consisted in this, that he was the first to ask, not what was the original thing, but what is the primary thing now; or, more simply still, “What is the world made of?” The answer he gave to this question was: Water.

10. Aristotle and Theophratos, followed by Simplicius and the doxographers, suggest several explanations of this answer. By Aristotle these explanations are given as conjectural; it is only later writers that repeat them as if they were quite certain.^[84] The most 49probable view of them seems to be that Aristotle simply ascribed to Thales the arguments used at a later date by Hippon of Samos in support of a similar thesis.^[85] This would account for their physiological character. The rise of scientific medicine had made biological arguments very popular in the fifth century; but, in the days of Thales, the prevailing interest was not physiological, but rather what we should call meteorological, and it is therefore from this point of view we must try to understand the theory.

Now it is not very hard to see how considerations of a meteorological kind may have led Thales to adopt the view he did. Of all the things we know, water seems to take the most various shapes. It is familiar to us in a solid, a liquid, and a vaporous form, and so Thales may well have thought that he saw the world-process from water and back to water again going on before his very eyes. The phenomenon of evaporation naturally suggests everywhere that the fire of the heavenly bodies is kept up by the moisture which they draw from the sea. Even at the present day, the country people speak of the appearance of sunbeams as “the sun drawing water.” Water comes down again in the rain; and lastly, so the early cosmologists thought, 50it turns to earth. This seems strange to us, but it may have seemed natural enough to men who were familiar with the river of Egypt which had formed the Delta, and with the torrents of Asia Minor, which bring down unusually large alluvial deposits. At the present day the Gulf of Latmos, on which Miletos used to stand, is completely filled up. Lastly, they thought, earth turns once more to water—an idea derived from the observation of dew, night-mists, and subterranean springs. For these last were not in early times supposed to have anything at all to do with the rain. The “waters under the earth” were regarded as an entirely independent source of moisture.^[86]

11. The third of the statements mentioned above is supposed by Aristotle himself to imply that Thales believed in a “soul of the world,” though he is careful to mark this as no more than an inference.^[87] The doctrine of the world-soul is then attributed quite positively to Thales by Aetios, who gives it in the Stoic phraseology which he found in his immediate source, and identifies the world-intellect with God.^[88] Cicero found a similar account of the matter in the Epicurean manual which he followed, but he goes a step further. Eliminating the Stoic pantheism, he turns the world-intellect into a Platonic demiourgos, and says that Thales held there was a divine mind which formed all things out of water.^[89] All this is derived 51from the cautious statement of Aristotle, and can have no greater authority than its source. We need not enter, then, upon the old controversy whether Thales was an atheist or not. It is really irrelevant. If we may judge from his successors, he may very possibly have called water divine; but, if he had any religious beliefs at all, we may be sure they were quite unconnected with his cosmological theory.

Nor must we make too much of the saying itself that “all things are full of gods.” It is often supposed to mean that Thales attributed a “plastic life” to matter, or that he was a “hylozoist.” We have seen already how misleading this way of speaking is apt to be,^[90] and we shall do well to avoid it. It is not safe to regard such an apophthegm as evidence for anything; the chances are that it belongs to Thales as one of the Seven Wise Men, rather than as founder of the Milesian school. Further, such sayings are, as a rule, anonymous to begin with, and are attributed now to one sage and now to another.^[91] On the other hand, it is extremely probable that Thales did say that the magnet and amber had souls. That is no apophthegm, but something more on the level of the statement that the earth floats on the water. It is, in fact, just the sort of thing we should expect Hekataios to record about Thales. It would be wrong, however, to draw any inferences from it as to his view of the world; for 52to say that the magnet and amber are alive is to imply, if anything, that other things are not.^[92]

II. Anaximander

12. The next name that has come down to us is that of Anaximander, son of Praxiades. He too was a citizen of Miletos, and Theophrastos described him as an “associate” of Thales.^[93] We have seen how that expression is to be understood (§ XIV.).

According to Apollodoros, Anaximander was sixty-four years old in Ol. LVIII. 2 (547/6 B.C.); and this is confirmed by Hippolytos, who says he was born in Ol. XLII. 3 (610/9 B.C.), and by Pliny, who assigns his discovery of the obliquity of the zodiac to the same Olympiad.^[94] We seem to have here something more than a mere combination of the ordinary type; for, according to all the rules of Alexandrian chronology, Anaximander should have “flourished” in 565 B.C., that is, just half-way between Thales and Anaximenes, and this would make him sixty, not sixty-four, in 546. Now Apollodoros appears to have said that he had met with the work of Anaximander; and his reason for mentioning this must be that he found in it some indication which enabled him to fix its date without having recourse to conjecture. Diels suggests that Anaximander may have given his age at the time of writing as sixty-four, and that the book may have 53contained some other statement showing it to have been published in 547/6 B.C.^[95] Perhaps, however, this hardly does justice to the fact that the year given is just that which preceded the fall of Sardeis and the subjugation of the Lydian empire by the Persians. It may be a more plausible conjecture that Anaximander, writing some years later, incidentally mentioned what his age had been at the time of that great crisis. We know from Xenophanes that the question, “How old were you when the Mede appeared?” was considered an interesting one in those days.^[96] At all events, we seem to be justified in believing that Anaximander was a generation younger than Thales. When he died we do not really know.^[97]

Like his predecessor, Anaximander distinguished himself by certain practical inventions. Some writers credited him with that of the gnomon; but that can hardly be correct. Herodotos tells us this instrument came from Babylon, so perhaps it was Anaximander who made it known among the Greeks. He was also the first to construct a map, and Eratosthenes said this was the map elaborated by Hekataios.^[98]

5413. Nearly all we know of Anaximander’s system is derived in the last resort from Theophrastos.^[99] As to the credibility of what we are told on his authority, it is enough to remark that the original work, which was in the hands of Apollodoros, must certainly have existed in the time of Theophrastos. Moreover, he seems once at least to have quoted Anaximander’s own words, and he criticised his style. Here are the remains of what he said of him in the First Book:—

14. Anaximander taught, then, that there was one eternal, indestructible substance out of which everything arises, and into which everything once more returns; a boundless stock from which the waste of existence is continually being made good. This is only the natural development of the thought we have ventured to ascribe to Thales, and there can be no doubt that Anaximander at least distinctly formulated it. Indeed, we can still follow to some extent the reasoning which led him to do so. Thales had regarded water as the most likely of all the things we know to be that of which all others are forms; Anaximander appears to have asked himself how the primary substance could be one of these particular things. His argument seems to be preserved by Aristotle, who has the following passage in his discussion of the Infinite:—

It is clear that in this passage Anaximander is contrasted with Thales and with Anaximenes. Nor is there any reason to doubt that the account given of his reasoning is substantially correct, though the form is Aristotle’s own, and the mention of “elements” is an anachronism.^[103] Anaximander was struck, it would seem, by the opposition and strife between the things which go to make up the world; the warm fire was opposed to the cold air, the dry earth to the moist sea. These opposites were at war, and any predominance of one over the other was an “injustice” for which they must make reparation to one another.^[104] We may suppose that his thoughts ran somewhat as follows. If Thales had been right in saying that water was the fundamental reality, it would not be easy to see how anything else could ever have existed. One side of the opposition, the cold and moist, would have had its way unchecked, injustice would have prevailed, and the warm and dry would have been driven from the field long ago. We must, then, have something which is not itself one of the warring opposites we know, something more primitive, out of which they arise, and into which they once more pass away. That Anaximander called this something by the name of φύσις, is clear 57from the doxographers; the current statement that the word ἀρχή in the sense of a “first principle” was introduced by him, is probably due to a misunderstanding of what Theophrastos said.^[105]

15. It was natural for Aristotle to regard this theory as an anticipation or presentiment of his own doctrine of “indeterminate matter.”^[106] He knew very well, of course, that he himself was the author of that; but it is in accordance with his method to represent his own theories as the distinct formulation of truths which earlier thinkers had only guessed at. It was to be expected, then, that he should sometimes express the views of Anaximander in terms of the theory of “elements.” He knew too that the Boundless was a body,^[107] though in his own system there was no room for anything corporeal prior to the elements; so he had to speak of it as a boundless body “alongside of” or “distinct from” the elements (παρὰ τὰ στοιχεῖα). So 58far as I know, no one has doubted that, when he uses this phrase, he is referring to Anaximander.

In a number of other places Aristotle speaks of a thinker, whom he does not happen to name, who held that the primary substance was something “intermediate between” the elements or between two of them.^[108] Nearly all the Greek commentators referred this to Anaximander also, but most modern writers refuse to follow them. It is, no doubt, easy to show that Anaximander can have never meant to describe the Boundless in this way, but that is no real objection to the older interpretation. It is difficult to see that it is more of an anachronism to call the Boundless “intermediate between the elements” than to say that it is “distinct from the elements”; and indeed, if once we introduce the elements at all, the former description is in some ways the more adequate of the two. At any rate, if we refuse to understand these passages as referring to Anaximander, we shall have to say that Aristotle paid a great deal of attention to some early thinker, whose very name has been lost, and who not only agreed with some of Anaximander’s views, but also, as is shown by one passage, used some of his most characteristic expressions.^[109] We may add that in one 59or two places Aristotle certainly seems to identify the “intermediate” with the something “distinct from” the elements.^[110]

There is even one place in which he appears to speak of Anaximander’s Boundless as a “mixture,” though his words may perhaps admit of another interpretation.^[111] But this is of no consequence for our interpretation of Anaximander himself. It is certain that he cannot have said anything about “elements,” which no one thought of before Empedokles, and no one could think of before Parmenides. The question has only been mentioned at all because it has been the subject of a lengthy controversy,^[112] and because it throws great light on the historical value of Aristotle’s statements. From the point of view of his own system, these are abundantly justified; but we shall have to remember in other cases that, when he seems to attribute an idea to some earlier thinker, we are not in the least bound to believe what he says in a historical sense.

16. Anaximander’s reason for conceiving the 60primary substance as boundless was, no doubt, that indicated by Aristotle, namely, “that becoming might not fail.”^[113] It is not likely, however, that these words are his own, though the doxographers speak as if they were. It is enough for us to know that Theophrastos, who had seen his book, attributed the thought to him. And certainly the way in which he regarded the world would bring home to him with more than common force the need of a boundless stock of matter. The “opposites” of which our world consists are, we have seen, at war with one another, and their strife is marked by “unjust” encroachments on either side. The warm commits “injustice” in summer, the cold in winter. To redress the balance, they must be absorbed once more in their common ground; and this would lead in the long run to the destruction of everything but the Boundless itself, if there were not an inexhaustible supply of it from which opposites might continually be separated out afresh. We must picture to ourselves, then, an endless mass, which is not any one of the opposites we know, stretching out without limit on every side of the heavens which bound the world we live in.^[114] This mass is a body, and out of it our world 61once emerged by the “separating out” of the opposites, which one day will all be absorbed again in the Boundless, and our world will cease to be.

17. The doxographers say it was the “eternal motion” that brought into being “all the heavens and all the worlds within them.” As we have seen (§ VIII), it is not likely that Anaximander himself used the phrase “eternal motion.” That is rather Aristotle’s own version of what he found stated about the “separating out” of opposites. We are not told expressly how Anaximander conceived this to operate, but the term “separating out” suggests some process of shaking and sifting as in a sieve. Now it is just such a process that Plato makes the Pythagorean Timaios describe, and the most probable theory is certainly that here, as in many other cases, he has reproduced a genuinely early view. As we shall see, it is quite likely that the Pythagoreans should have followed Anaximander in this.^[115] In any case, it is wrong to identify the “eternal motion” with the diurnal revolution of the heavens, as has sometimes been done. That motion cannot possibly be eternal, for the simple reason that the heavens themselves are perishable. Aristotle says, indeed, that all who believe the world has come into being represent 62the earth as having been forced into the centre by the circular motion;^[116] but, though this doubtless refers to Anaximander among others, it is quite irrelevant here. It has to do only with the formation of the world after it has been once for all separated off and enclosed in its own heaven, and we shall have to remember it when we come to that part of the theory. At present, we have only to do with the motion of the Boundless itself; and, if we wish to picture that, it is much safer to regard it as a sort of shaking up and down which sorts out the opposites from the infinite mass.

18. We are told more than once that Anaximander believed there were “innumerable worlds in the Boundless,”^[117] and it is now usual to regard these with Zeller as an infinite series succeeding one another in time. It may be allowed at once that his disproof of the idea that the worlds are coexistent and eternal is decisive. To suppose that Anaximander regarded this or any other world as eternal, is a flat contradiction of everything we otherwise know, and of the Theophrastean tradition that he taught the world was perishable. We have, then, to decide between the view that, though all the worlds are perishable, there may be an unlimited number of them in existence at the same time, and the view that a new world never comes into existence till 63the old one has passed away. Now, Zeller allows^[118] that there is nothing in the first of these views that is inconsistent with what we know of Anaximander; but he thinks all the statements which have come down to us point rather to the second. It seems to me that this is by no means the case, and, as the matter is of fundamental importance, it will be necessary to examine the evidence once more.

In the first place, the doxographical tradition proves that Theophrastos discussed the views of all the early philosophers as to whether there was one world or an infinite number, and there can be no doubt that, when he ascribed “innumerable worlds” to the Atomists, he meant coexistent and not successive worlds. Now, if he had really classed two such different views under one head, he would at least have been careful to point out in what respect they differed, and there is no trace of any such distinction in our tradition. On the contrary, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Archelaos, Xenophanes, Diogenes, Leukippos, Demokritos, and Epicurus are all mentioned together as holding the doctrine of “innumerable worlds” on all sides of this one,^[119] and the only distinction drawn between their views is that, while Epicurus made the distances between these worlds unequal, Anaximander said all the worlds were equidistant.^[120] Zeller rejected this evidence, which he 64supposed to be merely that of Stobaios, on the ground that we can have no confidence in a writer who attributes “innumerable worlds” to Anaximenes, Archelaos, and Xenophanes. With regard to the first two, I hope to show that the statement is quite correct, and that it is not even incorrect in the case of the last.^[121] In any case, it can be proved that the passage comes from Aetios,^[122] and there is no reason for doubting that, in the last resort, it is derived from Theophrastos, though the name of Epicurus may have been added later. This is still further confirmed by what Simplicius says in his commentary on the Physics.^[123]

It is probable that this too comes from Theophrastos through Alexander. Simplicius does not invent such things.

We come lastly to a very important statement which Cicero has copied from Philodemos, the author of the Epicurean treatise on Religion found at Herculaneum, or perhaps from the immediate source of that work. “Anaximander’s opinion was,” he makes Velleius say, “that there were gods who came into being, rising and passing away at long intervals, and 65that these were the innumerable worlds”;^[124] and this must clearly be taken along with the statement of Aetios to the effect that, according to Anaximander, the “innumerable heavens” were gods.^[125] Now it is very much more natural to understand the “long intervals” which Cicero mentions as intervals of space than as intervals of time;^[126] and, if we take the passage in this way, we have a perfect agreement among all our authorities.

It may be added that it is very unnatural to understand the statement that the Boundless “encompasses all the worlds” of worlds succeeding one another in time; for on this view there is at a given time only one world to “encompass.” Moreover, the argument mentioned by Aristotle that, if what is outside the heavens is infinite, body must be infinite, and there must be innumerable worlds, can only be understood in this sense, and is certainly intended to represent the reasoning of the Milesians; for they were the only cosmologists who held there was a boundless body outside the heavens.^[127] Lastly, we happen to know that Petron, one of the earliest Pythagoreans, held there were just one hundred and eighty-three worlds arranged in a triangle,^[128] which shows that views of this sort 66existed long before the Atomists, and looks like an attempt to introduce some order into Anaximander’s universe.

19. The doxographers have not left us in the dark as to the process by which the different parts of the world arose from the Boundless. The following statement comes ultimately from Theophrastos:—

We see from this that when a portion of the Boundless had been separated off from the rest to form a world, it first of all differentiated itself into the two opposites, hot and cold. The hot appears as a sphere of flame surrounding the cold; the cold, as earth with air surrounding it. We are not told, however, in this extract how the cold came to be differentiated into earth, air, and water; but there is a passage in Aristotle’s Meteorology which throws some light on the subject. We read there:—

In his commentary on the passage, Alexander tells us that this was the view of Anaximander and Diogenes; and what he says is amply confirmed by Anaximander’s theory of the sea as it is given by the doxographers (§ 20). We conclude, then, that after the first separation of the hot and the cold, the heat of the sphere of flame turned part of the moist, cold interior of the world into air or vapour—it is all one at this date—and that the expansion of this mist broke up the sphere of flame itself into rings. I give the theory which he adopted to explain the origin of the heavenly bodies from these rings as it has been preserved by Hippolytos, with some supplements from Aetios:—

We saw above that the sphere of flame was broken up into rings by the expansion of the air or vapour that its own heat had drawn up from the moist, cold interior. We must remember that Anaximander knew nothing of the ring of Saturn. There are three of these rings, that of the sun, that of the moon, and, 69lastly, nearest to the earth, the circle of the stars. The circle of the sun was twenty-seven times, and that of the moon eighteen times as large as the earth, from which we may perhaps infer that the circle of the stars was nine times as large. The numbers nine, eighteen, twenty-seven, play a considerable part in primitive cosmogonies.^[132] We do not see the rings of fire as complete circles; for the mist that formed them encloses the fire, and becomes an outer ring of opaque vapour. These outer rings, however, have openings at one point of their circumference, through which the fire escapes, and these are the heavenly bodies we actually see.^[133]

It will be observed that we only hear of three circles, and that the circle of the sun is the highest. The circle of the stars presents some difficulty. It is, in all probability, the Milky Way, the appearance of which may well have suggested the whole theory.^[134] It seems that Anaximander must have thought it had more “breathing-holes” than one, though the tradition is silent on this point. There is not the slightest reason for supposing that he regarded it as a sphere. He could not have failed to see that a sphere so placed would make the sun and moon permanently invisible. What, then, are we to say of the fixed 70stars that do not lie in the Milky Way? There seems to be no way of accounting for them unless we assume that they are the “innumerable worlds” which we have just discussed. As the fire and air which surrounded the world have been broken up into rings, we must be able to see right out into the Boundless, and the fixed stars must be just the worlds, each surrounded by its fiery envelope. It does not seem possible to explain all we are told in any other way; and, if this is right, the statement of some authors, that Anaximander regarded the stars of heaven as gods, may be more than the mere mistake which it is now generally taken to be.^[135]

The explanation given of thunder and lightning was very similar. They too were caused by fire breaking through compressed air, that is to say, through the storm-clouds. It seems probable that this is really the origin of the theory, and that Anaximander explained the heavenly bodies on the analogy of lightning, not vice versa. That would be in perfect agreement with the meteorological interest of the time.

20. We turn now to what we are told of the origin of earth and sea from the moist, cold matter which was “separated off” in the beginning, and which filled the inside of the sphere of flame:—

Adopting for a moment the later theory of “elements,” we see that Anaximander put fire on one side as “the hot,” and all the rest on the other as “the cold,” which is also moist. This may explain how Aristotle came to speak of the Boundless as intermediate between fire and water. And we have seen also that the moist element was partly turned into “air” or vapour by the fire, which explains how he could say the Boundless was something between fire and air, or between air and water.^[137]

The moist, cold interior of the world is not, it will be noticed, pure water. It is always called “the moist” or “the moist state.” That is because it has to be still further differentiated under the influence of heat into earth, water, and vapour. The gradual drying up of the water by the fire is a good example of what Anaximander meant by “injustice.” And we see how this injustice brings about the destruction of the world. 72The fire will in time dry up and burn up the whole of the cold, moist element. But then it will not be fire any longer; it will simply be the “mixture,” if we choose to call it so, of the hot and cold—that is, it will be the same as the Boundless which surrounds it, and will pass away into it.

The view which Anaximander takes of the earth is a great advance upon anything we can reasonably attribute to Thales, and Aristotle has preserved the arguments by which he supported it. It is equally distant from the extremes in every direction, and there is no reason for it to move up or down or sideways.^[138] Still, he does not attain to the idea that it is spherical. He believes that we live on a convex disc, and from this the cylindrical form follows as a matter of course. The really remarkable thing is that he should have seen, however dimly, that there is no absolute up and down in the world.

21. We have seen enough to show us that the speculations of Anaximander about the world were of an extremely daring character; we come now to the crowning audacity of all, his theory of the origin of living creatures. The Theophrastean account of this has been well preserved by the doxographers:—

The importance of these statements has sometimes been overrated and still more often underestimated. Anaximander has been called a precursor of Darwin by some, while others have treated the whole thing as a mythological survival. It is therefore important to notice that this is one of the rare cases where we have not merely a placitum, but an indication, meagre though it be, of the observations on which it was based, and the line of argument by which it was supported. It is clear from this that Anaximander had an idea of what is meant by adaptation to environment and survival of the fittest, and that he saw the higher mammals could not represent the original type of animal. For this he looked to the sea, and he naturally fixed upon those fishes which present the closest analogy to the mammalia. The statements of Aristotle 74about the galeus levis were shown long ago by Johannes Müller to be more accurate than those of later naturalists, and we now know that these observations were already made by Anaximander. The manner in which the shark nourishes its young furnished him with the very thing he required to explain the survival of the earliest animals.^[141]

22. In the course of our discussion of the “innumerable worlds” we saw that Anaximander regarded these as gods. It is true, of course, as Zeller says,^[142] that to the Greeks the word θεός meant primarily an object of worship, and he rightly adds that no one would think of worshipping innumerable worlds. This, however, is no real objection to our interpretation, though it serves to bring out an interesting point in the development of Greek theological ideas. The philosophers, in fact, departed altogether from the received usage of the word θεός. Empedokles called the Sphere and the Elements gods, though it is not to be supposed that he regarded them as objects of worship, and in the same 75way we shall find that Diogenes of Apollonia spoke of Air as a god.^[143] As we may learn from the Clouds of Aristophanes, it was just this way of speaking that got philosophers the name of being ἄθεοι. It is of great importance to bear this point in mind; for, when we come to Xenophanes, we shall see that the god or gods he spoke of meant just the world or worlds. It seems also that Anaximander called the Boundless itself divine,^[144] which is quite in accordance with the language of Empedokles and Diogenes referred to above.

III. Anaximenes

23. Anaximenes of Miletos, son of Eurystratos, was, according to TheophrastosTheophrastos, an “associate” of Anaximander.^[145] Apollodoros said, it appears, that he “flourished” about the time of the fall of Sardeis (546/5 B.C.), and died in Ol. LXIII. (528/524 B.C.).^[146] In other words, he was born when Thales “flourished,” and “flourished” when Thales died, and this means that Apollodoros had no definite information about his date at all. He most probably made him die in the sixty-third Olympiad because that gives just a hundred years, or three generations, for the Milesian school from the birth of Thales. We cannot, therefore, say anything 76positive as to his date, except that he must have been younger than Anaximander, and must have flourished before 494 B.C., when the school was, of course, broken up by the destruction of Miletos.

24. Anaximenes wrote a book which certainly survived until the age of literary criticism; for we are told that he used a simple and unpretentious Ionic,^[147] very different, we may suppose, from the poetical prose of Anaximander.^[148] We may probably trust this criticism, which comes ultimately from Theophrastos; and it furnishes a good illustration of the truth that the character of a man’s thoughts is sure to find expression in his style. We have seen that the speculations of Anaximander were distinguished for their hardihood and breadth; those of Anaximenes are marked by just the opposite quality. He appears to have thought out his system carefully, but he rejects the more audacious theories of his predecessor. The result is that, while his view of the world is on the whole much less like the truth than Anaximander’s, it is more fruitful in ideas that were destined to hold their ground.

25. Anaximenes is one of the philosophers on whom Theophrastos wrote a special monograph;^[149] and this gives us an additional guarantee for the trustworthiness of the tradition derived from his great work. The following^[150] are the passages which seem to contain the fullest and most accurate account of what he had to say on the central feature of the system:—

26. At the first glance, this undoubtedly looks like a falling off from the more refined doctrine of Anaximander to a cruder view; but a moment’s reflexion will show that this is not altogether the case. On the contrary, the introduction of rarefaction and condensation into the theory is a notable advance.^[153] In fact, it 78makes the Milesian cosmology thoroughly consistent for the first time; since it is clear that a theory which explains everything by the transformations of a single substance is bound to regard all differences as purely quantitative. The infinite substance of Anaximander, from which the opposites “in it” are “separated out,” cannot, strictly speaking, be thought of as homogeneous, and the only way to save the unity of the primary substance is to say that all diversities are due to the presence of more or less of it in a given space. And when once this important step has been taken, it is no longer necessary to make the primary substance something “distinct from the elements,” to use Aristotle’s inaccurate but convenient phrase; it may just as well be one of them.

27. The air that Anaximenes speaks of includes a good deal that we should not call by that name. In its normal condition, when most evenly distributed, it is invisible, and it then corresponds to our “air”; it is identical with the breath we inhale and the wind that blows. That is why he called it πνεῦμα. On the other hand, the old idea, familiar to us in Homer, that mist or vapour is condensed air, is still accepted without question. In other words, we may say that Anaximenes supposed it to be a good deal easier to get liquid air than it has since proved to be. It was Empedokles, we shall see, who first discovered that what we call air was a distinct corporeal substance, and was not identical either with vapour or with empty space. In the earlier cosmologists “air” is always a form of vapour, and 79even darkness is a form of it. It was Empedokles who cleared up this point too by showing that darkness is a shadow.^[154]

It was natural for Anaximenes to fix upon Air in this sense as the primary substance; for, in the system of Anaximander, it occupied an intermediate place between the two fundamental opposites, the sphere of flame and the cold, moist mass within it (§ 19). We know from Plutarch that he fancied air became warmer when rarefied, and colder when condensed. Of this he satisfied himself by a curious experimental proof. When we breathe with our mouths open, the air is warm; when we breathe with our lips closed, it is cold.^[155]

28. This argument from human breathing brings us to an important point in the theory of Anaximenes, which is attested by the single fragment that has come down to us.^[156] “Just as our soul, being air, holds us together, so do breath and air encompass the whole world.” The primary substance bears the same relation to the life of the world as to that of man. Now this, we shall see, was the Pythagorean view;^[157] and it is also an early instance of the argument from the microcosm to the macrocosm, and so marks the first beginnings of an interest in physiological matters.

8029. We turn now to the doxographical tradition concerning the formation of the world and its parts:—

We have seen that Anaximenes was quite justified in going back to Thales in regard to his general theory of the primary substance; but it cannot be denied that the effect of this upon the details of his cosmology was unfortunate. The earth is once more imagined as a table-like disc floating upon the air. The sun, moon, and planets are also fiery discs which float on the air “like leaves.” It follows that the heavenly bodies cannot be thought of as going under the earth at night, but only as going round it laterally like a cap or a millstone.^[160] This curious view is also mentioned in Aristotle’s Meteorology,^[161] where the elevation of the northern parts of the earth, which makes it possible for 82the heavenly bodies to be hidden from sight, is referred to. In fact, whereas Anaximander had regarded the orbits of the sun, moon, and stars as oblique with reference to the earth, Anaximenes regarded the earth itself as inclined. The only real advance is the distinction of the planets, which float freely in the air, from the fixed stars, which are fastened to the “crystalline” vault of the sky.^[162]

The earthy bodies, which circulate among the planets, are doubtless intended to account for eclipses and the phases of the moon.^[163]

30. As might be expected, there is the same difficulty about the “innumerable worlds” ascribed to Anaximenes as about those of Anaximander, and most of the arguments given above (§ 18) apply here also. The evidence, however, is far less satisfactory. Cicero says that Anaximenes regarded air as a god, and adds that it came into being.^[164] That there is some confusion here is obvious. Air, as the primary substance, is certainly eternal, and it is quite likely that Anaximenes called it “divine,” as Anaximander did the Boundless; but it is certain that he also spoke of gods who came into being and passed away. These arose, he said, from the air. This is expressly stated by Hippolytos,^[165] and also by St. Augustine.^[166] These gods are probably to 83be explained like Anaximander’s. Simplicius, indeed, takes another view;^[167] but he may have been misled by a Stoic authority.

31. It is not quite easy for us to realise that, in the eyes of his contemporaries, and for long after, Anaximenes was a much more important figure than Anaximander. And yet the fact is certain. We shall see that Pythagoras, though he followed Anaximander in his account of the heavenly bodies, was far more indebted to Anaximenes for his general theory of reality (§ 53). We shall see further that when, at a later date, science revived once more in Ionia, it was “the philosophy of Anaximenes” to which it attached itself (§ 122). Anaxagoras adopted many of his most characteristic views (§ 135), and some of them even found their way into the cosmology of the Atomists.^[168] Diogenes of Apollonia went back to the central doctrine of Anaximenes, and once more made Air the primary substance, though he also tried to combine it with the theories of Anaxagoras (§ 188). We shall come to all this later on; but it seemed desirable to point out at once that Anaximenes marks the culminating point of the line of thought which 84started with Thales, and to show how the “philosophy of Anaximenes” came to mean the Milesian doctrine as a whole. This it can only have done because it was really the work of a school, of which Anaximenes was the last distinguished representative, and because his contribution to it was one that completed the system he had inherited from his predecessors. That the theory of rarefaction and condensation was really such a completion of the Milesian system, we have seen already (§ 26), and it need only be added that a clear realisation of this fact will be the best clue at once to the understanding of the Milesian cosmology itself and to that of the systems which followed it. In the main, it is from Anaximenes that they all start.

32. So far we have not met with any trace of direct antagonism between science and popular beliefs, though the views of the Milesian cosmologists were really as inconsistent with the religions of the people as with the mythology of the anthropomorphic poets.^[169] Two things hastened the conflict—the shifting of the scene to the West, and the religious revival which swept over Hellas in the sixth century B.C.

The chief figures in the philosophical history of the period were Pythagoras of Samos and Xenophanes of Kolophon. Both were Ionians by birth, and yet both spent the greater part of their lives in the West. We see from Herodotos how the Persian advance in Asia Minor occasioned a series of migrations to Sicily and Southern Italy;^[170] and this, of course, made a great difference to philosophy as well as to religion. The new views had probably grown up so naturally and gradually in Ionia that the shock of conflict and reaction was avoided; but that could no longer be so, when they were transplanted to a region where men were wholly unprepared to receive them.

86Another, though a somewhat later, effect of these migrations was to bring Science into contact with Rhetoric, one of the most characteristic products of Western Hellas. Already in Parmenides we may note the presence of that dialectical and controversial spirit which was destined to have so great an influence on Greek thought, and it was just this fusion of the art of arguing for victory with the search for truth that before long gave birth to Logic.

33. Most important of all in its influence on philosophy was the religious revival which culminated about this time. The religion of continental Hellas had developed in a very different way from that of Ionia. In particular, the worship of Dionysos, which came from Thrace, and is barely mentioned in Homer, contained in germ a wholly new way of looking at man’s relation to the world. It would certainly be wrong to credit the Thracians themselves with any very exalted views; but there can be no doubt that, to the Greeks, the phenomenon of ecstasy suggested that the soul was something more than a feeble double of the self, and that it was only when “out of the body” it could show its true nature.^[171] To a less extent, such ideas were also suggested by the worship of Demeter, whose mysteries were celebrated at Eleusis; though, in later days, these came to take the leading place in men’s minds. That was because they were incorporated in the public religion of Athens.

Before the time with which we are dealing, tradition shows us dimly an age of inspired prophets—Bakides 87and Sibyls—followed by one of strange medicine-men like Abaris and Aristeas of Prokonnesos. With Epimenides of Crete, we touch the fringe of history, while Pherekydes of Syros is the contemporary of the early cosmologists, and we still have some fragments of his discourse. It looked as if Greek religion were about to enter upon the same stage as that already reached by the religions of the East; and, but for the rise of science, it is hard to see what could have checked this tendency. It is usual to say that the Greeks were saved from a religion of the Oriental type by their having no priesthood; but this is to mistake the effect for the cause. Priesthoods do not make dogmas, though they preserve them once they are made; and in the earlier stages of their development, the Oriental peoples had no priesthoods either in the sense intended.^[172] It was not so much the absence of a priesthood as the existence of the scientific schools that saved Greece.

34. The new religion—for in one sense it was new, though in another as old as mankind—reached its highest point of development with the foundation of the Orphic communities. So far as we can see, the original home of these was Attika; but they spread with extraordinary rapidity, especially in Southern Italy and Sicily.^[173] They were first of all associations for the worship of Dionysos; but they were distinguished by two features which were new among the Hellenes. They looked to a revelation as the source 88of religious authority, and they were organised as artificial communities. The poems which contained their theology were ascribed to the Thracian Orpheus, who had himself descended into Hades, and was therefore a safe guide through the perils which beset the disembodied soul in the next world. We have considerable remains of this literature, but they are mostly of late date, and cannot safely be used as evidence for the beliefs of the sixth century. We do know, however, that the leading ideas of Orphicism were quite early. A number of thin gold plates with Orphic verses inscribed on them have been discovered in Southern Italy;^[174] and though these are somewhat later in date than the period with which we are dealing, they belong to the time when Orphicism was a living creed and not a fantastic revival. What can be made out from them as to the doctrine has a startling resemblance to the beliefs which were prevalent in India about the same time, though it seems impossible that there should have been any actual contact between India and Greece at this date. The main purpose of the Orgia^[175] was to “purify” the believer’s soul, and so enable it to escape from the “wheel of birth,” and it was for the better attainment of this end that the Orphics were organised in communities. Religious associations must have been known to the Greeks from a fairly early date;^[176] but the oldest of 89these were based, at least in theory, on the tie of kindred blood. What was new was the institution of communities to which any one might be admitted by initiation.^[177] This was, in fact, the establishment of churches, though there is no evidence that these were connected with each other in such a way that we could rightly speak of them as a single church. The Pythagoreans came nearer to realising that.

35. We have to take account of the religious revival here, chiefly because it suggested the view that philosophy was above all a “way of life.” Science too was a “purification,” a means of escape from the “wheel.” This is the view expressed so strongly in Plato’s Phaedo, which was written under the influence of Pythagorean ideas.^[178] Sokrates became to his followers the ideal “wise man,” and it was to this side of his personality the Cynics mainly attached themselves. From them proceeded the Stoic sage and the Christian saint, and also the whole brood of impostors whom Lucian has pilloried for our edification.^[179] Saints and sages are apt to appear in questionable shapes, and 90Apollonios of Tyana showed in the end where this view may lead. It was not wholly absent from any Greek philosophy after the days of Pythagoras. Aristotle is as much possessed by it as any one, as we may see from the Tenth Book of the Ethics, and as we should see still more distinctly if we possessed such works as the Protreptikos in their entirety.^[180] Plato, indeed, tried to make the ideal wise man of service to the state and mankind by his doctrine of the philosopher king. It was he alone, so far as we know, that insisted on philosophers descending by turns into the cave from which they had been released and coming to the help of their former fellow-prisoners.^[181] That was not, however, the view that prevailed, and the “wise man” became more and more detached from the world. Apollonios of Tyana was quite entitled to regard himself as the spiritual heir of Pythagoras; for the theurgy and thaumaturgy of the late Greek schools was but the fruit of the seed sown in the generation before the Persian Wars.

36. On the other hand, it would be wrong to suppose that Orphicism or the Mysteries suggested any definite doctrines to philosophers, at least during the period which we are about to consider. We have admitted that they really implied a new view of the soul, and we might therefore have expected to find that they profoundly modified men’s theory of the world and their relation to it. The striking thing is 91that this did not happen. Even those philosophers who were most closely in touch with the religious movement, like Empedokles and the Pythagoreans, held views about the soul which really contradicted the theory implied by their religious practices.^[182] There is no room for an immortal soul in any philosophy of this period. Up to Plato’s time immortality was never treated in a scientific way, but merely assumed in the Orphic rites, to which Plato half seriously turns for confirmation of his own teaching.^[183]

All this is easily accounted for. With us a religious revival generally means the vivid realisation of a new or forgotten doctrine, while ancient religion has properly no doctrine at all. “The initiated,” Aristotle said, “were not expected to learn anything, but merely to be affected in a certain way and put into a certain frame of mind.”^[184] Nothing was required but that the ritual should be correctly performed, and the worshipper was free to give any explanation of it he pleased. It might be as exalted as that of Pindar and Sophokles, or as material as that of the itinerant mystery-mongers described by Plato in the Republic. The essential thing was that he should duly sacrifice his pig.

I. Pythagoras of Samos

37. It is no easy task to give an account of Pythagoras that can claim to be regarded as history. Our 92principal sources of information^[185] are the Lives composed by Iamblichos, Porphyry, and Laertios Diogenes. That of Iamblichos is a wretched compilation, based chiefly on the work of the arithmetician Nikomachos of Gerasa in Judaea, and the romance of Apollonios of Tyana, who regarded himself as a second Pythagoras, and accordingly took great liberties with his materials.^[186] Porphyry stands, as a writer, on a far higher level than Iamblichos; but his authorities do not inspire us with more confidence. He, too, made use of Nikomachos, and of a certain novelist called Antonius Diogenes, author of a work entitled Marvels from beyond Thule.^[187] Diogenes quotes, as usual, a considerable number of authorities, and the statements he makes must be estimated according to the nature of the sources from which they were drawn.^[188] So far, it must be confessed, our material does not seem promising. Further examination shows, however, that a good many fragments of two much older authorities, Aristoxenos and Dikaiarchos, are embedded in the mass. These writers were both disciples of Aristotle; they were natives of Southern Italy, and contemporary with the last generation of the Pythagorean school. Both 93wrote accounts of Pythagoras; and Aristoxenos, who was personally intimate with the last representatives of scientific Pythagoreanism, also made a collection of the sayings of his friends. Now the Neopythagorean story, as we have it in Iamblichos, is a tissue of incredible and fantastic myths; but, if we sift out the statements which go back to Aristoxenos and Dikaiarchos, we can easily construct a rational narrative, in which Pythagoras appears not as a miracle-monger and religious innovator, but simply as a moralist and statesman. We might then be tempted to suppose that this is the genuine tradition; but that would be altogether a mistake. There is, in fact, a third and still earlier stratum in the Lives, and this agrees with the latest accounts in representing Pythagoras as a wonder-worker and a religious reformer.

Some of the most striking miracles of Pythagoras are related on the authority of Andron’s Tripod, and of Aristotle’s work on the Pythagoreans.^[189] Both these treatises belong to the fourth century B.C., and are therefore untouched by Neopythagorean fancies. Further, it is only by assuming the still earlier existence of this view that we can explain the allusions of Herodotos. The Hellespontine Greeks told him that Salmoxis or Zamolxis had been a slave of Pythagoras,^[190] and Salmoxis is a figure of the same class as Abaris and Aristeas.

94It seems, then, that both the oldest and the latest accounts agree in representing Pythagoras as a man of the class to which Epimenides and Onomakritos belonged—in fact, as a sort of “medicine-man”; but, for some reason, there was an attempt to save his memory from this imputation, and that attempt belonged to the fourth century B.C. The significance of this will appear in the sequel.

38. We may be said to know for certain that Pythagoras passed his early manhood at Samos, and was the son of Mnesarchos;^[191] and he “flourished,” we are told, in the reign of Polykrates.^[192] This date cannot be far wrong; for Herakleitos already speaks of him in the past tense.^[193]

The extensive travels attributed to Pythagoras by late writers are, of course, apocryphal. Even the statement that he visited Egypt, though far from improbable if we consider the close relations between Polykrates of Samos and Amasis, rests on no sufficient authority.^[194] Herodotos, it is true, observes that the 95Egyptians agreed in certain practices with the rules called Orphic and Bacchic, which are really Egyptian, and with the Pythagoreans;^[195] but this does not imply that the Pythagoreans derived these directly from Egypt. He says also in another place that the belief in transmigration came from Egypt, though certain Greeks, both at an earlier and a later date, had passed it off as their own. He refuses, however, to give their names, so he can hardly be referring to Pythagoras.^[196] Nor does it matter; for the Egyptians did not believe in transmigration at all, and Herodotos was simply deceived by the priests or the symbolism of the monuments.

Aristoxenos said that Pythagoras left Samos in order to escape from the tyranny of Polykrates.^[197] It was at Kroton, a city already famous for its medical school,^[198] that he founded his society. How long he remained there we do not know; he died at Metapontion, whither he had retired on the first signal of revolt against his influence.^[199]

9639. There is no reason to believe that the detailed statements which have been handed down with regard to the organisation of the Pythagorean Order rest upon any historical basis, and in the case of many of them we can still see how they came to be made. The distinction of grades within the Order, variously called Mathematicians and Akousmatics, Esoterics and Exoterics, Pythagoreans and Pythagorists,^[200] is an invention designed to explain how there came to be two widely different sets of people, each calling themselves disciples of Pythagoras, in the fourth century B.C. So, too, the statement that the Pythagoreans were bound to inviolable secrecy, which goes back to Aristoxenos,^[201] is intended to explain why there is no trace of the Pythagorean philosophy proper before Philolaos.

The Pythagorean Order was simply, in its origin, a religious fraternity of the type described above, and not, as has sometimes been maintained, a political league.^[202] Nor had it anything to do with the “Dorian aristocratic 97ideal.” Pythagoras was an Ionian, and the Order was originally confined to Achaian states.^[203] Nor is there the slightest evidence that the Pythagoreans favoured the aristocratic rather than the democratic party.^[204] The main purpose of the Order was to secure for its own members a more adequate satisfaction of the religious instinct than that supplied by the State religion. It was, in fact, an institution for the cultivation of holiness. In this respect it resembled an Orphic society, though it seems that Apollo, rather than Dionysos, was the chief Pythagorean god. That is doubtless why the Krotoniates identified Pythagoras with Apollo Hyperboreios.^[205] From the nature of the case, however, an independent society within a Greek state was apt to be brought into conflict with the larger body. The 98only way in which it could then assert its right to exist was by identifying the State with itself, that is, by securing the control of the sovereign power. The history of the Pythagorean Order, so far as it can be traced, is, accordingly, the history of an attempt to supersede the State; and its political action is to be explained as a mere incident of that attempt.

40. For a time the new Order seems actually to have succeeded in securing the supreme power, but reaction came at last. Under the leadership of Kylon, a wealthy noble, Kroton was able to assert itself victoriously against the Pythagorean domination. This, we may well believe, had been galling enough. The “rule of the saints” would be nothing to it; and we can still imagine and sympathise with the irritation felt by the plain man of those days at having his legislation done for him by a set of incomprehensible pedants, who made a point of abstaining from beans, and would not let him beat his own dog because they recognised in its howls the voice of a departed friend (Xenophanes, fr. 7). This feeling would be aggravated by the private religious worship of the Society. Greek states could never pardon the introduction of new gods. Their objection to this was not, however, that the gods in question were false gods. If they had been, it would not have mattered so much. What they could not tolerate was that any one should establish a private means of communication between himself and the unseen powers. That introduced an unknown and incalculable element into the arrangements of the State, which might very likely be hostile to those citizens who had no means of propitiating the intruding divinity.

Aristoxenos’s version of the events which led to the 99downfall of the Pythagorean Order is given at length by Iamblichos. According to this, Pythagoras had refused to receive Kylon into his Society, and he therefore became a bitter foe of the Order. From this cause Pythagoras removed from Kroton to Metapontion, where he died. The Pythagoreans, however, still retained possession of the government of Kroton, till at last the partisans of Kylon set fire to Milo’s house, where they were assembled. Of those in the house only two, Archippos and Lysis, escaped. Archippos retired to Taras; Lysis, first to Achaia and then to Thebes, where he became later on the teacher of Epameinondas. The Pythagoreans who remained concentrated themselves at Rhegion; but, as things went from bad to worse, they all left Italy except Archippos.^[206]

This account has all the air of being historical. The mention of Lysis proves, however, that those events were spread over more than one generation. The coup d’état of Kroton can hardly have occurred before 450 B.C., if the teacher of Epameinondas escaped from it, and it may well have been even later. But it must have been before 410 B.C. that the Pythagoreans left Rhegion for Hellas; Philolaos was certainly at Thebes about that time.^[207]

100The political power of the Pythagoreans as an Order was now gone for ever, though we shall see that some of them returned to Italy at a later date. In exile they seem to have dropped the merely magical and superstitious parts of their system, and this enabled them to take their place as one of the scientific schools of Hellas.

41. Of the opinions of Pythagoras we know even less than of his life. Aristotle clearly knew nothing for certain of ethical or physical doctrines going back to the founder of the Society himself.^[208] Aristoxenos only gave a string of moral precepts.^[209] Dikaiarchos is quoted by Porphyry as asserting that hardly anything of what Pythagoras taught his disciples was known except the doctrine of transmigration, the periodic cycle, and the kinship of all living creatures.^[210] The fact is, that, like all teachers who introduce a new way of living rather than a new view of the world, Pythagoras preferred oral instruction to the dissemination of his opinions by writing, and it was not till Alexandrian times that any one ventured to forge books in his 101name. The writings ascribed to the earliest Pythagoreans were also forgeries of the same period.^[211] The early history of Pythagoreanism is, therefore, wholly conjectural; but we may still make an attempt to understand, in a very general way, what the position of Pythagoras in the history of Greek thought must have been.

42. In the first place, then, there can be no doubt that he really taught the doctrine of transmigration.^[212] The story told by the Greeks of the Hellespont and Pontos as to his relations with Salmoxis could never have gained currency by the time of Herodotos if he had not been known as a man who taught strange views of the life after death.^[213] Now the doctrine of transmigration is most easily to be explained as a development of the savage belief in the kinship of men and beasts, as all alike children of the Earth,^[214] a view which Dikaiarchos said Pythagoras certainly held. Further, among savages, this belief is commonly associated with a system of taboos on certain kinds of food, and the Pythagorean rule is best known for its prescription of similar forms of abstinence. This in itself goes far to show that it originated in the same ideas, and we have seen that the revival of these would be quite natural in connexion with the foundation of a new religious society. There is a further consideration 102which tells strongly in the same direction. In India we have a precisely similar doctrine, and yet it is not possible to assume any actual borrowing of Indian ideas at this date. The only explanation which will account for the facts is that the two systems were independently evolved from the same primitive ideas. These are found in many parts of the world; but it seems to have been only in India and in Greece that they were developed into an elaborate doctrine.

43. It has indeed been doubted whether we have a right to accept what we are told by such late writers as Porphyry on the subject of Pythagorean abstinence. Aristoxenos, whom we have admitted to be one of our earliest witnesses, may be cited to prove that the original Pythagoreans knew nothing of these restrictions on the use of animal flesh and beans. He undoubtedly said that Pythagoras did not abstain from animal flesh in general, but only from that of the ploughing ox and the ram.^[215] He also said that Pythagoras preferred beans to every other vegetable, as being the most laxative, and that he was partial to sucking-pigs and tender kids.^[216] Aristoxenos, however, is a witness who very often breaks down under cross-examination, and the palpable exaggeration of these statements shows that he is endeavouring to combat a belief 103which existed in his own day. We are therefore able to show, out of his own mouth, that the tradition which made the Pythagoreans abstain from animal flesh and beans goes back to a time long before there were any Neopythagoreans interested in upholding it. Still, it may be asked what motive Aristoxenos could have had for denying the common belief? The answer is simple and instructive. He had been the friend of the last of the Pythagoreans; and, in their time, the merely superstitious part of Pythagoreanism had been dropped, except by some zealots whom the heads of the Society refused to acknowledge. That is why he represents Pythagoras himself in so different a light from both the older and the later traditions; it is because he gives us the view of the more enlightened sect of the Order. Those who clung faithfully to the old practices were now regarded as heretics, and all manner of theories were set on foot to account for their existence. It was related, for instance, that they descended from one of the “Akousmatics,” who had never been initiated into the deeper mysteries of the “Mathematicians.”^[217] All this, however, is pure invention. The satire of the poets of the Middle Comedy proves clearly enough that, even though the friends of Aristoxenos did not practise abstinence, there were plenty of people in the fourth century, calling themselves followers of Pythagoras, who did.^[218] History has not been kind to the 104Akousmatics, but they never wholly died out. The names of Diodoros of Aspendos and Nigidius Figulus help to bridge the gulf between them and Apollonios of Tyana.

We know, then, that Pythagoras taught the kinship of beasts and men, and we infer that his rule of abstinence from flesh was based, not upon humanitarian or ascetic grounds, but on taboo. This is strikingly confirmed by a fact which we are told in Porphyry’s Defence of Abstinence. The statement in question does not indeed go back to Theophrastos, as so much of Porphyry’s tract certainly does;^[219] but it is, in all probability, due to Herakleides of Pontos, and is to the effect that, though the Pythagoreans did as a rule abstain from flesh, they nevertheless ate it when they sacrificed to the gods.^[220] Now, among savage peoples, we often find that the sacred animal is slain and eaten 105sacramentally by its kinsmen on certain solemn occasions, though in ordinary circumstances this would be the greatest of all impieties. Here, again, we have to do with a very primitive belief; and we need not therefore attach any weight to the denials of Aristoxenos.^[221]

44. We shall now know what to think of the various Pythagorean rules and precepts which have come down to us. These are of two kinds, and have very different sources. Some of them, derived from the collection of Aristoxenos, and for the most part preserved by Iamblichos, are mere precepts of morality. They do not pretend to go back to Pythagoras himself; they are only the sayings which the last generation of “Mathematicians” heard from their predecessors.^[222] The second class is of a very different nature, and the sayings which belong to it are called Akousmata,^[223] which points to their being the property of that sect of Pythagoreans which had faithfully preserved the old customs. Later writers interpret them as “symbols” of moral truth; but their interpretations are extremely far-fetched, and it does not require a very practised eye to see that they are genuine taboos of a thoroughly primitive type. 106I give a few examples in order that the reader may judge what the famous Pythagorean rule of life was really like.

• 1. To abstain from beans.
• 2. Not to pick up what has fallen.
• 3. Not to touch a white cock.
• 4. Not to break bread.
• 5. Not to step over a crossbar.
• 6. Not to stir the fire with iron.
• 7. Not to eat from a whole loaf.
• 8. Not to pluck a garland.
• 9. Not to sit on a quart measure.
• 10. Not to eat the heart.
• 11. Not to walk on highways.
• 12. Not to let swallows share one’s roof.
• 13. When the pot is taken off the fire, not to leave the mark of it in the ashes, but to stir them together.
• 14. Do not look in a mirror beside a light.
• 15. When you rise from the bedclothes, roll them together and smooth out the impress of the body.

It would be easy to multiply proofs of the close connexion between Pythagoreanism and primitive modes of thought, but what has been said is really sufficient for our purpose. The kinship of men and beasts, the abstinence from flesh, and the doctrine of transmigration all hang together and form a perfectly intelligible whole from the point of view which has been indicated.

45. Were this all, we should be tempted to delete the name of Pythagoras from the history of philosophy altogether, and relegate him to the class of “medicine-men” (γόητες) along with Epimenides and Onomakritos. This, however, would be quite wrong. As we shall see, the Pythagorean Society became one of the chief scientific schools of Hellas, and it is certain that Pythagorean 107science as well as Pythagorean religion originated with the master himself. Herakleitos, who is not partial to him, says that Pythagoras had pursued scientific investigation further than other men, though he also says that he turned his much learning into an art of mischief.^[224] Herodotos called Pythagoras “by no means the weakest sophist of the Hellenes,” a title which at this date does not imply the slightest disparagement.^[225] Aristotle even said that Pythagoras first busied himself with mathematics and numbers, and that it was later on he attached himself to the miracle-mongering of Pherekydes.^[226] Is it possible for us to trace any connexion between these two sides of his activity?

We have seen that the aim of the Orphic and other Orgia was to obtain release from the “wheel of birth” by means of “purifications,” which were generally of a very primitive type. The new thing in the Society founded by Pythagoras seems to have been that, while it admitted all these half-savage customs, it at the same time suggested a more exalted idea of what “purification” really was. Aristoxenos tells us that the Pythagoreans employed music to purge the soul as they used medicine to purge the body, and it is abundantly clear that Aristotle’s famous theory of κάθαρσις is derived from Pythagorean sources.^[227] Such 108methods of purifying the soul were familiar in the Orgia of the Korybantes, and will serve to explain the Pythagorean interest in Harmonics. But there is more than this. If we can trust Herakleides so far, it was Pythagoras who first distinguished the “three lives,” the Theoretic, the Practical, and the Apolaustic, which Aristotle made use of in the Ethics. The general theory of these lives is clear, and it is impossible to doubt that in substance it belongs to the very beginning of the school. It is to this effect. We are strangers in this world, and the body is the tomb of the soul, and yet we must not seek to escape by self-murder; for we are the chattels of God who is our herdsman, and without his command we have no right to make our escape.^[228] In this life, there are three kinds of men, just as there are three sorts of people who come to the Olympic Games. The lowest class is made up of those who come to buy and sell, and next above them are those who come to compete. Best of all, however, are those who come simply to look on (θεωρεῖν). The greatest purification of all is, therefore, disinterested science, and it is the man who devotes himself to that, the true philosopher, who has most effectually released himself from the “wheel of birth.” It would be rash to say that Pythagoras expressed himself exactly in this manner; but all these ideas are genuinely Pythagorean, and it is only in some such way that we can bridge the gulf which separates Pythagoras the man of science 109from Pythagoras the religious teacher.^[229] We must now endeavour to discover how much of the later Pythagorean science may reasonably be ascribed to Pythagoras himself.

46. In his treatise on Arithmetic, Aristoxenos said that Pythagoras was the first to carry that study beyond the needs of commerce,^[230] and his statement is confirmed by everything we otherwise know. By the end of the fifth century B.C., we find that there is a widespread interest in such subjects and that these are studied for their own sake. Now this new interest cannot have been wholly the work of a school; it must have originated with some great man, and there is no one but Pythagoras to whom we can refer it. As, however, he wrote nothing, we have no sure means of distinguishing his own teaching from that of his followers in the next generation or two. All we can safely say is that, the more primitive any Pythagorean doctrine appears, the more likely it is to be that of Pythagoras himself, and all the more so if it can be shown to have points of contact with views which we 110know to have been held in his own time or shortly before it. In particular, when we find the later Pythagoreans teaching things that were already something of an anachronism in their own day, we may be reasonably sure that we are dealing with survivals which only the authority of the master’s name could have preserved. Some of these must be mentioned at once, though the developed system belongs to a later part of our story. It is only by separating its earliest form from its later that the true place of Pythagoreanism in Greek thought can be made clear, though we must always remember that no one can now pretend to draw the line between its successive stages with any certainty.

47. Now one of the most remarkable statements that we have about Pythagoreanism is what we are told of Eurytos on the unimpeachable authority of Archytas. Eurytos was the disciple of Philolaos, and Aristoxenos expressly mentioned him along with Philolaos as having taught the last of the Pythagoreans, the men with whom he himself was personally acquainted. He therefore belongs to the beginning of the fourth century B.C., by which time the Pythagorean system was fully developed, and he was no eccentric enthusiast, but one of the foremost men in the school.^[231] We are told of him, then, that he used to give the number of all sorts of things, such as horses and men, and that he demonstrated these by arranging pebbles in a certain way. It is to be noted further that Aristotle compares his procedure to that of those 111who bring numbers into figures like the triangle and the square.^[232]

Now these statements, and especially the remark of Aristotle last quoted, seem to imply the existence at this date, and earlier, of a numerical symbolism quite distinct from the alphabetical notation on the one hand and from the Euclidean representation of numbers by lines on the other. The former was inconvenient for arithmetical purposes, just because the zero was one of the few things the Greeks did not invent, and they were therefore unable to develop a really serviceable numerical symbolism based on position. The latter, as will appear shortly, is intimately bound up with that absorption of arithmetic by geometry, which is at least as old as Plato, but cannot be primitive.^[233] It seems rather that numbers were represented by dots arranged in symmetrical and easily recognised patterns, of which the marking of dice or dominoes gives us the best idea. And these markings are, in fact, the best proof that this is a genuinely primitive method of indicating numbers; for they are of unknown antiquity, and go back to the time when men could only count by arranging numbers in such patterns, each of which became, as it were, a fresh unit. This way of counting may well be as old as reckoning with the fingers, or even older.

112It is, therefore, very significant that we do not find any adequate account of what Aristotle can have meant by “those who bring numbers into figures like the triangle and the square” till we come to certain late writers who called themselves Pythagoreans, and revived the study of arithmetic as a science independent of geometry. These men not only abandoned the linear symbolism of Euclid, but also regarded the alphabetical notation, which they did use, as something conventional, and inadequate to represent the true nature of number. Nikomachos of Gerasa says expressly that the letters used to represent numbers are only significant by human usage and convention. The most natural way would be to represent linear or prime numbers by a row of units, polygonal numbers by units arranged so as to mark out the various plane figures, and solid numbers by units disposed in pyramids and so forth.^[234] He therefore gives us figures like this:—

Now it ought to be obvious that this is no innovation, but, like so many things in Neopythagoreanism, a reversion to primitive usage. Of course the employment of the letter alpha to represent the units is derived from the conventional notation; but otherwise we are clearly in presence of something which belongs to the very earliest stage of the science—something, in fact, 113which gives the only possible clue to the meaning of Aristotle’s remark, and to what we are told of the method of Eurytos.

48. This is still further confirmed by the tradition which represents the great revelation made by Pythagoras to mankind as having been precisely a figure of this kind, namely the tetraktys, by which the Pythagoreans used to swear,^[235] and we have no less an authority than Speusippos for holding that the whole theory which it implies was genuinely Pythagorean.^[236] In later days there were many kinds of tetraktys,^[237] but the original one, that by which the Pythagoreans swore, was the “tetraktys of the dekad.” It was a figure like this—

and represented the number ten as the triangle of four. In other words, it showed at a glance that 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10. Speusippos tells us of several properties which the Pythagoreans discovered in the dekad. It is, for instance, the first number that has in it an equal number of prime and composite numbers. How much 114of this goes back to Pythagoras himself, we cannot tell; but we are probably justified in referring to him the conclusion that it is “according to nature” that all Hellenes and barbarians count up to ten and then begin over again.

It is obvious that the tetraktys may be indefinitely extended so as to exhibit the sums of the series of successive numbers in a graphic form, and these sums are accordingly called “triangular numbers.”

For similar reasons, the sums of the series of successive odd numbers are called “square numbers,” and those of successive even numbers “oblong.” If odd numbers are added to the unit in the form of gnomons, the result is always a similar figure, namely a square, while, if even numbers are added, we get a series of rectangles,^[238] as shown by the figure:—

It is clear, then, that we are entitled to refer the study of sums of series to Pythagoras himself; but 115whether he went beyond the oblong, and studied pyramidal or cubic numbers, we cannot say.^[239]

49. It is easy to see how this way of representing numbers would suggest problems of a geometrical nature. The dots which stand for the pebbles are regularly called “boundary-stones” (ὅροι, termini, “terms”), and the area which they occupy, or rather mark out, is the “field” (χώρα).^[240] This is evidently a very early way of speaking, and may therefore be referred to Pythagoras himself. Now it must have struck him that “fields” could be compared as well as numbers,^[241] and it is even likely that he knew the rough methods of doing this which were traditional in Egypt, though certainly these would fail to satisfy him. Once more the tradition is singularly helpful in suggesting the direction that his thoughts must have taken. He knew, of course, the use of the triangle 3, 4, 5 in constructing right angles. We have seen (p. 24) that it was familiar in the East from a very early date, and that Thales introduced it to the Hellenes, if they did not know it already. In later writers it is actually called the “Pythagorean triangle.” Now the Pythagorean proposition par excellence is just that, in a right-angled triangle, the square on the hypotenuse is equal 116to the squares on the other two sides, and the so-called Pythagorean triangle is the application of its converse to a particular case. The very name “hypotenuse” affords strong confirmation of the intimate connexion between the two things. It means literally “the cord stretching over against,” and this is surely just the rope of the “harpedonapt.”^[242] An early tradition says that Pythagoras sacrificed an ox when he discovered the proof of this proposition, and indeed it was the real foundation of scientific mathematics.^[243]

50. One great disappointment, however, awaited Pythagoras. It follows at once from the Pythagorean proposition that the square on the diagonal of a square is double the square on its side, and this ought surely to be capable of numerical expression. As a matter of fact, however, there is no square number which can be divided into two equal square numbers, and so the problem cannot be solved. In this sense, it is doubtless true that Pythagoras discovered the incommensurability of the diagonal and the side of a square, and the proof mentioned by Aristotle, namely, that, if they were commensurable, we should have to say that an even number was equal to an odd number, is distinctly Pythagorean in character.^[244] However that may be, it 117is certain that Pythagoras did not care to pursue the subject any further. He had, as it were, stumbled on the fact that the square root of two is a surd, but we know that it was left for Plato’s friends, Theodoros of Kyrene and Theaitetos, to give a complete theory of the matter.^[245] The fact is that the discovery of the Pythagorean proposition, by giving birth to geometry, had really superseded the old view of quantity as a sum of units; but it was not till Plato’s time that the full consequences of this were seen.^[246] For the present, the incommensurability of the diagonal and the square remained, as has been said, a “scandalous exception.” Our tradition says that Hippasos of Metapontion was drowned at sea for revealing this skeleton in the cupboard.^[247]

51. These last considerations show that, while it is quite safe to attribute the substance of the First Book of Euclid to Pythagoras, the arithmetic of Books VII.-IX., and the “geometrical algebra” of Book II. are certainly not his. They operate with lines or with areas instead of with units, and the relations which they establish therefore hold good whether they are capable of numerical expression or not. That is doubtless why arithmetic is not treated in Euclid till after plane geometry, a complete inversion of the original order. For the same reason, the doctrine of proportion which we find in Euclid cannot be Pythagorean, and is 118indeed the work of Eudoxos. Yet it is clear that the early Pythagoreans, and probably Pythagoras himself, studied proportion in their own way, and that the three “medieties” in particular go back to the founder, especially as the most complicated of them, the “harmonic,” stands in close relation to his discovery of the octave. If we take the harmonic proportion 12 : 8 : 6,^[248] we find that 12 : 6 is the octave, 12 : 8 the fifth, and 8 : 6 the fourth, and it can hardly be doubted that it was Pythagoras himself who discovered these intervals. The stories which have come down to us about his observing the harmonic intervals in a smithy, and then weighing the hammers that produced them, or of his suspending weights corresponding to those of the hammers to equal strings, are, indeed, impossible and absurd; but it is sheer waste of time to rationalise them.^[249] For our purpose their absurdity is their chief merit. They are not stories which any Greek mathematician or musician could possibly have invented, but genuine popular tales bearing witness to the existence of a real tradition that Pythagoras was the author of this momentous discovery.

52. It was this too, no doubt, that led Pythagoras to say all things were numbers. We shall see that, at a later date, the Pythagoreans identified these numbers with geometrical figures; but the mere fact that they 119called them “numbers,” when taken in connexion with what we are told about the method of Eurytos, is sufficient to show this was not the original sense of the doctrine. It is enough to suppose that Pythagoras reasoned somewhat as follows. If musical sounds can be reduced to numbers, why should not everything else? There are many likenesses to number in things, and it may well be that a lucky experiment, like that by which the octave was discovered, will reveal their true numerical nature. The Neopythagorean writers, going back in this as in other matters to the earliest tradition of the school, indulge their fancy in tracing out analogies between things and numbers in endless variety; but we are fortunately dispensed from following them in these vagaries. Aristotle tells us distinctly that the Pythagoreans explained only a few things by means of numbers,^[250] which means that Pythagoras himself left no developed doctrine on the subject, while the Pythagoreans of the fifth century did not care to add anything of the sort to the school tradition. Aristotle does imply, however, that, according to them the “right time” (καιρός) was seven, justice was four, and marriage three. These identifications, with a few others like them, we may safely refer to Pythagoras or his immediate successors; but we must not attach much importance to them. They are mere sports of the analogical fancy. If we wish to understand the cosmology of Pythagoras, we must start, not from them, but from any statements we can find that present points of contact with the teaching of the 120Milesian school. These, we may fairly infer, belong to the system in its most primitive form.

53. Now the most striking statement of this kind is one of Aristotle’s. The Pythagoreans held, he tells us, that there was “boundless breath” outside the heavens, and that it was inhaled by the world.^[251] In substance, this is the doctrine of Anaximenes, and it becomes practically certain that it was that of Pythagoras, when we find that Xenophanes denied it.^[252] We may infer, then, that the further development of the idea is also due to Pythagoras himself. We are told that, after the first unit had been formed—however that may have taken place—the nearest part of the Boundless was first drawn in and limited;^[253] and further, that it is just the Boundless thus inhaled that keeps the units separate from each other.^[254] It represents the interval between them. This is a very primitive way of describing the nature of discrete quantity.

In the passages of Aristotle just referred to, the Boundless is also spoken of as the void or empty. This identification of air and the void is a confusion which we have already met with in Anaximenes, and it need not surprise us to find it here too.^[255] We find 121also, as we might expect, distinct traces of the other confusion, that of air and vapour. It seems certain, in fact, that Pythagoras identified the Limit with fire, and the Boundless with darkness. We are told by Aristotle that Hippasos made Fire the first principle,^[256] and we shall see that Parmenides, in discussing the opinions of his contemporaries, attributes to them the view that there were two primary “forms,” Fire and Night.^[257] We also find that Light and Darkness appear in the Pythagorean table of opposites under the heads of the Limit and the Unlimited respectively.^[258] The identification of breath with darkness here implied is a strong proof of the primitive character of the doctrine; for in the sixth century darkness was supposed to be a sort of vapour, while in the fifth, its true nature was well known. Plato, with his usual historical tact, makes the Pythagorean Timaios describe mist and darkness as condensed air.^[259] We must think, then, of a “field” of darkness or breath marked out by luminous units, an imagination which the starry heavens would naturally suggest. It is even probable that we should ascribe to Pythagoras the Milesian view of a plurality of worlds, though it would not have been natural for him to speak of an infinite number. We know, at least, that Petron, one of the early Pythagoreans, said there were just a hundred and eighty-three worlds arranged in a triangle;^[260] and Plato makes Timaios 122admit, when laying down that there is only one world, that something might be urged in favour of the view that there are five, as there are five regular solids.^[261]

54. Anaximander had regarded the heavenly bodies as wheels of “air” filled with fire which escapes through certain openings (§ 19), and there is evidence that Pythagoras adopted the same view.^[262] We have seen that Anaximander only assumed the existence of three such wheels, and held that the wheel of the sun was the lowest. It is extremely probable that Pythagoras identified the intervals between these rings with the three musical intervals which he had discovered, the fourth, the fifth, and the octave. That would be the most natural beginning for the later doctrine of the “harmony of the spheres,” though that expression would be doubly misleading if applied to any theory we can properly ascribe to Pythagoras himself. The word ἁρμονία does not mean harmony, and the “spheres” are an anachronism. We are still at the stage when wheels or rings were considered sufficient to account for the motions of the heavenly bodies. It is also to be observed that sun, moon, planets, and fixed stars must all be regarded as moving in the same direction from east to west. Pythagoras certainly did not ascribe to the planets an orbital motion of their own from west to east. The old idea was rather that they were left behind more or less every day. As compared with the fixed stars, Saturn is left behind least of all, and the Moon most; so, instead of saying 123that the Moon took a shorter time than Saturn to complete its path through the signs of the Zodiac, men said Saturn travelled quicker than the Moon, because it more nearly succeeds in keeping up with the signs. Instead of holding that Saturn takes thirty years to complete its revolution, they said it took the fixed stars thirty years to pass Saturn, and only twenty-nine days and a half to pass the Moon. This is one of the most important points to bear in mind regarding the planetary systems of the Greeks, and we shall return to it again.^[263]

The account just given of the views of Pythagoras is, no doubt, conjectural and incomplete. We have simply assigned to him those portions of the Pythagorean system which appear to be the oldest, and it has not even been possible at this stage to cite fully the evidence on which our discussion is based. It will only appear in its true light when we have examined the second part of the poem of Parmenides and the system of the later Pythagoreans.^[264] For reasons which will then be apparent, I do not venture to ascribe to Pythagoras himself the theory of the earth’s revolution round the central fire. It seems safest to suppose that he still adhered to the geocentric hypothesis of Anaximander. In spite of this, however, it will be clear that he opened a new period in the development of Greek science, and it was certainly to his school that its greatest discoveries were directly or indirectly due. 124When Plato deliberately attributes some of his own most important discoveries to the Pythagoreans, he was acknowledging in a characteristic way the debt he owed them.

II. Xenophanes of Kolophon

55. We have seen how Pythagoras identified himself with the religious movement of his time; we have now to consider a very different manifestation of the reaction against that view of the gods which the poets had made familiar to every one. Xenophanes denied the anthropomorphic gods altogether, but was quite unaffected by the revival of more primitive ideas that was going on all round him. We still have a fragment of an elegy in which he ridiculed Pythagoras and the doctrine of transmigration. “Once, they say, he was passing by when a dog was being ill-treated. ‘Stop!’ he said, ‘don’t hit it! It is the soul of a friend! I knew it when I heard its voice.’”^[265] We are also told that he opposed the views of Thales and Pythagoras, and attacked Epimenides, which is likely enough, though no fragments of the kind have come down to us.^[266] His chief importance lies in the fact that he was the author of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry which culminated in Plato’s Republic.

It is not easy to determine the date of Xenophanes. Timaios said he was a contemporary of Hieron and Epicharmos, and he certainly seems to have 125played a part in the anecdotical romance of Hieron’s court which amused the Greeks of the fourth century much as that of Croesus and the Seven Wise Men amused those of the fifth.^[267] As Hieron reigned from 478 to 467 B.C., that would make it impossible to date the birth of Xenophanes much earlier than 570 B.C., even if we suppose him to have lived till the age of a hundred. On the other hand, both Sextus and Clement say that Apollodoros gave Ol. XL. (620-616 B.C.) as the date of his birth, and the former adds that his days were prolonged till the time of Dareios and Cyrus.^[268] Again, Diogenes, whose information on such matters mostly comes from Apollodoros, says that he flourished in Ol. LX. (540-537 B.C.), and Diels holds that Apollodoros really said so.^[269] However that may be, it is evident that the date 540 B.C. is based on the assumption that he went to Elea in the year of its foundation, and is, therefore, a mere combination.^[270]

126What we do know for certain is that Xenophanes had led a wandering life from the age of twenty-five, and that he was still alive and making poetry at the age of ninety-two. He says himself (fr. 8 = 24 Karst.; R. P. 97):—

It is tempting to suppose that in this passage Xenophanes was referring to the conquest of Ionia by Harpagos, and that he is, in fact, answering the question asked in another poem^[272] (fr. 22 = 17 Karst.; R. P. 95 a):—

We cannot, however, be sure of this, and we must be content with what is, after all, for our purpose the main fact, namely, that he refers to Pythagoras in the past tense, and is in turn so referred to by Herakleitos.^[273]

Theophrastos said that Xenophanes had “heard” Anaximander,^[274] and we shall see that he was certainly acquainted with the Ionian cosmology. When driven 127from his native city, he lived in Sicily, chiefly, we are told, at Zankle and Katana.^[275] Like Archilochos before him, he unburdened his soul in elegies and satires, which he recited at the banquets where, we may suppose, the refugees tried to keep up the usages of good Ionian society. The statement that he was a rhapsode has no foundation at all.^[276] The singer of elegies was no professional like the rhapsode, but the social equal of his listeners. In his ninety-second year he was still, we have seen, leading a wandering life, which is hardly consistent with the statement that he settled at Elea and founded a school there, especially if we are to think of him as spending his last days at Hieron’s court. It is quite probable that he visited Elea, and it is just possible that he wrote a poem of two thousand hexameters on the foundation of that city, which was naturally a subject of interest to all the Ionic émigrés.^[277] But it is very remarkable that no ancient writer expressly says that he ever was at Elea, and the only thing besides the doubtful poem referred to which connects him with it is a single anecdote of Aristotle’s as to the answer he gave the Eleates when they asked whether they should sacrifice to Leukothea and lament her or not. “If you think her a goddess,” he said, “do not 128lament her; if not, do not sacrifice to her.” That is absolutely all, and it is only an apophthegm.^[278] It is strange there should be no more if Xenophanes had really found a home at last in the Phokaian colony.

56. According to a notice preserved in Diogenes, Xenophanes wrote in hexameters and also composed elegies and iambics against Homer and Hesiod.^[279] No good authority says anything about his having written a philosophical poem.^[280] Simplicius tells us he had never met with the verses about the earth stretching infinitely downwards (fr. 28),^[281] and this means that the Academy possessed no copy of such a poem, which would be very strange if it had ever existed. Simplicius was able to find the complete works of much smaller men. Nor does internal evidence lend any support to the view that he wrote a philosophical poem. Diels refers about twenty-eight lines to it, but they would all come in quite as naturally in his attacks on Homer and Hesiod, as I have endeavoured to show. It is also significant that a considerable number of them are derived from commentators 129on Homer.^[282] It seems probable, then, that Xenophanes expressed his theological and philosophical views incidentally in his satires. That would be quite in the manner of the time, as we can see from the remains of Epicharmos.

The satires themselves are called Silloi by late writers, and this name may go back to Xenophanes himself. It is also possible, however, that it originates in the fact that Timon of Phleious, the “sillographer” (c. 259 B.C.), put much of his satire upon philosophers into the mouth of Xenophanes. Only one iambic line has been preserved, and that is immediately followed by a hexameter (fr. 14 = 5 Karst.). This suggests that Xenophanes inserted iambic lines among his hexameters in the manner of the Margites, which would be a very natural thing for him to do.^[283]

57. I give all the fragments of any importance according to the text and arrangement of Diels.

58. The intention of one of these fragments (fr. 32) is perfectly clear. “Iris too” is a cloud, and we may infer that the same thing had just been said of the sun, 134moon, and stars; for the doxographers tell us that these were all explained as “clouds ignited by motion.”^[290] To the same context clearly belongs the explanation of the St. Elmo’s fire which Aetios has preserved. “The things like stars which appear on ships,” we are told, “which some call the Dioskouroi, are little clouds made luminous by motion.”^[291] In the doxographers this explanation is repeated with trifling variations under the head of moon, stars, comets, lightning, shooting stars, and so forth, which gives the appearance of a systematic cosmology.^[292] But the system is due to the arrangement of the work of Theophrastos, and not to Xenophanes; for it is obvious that a very few hexameters added to those we possess would amply account for the whole doxography.

What we hear of the sun presents some difficulties. We are told, on the one hand, that it too was an ignited cloud; but this can hardly be right. The evaporation of the sea from which clouds arise is distinctly said to be due to the sun’s heat. Theophrastos stated that the sun, according to Xenophanes, was a collection of sparks from the moist exhalation; but even this leaves the exhalation itself unexplained.^[293] That, however, matters little, if the chief aim of Xenophanes was to discredit the anthropomorphic gods, rather than to give a 135scientific theory of the heavenly bodies. The important thing is that Helios too is a temporary phenomenon. The sun does not go round the earth, as Anaximander taught, but straight on, and the appearance of a circular path is solely due to its increasing distance. So it is not the same sun that rises next morning, but a new one altogether; while the old one “tumbles into a hole” when it comes to certain uninhabited regions of the earth. Besides that, there are many suns and moons, one of each for every region of the earth.^[294] It is obvious that things of that kind cannot be gods.

The vigorous expression “tumbling into a hole”^[295] seems clearly to come from the verses of Xenophanes himself, and there are others of a similar kind, which we must suppose were quoted by Theophrastos. The stars go out in the daytime, but glow again at night “like charcoal embers.”^[296] The sun is of some use in producing the world and the living creatures in it, but the moon “does no work in the boat.”^[297] Such expressions can only be meant to make the heavenly bodies appear ridiculous, and it will therefore be well to ask whether the other supposed cosmological fragments can be interpreted on the same principle.

13659. In fr. 29 Xenophanes says that “all things are earth and water,” and Hippolytos has preserved the account given by Theophrastos of the context in which this occurred. It was as follows:—

This is, of course, the theory of Anaximander, and we may perhaps credit him rather than Xenophanes with the observations of fossils.^[298] Most remarkable of all, however, is the statement that this change applies to “all the worlds.” It really seems impossible to doubt that Theophrastos attributed a belief in “innumerable worlds” to Xenophanes. As we have seen already, Aetios includes him in his list of those who held this doctrine, and Diogenes ascribes it to him also.^[299] In this place, Hippolytos seems to take it for granted. 137We shall also find, however, that in another connexion he said the World or God was one. If our interpretation of him is correct, there is no difficulty here. The main point is that, so far from being a primeval goddess, and “a sure seat for all things ever,” Gaia too is a passing appearance. That belongs to the attack upon Hesiod, and, if in this connexion Xenophanes spoke, with Anaximander, of “innumerable worlds,” while elsewhere he said that God or the World was one, that is probably connected with a still better attested contradiction which we have now to examine.

60. Aristotle tried without success to discover from the poems of Xenophanes whether he regarded the world as finite or infinite. “He made no clear pronouncement on the subject,” he tells us.^[300] Theophrastos, on the other hand, decided that he regarded it as spherical and finite because he said it was “equal every way.”^[301] This, however, leads to very serious difficulties. We have seen already that Xenophanes said the sun went right on to infinity, and this agrees with his view of the earth as an infinitely extended plain. Still more difficult to reconcile with the idea of a spherical and finite world is the statement of fr. 28 that, while the earth has an upper limit which we see, it has no limit below. This is attested by Aristotle, who speaks of the earth being “infinitely rooted,” and adds that Empedokles criticised Xenophanes for holding this 138view.^[302] It further appears from the fragment of Empedokles quoted by Aristotle that Xenophanes said the vast Air extended infinitely upwards.^[303] We are therefore bound to try to find room for an infinite earth and an infinite air in a spherical and finite world! That comes of trying to find science in satire. If, on the other hand, we regard these statements from the same point of view as those about the heavenly bodies, we shall at once see what they most probably mean. The story of Ouranos and Gaia was always the chief scandal of the Theogony, and the infinite air gets rid of Ouranos altogether. As to the earth stretching infinitely downwards, that gets rid of Tartaros, which Homer described as situated at the bottommost limit of earth and sea, as far beneath Hades as heaven is above the earth.^[304] This is pure conjecture, of course; but, if it is even possible, we are entitled to disbelieve that such startling contradictions occurred in a cosmological poem.

A more subtle explanation of the difficulty commended itself to the late Peripatetic who wrote an account of the Eleatic school, part of which is still extant in the Aristotelian corpus, and is generally known now as the treatise on Melissos, Xenophanes, and Gorgias.^[305] He said that Xenophanes declared the 139world to be neither finite nor infinite, and he composed a series of arguments in support of this thesis, to which he added another like it, namely, that the world is neither in motion nor at rest. This has introduced endless confusion into our sources. Alexander used this treatise as well as the great work of Theophrastos, and Simplicius supposed the quotations from it to be from Theophrastos too. Having no copy of the poems he was completely baffled, and until recently all accounts of Xenophanes were vitiated by the same confusion. It may even be suggested that, but for this, we should have heard very little of the “philosophy of Xenophanes,” a way of speaking which is in the main a survival from the days before this scholastic exercise was recognised as having no authority.

61. In the passage of the Metaphysics just referred to, Aristotle speaks of Xenophanes as “the first partisan of the One,”^[306] and the context shows that he means to suggest he was the first of the Eleatics. We have seen already that the certain facts of his life make it very unlikely that he settled at Elea and founded a school there, and it is probable that, as usual in such cases, Aristotle is simply reproducing 140certain statements of Plato. At any rate, Plato had spoken of the Eleatics as the “partisans of the Whole,”^[307] and he had also spoken of the school as “starting with Xenophanes and even earlier.”^[308] The last words, however, show clearly enough what he meant. Just as he called the Herakleiteans “followers of Homer and still more ancient teachers,”^[309] so he attached the Eleatic school to Xenophanes and still earlier authorities. We have seen in other instances how these playful and ironical remarks of Plato were taken seriously by his successors, and we need not let this fresh instance of the same thing influence our general view of Xenophanes unduly.

Aristotle goes on to tell us that Xenophanes, “referring to the whole world,^[310] said the One was god.” This clearly alludes to frs. 23-26, where all human attributes are denied of a god who is said to be one and “the greatest among gods and men.” It may be added that these verses gain very much in point if we may think of them as closely connected with frs. 14111-16, instead of referring the one set of verses to the Satires and the other to a cosmological poem. It was probably in the same context that Xenophanes called the world or god “equal every way”^[311] and denied that it breathed.^[312] The statement that, there is no mastership among the gods^[313] also goes very well with fr. 26. A god has no wants, nor is it fitting for one god to be the servant of others, like Iris and Hermes in Homer.

62. That this “god” is just the world, Aristotle tells us, and the use of the word θεός is quite in accordance with Anaximander’s. Xenophanes regarded it as sentient, though without any special organs of sense, and it sways all things by the thought of its mind. He also calls it “one god,” and, if that is monotheism, then Xenophanes was a monotheist, though this is surely not how the word is generally understood. The fact is that the expression “one god” wakens all sorts of associations in our mind which did not exist at all for the Greeks of this time. His contemporaries would have been more likely to call Xenophanes an atheist than anything else. As Eduard Meyer excellently says: “In Greece the question of one god or gods many hardly plays any part. Whether the divine power is thought of as a unity or a plurality, is irrelevant in comparison with the question whether it exists at all, and how its nature and its relation to the world is to be understood.”^[314]

142On the other hand, it is wrong to say with Freudenthal that Xenophanes was in any sense a polytheist.^[315] That he should use the language of polytheism in his elegies is only what we should expect, and the other references to “gods” can be best explained as incidental to his attack on the anthropomorphic gods of Homer and Hesiod. In one case, Freudenthal has pressed a proverbial way of speaking too hard.^[316] Least of all can we admit that Xenophanes allowed the existence of subordinate or departmental gods; for it was just the existence of such that he was chiefly concerned to deny. At the same time, I cannot help thinking that Freudenthal was more nearly right than Wilamowitz, who says that Xenophanes “upheld the only real monotheism that has ever existed upon earth.”^[317] Diels, I fancy, comes nearer the mark, when he calls it a “somewhat narrow pantheism.”^[318] But all these views would have surprised Xenophanes himself about equally. He was really Goethe’s Weltkind, with prophets to right and left of him, and he would have smiled if he had known that one day he was to be regarded as a theologian.

63. Herakleitos of Ephesos, son of Blyson, is said to have “flourished” in Ol. LXIX. (504/3-501/0 B.C.);^[319] that is to say, just in the middle of the reign of Dareios, with whom several traditions connected him.^[320] We shall see that Parmenides was assigned to the same Olympiad, though for another reason (§ 84). It is more important, however, for our purpose to notice that, while Herakleitos refers to Pythagoras and Xenophanes by name and in the past tense (fr. 16), he is in turn referred to by Parmenides (fr. 6). These references are sufficient to mark his proper place in the history of philosophy. Zeller holds, indeed, that he cannot have published his work till after 478 B.C., on the ground that the expulsion of his friend Hermodoros, alluded to in fr. 114, could not have taken place before the downfall of Persian rule. If that were so, it might be hard to see how Parmenides could have known the views of Herakleitos; but there is surely no difficulty in supposing that the Ephesians may have sent one of their foremost citizens into banishment at a time when they were still paying 144tribute to the Great King. The Persians never took their internal self-government from the Ionian cities, and the spurious Letters of Herakleitos show the accepted view was that the expulsion of Hermodoros took place during the reign of Dareios.^[321]

Sotion said that Herakleitos was a disciple of Xenophanes,^[322] which is not probable; for Xenophanes seems to have left Ionia for ever before Herakleitos was born. More likely he was not a disciple of any one; but it is clear, at the same time, that he was acquainted both with the Milesian cosmology and with the poems of Xenophanes. He also knew something of the theories taught by Pythagoras (fr. 17).

Of the life of Herakleitos we really know nothing, except, perhaps, that he belonged to the ancient royal house and resigned the nominal position of Basileus in favour of his brother.^[323] The origin of the other statements bearing on it is quite transparent.^[324]

64. We do not know the title of the work of Herakleitos^[325]—if, indeed, it had one at all—and it 145is not very easy to form a clear idea of its contents. We are told that it was divided into three discourses: one dealing with the universe, one political, and one theological.^[326] It is not likely that this division is due to Herakleitos himself; all we can infer from the statement is that the work fell naturally into these three parts when the Stoic commentators took their editions of it in hand.

The style of Herakleitos is proverbially obscure, and, at a later date, got him the nickname of “the Dark.”^[327] Now the fragments about the Delphic god and the Sibyl (frs. 11 and 12) seem to show that he was quite conscious of writing an oracular style, and we have to ask why he did so. In the first place, it was the manner of the time.^[328] The stirring events of the age, and the influence of the religious revival, gave something of a prophetic tone to all the leaders of thought. Pindar and Aischylos have it too. They all feel that they are in some measure inspired. It is also the age of great individualities, who are apt to be solitary and disdainful. Herakleitos at least was so. If men cared to dig for the gold they might find it (fr. 8); if not, they must be content with straw (fr. 51). This seems to have been the view taken by Theophrastos, who said that the headstrong temperament of Herakleitos sometimes led him into incompleteness and inconsistencies of statement.^[329] But that is 146a very different thing from studied obscurity and the disciplina arcani sometimes attributed to him; if Herakleitos does not go out of his way to make his meaning clear, neither does he hide it (fr. 11).

65. I give a version of the fragments according to the arrangement of Mr. Bywater’s exemplary edition.^[330]

66. It will be seen that some of these fragments are far from clear, and there are probably not a few of which the meaning will never be recovered. We naturally turn, then, to the doxographers for a clue; but, as ill-luck will have it, they are far less instructive with regard to Herakleitos than we have found them in other cases. We have, in fact, two great difficulties to contend with. The first is the unusual weakness of the doxographical tradition itself. Hippolytos, upon whom we can generally rely for a fairly accurate account of what Theophrastos really said, derived the material for his first four chapters, which treat of Thales, Pythagoras, Herakleitos, and Empedokles, not from the excellent epitome which he afterwards used, but from a biographical compendium,^[366] which consisted for the most part of apocryphal anecdotes and apophthegms. It was based, further, on some writer of Successions who regarded Herakleitos and Empedokles as Pythagoreans. They are therefore placed side by side, and their doctrines are hopelessly mixed up together. The link between Herakleitos and the Pythagoreans was Hippasos of Metapontion, in whose system, as we know, fire played an important part. 157Theophrastos, following Aristotle, had spoken of the two in the same sentence, and this was enough to put the writers of Successions off the track.^[367] We are forced, then, to look to the more detailed of the two accounts of the opinions of Herakleitos given in Diogenes,^[368] which goes back to the Vetusta Placita, and is, fortunately, pretty full and accurate. All our other sources are more or less tainted.

The second difficulty which we have to face is even more serious. Most of the commentators on Herakleitos mentioned in Diogenes were Stoics,^[369] and it is certain that their paraphrases were sometimes taken for the original. Now, the Stoics held the Ephesian in peculiar veneration, and sought to interpret him as far as possible in accordance with their own system. Further, they were fond of “accommodating”^[370] the views of earlier thinkers to their own, and this has had serious consequences. In particular, the Stoic theories of the λόγος and the ἐκπύρωσις are constantly ascribed to Herakleitos by our authorities, and the very fragments are adulterated with scraps of Stoic terminology.

67. Herakleitos looks down not only on the mass of men, but on all previous inquirers into nature. 158This must mean that he believed himself to have attained insight into some truth which had not hitherto been recognised, though it was, as it were, staring men in the face (fr. 93). Clearly, then, if we wish to get at the central thing in his teaching, we must try to find out what he was thinking of when he launched into those denunciations of human dulness and ignorance.^[371] The answer seems to be given in two fragments, 18 and 45. From them we gather that the truth hitherto ignored is that the many apparently independent and conflicting things we know are really one, and that, on the other hand, this one is also many. The “strife of opposites” is really an “attunement” (ἁρμονία). From this it follows that wisdom is not a knowledge of many things, but the perception of the underlying unity of the warring opposites. That this really was the fundamental thought of Herakleitos is stated by Philo. He says: “For that which is made up of both the opposites is one; and, when the one is divided, the opposites are disclosed. Is not this just what the Greeks say their great and much belauded Herakleitos put in the forefront of his philosophy as summing it all up, and boasted of as a new discovery?”^[372] We shall take the elements of this theory one by one, and see how they are to be understood.

68. Anaximander had taught already that the opposites were separated out from the Boundless, but passed away into it once more, so paying the penalty for their unjust encroachments on one another. It is 159here implied that there is something wrong in the war of opposites, and that the existence of the Many is a breach in the unity of the One. The truth which Herakleitos proclaimed was that there is no One without the Many, and no Many without the One. The world is at once one and many, and it is just the “opposite tension” of the Many that constitutes the unity of the One.

The credit of having been the first to see this is expressly assigned to Herakleitos by Plato. In the Sophist (242 d), the Eleatic stranger, after explaining how the Eleatics maintained that what we call many is really one, proceeds:—

In this passage the Ionian Muses stand, of course, for Herakleitos, and the Sicilian for Empedokles. We remark also that the differentiation of the one into many, and the integration of the many into one, are both eternal and simultaneous, and that this is the ground upon which the system of Herakleitos is contrasted with that of Empedokles. We shall come back to that point again. Meanwhile we confine ourselves to this, that, according to Plato, Herakleitos taught that reality was at once many and one.

We must be careful, however, not to imagine that 160what Herakleitos thus discovered was a logical principle. This was the mistake of Lassalle’s book.^[373] The identity in and through difference which he proclaimed was purely physical; logic did not yet exist, and as the principle of identity had not been formulated, it would have been impossible to protest against an abstract application of it. The identity which he explains as consisting in difference is simply that of the primary substance in all its manifestations. This identity had been realised already by the Milesians, but they had found a difficulty in the difference. Anaximander had treated the strife of opposites as an “injustice,” and what Herakleitos set himself to show was that, on the contrary, it was the highest justice (fr. 62).

69. All this made it necessary for him to seek out a new primary substance. He wanted not merely something out of which the diversified world we know might 161conceivably be made, or from which opposites could be “separated out,” but something which of its own nature would pass into everything else, while everything else would pass in turn into it. This he found in Fire, and it is easy to see why, if we consider the phenomenon of combustion, even as it appears to the plain man. The quantity of fire in a flame burning steadily appears to remain the same, the flame seems to be what we call a “thing.” And yet the substance of it is continually changing. It is always passing away in smoke, and its place is always being taken by fresh matter from the fuel that feeds it. This is just what we want. If we regard the world as an “ever-living fire” (fr. 20), we can understand how it is always becoming all things, while all things are always returning to it.^[374]

70. This necessarily brings with it a certain way of 162looking at the change and movement of the world. Fire burns continuously and without interruption. It is therefore always consuming fuel and always liberating smoke. Everything is either mounting upwards to serve as fuel, or sinking downwards after having nourished the flame. It follows that the whole of reality is like an ever-flowing stream, and that nothing is ever at rest for a moment. The substance of the things we see is in constant change. Even as we look at them, some of the matter of which they are composed has already passed into something else, while fresh matter has come into them from another source. This theory is usually summed up, appropriately enough, in the phrase “All things are flowing” (πάντα ῥεῖ), though, as it happens, it cannot be proved that this is a quotation from Herakleitos. Plato, however, expresses the idea quite clearly. “Nothing ever is, everything is becoming”; “All things are in motion like streams”; “All things are passing, and nothing abides”; “Herakleitos says somewhere that all things pass and naught abides; and, comparing things to the current of a river, he says that you cannot step twice into the same stream” (cf. fr. 41)—these are the terms in which he describes the system. And Aristotle says the same thing, “All things are in motion,” “nothing steadfastly is.”^[375] Herakleitos held, in fact, that any given thing, however stable in appearance, was merely a section in the stream, and that the matter composing it was never the same in any two consecutive moments of time. We shall see presently how he conceived this process to operate; meanwhile we remark that the idea was 163not altogether novel, and that it is hardly the central point in the system of Herakleitos. The Milesians held a similar view. The flux of Herakleitos was at most more unceasing and universal.

71. Herakleitos appears to have worked out the details of the perpetual flux with reference to the theories of Anaximenes.^[376] It is unlikely, however, that he explained the transformations of matter by means of rarefaction and condensation.^[377] Theophrastos, it appears, suggested that he did; but he allowed it was by no means clear. The passage from Diogenes which we are about to quote has faithfully preserved this touch.^[378] In the fragments, at any rate, we find nothing about rarefaction and condensation. The expression used is “exchange” (fr. 22); and this is certainly a very good name for what happens when fire gives out smoke and takes in fuel instead.

It has been pointed out that, in default of Hippolytos, our best account of the Theophrastean doxography of Herakleitos is the fuller of the two accounts given in Laertios Diogenes. It is as follows:—

165It is obvious that, if we can trust this passage, it is of the greatest possible value; and that, upon the whole, we can trust it is shown by the fact that it follows the exact order of topics to which all the doxographies derived from the great work of Theophrastos adhere. First we have the primary substance, then the world, then the heavenly bodies, and lastly, meteorological phenomena. We conclude, then, that it may be accepted with the exceptions, firstly, of the probably erroneous conjecture of Theophrastos as to rarefaction and condensation mentioned above; and secondly, of some pieces of Stoical interpretation which come from the Vetusta Placita.

Let us look at the details of the theory. The pure fire, we are told, is to be found chiefly in the sun. This, like the other heavenly bodies, is a trough or bowl, or perhaps a sort of boat, with the concave side turned towards us, in which the bright exhalations from the sea collect and burn. How does the fire of the sun pass into other forms? If we look at the fragments which deal with the downward path, we find that the first transformation that it undergoes is into sea, and we are further told that half of the sea is earth and half of it πρηστήρ (fr. 21). The full meaning of this we shall see presently, but we must settle at once what πρηστήρ is. Many theories have been advanced upon the subject; but, so far as I know, no one^[379] has yet proposed to take the word in the sense which it always bears elsewhere, that, namely, of hurricane accompanied by a fiery waterspout.^[380] Yet surely this is 166just what is wanted. It is amply attested that Herakleitos explained the rise of the sea to fire by means of the bright evaporations; and we want a similar meteorological explanation of the passing of the fire back into sea. We want, in fact, something which will stand equally for the smoke produced by the burning of the sun and for the immediate stage between fire and water. What could serve the turn better than a fiery waterspout? It sufficiently resembles smoke to be accounted for as the product of the sun’s combustion, and it certainly comes down in the form of water. And this interpretation becomes practically certain when taken in connexion with the report of Aetios as to the Herakleitean theory of πρηστῆρες. They were due, we are told, “to the kindling and extinction of clouds.”^[381] In other words, the bright vapour, after kindling in the bowl of the sun and going out again, reappears as the dark fiery storm-cloud, and so passes once more into sea. At the next stage we find water continually passing into earth. We are already familiar with this idea (§ 10), and no more need be said about it. Turning to the “upward path,” we find that the earth is liquefied in the same proportion as the sea becomes earth, so that the sea is still “measured by the same tale” (fr. 23). Half of it is earth and half of it is πρηστήρ (fr. 21). This must mean that, at any given moment, half of the sea is taking the downward 167path, and has just been fiery storm-cloud, while half of it is going up, and has just been earth. In proportion as the sea is increased by rain, water passes into earth; in proportion as the sea is diminished by evaporation, it is fed by the earth. Lastly, the ignition of the bright vapour from the sea in the bowl of the sun completes the circle of the “upward and downward path.”

72. The question now arises, How is it that, in spite of this constant flux, things appear relatively stable? The answer of Herakleitos was that it is owing to the observance of the “measures,” in virtue of which the aggregate bulk of each form of matter in the long run remains the same, though its substance is constantly changing. Certain “measures” of the “ever-living fire” are always being kindled, while like “measures” are always going out (fr. 20); and these measures the sun will not exceed. All things are “exchanged” for fire and fire for all things (fr. 22), and this implies that for everything it takes, fire will give as much. “The sun will not exceed his measures” (fr. 29).

And yet the “measures” are not to be regarded as absolutely fixed. We gather from the passage of Diogenes quoted above that Theophrastos spoke of an alternate preponderance of the bright and dark exhalations, and Aristotle speaks of Herakleitos as explaining all things by evaporation.^[382] In particular, the alternation of day and night, summer and winter, were accounted for in this way. Now, in a passage of the pseudo-Hippokratean treatise Περὶ διαίτης which is almost certainly of Herakleitean origin,^[383] we read of an 168“advance of fire and water” in connexion with day and night and the courses of the sun and moon.^[384] In fr. 26, again, we read of fire “advancing,” and all these things seem to be intimately connected. We must therefore try to see whether there is anything in the remaining fragments that bears upon the subject.

73. In studying this alternate advance of fire and water, it will be convenient to start with the microcosm. We have more definite information about the two exhalations in man than about the analogous processes in the world at large, and it would seem that Herakleitos himself explained the world by man rather than man by the world. In a well-known passage, Aristotle implies that soul is identical with the dry exhalation,^[385] and this is fully confirmed by the fragments. 169Man is made up of three things, fire, water, and earth. But, just as in the macrocosm fire is identified with the one wisdom, so in the microcosm the fire alone is conscious. When it has left the body, the remainder, the mere earth and water, is altogether worthless (fr. 85). Of course, the fire which animates man is subject to the “upward and downward path,” just as much as the fire of the world. The Περὶ διαίτης has preserved the obviously Herakleitean sentence: “All things are passing, both human and divine, upwards and downwards by exchanges.”^[386] We are just as much in perpetual flux as anything else in the world. We are and are not the same for two consecutive instants (fr. 81). The fire in us is perpetually becoming water, and the water earth; but, as the opposite process goes on simultaneously, we appear to remain the same.^[387]

74. This, however, is not all. Man is subject to a certain oscillation in his “measures” of fire and water, and this gives rise to the alternations of sleeping and waking, life and death. The locus classicus on this subject is a passage of Sextus Empiricus, which reproduces the account of the Herakleitean psychology given by Ainesidemos (Skeptic, c. 80-50 B.C.).^[388] It is as follows (R. P. 41):—

In this passage there is obviously a very large admixture of later phraseology and of later ideas. In particular, the identification of “that which surrounds us” with the air cannot be Herakleitean; for Herakleitos can have known nothing of air, which in his day was regarded as a form of water (§ 27). The reference to the pores or openings of the senses is probably foreign to him also; for the theory of pores is due to Alkmaion (§ 96). Lastly, the distinction between mind and body is far too sharply drawn. On the other hand, the important rôle assigned to respiration may very well be Herakleitean; for we 171have met with it already in Anaximenes. And we can hardly doubt that the striking simile of the embers which glow when they are brought near the fire is genuine (cf. fr. 77). The true Herakleitean doctrine doubtless was, that sleep was produced by the encroachment of moist, dark exhalations from the water in the body, which cause the fire to burn low. In sleep, we lose contact with the fire in the world which is common to all, and retire to a world of our own (fr. 95). In a soul where the fire and water are evenly balanced, the equilibrium is restored in the morning by an equal advance of the bright exhalation.

75. But in no soul are the fire and water thus evenly balanced for long. One or the other acquires predominance, and the result in either case is death. Let us take each of these cases in turn. It is death, we know, to souls to become water (fr. 68); but that is just what happens to souls which seek after pleasure. For pleasure is a moistening of the soul (fr. 72), as may be seen in the case of the drunken man, who, in pursuit of it, has moistened his soul to such an extent that he does not know where he is going (fr. 73). Even in gentle relaxation over our cups, it is more difficult to hide folly than at other times (fr. 108). That is why it is so necessary for us to quench wantonness (fr. 103); for whatever our heart’s desire insists on it purchases at the price of life, that is, of the fire within us (fr. 105). Take now the other case. The dry soul, that which has least moisture, is the best (fr. 74); but the preponderance of fire causes death as much as that of water. It is a very different death, however, and wins “greater portions” for those who die it (fr. 101). Apparently those who fall in battle 172share their lot (fr. 102). We have no fragment which tells us directly what it is, but the class of utterances we are about to look at next leaves little doubt on the subject. Those who die the fiery and not the watery death, become, in fact, gods, though in a different sense from that in which the one Wisdom is god. It is probable that the corrupt fragment 123 refers to this unexpected fate (fr. 122) that awaits men when they die.

Further, just as summer and winter are one, and necessarily reproduce one another by their “opposite tension,” so do life and death. They, too, are one, we are told; and so are youth and age (fr. 78). It follows that the soul will be now living and now dead; that it will only turn to fire or water, as the case may be, to recommence once more its unceasing upward and downward path. The soul that has died from excess of moisture sinks down to earth; but from the earth comes water, and from water is once more exhaled a soul (fr. 68). So, too, we are told (fr. 67) that gods and men are really one. They live each others’ life, and die each others’ death. Those mortals that die the fiery death become immortal,^[390] they become the guardians of the quick and the dead (fr. 123);^[391] and 173those immortals become mortal in their turn. Everything is really the death of something else (fr. 64). The living and the dead are always changing places (fr. 78), like the pieces on a child’s draught-board (fr. 79), and this applies not only to the souls that have become water, but to those that have become fire and are now guardian spirits. The real weariness is continuance in the same state (fr. 82), and the real rest is change (fr. 83). Rest in any other sense is tantamount to dissolution (fr. 84).^[392] So they too are born once more. Herakleitos estimated the duration of the cycle which preserves the balance of life and death as thirty years, the shortest time in which a man may become a grandfather (frs. 87-89).^[393]

76. Let us turn now to the world. Diogenes tells us that fire was kept up by the bright vapours from land and sea, and moisture by the dark.^[394] What are these “dark” vapours which increase the moist element? If we remember the “Air” of Anaximenes, we shall be inclined to regard them as darkness itself. We know that the idea of darkness as privation of light is not natural to the unsophisticated mind. We sometimes hear even now of darkness “thick enough to cut with a knife.” I suppose, then, that Herakleitos believed 174night and winter to be produced by the rise of darkness from earth and sea—he saw, of course, that the valleys were dark before the hill-tops,—and that this darkness, being moist, so increased the watery element as to put out the sun’s light. This, however, destroys the power of darkness itself. It can no longer rise upwards unless the sun gives it motion, and so it becomes possible for a fresh sun (fr. 32) to be kindled, and to nourish itself at the expense of the moist element for a time. But it can only be for a time. The sun, by burning up the bright vapour, deprives himself of nourishment, and the dark vapour once more gets the upper hand. It is in this sense that “day and night are one” (fr. 35). Each implies the other, and they are therefore to be regarded as merely two sides of the one, in which alone their true ground of explanation is to be found (fr. 36).

Summer and winter were easily to be explained in the same way. We know that the “turnings” of the sun were a subject of interest in those days, and it was natural for Herakleitos to see in its retreat further to the south the gradual advance of the moist element, caused by the heat of the sun itself. This, however, diminishes the power of the sun to cause evaporation, and so it must return to the north once more that it may supply itself with nourishment. Such was, at any rate, the Stoic doctrine on the subject,^[395] and that it comes from Herakleitos seems to be proved by its 175occurrence in the Περὶ διαίτης. It seems impossible to refer the following sentence to any other source:—

77. Herakleitos spoke also of a longer period, which is identified with the “Great Year,” and is variously described as lasting 18,000 and 10,800 years.^[397] We have no definite statement, however, of what process Herakleitos supposed to take place in the Great Year. We have seen that the period of 36,000 years was, in all probability, Babylonian, and was that of the revolution which produces the precession of the equinoxes.^[398] 176Now 18,000 years is just half that period, a fact which may be connected with Herakleitos’s way of dividing all cycles into an “upward and downward path” It is not at all likely, however, that Herakleitos, who held with Xenophanes that the sun was “new every day,” would trouble himself about the precession of the equinoxes, and we seem forced to assume that he gave some new application to the traditional period. The Stoics, or some of them, held that the Great Year was the period between one world-conflagration and the next. They were careful, however, to make it a good deal longer than Herakleitos did, and, in any case, we are not entitled without more ado to credit him with the theory of a general conflagration.^[399] We must try first, if possible, to interpret the Great Year on the analogy of the shorter periods discussed already.

Now we have seen that a generation is the shortest time in which a man can become a grandfather, it is the period of the upward or downward path of the soul, and the most natural interpretation of the longer period would surely be that it represents the time taken by a “measure” of the fire in the world to travel on the downward path to earth or return to fire once more by the upward path. Plato certainly implies that such a parallelism between the periods of man and the world 177was recognised,^[400] and this receives a curious confirmation from a passage in Aristotle, which is usually supposed to refer to the doctrine of a periodic conflagration. He is discussing the question whether the “heavens,” that is to say, what he calls the “first heaven,” is eternal or not, and he naturally enough, from his own point of view, identifies this with the Fire of Herakleitos. He quotes him along with Empedokles as holding that the “heavens” are alternately as they are now and in some other state, one of passing away; and he goes on to point out that this is not really to say they pass away, any more than it would be to say that a man ceases to be, if we said that he turned from boy to man and then from man to boy again.^[401] It is surely clear that this is a reference to the parallel between the generation and the Great Year, and, if so, the ordinary interpretation of the passage must be wrong. It is true that it is not quite consistent with the theory to suppose that a “measure” of Fire could preserve its identity throughout the whole of its upward and downward path; but it is exactly the same inconsistency that we have felt bound to recognise with regard to the continuance of individual souls, a fact which is really in favour of our interpretation. It should be added that, while 18,000 is half 36,000, 10,800 is 360 × 30, which 178would make each generation a day in the Great Year.^[402]

78. Most modern writers, however, ascribe to Herakleitos the doctrine of a periodical conflagration or ἐκπύρωσις, to use the Stoic term.^[403] That this is inconsistent with the theory, as we have interpreted it, is obvious, and is indeed admitted by Zeller. To his paraphrase of the statement of Plato quoted above (p. 159) he adds the words: “Herakleitos did not intend to retract this principle in the doctrine of a periodic change in the constitution of the world; if the two doctrines are not compatible, it is a contradiction which he has not observed.” Now, it is in itself quite likely that there were contradictions in the discourse of Herakleitos, but it is very unlikely that there was this particular one. In the first place, it is a contradiction of the central idea of his system, the thought that possessed his whole mind (§ 67), and we can only admit the possibility of that, if the evidence for it should prove irresistible. In the second place, such an interpretation destroys the whole point of Plato’s contrast between Herakleitos and Empedokles (§ 68), which is just that, while Herakleitos said the One was always many, and the Many always one, Empedokles said the All was many and one by turns. Zeller’s interpretation obliges us, then, to suppose that Herakleitos flatly contradicted his own discovery without noticing it, and that Plato, in discussing this very discovery, was also blind to the contradiction.^[404]

179Nor is there anything in Aristotle to set against Plato’s emphatic statement. We have seen that the passage in which he speaks of him along with Empedokles as holding that the heavens were alternately in one condition and in another refers not to the world in general, but to fire, which Aristotle identified with the substance of his own “first heaven.”^[405] It is also quite consistent with our interpretation when he says that all things at one time or another become fire. This does not necessarily mean that they all become fire at the same time, but is merely a statement of the undoubted Herakleitean doctrine of the upward and downward path.^[406]

The only clear statements to the effect that Herakleitos taught the doctrine of a general conflagration are posterior to the rise of Stoicism. It is unnecessary to enumerate them, as there is no doubt about their meaning. The Christian apologists too were interested in the idea of a final conflagration, and reproduce the Stoic view. The curious thing, however, is that there was a difference of opinion on the subject 180even among the Stoics. In one place, Marcus Aurelius says: “So that all these things are taken up into the Reason of the universe, whether by a periodical conflagration or a renovation effected by external exchanges.”^[407] Indeed, there were some who said there was no general conflagration at all in Herakleitos. “I hear all that,” Plutarch makes one of his personages say, “from many people, and I see the Stoic conflagration spreading over the poems of Hesiod, just as it does over the writings of Herakleitos and the verses of Orpheus.”^[408] We see from this that the question was debated, and we should therefore expect that any statement of Herakleitos which could settle it would be quoted over and over again. It is highly significant that not a single quotation of the kind can be produced.

On the contrary, the absence of anything to show that Herakleitos spoke of a general conflagration only becomes more patent when we turn to the few fragments which are supposed to prove it. The favourite is fr. 24, where we are told that Herakleitos said Fire was Want and Surfeit. That is just in his manner, and it has a perfectly intelligible meaning on our interpretation, which is further confirmed by fr. 36. On the other hand, it seems distinctly artificial to understand the 181Surfeit as referring to the fact that fire has burnt everything else up, and still more so to interpret Want as meaning that fire, or most of it, has turned into a world. The next is fr. 26, where we read that fire in its advance will judge and convict all things. There is nothing in this, however, to suggest that fire will judge all things at once rather than in turn, and, indeed, the phraseology reminds us of the advance of fire and water which we have seen reason for attributing to Herakleitos, but which is expressly said to be limited to a certain maximum.^[409] These appear to be the only passages which the Stoics and the Christian apologists could discover, and, whether our interpretation of them is right or wrong, it is surely obvious that they cannot bear the weight of their conclusion, and that there was certainly nothing more definite to be found.

It is much easier to find fragments which are on the face of them inconsistent with a general conflagration. The “measures” of fr. 20 and fr. 29 must be the same thing, and they must surely be interpreted in the light of fr. 23. If this be so, fr. 20, and more especially fr. 29, directly contradict the idea of a general conflagration. “The sun will not overstep his measures.”^[410] Secondly, the metaphor of “exchange,” which is applied to the transformations of fire in fr. 22, points in the same direction. When gold is given in exchange for wares and wares for gold, the sum or “measure” of each remains constant, though they change owners. All the wares and gold do not come 182into the same hands. In the same way, when anything becomes fire, something of equal amount must cease to be fire, if the “exchange” is to be a just one; and that it will be just, we are assured by the watchfulness of the Erinyes (fr. 29), who see to it that the sun does not take more than he gives. Of course there is, as we have seen, a certain variation; but this is strictly confined within limits, and is compensated in the long run by a variation in the other direction. Thirdly, fr. 43, in which Herakleitos blames Homer for desiring the cessation of strife, is very conclusive. The cessation of strife would mean that all things should take the upward or downward path at the same time, and cease to “run in opposite directions.” If they all took the upward path, we should have a general conflagration. Now, if Herakleitos had himself held that this was the appointment of fate, would he have been likely to upbraid Homer for desiring so necessary a consummation?^[411] Fourthly, we note that in fr. 20 it is this world,^[412] and not merely the “ever-living fire,” which is said to be eternal; and it appears also that its eternity depends upon the fact that it is always kindling and always going out in the same “measures,” or that an encroachment in one direction is compensated by a subsequent encroachment in the other. Lastly, Lassalle’s argument from the concluding sentence of the passage from the Περὶ διαίτης, quoted above, is 183really untouched by Zeller’s objection, that it cannot be Herakleitean because it implies that all things are fire and water. It does not imply this, but only that man, like the heavenly bodies, oscillates between fire and water; and that is just what Herakleitos taught. It does not appear either that the measures of earth varied at all. Now, in this passage we read that neither fire nor water can prevail completely, and a very good reason is given for this, a reason too which is in striking agreement with the other views of Herakleitos.^[413] And, indeed, it is not easy to see how, in accordance with these views, the world could ever recover from a general conflagration if such a thing were to take place. The whole process depends, so far as we can see, on the fact that Surfeit is also Want, or, in other words, that an advance of fire increases the moist exhalation, while an advance of water deprives the fire of the power to cause evaporation. The conflagration, though it lasted but for a moment,^[414] would destroy the opposite tension on which the rise of a new world depends, and then motion would become impossible.

18479. We are now in a position to understand more clearly the law of strife or opposition which manifests itself in the “upward and downward path.” At any given moment, each of the three forms of matter, Fire, Water, and Earth, is made up of two equal portions,—subject, of course, to the oscillation described above,—one of which is taking the upward and the other the downward path. Now, it is just the fact that the two halves of everything are being “drawn in opposite directions,” this “opposite tension,” that “keeps things together,” and maintains them in an equilibrium which can only be disturbed temporarily and within certain limits. It thus forms the “hidden attunement” of the universe (fr. 47), though, in another aspect of it, it is Strife. Bernays has pointed out that the word ἁρμονία meant originally “structure,” and the illustration of the bow and the lyre shows that this idea was present. On the other hand, that taken from the concord of high and low notes shows that the musical sense of the word, namely, an octave, was not wholly absent. As to the “bow and the lyre” (fr. 45), I think that Professor Campbell has best brought out the point of the simile. “As the arrow leaves the string,” he says, “the hands are pulling opposite ways to each other, and to the different parts of the bow (cf. Plato, Rep. 4. 439); and the sweet note of the lyre is due to a similar tension and retention. The secret of the universe is the same.”^[415] War, then, is the father and king of all things, in the 185world as in human society (fr. 44); and Homer’s wish that strife might cease was really a prayer for the destruction of the world (fr. 43).

We know from Philo that Herakleitos supported his theory of the attainment of harmony through strife by a multitude of examples; and, as it happens, some of these can be recovered. There is a remarkable agreement between a passage of this kind in the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, entitled The Kosmos, and the Hippokratean work to which we have already referred. That the authors of both drew from the same source, namely, Herakleitos, is probable in itself, and is made practically certain by the fact that this agreement extends in part to the Letters of Herakleitos, which, though spurious, were certainly composed by some one who had access to the original work. The argument was that men themselves act just in the same way as Nature, and it is therefore surprising that they do not recognise the laws by which she works. The painter produces his harmonious effects by the contrast of colours, the musician by that of high and low notes. “If one were to make all things alike, there would be no delight in them.” There are many similar examples in the Hippokratean tract, some of which must certainly come from Herakleitos; but it is not easy to separate them from the later additions.^[416]

18680. There are a number of Herakleitean fragments which form a class by themselves, and are among the most striking of all the utterances that have come down to us. Their common characteristic is, that they assert in the most downright way the identity of various things which are usually regarded as opposites. The clue to their meaning is to be found in the account already given of the assertion that day and night are one. We have seen that Herakleitos meant to say, not that day was night or that night was day, but that they were two sides of the same process, namely, the oscillation of the “measures” of fire and water, and that neither would be possible without the other. Any explanation that can be given of night will also be an explanation of day, and vice versa; for it will be an account of that which is common to both, and manifests itself now as one and now as the other. Moreover, it is just because it has manifested itself in the one form that it must next appear in the other; for this is required by the law of compensation or Justice.

This is only a particular application of the universal principle that the primary fire is one even in its division. It itself is, even in its unity, both surfeit and want, war and peace (fr. 36). In other words, the “satiety” which makes fire pass into other forms, which makes it seek “rest in change” (frs. 82, 83), and “hide itself” (fr. 10) in the “hidden attunement” of opposition, is only one side of the process. The other is the “want” which leads it to consume the bright vapour as fuel. The upward path is nothing without the downward 187(fr. 69). If either were to cease, the other would cease too, and the world would disappear; for it takes both to make an apparently stable reality.

All other utterances of the kind are to be explained in the same way. If there were no cold, there would be no heat; for a thing can only grow warm if, and in so far as, it is already cold. And the same thing applies to the opposition of wet and dry (fr. 39). These, it will be observed, are just the two primary oppositions of Anaximander, and Herakleitos is showing that the war between them is really peace, for it is the common element in them (fr. 62) which appears as strife, and that very strife is justice, and not, as Anaximander had taught, an injustice which they commit one against the other, and which must be expiated by a reabsorption of both in their common ground.^[417] The strife itself is the common ground (fr. 62), and is eternal.

The most startling of these sayings is that which affirms that good and evil are the same (fr. 57). This does not mean in the least, however, that good is evil or that evil is good, but simply that they are the two inseparable halves of one and the same thing. A thing can become good only in so far as it is already evil, and evil only in so far as it is already good, and everything depends on the contrast. The illustration given in fr. 58 shows this clearly. Torture, one would say, was an evil, and yet it is made a good by the presence of another evil, namely, disease; as is shown by the fact that surgeons expect a fee for inflicting it upon their patients. Justice, on the other hand, which is a good, would be altogether unknown were it not for the existence of injustice, which is an evil 188(fr. 60). And that is why it is not good for men to get everything they wish (fr. 104). Just as the cessation of strife in the world would mean its destruction, so the disappearance of hunger, disease, and weariness would mean the disappearance of satisfaction, health, and rest.

This leads to a theory of relativity which prepares the way for the doctrine of Protagoras, that “Man is the measure of all things.”^[418] Sea-water is good for fish and bad for men (fr. 52), and so with many other things. At the same time, Herakleitos is not a believer in absolute relativity. The process of the world is not merely a circle, but an “upward and downward path.” At the upper end, where the two paths meet, we have the pure fire, in which, as there is no separation, there is no relativity. We are told expressly that, while to man some things are evil and some things are good, all things are good to God (fr. 61). Now by God there is no doubt that Herakleitos meant Fire. He also calls it the “one wise,” and perhaps said that it “knows all things.” There can hardly be any question that what he meant to say was that in it the opposition and relativity which are universal in the world disappear. It is doubtless to this that frs. 96, 97, and 98 refer.

81. Herakleitos speaks of “wisdom” or the “wise” in two senses. We have seen already that he said wisdom was “something apart from everything else” 189(fr. 18), meaning by it the perception of the unity of the many; and he also applies the term to that unity itself regarded as the “thought that directs the course of all things.” This is synonymous with the pure fire which is not differentiated into two parts, one taking the upward and the other the downward path. That alone has wisdom; the partial things we see have not. We ourselves are only wise in so far as we are fiery (fr. 74).

82. With certain reservations, Herakleitos was prepared to call the one Wisdom by the name of Zeus. Such, at least, appears to be the meaning of fr. 65. What these reservations were, it is easy to guess. It is not, of course, to be pictured in the form of a man. In saying this, Herakleitos would only have been repeating what had already been laid down by Anaximander and Xenophanes. He agrees further with Xenophanes in holding that this “god,” if it is to be called so, is one; but his polemic against popular religion was directed rather against the rites and ceremonies themselves than their mere mythological outgrowth. He gives a list (fr. 124) of some of the most characteristic religious figures of his time, and the context in which the fragment is quoted shows that he in some way threatened them with the wrath to come. He comments upon the absurdity of praying to images (fr. 126), and the strange idea that blood-guiltiness can be washed out by the shedding of blood (fr. 130). He seems also to have said that it was absurd to celebrate the worship of Dionysos by cheerful and licentious ceremonies, while Hades was propitiated by gloomy rites (fr. 127). According to the mystic doctrine itself, the two were really one; and the one Wisdom ought to be worshipped in its integrity.

190The few fragments which deal with theology and religion hardly suggest to us that Herakleitos was in sympathy with the religious revival of the time, and yet we have been asked to consider his system “in the light of the idea of the mysteries.”^[419] Our attention is called to the fact that he was “king” of Ephesos, that is, priest of the branch of the Eleusinian mysteries established in that city, which was also connected in some way with the worship of Artemis or the Great Mother.^[420] These statements may be true; but, even if they are, what follows? We ought surely to have learnt from Lobeck by this time that there was no “idea” in the mysteries at all; and on this point the results of recent anthropological research have abundantly confirmed those of philological and historical inquiry.

83. The moral teaching of Herakleitos has sometimes been regarded as an anticipation of the “common-sense” theory of Ethics.^[421] The “common” upon which Herakleitos insists is, nevertheless, something very different from common sense, for which, indeed, he had the greatest possible contempt (fr. 111). It is, in fact, his strongest objection to “the many,” that they live each in his own world (fr. 95), as if they had a private wisdom of their own (fr. 92); and public opinion is therefore just the opposite of “the common.”

The Ethics of Herakleitos are to be regarded as a corollary of his anthropological and cosmological views. Their chief requirement is that we keep our 191souls dry, and thus assimilate them to the one Wisdom, which is fire. That is what is really “common,” and the greatest fault is to act like men asleep (fr. 94), that is, by letting our souls grow moist, to cut ourselves off from the fire in the world. We do not know what were the consequences which Herakleitos deduced from his rule that we must hold fast to what is common, but it is easy to see what their nature must have been. The wise man would not try to secure good without its correlative evil. He would not seek for rest without exertion, nor expect to enjoy contentment without first suffering discontent. He would not complain that he had to take the bad with the good, but would consistently look at things as a whole.

Herakleitos prepared the way for the Stoic world-state by comparing “the common” to the laws of a city. And these are even more than a type of the divine law: they are imperfect embodiments of it. They cannot, however, exhaust it altogether; for in all human affairs there is an element of relativity (fr. 91). “Man is a baby compared to God” (fr. 97). Such as they are, however, the city must fight for them as for its walls; and, if it has the good fortune to possess a citizen with a dry soul, he is worth ten thousand (fr. 113); for in him alone is “the common” embodied.

84. Parmenides, son of Pyres, was a citizen of Hyele, Elea, or Velia, a colony founded in Oinotria by refugees from Phokaia in 540-39 B.C.^[422] Diogenes tells us that he “flourished” in Ol. LXIX. (504-500 B.C.), and this was doubtless the date given by Apollodoros.^[423] On the other hand, Plato says that Parmenides came to Athens in his sixty-fifth year, accompanied by Zeno, and conversed with Sokrates, who was then quite young. Now Sokrates was just over seventy when he was put to death in 399 B.C.; and therefore, if we suppose him to have been an ephebos, that is, from eighteen to twenty years old, at the time of his interview with Parmenides, we get 451-449 B.C. as the date of that event. I do not hesitate to accept Plato’s statement,^[424] especially as 193we have independent evidence of the visit of Zeno to Athens, where Perikles is said to have “heard” him.^[425] The date given by Apollodoros, on the other hand, depends solely on that of the foundation of Elea, which he had adopted as the floruit of Xenophanes. Parmenides is born in that year, just as Zeno is born in the year when Parmenides “flourished.” Why any one should prefer these transparent combinations to the testimony of Plato, I am at a loss to understand, though it is equally a mystery why Apollodoros himself should have overlooked such precise data.

We have seen already (§ 55) that Aristotle mentions a statement which made Parmenides the disciple of Xenophanes; but the value of this testimony is diminished by the doubtful way in which he speaks, and it is more than likely that he is only referring to what Plato says in the Sophist.^[426] It is, we also saw, very improbable that Xenophanes founded the school of Elea, though it is quite possible he visited that city. He tells us himself that, in his ninety-second year, he was still wandering up and down (fr. 8). At that time Parmenides would be well advanced in life. And we must not overlook the statement of Sotion, preserved to us by Diogenes, that, though Parmenides “heard” Xenophanes, he did not “follow” him. According to this account, our philosopher was the “associate” of a Pythagorean, Ameinias, son of Diochaitas, “a poor but noble man to whom he afterwards built a shrine as to a hero.” It was 194Ameinias and not Xenophanes that “converted” Parmenides to the philosophic life.^[427] This does not read like an invention, and we must remember that the Alexandrians had information about the history of Southern Italy which we have not. The shrine erected by Parmenides would still be there in later days, like the grave of Pythagoras at Metapontion. It should also be mentioned that Strabo describes Parmenides and Zeno as Pythagoreans, and that Kebes talks of a “Parmenidean and Pythagorean way of life.”^[428] Zeller explains all this by supposing that, like Empedokles, Parmenides approved of and followed the Pythagorean mode of life without adopting the Pythagorean system. It is possibly true that Parmenides believed in a “philosophic life” (§ 35), and that he got the idea from the Pythagoreans; but there is very little trace, either in his writings or in what we are told about him, of his having been in any way affected by the religious side of Pythagoreanism. The writing of Empedokles is obviously modelled upon that of Parmenides, and yet there is an impassable gulf between the two. The touch of charlatanism, which is so strange a feature in the copy, is altogether absent from the model. It is true, no doubt, that there are traces of Orphic ideas in the poem of Parmenides;^[429] 195but they are all to be found either in the allegorical introduction or in the second part of the poem, and we need not therefore take them very seriously. Now Parmenides was a western Hellene, and he had probably been a Pythagorean, so it is not a little remarkable that he should be so free from the common tendency of his age and country. It is here, if anywhere, that we may trace the influence of Xenophanes. As regards his relation to the Pythagorean system, we shall have something to say later on. At present we need only note further that, like most of the older philosophers, he took part in politics; and Speusippos recorded that he legislated for his native city. Others add that the magistrates of Elea made the citizens swear every year to abide by the laws which Parmenides had given them.^[430]

85. Parmenides was really the first philosopher to expound his system in metrical language. As there is some confusion on this subject, it deserves a few words of explanation. In writing of Empedokles, Mr. J. A. Symonds said: “The age in which he lived had not yet thrown off the form of poetry in philosophical composition. Even Parmenides had committed his austere theories to hexameter verse.” Now this is wrongly put. The earliest philosophers, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Herakleitos, all wrote in prose, and the only Greeks who ever wrote philosophy in verse 196at all were just these two, Parmenides and Empedokles; for Xenophanes was not primarily a philosopher any more than Epicharmos. Empedokles copied Parmenides; and he, no doubt, was influenced by Xenophanes and the Orphics. But the thing was an innovation, and one that did not maintain itself.

The fragments of Parmenides are preserved for the most part by Simplicius, who fortunately inserted them in his commentary, because in his time the original work was already rare.^[431] I follow the arrangement of Diels.

86. In the First Part of his poem, we find Parmenides chiefly interested to prove that it is; but it is not quite obvious at first sight what it is precisely that is. He says simply, What is, is. To us this does not seem very clear, and that for two reasons. In the first place, we should never think of doubting it, and we cannot, therefore, understand why it should be asserted with such iteration and vigour. In the second place, we are accustomed to all sorts of distinctions between different kinds and degrees of reality, and we do not see which of these is meant. Such distinctions, however, were quite unknown in those days. “That which is,” with Parmenides, is primarily what, in popular language, we call matter or body; only it is not matter as distinguished from anything else. It is certainly regarded as spatially extended; for it is quite seriously spoken of as a sphere (fr. 8, 40). Moreover, Aristotle tells us that Parmenides believed in none but a sensible reality, which does not necessarily mean with him a reality that is actually perceived by the senses, but includes any which might be so perceived if the senses were more perfect than they are.^[449] Parmenides 204does not say a word about “Being” anywhere.^[450] The assertion that it is amounts just to this, that the universe is a plenum; and that there is no such thing as empty space, either inside or outside the world. From this it follows that there can be no such thing as motion. Instead of endowing the One with an impulse to change, as Herakleitos had done, and thus making it capable of explaining the world, Parmenides dismissed change as an illusion. He showed once for all that if you take the One seriously you are bound to deny everything else. All previous solutions of the question, therefore, had missed the point. Anaximenes, who thought to save the unity of the primary substance by his theory of rarefaction and condensation, did not observe that, by assuming there was less of what is in one place than another, he virtually affirmed the existence of what is not (fr. 8, 42). The Pythagorean explanation implied that empty space or air existed outside the world, and that it entered into it to separate the units (§ 53). It, too, assumes the existence of what is not. Nor is the theory of Herakleitos any more satisfactory; for it is based upon the contradiction that fire both is and is not (fr. 6).

The allusion to Herakleitos in the verses last referred 205to has been doubted, though upon insufficient grounds. Zeller points out quite rightly that Herakleitos never says Being and not-Being are the same (the common translation of fr. 6, 8); and, were there nothing more than this, the reference might well seem doubtful. The statement, however, that, according to the view in question, “all things travel in opposite directions,” can hardly be understood of anything but the “upward and downward path” of Herakleitos (§ 71). And, as we have seen, Parmenides does not attribute the view that Being and not-Being are the same to the philosopher whom he is attacking; he only says that it is and is not, the same and not the same.^[451] That is the natural meaning of the words; and it furnishes a very accurate description of the theory of Herakleitos.

87. The great novelty in the poem of Parmenides is the method of argument. He first asks what is the common presupposition of all the views with which he has to deal, and he finds that this is the existence of what is not. The next question is whether this can be thought, and the answer is that it cannot. If you think at all, you must think of something. Therefore there is no nothing. Philosophy had not yet learned to make the admission that a thing might be unthinkable and nevertheless exist. Only that can be which can be thought (fr. 5); for thought exists for the sake of what is (fr. 8, 34).

This method Parmenides carries out with the utmost rigour. He will not have us pretend that we think what we must admit to be unthinkable. It is true that if we resolve to allow nothing but what we can understand, we come into direct conflict with the evidence 206of our senses, which present us with a world of change and decay. So much the worse for the senses, says Parmenides. To many this will doubtless seem a mistake on his part, but let us see what history has to say on the point. The theory of Parmenides is the inevitable outcome of a corporeal monism, and his bold declaration of it ought to have destroyed that theory for ever. If he had lacked courage to work out the prevailing views of his time to their logical conclusion, and to accept that conclusion, however paradoxical it might seem to be, men might have gone on in the endless circle of opposition, rarefaction and condensation, one and many, for ever. It was the thorough-going dialectic of Parmenides that made progress possible. Philosophy must now cease to be monistic or cease to be corporealist. It could not cease to be corporealist; for the incorporeal was still unknown. It therefore ceased to be monistic, and arrived at the atomic theory, which, so far as we know, is the last word of the view that the world is matter in motion. Having worked out its problems on those conditions, philosophy next attacked them on the other side. It ceased to be corporealist, and found it possible to be monistic once more, at least for a time. This progress would have been impossible but for that faith in reason which gave Parmenides the courage to reject as untrue what was to him unthinkable, however strange the result might be.

88. He goes on to develop all the consequences of the admission that it is. It must be uncreated and indestructible. It cannot have arisen out of nothing; for there is no such thing as nothing. Nor can it have arisen from something; for there is no room for anything 207but itself. What is cannot have beside it any empty space in which something else might arise; for empty space is nothing, nothing cannot be thought, and therefore cannot exist. What is, never came into being, nor is anything going to come into being in the future. “Is it or is it not?” If it is, then it is now, all at once.

That Parmenides was really denying the existence of empty space was quite well known to Plato. He says that Parmenides held “all things were one, and that the one remains at rest in itself, having no place in which to move.”^[452] Aristotle is no less clear. In the de Caelo he lays it down that Parmenides was driven to take up the position that the One was immovable just because no one had yet imagined that there was any reality other than sensible reality.^[453]

That which is, is; and it cannot be more or less. There is, therefore, as much of it in one place as in another, and the world is a continuous, indivisible plenum. From this it follows at once that it must be immovable. If it moved, it must move into an empty space, and there is no empty space. It is hemmed in by what is, by the real, on every side. For the same reason, it must be finite, and can have nothing beyond it. It is complete in itself, and has no need to stretch out indefinitely into an empty space that does not exist. Hence, too, it is spherical. It is equally real in every direction, and the sphere is the only form which meets this condition. Any other would be in one direction more than in another. And this sphere cannot even 208move round its own axis; for there is nothing outside of it with reference to which it could be said to move.

89. To sum up. What is, is a finite, spherical, motionless corporeal plenum, and there is nothing beyond it. The appearances of multiplicity and motion, empty space and time, are illusions. We see from this that the primary substance of which the early cosmologists were in search has now become a sort of “thing in itself.” It never quite lost this character again. What appears later as the elements of Empedokles, the so-called “homoeomeries” of Anaxagoras and the atoms of Leukippos and Demokritos, is just the Parmenidean “being.” Parmenides is not, as some have said, the “father of idealism”; on the contrary, all materialism depends on his view of reality.

90. It is commonly said that, in the Second Part of his poem, Parmenides offered a dualistic theory of the origin of things as his own conjectural explanation of the sensible world, or that, as Gomperz says, “What he offered were the Opinions of Mortals; and this description did not merely cover other people’s opinions. It included his own as well, as far as they were not confined to the unassailable ground of an apparent philosophical necessity.”^[454] Now it is true that in one place Aristotle appears to countenance a view of this sort, but nevertheless it is an anachronism.^[455] Nor is it really Aristotle’s view. He was perfectly well aware 209that Parmenides did not admit the existence of “not-being” in any degree whatever; but it was a natural way speaking to call the cosmology of the Second Part of the poem that of Parmenides. His hearers would understand at once in what sense this was meant. At any rate, the Peripatetic tradition was that Parmenides, in the Second Part of the poem, meant to give the belief of “the many.” This is how Theophrastos put the matter, and Alexander seems to have spoken of the cosmology as something which Parmenides himself regarded as wholly false.^[456] The other view comes from the Neoplatonists, and especially Simplicius, who very naturally regarded the Way of Truth as an account of the intelligible world, and the Way of Opinion as a description of the sensible. It need hardly be said that this is almost as great an anachronism as the Kantian parallelism suggested by Gomperz.^[457] Parmenides himself tells us in the most unequivocal language that there is no truth at all in the theory which he expounds, and he gives it merely as the belief of “mortals.” It was this that led Theophrastos to speak of it as the opinion of “the many.”

His explanation however, though preferable to that of Simplicius, is not convincing either. “The many” 210are as far as possible from believing in an elaborate dualism such as Parmenides expounded, and it is a highly artificial hypothesis to assume that he wished to show how the popular view of the world could best be systematised. “The many” would hardly be convinced of their error by having their beliefs presented to them in a form which they would certainly fail to recognise. This, indeed, seems the most incredible interpretation of all. It still, however, finds adherents, so it is necessary to point out that the beliefs in question are called “the opinions of mortals” simply because the speaker is a goddess. Further, we have to note that Parmenides forbids two ways of research, and we have seen that the second of these, which is also expressly ascribed to “mortals,” must be the system of Herakleitos. We should surely expect, then, to find that the other way too is the system of some contemporary school, and it seems hard to discover any of sufficient importance except the Pythagorean. Now it is admitted by every one that there are Pythagorean ideas in the Second Part of the poem, and it is therefore to be presumed, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that the whole system comes from the same source. It does not appear that Parmenides said any more about Herakleitos than the words to which we have just referred, in which he forbids the second way of inquiry. He implies, indeed, that there are really only two ways that can be thought of, and that the attempt of Herakleitos to combine them was futile.^[458] In any case, the Pythagoreans 211were far more serious opponents at that date in Italy, and it is certainly to them that we should expect Parmenides to define his attitude.

It is still not quite clear, however, why he should have thought it worth while to put into hexameters a view which he believed to be false. Here it becomes important to remember that he had been a Pythagorean himself, and that the poem is a renunciation of his former beliefs. In such cases men commonly feel the necessity of showing where their old views were wrong. The goddess tells him that he must learn of those beliefs also “how men ought to have judged that the things which seem to them really are.”^[459] That is clear so far; but it does not explain the matter fully. We get a further hint in another place. He is to learn these beliefs “in order that no opinion of mortals may ever get the better of him” (fr. 8, 61). If we remember that the Pythagorean system at this time was handed down by oral tradition alone, we shall perhaps see what this means. Parmenides was founding a dissident school, and it was quite necessary for him to instruct his disciples in the system they might be called upon to oppose. In any case, they could not reject it intelligently without a knowledge of it, and this Parmenides had to supply himself.^[460]

21291. The view that the Second Part of the poem of Parmenides was a sketch of contemporary Pythagorean cosmology is, doubtless, incapable of rigorous demonstration, but it can, I think, be made extremely probable. The entire history of Pythagoreanism up to the end of the fifth century B.C. is certainly conjectural; but, if we find in Parmenides ideas which are wholly unconnected with his own view of the world, and if we find precisely the same ideas in later Pythagoreanism, the most natural inference will surely be that the later Pythagoreans derived these views from their predecessors, and that they formed part of the original stock-in-trade of the society to which they belonged. This will only be confirmed if we find that they are developments of certain features in the old Ionian cosmology. Pythagoras came from Samos, which always stood in the closest relations with Miletos; and it was not, so far as we can see, in his cosmological views that he chiefly displayed his originality. It has been pointed out above (§ 53) that the idea of the world breathing came from Anaximenes, and we need not be surprised to find traces of Anaximander as well. Now, if we were 213confined to what Aristotle tells us on this subject, it would be almost impossible to make out a case; but his statements require, as usual, to be examined with a certain amount of care. He says, first of all, that the two elements of Parmenides were the Warm and the Cold.^[461] In this he is so far justified by the fragments that, since the Fire of which Parmenides speaks is, of course, warm, the other “form,” which has all the opposite qualities, must of necessity be cold. But, nevertheless, the habitual use of the terms “the warm” and “the cold” is an accommodation to Aristotle’s own system. In Parmenides himself they were simply one pair of attributes amongst others.

Still more misleading is Aristotle’s identification of these with Fire and Earth. It is not quite certain that he meant to say Parmenides himself made this identification; but, on the whole, it is most likely that he did, and TheophrastosTheophrastos certainly followed him in this.^[462] It is another question whether it is accurate. Simplicius, who had the poem before him (§ 85), after mentioning Fire and Earth, at once adds “or rather Light and Darkness”;^[463] and this is suggestive enough. Lastly, Aristotle’s identification of the dense element with “what is not,”^[464] the unreal of the First Part of the poem, is not very easy to reconcile with the view that it is 214earth. On the other hand, if we suppose that the second of the two “forms,” the one which should not have been “named,” is the Pythagorean Air or Void, we get a very good explanation of Aristotle’s identification of it with “what is not.” We seem, then, to be justified in neglecting the identification of the dense element with earth for the present. At a later stage, we shall be able to see how it may have originated.^[465] The further statement of Theophrastos, that the Warm was the efficient cause and the Cold the material or passive,^[466] is intelligible enough if we identify them with the Limit and the Unlimited respectively; but is not, of course, to be regarded as historical.

We have seen that Simplicius, with the poem of Parmenides before him, corrects Aristotle by substituting Light and Darkness for Fire and Earth, and in this he is amply borne out by the fragments which he quotes. Parmenides himself calls one “form” Light, Flame, and Fire, and the other Night, and we have now to consider whether these can be identified with the Pythagorean Limit and Unlimited. We have seen good reason to believe (§ 58) that the idea of the world breathing belonged to the earliest form of Pythagoreanism, and there can be no difficulty in identifying this “boundless breath” with Darkness, which stands very well for the Unlimited. “Air” or mist was always regarded as the dark element.^[467] And that which gives definiteness 215to the vague darkness is certainly light or fire, and this may account for the prominence given to that element by Hippasos.^[468] We may probably conclude, then, that the Pythagorean distinction between the Limit and the Unlimited, which we shall have to consider later (Chap. VII.), made its first appearance in this crude form. If, on the other hand, we identify darkness with the Limit, and light with the Unlimited, as most critics do, we get into insuperable difficulties.

92. We must now look at the general cosmical view expounded in the Second Part of the poem. The fragments are scanty, and the doxographical tradition hard to interpret; but enough remains to show that here, too, we are on Pythagorean ground. All discussion of the subject must start from the following important passage of Aetios:—

93. The first thing we have to observe is that it is quite unjustifiable to regard these “crowns” as spheres. The word στέφαναι can mean “rims” or “brims” or anything of that sort, but it seems incredible that it 216should be used of spheres. It does not appear, either, that the solid circle which surrounds all the crowns is to be regarded as spherical. The expression “like a wall” would be highly inappropriate in that case. We seem, then, to be face to face with something of the same kind as the “wheels” of Anaximander, and it is obviously quite likely that Pythagoras should have taken this theory from him. Nor is evidence altogether lacking that the Pythagoreans did regard the heavenly bodies in this way. In Plato’s Myth of Er, which is certainly Pythagorean in its general character, we do not hear of spheres, but of the “lips” of concentric whorls fitted into one another like a nest of boxes.^[470] Even in the Timaeus there are no spheres, but bands or strips crossing each other at an angle.^[471] Lastly, in the Homeric Hymn to Ares, which seems to have been composed under Pythagorean influence, the word used for the orbit of the planet is ἄντυξ, which must mean “rim.”^[472]

The fact is, there is really no evidence that any one ever adopted the theory of celestial spheres at all, till Aristotle turned the geometrical construction which Eudoxos had set up as a hypothesis “to save appearances” (σῴζειν τὰ φαινόμενα ) into real things.^[473] 217From that time forward we hear a great deal about spheres, and it was natural that later writers should attribute them to the Pythagoreans; but there is no occasion to do violence to the language of Parmenides by turning his “crowns” into anything of the sort. At this date, spheres would not have served to explain anything that could not be explained more simply without them.

We are next told that these “crowns” encircle one another or are folded over one another, and that they are made of the rare and the dense element. We also learn that between them are “mixed crowns” made up of light and darkness. Now it is to be observed, in the first place, that light and darkness are exactly the same thing as the rare and the dense, and it looks as if there was some confusion here. It may be doubted whether these statements are based on anything else than fr. 12, which might certainly be interpreted to mean that between the crowns of fire there were crowns of night with a portion of fire in them. That may be right; but I think it is rather more natural to understand the passage as saying that the narrower circles are surrounded by wider circles of night, each with its portion of fire rushing in the midst of it. These last words would then be a simple repetition of the statement that the narrower circles are filled with unmixed fire,^[474] and we should have a 218fairly exact reproduction of the planetary system of Anaximander. It is, however, possible, though I think less likely, that Parmenides represented the space between the circles as occupied by similar rings in which the fire and darkness were mixed instead of having the fire enclosed in the darkness.

94. “In the middle of those,” says Parmenides, “is the goddess who steers the course of all things.” Aetios, that is, Theophrastos, explains this to mean in the middle of the mixed crowns, while Simplicius declares that it means in the middle of all the crowns, that is to say, in the centre of the world.^[475] It is not very likely that either of them had anything better to go upon than the words of Parmenides just quoted, and these are ambiguous. Simplicius, as is clear from the language he uses, identified this goddess with the Pythagorean Hestia or central fire, while Theophrastos could not do this, because he knew and stated that Parmenides held the earth to be round and in the centre of the world.^[476] In this very passage we are told that what is in the middle of all the crowns is solid. The data furnished by Theophrastos, in fact, exclude the identification of the goddess with the central fire altogether. We cannot say that what is in the middle of all the crowns is solid, and that under it there is again a fiery crown.^[477] Nor does it seem fitting to 219relegate a goddess to the middle of a solid spherical earth. We must try to find a place for her elsewhere.

We are further told by Aetios that this goddess was called Ananke and the “Holder of Lots.”^[478] We know already that she steers the course of all things, that is, that she regulates the motions of the celestial crowns. Simplicius adds, unfortunately without quoting the actual words, that she sends souls at one time from the light to the unseen world, at another from the unseen world to the light.^[479] It would be difficult to describe more exactly what the goddess does in the Myth of Er, and so here once more we seem to be on Pythagorean ground. It is to be noticed further that in fr. 10 we read how Ananke took the heavens and compelled them to hold fast the fixed courses of the stars, and that in fr. 12 we are told that she is the beginner of all pairing and birth. Lastly, in fr. 13 we hear that she created Eros first of all the gods. Modern parallels are dangerous, but it is not really going much beyond what is written to say that this Eros is the Will to Live, which leads to successive rebirths of the soul. So we shall find that in Empedokles it is an ancient 220oracle or decree of Ananke that causes the gods to fall and become incarnate in a cycle of births.^[480]

We should, then, be more certain of the place which this goddess occupies in the universe if we could be quite sure where Ananke is in the Myth of Er. Without, however, raising that vexed question, we may lay down with some confidence that, according to Theophrastos, she occupied a position midway between the earth and the heavens. Whether we believe in the “mixed crowns” or not makes no difference in this respect; for the statement of Aetios that she was in the middle of the mixed crowns undoubtedly implies that she was in that region. Now she is identified with one of the crowns in a somewhat confused passage of Cicero,^[481] and we have seen above (p. 69) that the whole theory of wheels or crowns was probably suggested by the Milky Way. It seems to me, therefore, that we must think of the Milky Way as a crown intermediate between the crowns of the Sun and the Moon, and this agrees very well with the prominent way in which it is mentioned in fr. 11. It is better not to be too positive about the other details of the system, though it is interesting to notice that according to some it was Pythagoras, and according to others Parmenides, who discovered the identity of the evening and morning star. That fits in exactly with our general view.^[482]

221Besides all this, it is quite certain that Parmenides went on to describe how the other gods were born and how they fell, an idea which we know to be Orphic, and which may well have been Pythagorean. We shall come to it again in Empedokles. In Plato’s Symposium, Agathon couples Parmenides with Hesiod as a narrator of ancient deeds of violence committed by the gods.^[483] If Parmenides was expounding the Pythagorean theology, all this is just what we should expect; but it seems hopeless to explain it on any of the other theories which have been advanced on the purpose of the Way of Belief. Such things do not follow naturally from the ordinary view of the world, and we have no reason to suppose that Herakleitos expounded his views of the upward and downward path of the soul in this form. He certainly did hold that the guardian spirits entered into human bodies; but the whole point of his theory was that he gave a naturalistic rather than a theological account of the process. Still less can we think it probable that Parmenides made up these stories himself in order to show what the popular view of the world really implied if properly formulated. We must ask, I think, that any theory on the subject shall account for what was evidently no inconsiderable portion of the poem.

95. In describing the views of his contemporaries, Parmenides was obliged, as we see from the fragments, 222to say a good deal about physiological matters. Like everything else, man was composed of the warm and the cold, and death was caused by the removal of the warm. Some curious views with regard to generation were also stated. In the first place, males came from the right side and females from the left. Women had more of the warm and men of the cold, a view which we shall find Empedokles contradicting.^[484] It is just the proportion of the warm and cold in men that determines the character of their thought, so that even corpses, from which the warm has been removed, retain a perception of what is cold and dark.^[485] These fragments of information do not tell us much when taken by themselves; but they connect themselves in a most interesting way with the history of medicine, and point to the fact that one of its leading schools stood in close relation with the Pythagorean Society. Even before the days of Pythagoras, we know that Kroton was famous for its doctors. A Krotoniate, Demokedes, was court physician to the Persian king, and married Milo the Pythagorean’s daughter.^[486] We also know the name of a very distinguished medical writer who lived at Kroton in the days between Pythagoras and Parmenides, and the few facts we are told about him enable us to regard the physiological views described by Parmenides not as isolated curiosities, but as landmarks by means of which we can trace the origin and growth of one of the most influential of medical theories, that which explains health as a balance of opposites.

22396. Aristotle tells us that Alkmaion of Kroton^[487] was a young man in the old age of Pythagoras. He does not actually say, as later writers do, that he was a Pythagorean, though he points out that he seems either to have derived his theory of opposites from the Pythagoreans or they theirs from him.^[488] In any case, he was intimately connected with the society, as is proved by one of the scanty fragments of his book. It began as follows: “Alkmaion of Kroton, son of Peirithous, spoke these words to Brotinos and Leon and Bathyllos. As to things invisible and things mortal, the gods have certainty; but, so far as men may infer ...”^[489] The quotation unfortunately ends in this abrupt way, but we learn two things from it. In the first place, Alkmaion possessed that reserve which marks all the best Greek medical writers; and in the second place, he dedicated his work to the heads of the Pythagorean Society.^[490]

Alkmaion’s chief importance in the history of philosophy really lies in the fact that he is the founder of empirical psychology.^[491] It is certain that he regarded 224the brain as the common sensorium, an important discovery which Hippokrates and Plato adopted from him, though Empedokles, Aristotle, and the Stoics reverted to the more primitive view that the heart performs this function. There is no reason to doubt that he made this discovery by anatomical means. We have some authority for saying that he practised dissection, and, though the nerves were not yet recognised as such, it was known that there were certain “passages” which might be prevented from communicating sensations to the brain by lesions.^[492] He also distinguished between sensation and understanding, though we have no means of knowing exactly where he drew the line between them. His theories of the special senses are of great interest. We find in him already, what is characteristic of Greek theories of vision as a whole, the attempt to combine the view of vision as an act proceeding from the eye with that which attributes it to an image reflected in the eye. He knew the importance of air for the sense of hearing, though he called it the void, a thoroughly Pythagorean touch. With regard to the other senses, our information is more scanty, but sufficient to show that he treated the subject systematically.^[493]

His astronomy seems surprisingly crude for one who stood in close relations with the Pythagoreans. We are told that he adopted Anaximenes’ theory of the sun and Herakleitos’s explanation of eclipses.^[494] 225It is all the more remarkable that he is credited with originating the idea, which it required all Plato’s authority to get accepted later, that the planets have an orbital motion in the opposite direction to the diurnal revolution of the heavens.^[495] This, if true, probably stood in close connexion with his saying that soul was immortal because it resembled immortal things, and was always in motion like the heavenly bodies.^[496] He seems, in fact, to be the real author of the curious view which Plato put into the mouth of the Pythagorean Timaios, that the soul has circles revolving just as the heavens and the planets do. This too seems to be the explanation of his further statement that man dies because he cannot join the beginning to the end.^[497] The orbits of the heavenly bodies always come full circle, but the circles in the head may fail to complete themselves. This new version of the parallelism between the microcosm and the macrocosm would be perfectly natural for Alkmaion, though it is, of course, no more than a playful fancy to Plato.

Alkmaion’s theory of health as “isonomy” is at once that which most clearly connects him with earlier inquirers like Anaximander, and also that which had the greatest influence on the subsequent development of philosophy. He observed, to begin with, that “most things human were two,” and by this he meant that man was made up of the hot and the cold, the moist and 226the dry, and the rest of the opposites.^[498] Disease was just the “monarchy” of any one of these—the same thing that Anaximander had called “injustice”—while health was the establishment in the body of a free government with equal laws.^[499] This was the leading doctrine of the Sicilian school of medicine which came into existence not long after, and we shall have to consider in the sequel its influence on the development of Pythagoreanism. Taken along with the theory of “pores,”^[500] it is of the greatest importance for later science.

97. The belief that all things are one was common to the philosophers we have hitherto studied; but now Parmenides has shown that, if this one thing really is, we must give up the idea that it can take different forms. The senses, which present to us a world of change and multiplicity, are deceitful. From this there was no escape; the time was still to come when men would seek the unity of the world in something which, from its very nature, the senses could never perceive.

We find, accordingly, that from the time of Parmenides to that of Plato, all thinkers in whose hands philosophy made real progress abandoned the monistic hypothesis. Those who still held by it adopted a critical attitude, and confined themselves to a defence of the theory of Parmenides against the new views. Others taught the doctrine of Herakleitos in an exaggerated form; some continued to expound the systems of the early Milesians. This, of course, showed want of insight; but even those thinkers who saw that Parmenides could not be left unanswered, were by no means equal to their predecessors in power and thoroughness. The corporealist hypothesis had 228proved itself unable to bear the weight of a monistic structure; but a thorough-going pluralism such as the atomic theory might have some value, if not as a final explanation of the world, yet at least as an intelligible view of a part of it. Any pluralism, on the other hand, which, like that of Empedokles and Anaxagoras, stops short of the atoms, will achieve no permanent result, however many may be the brilliant aperçus which it embodies. It will remain an attempt to reconcile two things that cannot be reconciled, and may always, therefore, be developed into contradictions and paradoxes.

98. Empedokles was a citizen of Akragas in Sicily, and his father’s name, according to the best accounts, was Meton.^[501] His grandfather, also called Empedokles, had won a victory in the horse-race at Olympia in Ol. LXXI. (496-95 B.C.),^[502] and Apollodoros fixed the floruit of Empedokles himself in Ol. LXXXIV. 1 (444-43 B.C.). This is the date of the foundation of Thourioi; and it appears from the quotation in Diogenes that the almost contemporary biographer, Glaukos of Rhegion,^[503] said Empedokles visited the 229new city shortly after its foundation. But we are in no way bound to believe that he was just forty years old at the time of the event in his life which can most easily be dated. That is the assumption made by Apollodoros; but there are reasons for thinking that his date is too late by some eight or ten years.^[504] It is, indeed, most likely that Empedokles did not go to Thourioi till after his banishment from Akragas, and he may well have been more than forty years old when that happened. All, therefore, we can be said to know of his date is, that his grandfather was still alive in 496 B.C.; that he himself was active at Akragas after 472, the date of Theron’s death; and that he died later than 444.

Even these indications are enough to show that he must have been a boy in the reign of Theron, the tyrant who co-operated with Gelon of Syracuse in the repulse of the Carthaginians from Himera. His son and successor, Thrasydaios, was a man of another stamp. Before his accession to the throne of Akragas, he had ruled in his father’s name at Himera, and completely estranged the affections of its inhabitants. Theron died in 472 B.C., and Thrasydaios at once displayed all the vices and follies usual in the second holder of a usurped dominion. After a disastrous war with Hieron of Syracuse, he was driven out; and Akragas enjoyed a free government till it 230fell before the Carthaginians more than half a century later.^[505]

99. In the political events of the next few years, Empedokles certainly played an important part; but our information on the subject is of a very curious kind. The Sicilian historian Timaios told one or two stories about him, which are obviously genuine traditions picked up about a hundred and fifty years afterwards; but, like all popular traditions, they are a little confused. The picturesque incidents are remembered, but the essential parts of the story are dropped. Still, we may be thankful that the “collector of old wives’ tales,”^[506] as sneering critics called him, has enabled us to measure the historical importance of Empedokles for ourselves by showing us how he was pictured by the great-grandchildren of his contemporaries.

We read, then,^[507] that once he was invited to sup with one of the “rulers.” Tradition delights in such vague titles. “Supper was well advanced, but no wine was brought in. The rest of the company said nothing, but Empedokles was righteously indignant, and insisted on wine being served. The host, however, said he was waiting for the serjeant of the Council. When that official arrived, he was appointed ruler of the feast. The host, of course, appointed him. Thereupon he began to give hints of an incipient tyranny. He ordered the company either to drink or have the wine poured over their heads. At the time, Empedokles said nothing; but next day he led both 231of them before the court, and had them condemned and put to death—both the man who asked him to supper, and the ruler of the feast.^[508] This was the beginning of his political career.” The next tale is that Empedokles prevented the Council from granting his friend Akron a piece of land for a family sepulchre on the ground of his eminence in medicine, and supported his objection by a punning epigram.^[509] Lastly, he broke up the assembly of the Thousand—perhaps some oligarchical association or club.^[510] It may have been for this that he was offered the kingship, which Aristotle tells us he refused.^[511] At any rate, we see that Empedokles was the great democratic leader at Akragas in those days, though we have no clear knowledge of what he did.

100. But there is another side to his public character which Timaios found it hard to reconcile with his political views. He claimed to be a god, and to receive the homage of his fellow-citizens in that capacity. The truth is, Empedokles was not a mere statesman; he had a good deal of the “medicine-man” about him. According to Satyros,^[512] Gorgias affirmed that he had 232been present when his master was performing sorceries. We can see what this means from the fragments of the Purifications. Empedokles was a preacher of the new religion which sought to secure release from the “wheel of birth” by purity and abstinence; but it is not quite certain to which form of it he adhered. On the one hand, Orphicism seems to have been strong at Akragas in the days of Theron, and there are even some verbal coincidences between the poems of Empedokles and the Orphicising Odes which Pindar addressed to that prince.^[513] There are also some points of similarity between the Rhapsodic Theogony, as we know it from Damaskios, and certain fragments of Empedokles, though the importance of these has been exaggerated.^[514] On the other hand, there is no reason to doubt the statement of Ammonios that fr. 134 refers to Apollo;^[515] and, if that is so, it would point to his having been an adherent of the Ionic form of the mystic doctrine, as we have seen (§ 39) that Pythagoras was. Further, Timaios already knew the story that he had been expelled from the Pythagorean Order for “stealing discourses,”^[516] and it is probable on the whole that fr. 129 refers to Pythagoras.^[517] It would be very hazardous to dogmatise on this subject; but it seems most likely that Empedokles had been influenced by Orphic ideas in his youth, and that, in later life, he preached a form of Pythagoreanism which 233was not considered orthodox by the heads of the Society. In any case, it seems far more probable that his political and scientific activity belong to the same period of his life, and that he only became a wandering prophet after his banishment, than that his scientific work belonged to his later days when he was a solitary exile.^[518]

We hear of a number of marvels performed by Empedokles, which are for the most part nothing but inferences from his writings. Timaios told how he weakened the force of the etesian winds by hanging bags of asses’ skins on the trees to catch them. He had certainly said, in his exaggerated way, that the knowledge of science as taught by him would enable his disciples to control the winds (fr. 111); and this, along with the fabled windbags of Aiolos, is enough to account for the tale.^[519] We are also told how he brought back to life a woman who had been breathless and pulseless for thirty days. The verse where he asserts that his teaching will enable Pausanias to bring the dead back from Hades (fr. 111) shows how this story may have arisen.^[520] Again, we hear that he sweetened the pestilent marsh between Selinous and the sea by diverting the rivers Hypsas and Selinos into it. We know from coins that this purification 234of the marshes actually took place, but we may doubt whether it was attributed to Empedokles till a later time.^[521]

101. Aristotle said that Empedokles was the inventor of Rhetoric;^[522] and Galen made him the founder of the Italian school of Medicine, which he puts on a level with those of Kos and Knidos.^[523] Both these statements must be considered in connexion with his political and scientific activity. It seems to be certain that Gorgias was his disciple in physics and medicine, and some of the peculiarities which marked his style are to be found in the poems of Empedokles.^[524] It is not to be supposed, of course, that Empedokles wrote a formal treatise on Rhetoric; but it is in every way probable, and in accordance with his character, that the speeches, of which he must have made many, were marked by that euphuism which Gorgias introduced to Athens at a later date, and which gave rise to the idea of an artistic prose. The influence of Empedokles on the development of medicine was, however, far more important, as it affected not only medicine itself, but through it, the whole tendency of scientific and philosophical thinking. It has been said that Empedokles had no successors,^[525] and the remark is 235true if we confine ourselves strictly to philosophy. On the other hand, the medical school which he founded was still living in the days of Plato, and it had considerable influence on him, and still more on Aristotle.^[526] Its fundamental doctrine was the identification of the four elements with the hot and the cold, the moist and the dry. It also held that we breathe through all the pores of the body, and that the act of respiration is closely connected with the motion of the blood. The heart, not the brain, was regarded as the organ of consciousness.^[527] A more external characteristic of the medicine taught by the followers of Empedokles is that they still clung to ideas of a magical nature. A protest against this by a member of the Koan school has been preserved. He refers to them as “magicians and purifiers and charlatans and quacks, who profess to be very religious.”^[528] Though there is some truth in this, it hardly does justice to the great advances in physiology that were due to the Sicilian school.

102. In the biography of Empedokles, we hear very little of his theory of nature. The only hints we get are some statements about his teachers. Alkidamas, who had good opportunities of knowing, made him a 236fellow-student of Zeno under Parmenides. That is both possible and likely. Theophrastos too made him a follower and imitator of Parmenides. But the further statement that he had “heard” Pythagoras cannot be right. Probably Alkidamas said “Pythagoreans.”^[529]

Some writers hold that certain parts of the system of Empedokles, in particular the theory of pores and effluvia (§ 118), which do not seem to follow very naturally from his own principles, were due to the influence of Leukippos.^[530] This, however, is not necessarily the case. We know that Alkmaion (§ 96) spoke of “pores” in connexion with sensation, and it may equally well be from him that Empedokles got the theory. It may be added that this is more in accordance with the history of certain other physiological views which are common to Alkmaion and the later Ionian philosophers. We can generally see that those reached Ionia through the medical school which Empedokles founded.^[531]

103. We are told that Empedokles leapt into the crater of Etna that he might be deemed a god. This appears to be a malicious version^[532] of a tale set on foot by his adherents that he had been snatched up to heaven in the night.^[533] Both stories would easily get 237accepted; for there was no local tradition. Empedokles did not die in Sicily, but in the Peloponnese, or, perhaps, at Thourioi. He had gone to Olympia to have his religious poem recited to the Hellenes; his enemies were able to prevent his return, and he was seen in Sicily no more.^[534]

104. Empedokles was the second philosopher to expound his system in verse, if we leave the satirist Xenophanes out of account. He was also the last among the Greeks; for the forged Pythagorean poems may be neglected.^[535] Lucretius imitates Empedokles in this, just as Empedokles imitated Parmenides. Of course, the poetical imagery creates a difficulty for the interpreter; but it would be wrong to make too much of it. It cannot be said that it is harder to extract the philosophical kernel from the verses of Empedokles than from the prose of Herakleitos.

There is some divergence of opinion as to the poetical merit of Empedokles. The panegyric of Lucretius is well known.^[536] Aristotle says in one place that Empedokles and Homer have nothing in common but the metre; in another, that Empedokles was “most Homeric.”^[537] To my mind, there can be no question that he was a genuine poet, far more so than Parmenides. No one doubts nowadays that Lucretius was one, and Empedokles really resembles him very closely.

238105. We have more abundant remains of Empedokles than of any other early Greek philosopher. If we may trust our manuscripts of Diogenes and of Souidas, the librarians of Alexandria estimated the Poem on Nature and the Purifications together as 5000 verses, of which about 2000 belonged to the former work.^[538] Diels gives about 350 verses and parts of verses from the cosmological poem, or not a fifth of the whole. It is important to remember that, even in this favourable instance, so much has been lost. Besides the two poems, the Alexandrian scholars possessed a prose work of 600 lines on medicine ascribed to Empedokles. The tragedies and other poems which were sometimes attributed to him seem really to belong to a younger writer of the same name, who is said by Souidas to have been his grandson.^[539]

I give the remains as they are arranged by Diels:—

106. At the very outset of his poem, Empedokles is careful to mark the difference between himself and previous inquirers. He speaks angrily of those who, though their experience was only partial, professed to have found the whole (fr. 2); he even calls this “madness” (fr. 4). No doubt he is thinking of Parmenides. His own position is not, however, sceptical. He only deprecates the attempt to construct a theory of the universe off-hand instead of trying to understand each thing we come across “in the way in which it is clear” (fr. 4). And this means that we must not, like Parmenides, reject the assistance of the senses. Weak though they are (fr. 2), they are the only channels through which knowledge can enter our minds at all. We soon discover, however, that Empedokles is not very mindful of his own warnings. He too sets up a system which is to explain everything, though that system is no longer a monistic one.

It is often said that this system was an attempt to mediate between Parmenides and Herakleitos. It is not easy, however, to find any trace of specially Herakleitean doctrine in it, and it would be truer to 262say that it aimed at mediating between Eleaticism and the senses. He repeats, almost in the same words, the Eleatic argument for the sole reality and indestructibility of “what is” (frs. 11-15); and his idea of the “Sphere” seems to be derived from the Parmenidean description of the universe as it truly is.^[579] Parmenides had held that the reality which underlies the illusory world presented to us by the senses was a corporeal, spherical, continuous, eternal, and immovable plenum, and it is from this that Empedokles starts. Given the sphere of Parmenides, he seems to have said, How are we to get from it to the world we know? How are we to introduce motion into the immovable plenum? Now Parmenides need not have denied the possibility of motion within the Sphere, though he was bound to deny all motion of the Sphere itself; but such an admission on his part, had he made it, would not have served to explain anything. If any part of the Sphere were to move, the room of the displaced matter must at once be taken by other matter, for there is no empty space. This, however, would be of precisely the same kind as the matter it had displaced; for all “that is” is one. The result of the motion would be precisely the same as that of rest; it could account for no change. But, Empedokles must have asked, is this assumption of perfect homogeneity in the Sphere really necessary? Evidently not; it is simply the old unreasoned feeling that existence must be one. If, instead of this, we were to assume a number of existent things, it would be quite possible to apply all that Parmenides says of reality to each of them, and the forms of existence we know might be 263explained by the mingling and separation of those realities. The conception of “elements” (στοιχεῖα), to use a later term,^[580] was found, and the required formula follows at once. So far as concerns particular things, it is true, as our senses tell us, that they come into being and pass away; but, if we have regard to the ultimate elements of which they are composed, we shall say with Parmenides that “what is” is uncreated and indestructible (fr. 17).

107. The “four roots” of all things (fr. 6) which Empedokles assumed were those that have become traditional—Fire, Air, Earth, and Water. It is to be noticed, however, that he does not call Air ἀήρ, but αἰθήρ, and this must be because he wished to avoid any confusion with what had hitherto been meant by the former word. He had, in fact, made the great discovery that atmospheric air is a distinct corporeal substance, and is not to be identified with empty space on the one hand or rarefied mist on the other. Water is not liquid air, but something quite different.^[581] This truth Empedokles demonstrated by means of the apparatus known as the klepsydra, and we still possess the verses in which he applied his discovery to the explanation of respiration and the motion of the blood (fr. 100). Aristotle laughs at those who try to show there is no empty space by shutting up air in water-clocks and torturing wineskins. They only prove, he says, that air is a thing.^[582] That, however, is exactly 264what Empedokles intended to prove, and it was one of the most important discoveries in the early history of science. It will be convenient for us to translate the αἰθήρ of Empedokles by “air”; but we must be careful in that case not to render the word ἀήρ in the same way. Anaxagoras seems to have been the first to use it of atmospheric air.

Empedokles also called the “four roots” by the names of certain divinities—“shining Zeus, life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis” (fr. 6)—though there is some doubt as to how these names are to be apportioned among the elements. Nestis is said to have been a Sicilian water-goddess, and the description of her shows that she stands for Water; but there is a conflict of opinion as to the other three. This, however, need not detain us.^[583] We are already prepared to find that Empedokles called the elements gods; for all the early thinkers had spoken in this way of whatever they regarded as the primary substance. 265We must only remember that the word is not used in its religious sense. Empedokles did not pray or sacrifice to the elements, and the use of divine names is in the main an accident of the poetical form in which he cast his system.

Empedokles regarded the “roots of all things” as eternal. Nothing can come from nothing or pass away into nothing (fr. 12); what is is, and there is no room for coming into being and passing away (fr. 8). Further, Aristotle tells us, he taught that they were unchangeable.^[584] This Empedokles expressed by saying that “they are what they are” (frs. 17, 34; 21, 13), and are “always alike.” Again, they are all “equal,” a statement which seemed strange to Aristotle,^[585] but was quite intelligible in the days of Empedokles. Above all, the elements are ultimate. All other bodies, as Aristotle puts it, might be divided till you came to the elements; but Empedokles could give no further account of these without saying (as he did not) that there is an element of which Fire and the rest are in turn composed.^[586]

The “four roots” are given as an exhaustive enumeration of the elements (fr. 23 sub fin.); for they account for all the qualities presented by the world to the senses. When we find, as we do, that the school of medicine which regarded Empedokles as its founder 266identified the four elements with the “opposites,” the hot and the cold, the moist and the dry, which formed the theoretical foundation of its system, we see at once how the theory is related to previous views of reality.^[587] To put it shortly, what Empedokles did was to take the opposites of Anaximander and to declare that they were “things,” each of which was real in the Parmenidean sense. We must remember that the conception of quality had not yet been formed. Anaximander had no doubt regarded his “opposites” as things; though, before the time of Parmenides, no one had fully realised how much was implied in saying that anything is a thing. That is the stage we have now reached. There is still no conception of quality, but there is a clear apprehension of what is involved in saying that a thing is.

Aristotle twice^[588] makes the statement that, though Empedokles assumes four elements, he treats them as two, opposing Fire to all the rest. This, he says, we can see for ourselves from his poem. So far as the general theory of the elements goes, it is impossible to see anything of the sort; but, when we come to the origin of the world (§ 112), we shall find that Fire certainly plays a leading part, and this may be what Aristotle meant. It is also true that in the biology (§ 114–116) Fire fulfils a unique function, while the other three act more or less in the same way. But we must remember that it has no pre-eminence over the rest: all are equal.

108. The Eleatic criticism had made it necessary for 267subsequent thinkers to explain motion.^[589] Empedokles starts, as we have seen, from an original state of the “four roots,” which only differs from the Sphere of Parmenides in so far as it is a mixture, not a homogeneous and continuous mass. The fact that it is a mixture makes change and motion possible; but, were there nothing outside the Sphere which could enter in, like the Pythagorean “Air,” to separate the four elements, nothing could ever arise from it. Empedokles accordingly assumed the existence of such a substance, and he gave it the name of Strife. But the effect of this would be to separate all the elements in the Sphere completely, and then nothing more could possibly happen; something else was needed to bring the elements together again. This Empedokles found in Love, which he regarded as the same impulse to union that is implanted in human bodies (fr. 17, 22 sqq.). He looks at it, in fact, from a purely physiological point of view, as was natural for the founder of a medical school. No mortal had yet marked, he says, that the very same Love which men know in their bodies had a place among the elements.

It is important to observe that the Love and Strife of Empedokles are no incorporeal forces, but corporeal elements like the other four. At the time, this was inevitable; nothing incorporeal had yet been dreamt of. Naturally, Aristotle is puzzled by this characteristic of what he regarded as efficient causes. “The Love of Empedokles,” he says^[590] “is both an efficient cause, for it brings things together, and a material cause, for it is a part of the mixture.” And Theophrastos 268expressed the same idea by saying^[591] that Empedokles sometimes gave an efficient power to Love and Strife, and sometimes put them on a level with the other four. The verses of Empedokles himself leave no room for doubt that the two were thought of as spatial and corporeal. All the six are called “equal.” Love is said to be “equal in length and breadth” to the others, and Strife is described as equal to each of them in weight (fr. 17).

The function of Love is to produce union; that of Strife, to break it up again. Aristotle, however, rightly points out that in another sense it is Love that divides and Strife that unites. When the Sphere is broken up by Strife, the result is that all the Fire, for instance, which was contained in it comes together and becomes one; and again, when the elements are brought together once more by Love, the mass of each is divided. In another place, he says that, while Strife is assumed as the cause of destruction, and does, in fact, destroy the Sphere, it really gives birth to everything else in so doing.^[592] It follows that we must carefully distinguish between the Love of Empedokles and that “attraction of like for like” to which he also attributed an important part in the formation of the world. The latter is not an element distinct from the others; it depends, we shall see, on the proper nature of each element, and is only able to take effect when Strife divides the Sphere. Love, on the contrary, is something that comes from outside and produces an attraction of unlikes.

269109. But, when Strife has once separated the elements, what is it that determines the direction of their motion? Empedokles seems to have given no further explanation than that each was “running” in a certain direction (fr. 53). Plato severely condemns this in the Laws,^[593] on the ground that no room is thus left for design. Aristotle also blames him for giving no account of the Chance to which he ascribed so much importance. Nor is the Necessity, of which he also spoke, further explained.^[594] Strife enters into the Sphere at a certain time in virtue of Necessity, or “the mighty oath” (fr. 30); but we are left in the dark as to the origin of this.

The expression used by Empedokles to describe the movement of the elements is that they “run through each other” (fr. 17, 34). Aristotle tells us^[595] that he explained mixture in general by “the symmetry of pores.” And this is the true explanation of the “attraction of like for like.” The “pores” of like bodies are, of course, much the same size, and these bodies can therefore mingle easily. On the other hand, a finer body will “run through” a coarse one without becoming mixed, and a coarse body will not be able to enter into the pores of a finer one at all. It will be observed that, as Aristotle says, this really implies something like the atomic theory; but there is no evidence that Empedokles himself was conscious of that. Another question raised by Aristotle is even more instructive. Are the pores, he asks, empty or full? If empty, what becomes of the denial of the 270void? If full, why need we assume pores at all?^[596] These questions Empedokles would have found it hard to answer. They point to a real want of thoroughness in his system, and mark it as a mere stage in the transition from Monism to Atomism.

110. It will be clear from all this that we must distinguish four periods in the cycle. First we have the Sphere, in which all the elements are mixed together by Love. Secondly, there is the period when Love is passing out and Strife coming in, when, therefore, the elements are partially separated and partially combined. Thirdly, comes the complete separation of the elements, when Love is outside the world, and Strife has given free play to the attraction of like for like. Lastly, we have the period when Love is bringing the elements together again, and Strife is passing out. This brings us back in time to the Sphere, and the cycle begins afresh. Now a world such as ours can exist only in the second and fourth of these periods; and it is clear that, if we are to understand Empedokles, we must discover in which of these we now are. It seems to be generally supposed that we are in the fourth period;^[597] I hope to show that we are really in the second, that when Strife is gaining the upper hand.

111. That a world of perishable things arises both in the second and fourth period is distinctly stated by Empedokles (fr. 17), and it is inconceivable that he 271himself had not made up his mind which of these worlds is ours. Aristotle is clearly of opinion that it is the world which arises when Strife is increasing. In one place, he says that Empedokles “holds that the world is in a similar condition now in the period of Strife as formerly in that of Love.”^[598] In another, he tell us that Empedokles omits the generation of things in the period of Love, just because it is unnatural to represent this world, in which the elements are separate, as arising from things in a state of separation.^[599] This remark can only mean that the scientific theories contained in the poem of Empedokles assumed the increase of Strife, or, in other words, that they represented the course of evolution as the disintegration of the Sphere, not as the gradual coming together of things from a state of separation.^[600] That is only what we should expect, if we are right in supposing that the problem he set himself to solve was the origin of this world from the Sphere of Parmenides, and it is also in harmony with the universal tendency of such speculations to represent the world as getting worse rather than better. We have only to consider, then, whether the details of the system bear out this general view.

112. To begin with the Sphere, in which the “four roots of all things” are mixed together, we note in the 272first place that it is called a god in the fragments just as the elements are, and that Aristotle more than once refers to it in the same way.^[601] We must remember that Love itself is a part of this mixture,^[602] while Strife surrounds or encompasses it on every side just as the Boundless encompasses the world in earlier systems. Strife, however, is not boundless, but equal in bulk to each of the four roots and to Love.

At the appointed time, Strife begins to enter into the Sphere and Love to go out of it (frs. 30, 31). The fragments by themselves throw little light on this; but Aetios and the Plutarchean Stromateis have between them preserved a very fair tradition of what Theophrastos said on the point.

The first of the elements to be separated out by Strife, then, was Air, which took the outermost position surrounding the world (cf. fr. 38). We must not, however, take the statement that it surrounded the world “in a circle” too strictly. It appears that Empedokles regarded the heavens as shaped like an egg.^[604] Here, probably, we have a trace of Orphic ideas. At any rate, the outer circle of the Air became solidified or frozen, and we thus get a crystalline vault as the boundary of the world. We note that it was Fire which solidified the Air and turned it to ice. Fire in general had a solidifying power.^[605]

In its upward rush Fire displaced a portion of the Air in the upper half of the concave sphere formed by the frozen sky. This air then sunk downwards, carrying with it a small portion of the fire. In this 274way, two hemispheres were produced: one, consisting entirely of fire, the diurnal hemisphere; the other, the nocturnal, consisting of air with a little fire.

The accumulation of Fire in the upper hemisphere disturbs the equilibrium of the heavens and causes them to revolve; and this revolution not only produces the alternation of day and night, but by its rapidity keeps the heavens and the earth in their places. This was illustrated, Aristotle tells us, by the simile of a cup of water whirled round at the end of a string.^[606] The verses which contained this remarkable account of so-called “centrifugal force” have been lost; but the experimental illustration is in the manner of Empedokles.

113. It will be observed that day and night have been explained without reference to the sun. Day is produced by the light of the fiery diurnal hemisphere, while night is the shadow thrown by the earth when the fiery hemisphere is on the other side of it (fr. 48). What, then, is the sun? The Plutarchean Stromateis^[607] again give us the answer: “The sun is not fire in substance, but a reflexion of fire like that which comes from water.” Plutarch himself makes one of his personages say: “You laugh at Empedokles for saying that the sun is a product of the earth, arising from the reflexion of the light of heaven, and once more ‘flashes back to Olympos with untroubled countenance.’”^[608] 275Aetios says:^[609] “Empedokles held that there were two suns: one, the archetype, the fire in one hemisphere of the world, filling the whole hemisphere always stationed opposite its own reflexion; the other, the visible sun, its reflexion in the other hemisphere, that which is filled with air mingled with fire, produced by the reflexion of the earth, which is round, on the crystalline sun, and carried round by the motion of the fiery hemisphere. Or, to sum it up shortly, the sun is a reflexion of the terrestrial fire.”

These passages, and especially the last, are by no means clear. The reflexion which we call the sun cannot be in the hemisphere opposite to the fiery one; for that is the nocturnal hemisphere. We must say rather that the light of the fiery hemisphere is reflected by the earth on to the fiery hemisphere itself in one concentrated flash. From this it follows that the appearance which we call the sun is the same size as the earth. We may explain the origin of this view as follows. It had just been discovered that the moon shone by reflected light, and there is always a tendency to give any novel theory a wider application than it really admits of. In the early part of the fifth century B.C., men saw reflected light everywhere; the Pythagoreans held a very similar view, and when we come to them, we shall see why Aetios, or rather his source, expresses it by speaking of “two suns.”

276It was probably in this connexion that Empedokles announced that light takes some time to travel, though its speed is so great as to escape our perception.^[610]

“The moon,” we are told, “was composed of air cut off by the fire; it was frozen just like hail, and had its light from the sun.” It is, in other words, a disc of frozen air, of the same substance as the solid sky which surrounds the heavens. Diogenes says that Empedokles taught it was smaller than the sun, and Aetios tells us it was only half as distant from the earth.^[611]

Empedokles did not attempt to explain the fixed stars by reflected light, nor even the planets. They were fiery, made out of the fire which the air carried with it when forced beneath the earth by the upward rush of fire at the first separation, as we saw above. The fixed stars were attached to the frozen air; the planets moved freely.^[612]

Empedokles was acquainted (fr. 42) with the true theory of solar eclipses, which, along with that of the moon’s light, was the great discovery of this period. He also knew (fr. 48) that night is the conical shadow of the earth, and not a sort of exhalation.

Wind was explained from the opposite motions of the fiery and airy hemispheres. Rain was caused by the compression of the Air, which forced any water there might be in it out of its pores in the form of drops. Lightning was fire forced out from the clouds in much the same way.^[613]

277The earth was at first mixed with water, but the increasing compression caused by the velocity of the world’s revolution made the water gush forth, so that the sea is called “the sweat of the earth,” a phrase to which Aristotle objects as a mere poetical metaphor. The saltness of the sea was explained by the help of this analogy.^[614]

114. Empedokles went on to show how the four elements, mingled in different proportions, gave rise to perishable things, such as bones, flesh, and the like. These, of course, are the work of Love; but this in no way contradicts the view taken above as to the period of evolution to which this world belongs. Love is by no means banished from the world yet, though one day it will be. At present, it is still able to form combinations of elements; but, just because Strife is ever increasing, they are all perishable.

The possibility of organic combinations depends upon the fact that there is still water in the earth, and even fire (fr. 52). The warm springs of Sicily were a proof of this, not to speak of Etna. These springs Empedokles appears to have explained by one of his characteristic images, drawn this time from the heating of warm baths.^[615] It will be noted that his similes are nearly all drawn from human inventions and manufactures.

115. Plants and animals were formed from the four elements under the influence of Love and Strife. 278The fragments which deal with trees and plants are 77-81; and these, taken along with certain Aristotelian statements and the doxographical tradition, enable us to make out pretty fully what the theory was. The text of Aetios is very corrupt here; but it may, perhaps, be rendered as follows:—

Aristotle finds fault with Empedokles for explaining the double growth of plants, upwards and downwards, by the opposite natural motions of the earth and fire contained in them.^[616] For “natural motions” we must, of course, substitute the attraction of like for like (§ 109). Theophrastos says much the same thing.^[617] The growth of plants, then, is to be regarded as an incident in that separation of the elements which Strife is bringing about. Some of the fire which is still beneath the earth (fr. 52) meeting in its upward 279course with earth, still moist with water and “running” down so as to “reach its own kind,” unites with it, under the influence of the Love still left in the world, to form a temporary combination, which we call a tree or a plant.

At the beginning of the pseudo-Aristotelian Treatise on Plants,^[618] we are told that Empedokles attributed desire, sensation, and the capacity for pleasure and pain to plants, and he rightly saw that the two sexes are combined in them. This is mentioned by Aetios, and discussed in the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise. If we may so far trust that Byzantine translation from a Latin version of the Arabic,^[619] we get a most valuable hint as to the reason. Plants, we are there told, came into being “in an imperfect state of the world,”^[620] in fact, at a time when Strife had not so far prevailed as to differentiate the sexes. We shall see that the same thing applies to the original race of animals in this world. It is strange that Empedokles never observed the actual process of generation in plants, but confined himself to the statement that they spontaneously “bore eggs” (fr. 79), that is to say, fruit.

116. The fragments which deal with the evolution of animals (57-62) must be understood in the light of the statement (fr. 17) that there is a double coming into being and a double passing away of mortal things. Empedokles describes two processes of evolution, which take exactly opposite courses, one of them 280belonging to the period of Love and the other to that of Strife. The four stages of this double evolution are accurately distinguished in a passage of Aetios,^[621] and we shall see that there is evidence for referring two of them to the second period of the world’s history and two to the fourth.

The first stage is that in which the various parts of animals arise separately. It is that of heads without necks, arms without shoulders, and eyes without foreheads (fr. 57). It is clear that this must be the first stage in what we have called the fourth period of the world’s history, that in which Love is coming in and Strife passing out. Aristotle distinctly refers it to the period of Love, by which, as we have seen, he means the period when Love is increasing.^[622] It is in accordance with this that he also says these scattered members were subsequently put together by Love.^[623]

The second stage is that in which the scattered limbs are united. At first, they were combined in all possible ways (fr. 59). There were oxen with human heads, creatures with double faces and double breasts, and all manner of monsters (fr. 61). Those of them that were fitted to survive did so, while the rest perished. That is how the evolution of animals took place in the period of Love.^[624]

281The third stage belongs to the period when the unity of the Sphere is being destroyed by Strife. It is, therefore, the first stage in the evolution of our present world. It begins with “whole-natured forms” in which there is not as yet any distinction of sex or species.^[625] They are composed of earth and water, and are produced by the upward motion of fire which is seeking to reach its like.

In the fourth stage, the sexes and species have been separated, and new animals no longer arise from the elements, but are produced by generation. We shall see presently how Empedokles conceived this to operate.

In both these processes of evolution, Empedokles was guided by the idea of the survival of the fittest. Aristotle severely criticises this. “We may suppose,” he says, “that all things have fallen out accidentally just as they would have done if they had been produced for some end. Certain things have been preserved because they had spontaneously acquired a fitting structure, while those which were not so put together have perished and are perishing, as Empedokles says of the oxen with human faces.”^[626] This, according to Aristotle, leaves too much to chance. One curious instance has been preserved. Vertebration was explained by saying that an early invertebrate animal tried to turn round and broke its back in so doing. This was a favourable variation and so survived.^[627] It should be noted that it clearly belongs to the period of Strife, and not, like 282the oxen with human heads, to that of Love. The survival of the fittest was the law of both processes of evolution.

117. The distinction of the sexes was an important result of the gradual differentiation brought about by the entrance of Strife into the world. Empedokles differed from the theory given by Parmenides in his Second Part (§ 95) in holding that the warm element preponderated in the male sex, and that males were conceived in the warmer part of the uterus (fr. 65). The fœtus was formed partly from the male and partly from the female semen (fr. 63); and it was just the fact that the substance of a new being’s body was divided between the male and the female that produced desire when the two were brought together by sight (fr. 64). A certain symmetry of the pores in the male and female semen is, of course, necessary for procreation, and from its absence Empedokles explained the sterility of mules. The children most resemble that parent who contributed most to their formation. The influence of statues and pictures was also noted, however, as modifying the appearance of the offspring. Twins and triplets were due to a superabundance and division of the semen.^[628]

As to the growth of the fœtus in the uterus, Empedokles held that it was enveloped in a membrane, and that its formation began on the thirty-sixth day and was completed on the forty-ninth. The heart was formed first, the nails and such things last. Respiration did not begin till the time of birth, when the fluids round the fœtus were withdrawn. Birth took place in the ninth or seventh month, because the day had 283been originally nine months long, and afterwards seven. Milk arises on the tenth day of the eighth month (fr. 68).^[629]

Death was the final separation by Strife of the fire and earth in the body, each of which had all along been striving to “reach its own kind.” Sleep was a temporary separation to a certain extent of the fiery element.^[630] At death the animal is resolved into its elements, which perhaps enter into fresh combinations, perhaps become permanently united with “their own kind.” There can be no question here of an immortal soul.

Even in life, we may see the attraction of like to like operating in animals just as it did in the upward and downward growth of plants. Hair is the same thing as foliage (fr. 82); and, generally speaking, the fiery part of animals tends upwards and the earthy part downwards, though there are exceptions, as may be seen in the case of certain shell-fish (fr. 76), where the earthy part is above. These exceptions are only possible because there is still a great deal of Love in the world. We also see the attraction of like for like in the different habits of the various species of animals. Those that have most fire in them fly up into the air; those in which earth preponderates take to the earth, as did the dog which always sat upon a tile.^[631] Aquatic animals are those in which water predominates. This does not, however, apply to fishes, which are very fiery, and take to the water to cool themselves.^[632]

284Empedokles paid great attention to the subject of respiration, and his very ingenious explanation of it has been preserved in a continuous form (fr. 100). We breathe, he held, through all the pores of the skin, not merely through the organs of respiration. The cause of the alternate inspiration and expiration of the breath was the movement of the blood from the heart to the surface of the body and back again, which was explained by the klepsydra.

The nutrition and growth of animals is, of course, to be explained from the attraction of like to like. Each part of the body has pores into which the appropriate food will fit. Pleasure and pain were derived from the absence or presence of like elements, that is, of nourishment which would fit the pores. Tears and sweat arose from a disturbance which curdled the blood; they were, so to say, the whey of the blood.^[633]

118. For the theory of perception held by Empedokles we have the original words of Theophrastos:—

Perception, then, is due to the meeting of an element in us with the same element outside. This takes place when the pores of the organ of sense are neither too large nor too small for the “effluences” which all things are constantly giving off (fr. 89). Smell was explained by respiration. The breath drew in along with it the small particles which fit into the pores. From Aetios^[637] we learn that Empedokles proved this by the example of people with a cold in their head, who cannot smell, just because they have a difficulty 287in breathing. We also see from fr. 101 that the scent of dogs was referred to in support of the theory. Empedokles seems to have given no detailed account of smell, and did not refer to touch at all.^[638] Hearing was explained by the motion of the air which struck upon the cartilage inside the ear and made it swing and sound like a bell.^[639]

The theory of vision^[640] is more complicated; and, as Plato adopted most of it, it is of great importance in the history of philosophy. The eye was conceived, as by Alkmaion (§ 96),^[641] to be composed of fire and water. Just as in a lantern the flame is protected from the wind by horn (fr. 84), so the fire in the iris is protected from the water which surrounds it in the pupil by membranes with very fine pores, so that, while the fire can pass out, the water cannot get in. Sight is produced by the fire inside the eye going forth to meet the object. This seems strange to us, because we are accustomed to the idea of images being impressed upon the retina. But looking at a thing no doubt seemed much more like an action proceeding from the eye than a mere passive state.

He was quite aware, too, that “effluences,” as he called them, came from things to the eyes as well; for he defined colours as “effluences from forms (or ‘things’) fitting into the pores and perceived.”^[642] It is not quite clear how these two accounts of vision were reconciled, or how far we are entitled to credit Empedokles with the Platonic theory. The statements 288which have been quoted seem to imply something very like it.^[643]

Theophrastos tells us that Empedokles made no distinction between thought and perception, a remark already made by Aristotle.^[644] The chief seat of perception was the blood, in which the four elements are most evenly mixed, and especially the blood near the heart (fr. 105).^[645] This does not, however, exclude the idea that other parts of the body may perceive also; indeed, Empedokles held that all things have their share of thought (fr. 103). But the blood was specially sensitive because of its finer mixture.^[646] From this it naturally follows that Empedokles adopted the view, already maintained in the Second Part of the poem of Parmenides (fr. 16), that our knowledge varies with the varying constitution of our bodies (fr. 106). This consideration became very important later on as one of the foundations of scepticism; but Empedokles himself only drew from it the conclusion that we must make the best use we can of our senses, and check one by the other (fr. 4).

119. The theoretical theology of Empedokles reminds us of Xenophanes, his practical religious teaching of Pythagoras and the Orphics. We are told in the earlier part of the poem that certain “gods” are composed of the elements; and that therefore though 289they “live long lives” they must pass away (fr. 21). We have seen that the elements and the Sphere are also called gods, but that is in quite another sense of the word.

If we turn to the religious teaching of the Purifications, we find that everything turns on the doctrine of transmigration. On the general significance of this enough has been said above (§ 42); the details given by Empedokles are peculiar. According to a decree of Necessity, “daemons” who have sinned are forced to wander from their home in heaven for three times ten thousand seasons (fr. 115). He himself is such an exiled divinity, and has fallen from his high estate because he put his trust in raving Strife. The four elements toss him from one to the other with loathing; and so he has not only been a human being and a plant, but even a fish. The only way to purify oneself from the taint of original sin was by the cultivation of ceremonial holiness, by purifications, and abstinence from animal flesh. For the animals are our kinsmen (fr. 137), and it is parricide to lay hands on them. In all this there are, no doubt, certain points of contact with the cosmology. We have the “mighty oath” (fr. 115; cf. fr. 30), the four elements, Hate as the source of original sin, and Kypris as queen in the Golden Age (fr. 128). But these points are neither fundamental nor of great importance. And it cannot be denied that there are really contradictions between the two poems. That, however, is just what we should expect to find. All through this period, there seems to have been a gulf between men’s religious beliefs, if they had any, and their cosmological views. The few points of contact which we have mentioned may have been sufficient to hide this from Empedokles himself.