What the Greeks Gave Us
A Review of Adam Nicolson’s How To Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks
The Greek mainland is hard living. Most of it is rocky, with pockets of arable soil separated by hills, ridges, mountains, and large areas where ordinary staples are impossible to grow. Olive trees and grapevines do well here, versatile as they are, but other grains, fruits, and vegetables only thrive in some areas. But virtually anywhere in the peninsula, one is very close to the sea, and via the sea an unfurling world of lands abroad: the archipelago of Aegean islands that dot the way from Greece up along the coast of ancient Thrace and onto Anatolia, erstwhile Asia Minor, modern Türkiye, the Levantine Coast embracing Syria-Palestine, and further south the ports of Egypt, where the Nile River Delta meets the sea. This is, so to speak, like one of the curved wings of Iris, goddess of the rainbow and messenger of Zeus; the other spreads out west across the Ionian Sea to Sicily, Italy, and the cisalpine coast that curves up and downwards into ancient Gaul and Iberia, modern France and Spain. If one sails between the Pillars of Herakles and up the other side of these coasts one can come to the southern British shore. The Greeks would not make it quite this far until later, but back on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar they boasted colonial cities as far West as what is now Spain, as far East and North as Trapezus and Tanais, and everywhere in between.
All of this happened during what’s usually called the Greek “Archaic Age,” between the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet around 800 BCE and ending around the time of the Persian Wars in the fifth century. If anybody knows anything about ancient Greece, it is not typically this period that they think about. They are much more likely to think of “Classical” Greece, which is basically late fifth century and fourth century BCE Athens, which itself comes to an end (at least in the periodization efforts of modern historians) with the conquests of Philip and Alexander of Macedon and the dawn of the “Hellenistic Age.” Or, perhaps, buoyed by general background awareness of the Trojan War through primary school or movies like Troy (2004), they know something (or think they know something) about Bronze Age Greece: the world in which the Minoans of Crete and the Mycenaean palatial culture based on their civilization in the mainland was connected by trade and warfare to Asia Minor, to Cyprus where copper (kypris in Greek) was mined that was an essential element, together with tin (mined in Bactria), in bronze, to Syria and Egypt, and through them to the great Mesopotamian empires that had already cycled through many revolutions of rise and fall by the time that comparable cultures were arising in the Greek world, and even more distantly to the Indus Valley. This world of exchange—of goods, of people, of services, of art, of gods (like Aphrodite/Kypris, the Cypriot import of many Near Eastern goddesses of love and war, lust and rage), and more—was the world of Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus, about which we read in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Yet what’s usually missing from popular consciousness is the exact relationship those epics, the foundation of all Western literature, hold to the events that they purport to describe. Iliad and Odyssey surely curate many authentic memories of that Bronze Age world, but they were composed no earlier than the beginning of the Archaic Age, and they are unlikely to have been by the same person, as ML West observed in his famous (and controversial) answer to the Homeric Question. The first “Homer” likely composed the Iliad around 750 BCE on the Ionian Coast, shortly after the adoption and popularization of the Phoenician alphabet for the writing of Greek (displacing Linear B); the second “Homer,” probably around 100 years later, close to 650, in a world that was increasingly more cosmopolitan, rediscovering the trade networks and internationalism that had earlier defined the Bronze Age.
Between the Bronze Age and the Archaic Age two periods—the so-called “Bronze Age Collapse,” from 1200 to 1150, in which the entire network of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds seemingly fell apart for a variety of reasons (including but not reducible to the marauding Sea Peoples, some of whose descendants founded the Philistine pentapolis on the coast of Canaan, which in turn likely drove the Proto-Israelites into the Canaanite highlands, or at least, this is when we first encounter their archaeological remains, and around which same time the Phoenician city-states of Tyre and Sidon appear in what is now Lebanon while the Canaanite city-states were in decline), and the so-called “Dark Age,” during which we have a deeply imperfect picture of Greek life other than a clear sense of the decline of megaron-based monarchies—separate Homer from Troy. Both Homers remember Troy, and pass down Bronze Age traditions in their Archaic texts, but they also resituate those memories in the world as it was known to their audiences, the world not of the original Bronze Age melting pot of Near East and Aegean cultures but in the setting of their rediscovered relationship. And so, insofar as Homeric poetry is very much at the foundation of what it is to be “Greek,” whether as it was conceived in antiquity or how it is often accounted today, Greekness is to be found not in pure autochthony but in the very meeting of separate worlds, and the audacity to live on the margins between them.
This is what Adam Nicolson calls the “Harbour Minds” of the Greeks in his new book How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks, in which he seeks to tell the story of Presocratic philosophy and to walk the reader through several of the key ideas that animated thinkers in the era before the rise of “Classical” Greece, which is to say, the primary resources that helped eventually make Greece “Classical.” “It’s a story of the margins,” he writes, “the product of deep political and cultural changes in the eastern Mediterranean between about 1200 and 800 BC. Nothing about the new way of thinking came form centrality or long-instituted authority; every one of its qualities derived form conditions found on the edges of power, where fusion, manoeuvrability, thievery, deceit, eclecticism and openness were aspects of a vitalized, at times anxious and often predatory life” (7). In that context, '“the Greeks would draw on the ancient, inherited learning of Egypt and Mesopotamia; set it in the frame of an adventurous and disruptive approach to life; and then look for a third term, neither wedded to autocratic power nor merely interested in a piratical free-for-all, but seeking what might be called the inventively civic, forms of life and understanding that depended neither on arbitrary authority nor on anarchic violence but were forever in search of the middle ground of social and personal justice, looking for if perhaps never quite finding, the shared understanding of the three connected realms of soul, city and cosmos that would come to define them” (14). Greek culture, of which philosophy is a part, has a geography, so insists Nicolson, and that geography’s unique tensions and opportunities shaped the Greek mind as much as any abstract logic (indeed, gave it the context within which it could deal in abstractions at all).
In this Archaic world, the two deities of note—joined together on the marble base of Phidias’s Zeus in Olympia—were Hermes and Hestia, who “belong together because they don’t belong together. Hermes is the god of movement and change, of unreliability, of the imminent presence of the foreign. Hestia is the goddess of the hearth, the central, the immoveable, the safe and the domestic. She is habitat, he is journey. She is navel, he is gesture. She is centred, he disperses. They represent those two irreconcilables: the urge to settle and the urge to explore. In a house, she is at the hearth, he on the threshold, as on the borders of a city, where he can protect it from thieves because he is the king of thieves himself” (34-35). Between these two poles of Archaic Greek life the necessity of thought, humanized in Odysseus and divinized in Athena, is obvious. Odysseus “is protean, slipperily capable of many ways of being. He is many because the world he meets is many. Only by being many can a man survived in a many-wayed world…Odysseus is essentially the navigator of mind and world. Navigation is what defines his vitality in a universe formed by its multiplicity. Many-ness requires a hand on the helm. To exist in a world of unexpectedness is to steer. Fully to live is to be Odyssean. To live is to think” (41).
It is not that the Greeks are the only ancient people to have engaged in critical thought. Critical thinking is a fundamentally human activity, from our earliest human ancestors to our more immediate hunter-gatherer ancestors to the world of the Agricultural Revolution to now. But the Greeks were genuinely original in making critical thinking a fundamental cultural value—indeed, the cultural value, the value around which their culture is built. At a time when the Near East was still ruled by god-kings and their priestly hierarchies, Greek poleis were developing oligarchic and democratic modes of government and Greek philosophers were questioning the inherited wisdom of past generations, including on matters of religion, cosmology, politics, and personal well-being.
It is easy to oversell the distinction between the Greeks and the East on this point, and I don’t want to give the impression that Greek society was an inherently more enlightened or progressive place to be in every way. The Orientalist fantasy of Greek reason vs. Eastern fideism is indefensible. In fact, this way of framing the conflict between Persia and the Greek city-states on the Western periphery of the Achaemenid realm is popular in Europe and the United States but it is basically farcical: compared to the emergent sense among the Greeks in response to the Persian incursion of their own civilization over against the barbaroi, the Achaemenids were in fact a cosmopolitan society in which internationalism and pluralism were normative and in which the empire’s lubricated administration largely depended on tolerance and the reactivation of local institutions and cultural norms. Those cultural norms, going back deep into the Mesopotamian past (see, e.g., Amanda Podany’s Weavers, Scribes, and Kings), included many kinds of cultural sophistication that the Greeks only got through their contact with the East, especially monumental architecture and sculpture which came into Greek vogue from Egyptian, Levantine, and Anatolian precedents and analogues.
Greek women throughout the ancient world enjoyed far fewer freedoms, particularly in Athens, than in places like ancient Iran, where women were capable of owning land and engaging in ordinary trade transactions. Slavery was ubiquitous everywhere, in both Greece and Persia alike. Nor is it the case that philosophical inquiry was valued for its own sake in the Greek world in the Archaic Age and the era of the Persian Wars: after all, Athens put Socrates to death for his devotion to philosophical inquiry. Nor is it the case that Greek philosophy would have been possible without the Near East. This is a large part of Nicolson’s point: people like Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras were only able to do what they did because they were living in a world where Asia and Europe were in passionate, sometimes contested, embrace.
Nevertheless, the Greek world’s application of critical thinking to things traditionally beyond review in the rest of the ancient world is indeed unique. Philosophers like Xenophanes were among the first to question the gods: not their existence, their power, or their providence, but their mythic portraiture in the Homeric and Hesiodic poetry that had recently become the literary standard and was quickly influencing ordinary religious belief and life. Philosophers like Thales and Anaximander were among the first to seek a philosophical, even a scientific first principle—whether pointing to an individual element like water (sensible, given the Aegean geography of Greek culture) or air (aer or pneuma, which would later be important to the Stoics) as the origin of everything or to something metaphysical like mind. Heraclitus split the difference by locating the one cause of everything in a mindlike fire, which he identified with Zeus: while he is more often famous for his belief that “everything flows” (to pan rhō), this refers simply to the forms the fire takes, not to the fire itself which maintains essential equilibrium through all of its sensible mutations. (The Stoics can in large part be read as having combined Heraclitus with certain Milesian attitudes in their pantheistic of Plato’s Timaeus, at least on cosmology and psychology.) Around the same time, Pythagoras, “Orpheus,” and Empedocles were proposing theories of metempsychosis that promised a somewhat brighter hereafter than what was available in traditional religion and myth; Sappho, Archilochus, and Alcaeus were revolutionizing the Greek poetic tradition by choosing to focus on core human experiences like lust, symposia, longing, and nostalgia; Solon was reinventing the Athenian politeia and telling Croesus that the happiest people he ever knew were those that died well, having fulfilled their duties; and Empedocles, again, was wondering whether the arc of the universe ultimately favors love (eros) or strife (eris).
This is Greece on the eve of the Greece we know. If some of these themes seem familiar—Nicolson organizes his chapters by their questions: “Must I think my own way through the world?”, “What is existence made of?”, “Is politeness a virtue?”, “Is life a fire?”, “Is the world full of souls?”, “Can I live in multiple realities?”, “Does love rule the universe?”—that’s because the Presocratic traditions of both philosophy and poetry were the very stuff that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, not to mention the Athenian dramatists studied at length by every student of Attic, all knew and engaged with. We only possess their fragments not because they were unimportant but rather for the opposite reason: they were so impactful that their fundamental ideas were absorbed, critiqued, qualified, integrated, and disputed by the more famous philosophical minds of the Classical period and later scribes and readers preferred to engage the ideas there rather than in the originals.
Yet these originals were distinctive. It is not the case, again, that they are wholly anomalous, as though no person prior to the Presocratics or beyond the Greek world had ever wondered what it’s all really about or really given poetic expression to the finer points of the human experience. The Greek accomplishment is instead making thought about thought a priority itself: it is the self-consciousness, the awareness, and the intentionality that mark these pursuits that is unique to them. Consider, for example, the difference between the Sumerian priestess-poet Enheduana and Sappho. Enheduana gives us some autobiography in the course of her hymns: “I am Enheduana, I / am the high priestess. / I carried the basket / of offerings, I sang / the hymns of joy. / Now they bring me / funeral gifts—am I no longer living?” (The Exaltation IV).1 But it is in the course of a prayer to Inana to aid her against a usurper. The poem does involve some metanarratival self-reflection—it seems to be told from Enheduana’s later perspective of having regained her voice to pray to Inana and being restored to her proper position, after her “heart was filled, over filled” and she “gave birth to it for you [Inana]”—but the objects of focus here are fairly standard: deities, priesthood, status, position, personal enemies, devotional relations to and among gods and humans, ritual, etc.2
Now compare Sappho, who also prays to a goddess:
ποικιλόθρον’ ἀθανάτ’ Ἀφρόδιτα,
παῖ Δίος δολόπλοκε, λίσσομαί σε,
μή μ’ἄσαισι μηδ’ ὀνίαισι δάμνα,
πότνια, θῦμον·
5 ἀλλὰ τυίδ’ ἔλθ’, αἴ ποτα κἀτέρωτα
τὰς ἔμας αὔδας ἀΐοισα πήλοι,
ἔκλυες, πάτρος δὲ δόμον λίποισα
χρύσιον ἦλθες
ἄρμ’ ὐπασδεύξαισα. κάλοι δέ σ’ἆγον
10 ὤκεες στροῦθοι περὶ γὰς μελαίνας
πύκνα δίννηντες πτέρ’ ἀπ’ ὠράνω αἴθερος διὰ μέσσω·
αἶψα δ’ ἐξίκοντο. σὺ δ’, ὦ μάκαιρα,
μειδιαίσαισ’ ἀθανάτωι προσώπωι,
15 ἤρε’ ὄττι δηὖτε πέπονθα κὤττι
δυἦτε κάλημι
κὤττι μοι μάλιστα θέλω γένεσθαι
μαινόλαι θύμωι· ‘τίνα δηὖτε πείθω
σαγην ἐς σὰν φιλότατα; τίς σ’, ὦ
20 Ψάπφ’, ἀδικήει;
καὶ γὰρ αἰ φεύγει, ταχέως διώξει·
αἰ δὲ δῶρα μὴ δέκετ’, ἀλλὰ δώσει·
αἰ δὲ μὴ φίλει, ταχέως φιλήσει
κωὐκ ἐθέλοισα.’
25 ἔλθε μοι καὶ νῦν, χαλέπαν δὲ λῦσον
ἐκ μερίμναν, ὄσσα δέ μοι τέλεσσαι
θῦμος ἰμέρρει τέλεσον, σὺ δ’ αὔτα
σύμμαχος ἔσσο.Ornately-throned, immortal Aphrodite,
Plot-weaving child of Zeus,
do not tame, Mistress, my heart with discomfort or distress;
but come here, whether also on another occasion
perceiving my songs from afar
you heard, and leaving your father’s golden house
you came yoking up your chariot. And your lovely
swift sparrows led you over the black earth
rapidly whirling their wings from heaven
through the middle aether;
and at once they arrived. And you, o blessed,
smiling with your immortal face,
asked what I suffered this time and what this time
in my maddened heart I wanted above all to happen to me:
“Whom this time shall I persuade
to bring you back to her love?
Who, Sappho, has done you wrong?
For even if she flees, she will quickly pursue;
if she does not take gifts, nevertheless she will give them;
and if she does not love, quickly she will love
even if she doesn’t want to.”
Come to me even now, and loose me
from my difficult cares, and fulfill for me
whatever my heart desires to be fulfilled,
and you yourself be my accomplice. (Sappho 1 [Voigt]).3
Notice what’s similar: both Enheduana and Sappho pray to a goddess in their poetry for something they want. For both Enheduana and Sappho, the goddess comes through for them. But the context and meaning of the poetry could not be more different. Enheduana actually was a high priestess to the goddess she sang to, while Sappho was decidedly not (despite some suggestions in the scholarship that some of her poetry may have been recited at all-female erotic worship of Aphrodite). Enheduana’s world is the royal and cultic context of ancient Sumer, where the things she’s asking Inana to come through for her on are essentially matters of public affairs: in large part, the same sort of stuff that much of biblical literature is asking Yhwh to help out with. But “the world Sappho portrays in her poetry is very different from that of Alcaeus. It is a world of friendship, love and desire among women, of family life and relationships, of weddings, of poetry and music and of communion with the divine, above all Aprhodite.”4 In contrast to Enheduana’s love for the goddess Inana, “Sappho is best known for her first-person poetry of passionate love for other women, some of it set in the context of a hazily evoked all-female grouping.”5 And given this context, Sappho’s in-text and metatextual summoning of Aphrodite takes on a kind of humorous tone of self-reproach at the same time that it reflects a deeply libidinous soul that the poet herself finds best expressed through appeal to the goddess. Aphrodite hears Sappho’s moaning from afar and gets on her sparrow-pulled chariot like she is coming to the aid of some Trojan paramour or love-child on a Homeric battlefield, but when she arrives her tone is a gentle, chiding “Who is it this time?” in Sappho’s direction, asking her which girl has caught her eye that she has asked Aphrodite to help her win over with the implication that this has happened multiple times before. In the text, Sappho seems unaware that this is a relatively quotidian thing to summon one of the Olympians herself for, and enjoins Aphrodite to be her “ally” or “accomplice” (σύμμαχος, someone who “fights with” you), but when we consider the author Sappho who wrote this poem depicting herself and Aphrodite in this conversation in the metrical genre of lyric and erotica, we have to walk away with the sense that whatever religious sentiment Sappho might have about her lust it is not quite the same divine drama that Enheduana felt she was wrapped up in. Enheduana’s is an agony of a communion broken and a voice lost, in which her heart must be in some way reborn so as to sing the praises of her deity aright, which rescues her lost status and restores her to a position she really, historically held. Sappho’s randy, by contrast, and is willing to summon the very goddess of love herself to come to her aid in a literary production that does not necessarily imply any real practice of this kind on her part and does not actually require her beloved to have really existed at all.
It is not, then, that the Sumerian is interested in gods and the Greek poet isn’t, or that the Near Eastern precedent is “superstitious” while the Greek exemplum is “rational.” It is rather that Enheduana expresses what Owen Barfield might have called “original participation,” in which her own identity is largely sublimated to and a function of the seamless world of divinity, nature, and human society that she is part of, while Sappho’s is much more a poetry of “withdrawn participation,” in which the divine, the natural, and the human still stand in relation to one another but with an advanced sense of personal identity and agency on behalf of the human. Sappho herself is where those raw forces meet and they respond to her will as much as she is answerable to theirs. Indeed, Sappho’s eroticism may well carry her to some degree beyond merely “withdrawn participation” and into “final participation.” Nicolson observes that “Sappho seems to be both the speaker of an individual self and the celebrant of an ecstatic jointness in the pleasures and beauties of her companions. She lives on the boundary of self and city,” in a “passionate, private selfhood” (114-115).
And it is this which the Greek tradition of the Archaic and Classical eras really imparts: a sense of the human being as an individual—not an atomized individual, to be clear, cut off from gods and nature and society, but an individual all the same, whose own questions, opportunities, failures, and choices matter, and who contends with the titanic forces of the cosmos if not as an equal then at least as a competitor. This is already evident in Homer, particularly the Odyssean Homer. In the Iliad, fate rules gods and men alike: whatever limited powers either exercise within the course of cosmos and history are ultimately subject to fate’s decrees, and constitute more of a choice among available options (when they exist) than a matter of genuine freedom. So in the Iliad, Zeus cannot save Sarpedon without risking divine rebellion from the other gods whom he asks to sacrifice their sons in this war which he has devised as a way to kill off the generation of heroes (Iliad I.5); Achilles cannot choose to stay and avenge Patroklos without also choosing to stay and suffer the fate decreed for him to die young in this war but be remembered forever. But in the Odyssey, it is human beings, not the gods, that decide their fates through their moral choices. In Book I, our first genuine scene takes place in the divine council on Olympus, where “the Father of men and gods, who’d been brooding in his heart over handsome Aegisthus, slain by far-famed Orestes, the son of Agamemnon” (Odyssey I.28-30) addresses the council.6 The events referred to here are covered in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and they recount the homecoming (Grk: nostos) of Agamemnon in the aftermath of the war, which ends violently as Clytemnestra conspires her with her lover (and Agamemnon’s cousin), Aegisthus, to murder Agamemnon. They plan to do this for what might seem to us a relatively just reason: Agamemnon sacrificed their youngest daughter, Iphigenia, to Artemis before setting sail for Troy, having lured both her and Clytemnestra to the sea under the false pretense of marrying Iphigenia to Achilles. They succeed, but this forces the hand of Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, to avenge him, which he does in a bloody massacre. By the time of Odyssey’s composition, this story was surely already widely known, even though our main access to it now is Aeschylus’ version of the tale. Odyssey’s Zeus takes this as a moral lesson about human folly and the power of human choice:
My oh my, the way mortals will fasten blame on the gods! / From us, they say, evils come, yet they themselves / through their own blind recklessness have ills beyond / their fated lot, as lately Aegisthus—beyond his fated lot— / killed Atreus’ son at his homecoming, married his wife, / though he knew this meant sheer destruction, since we’d told him / before the event, sending Hermes, the sharp-eyed Argos-slayer, / he should neither slay the man nor marry his bedfellow, / since vengeance for Atreus’ son would come from Oreste / once he’d reached manhood, and longed for his own country. / So Hermes said; but he failed, for all his good intentions, / to dissuade Aegisthus, who now has paid the full penalty. (Od. I.32-43)
Notice the difference: fate plays a role in human life in both Iliad and Odyssey; but in Iliad, fate is a vicious force of indifference, while in Odyssey fate supplies the circumstances of humans, the acceptable range of their becoming within which they exercise real freedoms to conform. In Iliad, fate’s strength is irresistible; in Odyssey, human resistance to fate is the very substance of wickedness that gets its just comeuppance. Fate and the gods surely impose upon human freedoms in various ways, but humans still have a power of choice that can struggle against these boundaries. Nor would I say, despite what Zeus says here, that all mortal struggle against fate is necessarily morally wrong in Homer’s view: after all, Odysseus spends the majority of the epic resisting the will of Poseidon to keep him from home by aligning with the will of the deity that favors him (Athena), and struggling to overcome the will of other divine and human obstacles to his quest.
Similar questions about necessity and freedom would radiate throughout the later Greek tradition, but what is interesting about the Archaic Age, as Nicolson sees, is that it is here that we get for the first time in the West a genuine sense of interiority, of the site of necessity and freedom as not primarily located in gods, in “great men” like demigods, heroes, kings, aristocratic warriors, and so on, but in the individual. Sure, Odysseus comes from the age of myth, and sure, he, too, is a Zeus-sired king, born to human parents but boasting the royal lineage and aristocratic status that folks like Agamemnon and Achilles also enjoy; he further has a divine patron in Athena whose advocacy on his behalf drives his decisions. But for the majority of the epic Odysseus is reduced and deprived of all of those things: he is a castaway, a suppliant, a beggar of princesses, kings, and the suitors in his own home, a schemer, a plotter, and a storyteller. Odysseus really isn’t the best person, frankly, in the Odyssey: if you want nobility, interlaced though it is with carnage, you’ll need to read the Iliad. Nicolson is right to identify the Odyssey as setting the poetic tone for an age of Greek thought that turns away from the mere appearances of things, from the given inheritance of “common sense,” to an analytical, deconstructive, deeper perception. It is the epic of a world where the givens of the previous age have become as murky as the wine-dark sea and the waves of fortune must be navigated by wit rather than by mere oracle, where the word from the dead in a heroic katabasis is that you can go back home only for a little while, but not forever, and it will never be quite the same as you remember.
In tandem, Archaic values about the good life differ from those of the Bronze Age. Where the Homeric hero’s overriding concern is with kleos or kudos (dependent on the epic), the renown for mighty deeds that will go on to be told in the world long after their own demise, the only palliative for death which is otherwise irreconcilable, Archaic values focused on the goodness of this life and achieving a good death (even as this was also the period that first imagined a better afterlife for ordinary people, and not just for demigods and heroes). A classic example is the tale of Kleobis and Biton told by Solon to Croesus in Herodotus’ Histories 1.31. When Croesus asks him who the happiest person he’s ever known is—it’s a leading question: Croesus wants him to say himself, because of his massive wealth (hence our own English idiom “Rich as Croesus”)—Solon tells him first the story of Tellus, an Athenian statesman that lived to see his children, grandchildren, and to come to the rescue of the Athenians during a war with Eleusis, in which he died (Hist. 1.30). Croesus then asked who Solon considered second-most blest, and Solon answered Kleobis and Biton: two Argive brothers, sons of Cydippe, priestess to Hera. There was a festival in town she was due for, and when her oxen could not be discovered, they yoked themselves to her cart and drove her six miles to town for the festival. They fell asleep in the temple after the prayers and sacrifices, and never woke up. Solon summarizes:
ταῦτα δέ σφι ποιήσασι καὶ ὀφθεῖσι ὑπὸ τῆς πανηγύριος τελευτὴ τοῦ βίου ἀρίστη ἐπεγένετο, διέδεξέ τε ἐν τούτοισι ὁ θεὸς ὡς ἄμεινον εἴη ἀνθρώπῳ τεθνάναι μᾶλλον ἢ ζώειν.
Having done these things and been seen by the assembly a most excellent end of life occurred, and the god showed in these matters that it is better for a man to be dead than to live.
Now, the point is that Tellus had a full life as a husband, a father, and a statesman, and died gloriously in battle; Kleobis and Biton are strong young men when they die—they don’t have to grow old and feeble. “It is better to be dead than to live” is not a statement of suicidal nihilism but rather a metric of evaluating a life well lived: to die well is more important than living sumptuously. But a good death brings its own kind of immortality, as the kouroi, or statuary of young men (clearly influenced by Egyptian art style), dedicated to Kleobis and Biton—pictured above—demonstrate. “With respect to the whole,” says Solon, “the human being is chance” (πᾶν ἐστὶ ἄνθρωπος συμφορή; 1.32). And so, while Solon perceives Croesus’s wealth and power and the meaning behind his question, he no less says that he cannot answer in Croesus’s favor “before I learn that you ended your life well” (πρὶν τελευτήσαντα καλῶς τὸν αἰῶνα πύθωμαι). Famously, at least in Herodotus, Croesus’s refusal to take Solon’s wisdom here sets him up for failure: Croesus will lose his own son when he foolishly sends Adrestus, who comes to him seeking purification from unintentional manslaughter (a function of ancient kings), with him on a hunt; his cocksure interpretation of the Delphic oracle’s statement that should he go up against Cyrus he will destroy a great empire leads him to ruin, because the empire his greed and ambition will destroy is in fact his own. When the Persians take Sardis, Croesus’s capital, and put him on a pyre to be burned alive, it is Solon’s name that Croesus regretfully calls out, and only this saves him, to be Cyrus’s pet at court to the end of his days.
Stories like this are indicative of a cultural shift in favor of accepting the smallness and limitation of human life. It is better to live and die well than to reach for riches and power, which can prove not only disastrous but corrosive. Glory is overrated, as Odysseus and Croesus both find out the hard way (in Odysseus’s case when he proudly, and stupidly, announces himself to Polyphemus, leading to Poseidon’s curse on him). Other Greek myth, especially as it persists in drama, poetry, and later narrative prose, might have told us the same thing: being the biggest and best, even just by accident, is likely to provoke the wrath of the gods, who are likely to perceive it as hubris (correctly or not). Consider, for example, Arachne, whose talent and open provocation of Athena, both by claiming to be her better at the loom (she is) but also by choosing to depict divine bad behavior in her competitive tapestry, lands her in the form that still bears her name; consider Hippolytus’s spurning of Aphrodite through lifelong chastity in Euripides’s eponymous play named for him, which leads to the unraveling of his family and his own tragic death; consider Apuleius’s Psyche and Cupid (Met. V.1-3). (A lesson here might be to be especially careful with Aphrodite.) Our interiority, our smallness, becomes the new site of divine communion, natural wisdom, and political virtue where previously it was our externality, our public face, on which such characteristics were most clearly inscribed.
On the one hand I have insisted that without this gestational period of the Greek tradition of thought and culture none of the folks we know better and read more often—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, Polybius, Plutarch, etc.—would exist. It bears repeating: their cultural inheritance, their starting place, was the culture of the Archaic Age and the broadly Presocratic tradition of philosophical thought, the political enterprises of oligarchy and democracy, symposial drinking, song, conversation, and cavorting, the artistic and architectural fusions of East and West, the cultic, mythological, and philosophical lenses through which to approach divinity. Their remix of this previous tradition was largely accomplished on the eve of Alexander’s conquests, which is how “Classical” Greek culture became exported to the rest of the world as “Hellenism.” But even in the repackaging, direct focus on the Presocratics endured well into Late Antiquity, where they were regularly cited and commented on by, for example, Simplicius as philosophical authorities whose ideas helped to explain the more doctrinally foundational ideas of Plato and Aristotle. Their lives were of interest to Diogenes Laertius, the philosophical biographer who is our main source in some instances both for knowledge of the lives of the Presocratics and of other philosophers whose work has not survived in whole, especially the Stoics. We don’t get any of the “Classics” stuff without these cultural accomplishments of the Iron Age Greeks.
But more broadly, on the other hand, the world as we know it would be very, very different without them too. This is a dispatch theoretically devoted to the intersection of classics, religion, and theology, so I’ll briefly give the impact of the Presocratics on religion, which I have treated at far greater length elsewhere in other articles: in a nutshell, the Presocratic first principle—variously understood as the infinite, as “That Which Is” (Parmenidean ho eōn), as Mind, as Spirit, and as intelligent Fire, Zeus—is the precedent for Plato’s Form of the Good which is later Plotinus’s One, and Jews, Christians, and Muslims equated this first principle with the biblical God. The historic concept of God that one finds in the major theologians and philosophers of these three traditions—not always represented in popular belief, but all the same—owes as much to Heraclitus as Origen or to Thales as to Gregory the Theologian. (If you know Greek, both of these pairings are alliterative.) For Christians in particular, we also owe no small degree of our sense of devotional interiority to our Greek precedents. There’s no Augustine’s Confessiones or Ignatius of Loyola’s Exercises without the deeply personal poetry of someone like Sappho as its precedent, however distant (and, in Augustine’s case at least, they’re not really that dissimilar, when you think about it).
Beyond religion, there are plenty of ways that the Archaic Age constitutes an essential fundament of our medieval and modern worlds. I have mentioned a few times that this is the period in which the Solonian reforms of the Athenian politeia took on their first democratic expression; this was not democracy was we think about it, in which freedom and voting power are exercised by each individual human being (Athens was, again, horrific to women, slaves, and foreigners). More than half of the countries on Earth now have democratic states that owe something to the Greek system (as mediated via Rome, Europe, and the US). The Archaic Age is also around the time when the phalanx was adopted as the fundamental Greek military unit on land—which would later surpass the armies of Xerxes at Marathon and Plataea, and stall at the Gates of Thermpoylae. The trireme came into use at the same time, without which Themistocles would not have been victorious at Salamis. Whether the world would have been better or worse had Persia prevailed over its fledgling Western periphery, and I think one can make arguments both directions, that it would have been different is unquestionable (as different as it might have been had Alexander tried to succeed in Sicily and Italy where the Athenians failed, preventing the rise of Rome). But it is chiefly the ideas—especially the philosophical and religious ones, including the cosmological ones that now overlap with what we call science—that have remained most compelling for us. Democritus was the first person to think about atoms, though his ἄτομοι are very different from the modern scientific picture of them; Democritean atomism was taken up by the Epicureans, who also believed in things like a spatial multiverse, the non-provident activity of the gods, and the mortality of the soul, all of which, whether we agree with them or not (I like the multiverse; I at least think that interventionist models of providence are problematic and at that level I agree with Epicurus/Thucydides that the gods do not directly interfere with mundane causality as though they were competitors; I think the soul is immortal, but I also think that this person that I am as a combination of soul and body will not endure in its present form forever and that its only chance at immortalization is by assumption into the higher principle through virtue; etc.), are certainly in vogue.7 The Pythagorean and Empedoclean concept of metempsychosis was adopted by Platonists, and while the modern West largely plays with rebirth via interaction with South and East Asian traditions, the temptation from within towards an eschatology of rebirth has resurfaced from time to time in Western thought.
We should not, though, reduce their importance to their afterlives, as though the only thing that makes the Archaics important is the way they were later received. Nicolson, answering his own question of “What can we take from these people, so far away in time and mind?”, remarks that “It helps, maybe, to forget the history, both the historical moment to which they belonged and the aeons that spread out between us and them, the vast, troubled plains of European history, and imagine instead that they are here now with us, speaking to us, addressing us as people” (287). This is his own real accomplishment: he invites us to talk, not to the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman thinkers that witness to them, but to they themselves who plowed the waves of time and space with the ships (naus) of their own minds (nous), and learned to live on the fault lines of so many intersecting margins, before and in some very real sense first.
The translation is Sophus Helle. Helle, Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 12.
The text and commentary are taken from Felix Budelmann, Greek Lyric: A Selection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). The translation is mine, but I have taken Budelmann’s advice at various points in the text that are relatively difficult to render due to manuscript issues and Archaic dialectical concerns.
Budelmann, Greek Lyric, 113.
Budelmann, Greek Lyric, 113.
For time and convenience I’ve borrowed Peter Green’s translation. See Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Peter Green (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018). Green belongs to a school of transliteration that may bother readers more familiar with the tendency of older classics to render Greek names and words into English via their Latinate equivalents, so I’ve simplified by changing the names accordingly.
I here register a complaint with another recent book about the Presocratics, Carlo Rovelli’s Anaximander and the Birth of Science (New York: Penguin/Riverhead, 2023). As atheist pop-scientists that try to make science accessible to lay readers and engage in a bit of philosophizing about their work go, I like Rovelli better than, say, Neil Degrasse Tyson, who has a petulant streak in his condescending belief that science can do philosophy’s job better than philosophy (and mysticism better than religion, for that matter; that said, Cosmos is a really fun watch). Specifically, my complaint is with the idea that Anaximander's work is a.) somehow novel compared to the other Presocratics because it is supposedly more “scientific” than their work and b.) that it is more directly patrimonial for the modern sciences than the others. I suppose in some senses that could be true, but in general, the worldview of all of the Presocratics is very different from the naturalist materialism Rovelli wants to marshal him in service of.
This is excellent. Thanks for writing it.
The other problem with Neil degrasse Tyson is that he is an alleged sex pest.