~ARLY GREEK PHILOSOPH~ BY THE LATE JOHN ~URNET FELi.OW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY IItpl µl11 TWII 6nw11 T7']11 6.;>..1]0eia11 f1TK61rou11, Ta o' 6J1Ta inrl;>..af1011 Ei11a, Tct al<T0'TjTO. µ.611011.-ARISTOTJ.E. FOURTH EDITION A. & C. BLACK, LTD. 4, 5 & 6 -SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.1 1930 P,11,ted III Great Britarn. Fml Editio11 published April 1892. Second Ed1t:"o11 ]mu 1908. Third Editio11 September 1920. NOTE ON THE FOURTH EDITION. The present is a reprint of the third edition, but the oppor- tunity has been taken to incorporate a couple of additional refe r enc es and one correction which the author had noted in his own copy and to correct some mi'sprints and trivial slips. St. Andrews, March, 1930. w. L. LORIMER. PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION As a third edition of this work has been called for, and as it has been translated into German 1 and into French,2 it must have served some useful purpose, in spite of its imperfec- tions, of which I am naturally more conscious than any one. The present edition was prepared under the stress of war conditions, which much abridged the leisure of university teachers, and its publication has been delayed longer than I could have wished for the same reason. My aim has been to show that a new thing came into the world with the early Ionian teachers-the thing we call science-and that they first pointed the way which Europe has followed ever since, so that, as I have said elsewhere, it is an adequate description of science to say that it is "thinking about the world in the Greek way." That is why science has never existed except among peoples who have come under the influence of Greece. When the first edition of Early Greek Philosophy was published, twenty-eight years ago, the subject was still generally treated in this country from a Hegelian point of view, and many of my conclusions were regarded as para- doxes. Some of these are now accepted by most people, but there are two which still provoke opposition. In the first place, I ventured to call Parmenides "the father of Materialism," and it is still maintained in some quarters that he was an Idealist (a modern term, which is most 1 Dz'e Anfange der grt"echischen I'hz'losophie, aus dtm Englischen ubersetzt von Else Schml:l (Berlin, Teubner, 1913). 2 L' Aurore de la Phz'losophz'e grecque, edition franpaise, par Aug. Reynzond (Paris, Payot, 1919). V EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY V1 misleading when applied to Greek philosophy) on the ground that "the very essence of materialism is that this material world, this world of sense, is the real world," 1 and that Parmenides certainly denied all reality to the world of sense. Undoubtedly he did, and, if I had used the term Materialism in the sense alleged, I should have been talking nonsense. As I understand it, however, the" matter" of the M_aterialist is not a possible object of sense at all; it is as much, or more, an ens rationis as Spirit, and the "being" of Par- menides is the first clear attempt to apprehend this non- sensuous reality. That is, in fact, the main thesis of my book, and the vital point of the argument is my insistence . on the derivation of Atomism (which is admittedly material- istic) from Eleaticism, in accordance with the express state- ments of Aristotle and Theophrastos (pp. 333 sqq.). If that is wrong, my whole treatment of the subject is wrong. The other paradox which has still to win acceptance is my contention that the opposite view which fu:ids reality not in matter, but in form, the Platonist view in short, goes back to the Pythagoreans, and was already familiar to Sokrates, though it was not formulated in a perfectly clear way till the days of the Platonic Academy. I am convinced that this can only be made good by a fresh interpretation in detail of the Platonic dialogues, and I am now engaged on that task. It is necessary to make it quite clear that . the interpretation current in the nineteenth century was based on certain assumptions, for which no evidence has ever been offered, and which are most improbabl~ in them- selves. I cannot discuss this further here, but I hope to have an early opportunity of doing so. J.B. ST. ANDREWS, July I 920. 1 \V. T. Stace, A Critz'cal History of Greek Philosophy (London, 1920), pp. 46 sqq. CONTENTS PAGES 1-30 INTRODUCTION • 31-38 ~OTE ON THE SouRCES CHAP. 39-79 I. THE M1LESIAN ScttooL. 80-129 II. SCIENCE AND RELIGION . 130-168 III. HERAKLEITOS OF EPHESOS 169-196 IV. PARMENIDES OF ELEA 197-250 V. EMPEDOKLES OF AKRAGAS . 2 51-275 VI. A)<AXAGORAS OF KLAZOMENAI • 276-309 VII. THE PYTHAGOREANS . 310-329 VIII. THE YouNGER ELEATICS 330-349 IX. LEUKIPPOS OF MILETOS • 3 50-361 X. ECLECTICISM AND REACTION 363-364 APPENDIX 365-375 INDEX VII ABBREVIATIONS Arch. Archiv fur Geschichtt! de1 PhilosotJhie. Berlin, I 888- 1920. BEARE. Greek Theon·es of Elementary Cognition, by John I. Beare. Oxford, 1906. DIELS Dox. Doxographi graeci. Hermannus Diels. Berlin, 1879. DIELS Vors. Die Fragmente der Vorsokr?Ztiker, von Hermann Diels, Dritte Auflage. Berlin, 1912. G0MPERZ. Greek Thinkers, by Theodor Gomperz, Authorised (English) Edition, vol. i. London, 1901. JACOBY. AjJollodors Chronik, von Felix Jacoby (Philo!. Unters. Heft xvi.). Berlin, 1902. R. P. Histon·a PhilosojJhiae Graecae, H. Ritter et L. Preller. Editio octava, quam curavit Eduardus Wellmann. Gotha, 1898. ZELLER. Die PhilosojJhie der Gn'echen, dargestellt von Dr. Eduard Zeller. Erster Theil, Filnfte Auflage. Leipzig, 1892. EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY INTRODUCTION I. IT was not till the traditional view of the world and the The cos- 1 customary rules of life had broken down, that the Greeks ~~;;~~:: began to feel the needs which philosophies of nature and of early Greek of conduct seek to satisfy. Nor were those needs felt philo- . f d sophy. a 11 at once. The ancestral maxims o con uct 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 had 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 pre- judices of the unscientific. Later still, the prevailing interest in logical matters raised the question of the origin and validity of knowledge; while, about the same time, the break-down of traditional morality gave rise to Ethics. The period which precedes the rise of Logic and Ethics has thus a distinctive character of its own, and may fitly be treated apart.1 1 It will be observed that Demokritos falls outside the period thus defined. The common practice of treating this younger contemporary of Sokrates along with the " Pre-Socratics " obscures the historical develop- n1ent altogether. Demokritos comes after Protagoras, and he has to face the problems of knowledge and conduct far more seriously _th~? bis pr~- rdecessors had done (see Brochard, " Protagoras et Democnte, Ar~h. u. / p.368). I I f I I I EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 2 II. It must, however, be remembered that the world The traditional was already very old when science and philosophy began. view of the world. In particular, the Aegean Sea had been the seat of a high civilisation from the Neolithic age onwards, a civilisation as ancient as that of Egypt or of Babylon, and superior to either in most things that matter. It is becoming clearer every day that the Greek civilisation of later days was mainly the revival and continuation of this, though it no doubt received certain new and important elements from tlf less civilised northern peoples who for a time arrested its development. The original Mediterranean population must have far outnumbered the intruders, and must have assimilated and absorbed them in a few generations, except in a state like Sparta, which deliberately set itself to resist the process. At any rate, it is to the older race we owe Greek Art and Greek Science.1 It is a remarkable fact 1 See Sir Arthur Evans, "The Minoan and Mycenean Element in Hellenic Life " (J.H.S. xxxii. 277 sqq.), where it is contended (p. 278) that "The people whom we discern in the new dawn are not the pale- skinned northerners-the 'yellow-haired Achaeans' and the rest-but essentially the dark-haired, brown-complexioned race . . . of whom we find the earlier portraiture in the Minoan and Mycenean wall-paintings." But, if the Greeks of historical times were the same people as the " Minoans," why should Sir Arthur Evans hesitate to call the " Minoans " Greeks? The Achaians and Dorians have no special claim to t)J.e name; for the Graes of Boiotia, who brought it to Cumae, were of the older race. I can attach no intelligible meaning either to the term "pre-Hellenic." If it means that the Aegean race was there before the somewhat un- important Achaian tribe which accidentally gave its name later to the whole nation, that is true, but irrelevant. If, on the other hand, it implies that there was a real change in the population of the Aegean at any time since the end of the Neolithic age, that is untrue, as Sir Arthur Evans himself maintains. If it means (as it probably does) that the Greek language was introduced into the Aegean by the northerners, there is no evidence of that, and it is contrary to analogy. The Greek language, as we know it, is in its vocabulary a mixed speech, like our own, 'but its essential structure is far liker that of the Indo-Iranian languages than that of any northern branch of Indo-European speech. For instance, the augment is common and peculiar to Sanskrit, Old Persian, and Greek. The Greek language cannot have differed very much from the Persiai 1 in the second millennium B.C. The popular distinction between centur,,--i and satem languages_ is wholly misleading and based on a secondary phenomenon, as is shown by the fact that the Romance languages have\ become satem languages in historical times. It would be more to the point to note that Greek, like Old Indian and Old Persian, represents the INTRODUCTION 3 that every one of the men whose work we are about to study was an Ionian, except Empedokles of Akragas, and this exception is perhaps more apparent than real. Akragas , was founded from the Rhodian colony of Gela, its ol1wrr17~ was himself a Rhodian, and Rhodes, though officially Dorian, had been a centre of the early Aegean civilisation. We may fairly assume that the emigrants belonged mainly to the older population rather than to the new Dorian aristocracy. Pythagoras founded his society in the Achaian city of Kroton, but he himself was an Ionian from Samas. This being so, we must be prepared to find that the Greeks of historical times who first tried to understand the world were not at all in the position of men setting out on a hitherto untrodden path. The remains of Aegean art prove that there must have been a tolerably consistent view of th~ world in existence already, though we cannot hope to recover it in detail till the records are deciphered. The ceremony represented on the sarcophagus of Hagia Triada implies some quite definite view as to the state of the dead, and we may be sure that the Aegean people were as capable of developing theological speculation as were the Egyptians and Babylonians. We shall expect to find traces of this in later _days, and it may be said at once that things like the fragments of Pherekydes of Syros are in- explicable except as survivals of some such speculation. There is no ground for supposing that this was borrowed from Egypt, though no doubt these early civilisations all influenced one another. The Egyptians may have borrowed from Crete as readily as the Cretans from Egypt, and there was a seed of life in the sea civilisation which was somehow lacking in that of the great rivers. On the other hand, it is clear that the northern invaders must have assisted the free development of the Greek sonant n :n the word for "hundred" (ha.r6v=satam, satem) by a, and to classify it with them as a satem language on that ground. EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 4 genius by breaking up the powerful monarchies of earlier days and, above all, by checking the growth of a super- stition like that which ultimately stifled Egypt and Babylon. That there was once a real danger of this is suggested by certain features in the Aegean remains. On the other hand, the worship of Apollo seems to have been brought from the North by the Achaians,1 and indeed what has been called the Olympian religion was, so far as we can see, derived mainly from that source. Still, the artistic form it assumed bears the stamp of the Mediterranean peoples, and it was chiefly in that form it appealed to them. It could not become oppressive to them as the old Aegean religion might very possibly have done. It was probably due to the Achaians that the Greeks never had a priestly class, and that may well have had something to do with the rise of free science among them. 1. Homer. III. We see the working of these influences clearly in Homer. Though he doubtle·ss belonged to the older race himself and used its language,2 it is for the courts of Achaian princes he sings, and the gods and heroes he celebrates are mostly Achaian. 3 That is why we find so few traces of the traditional view of the world in the epic. The gods have become frankly human, and everything primitive ·is kept out of sight. There are, of course, vestiges of the early 1 Sec Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, vol. iv. pp. 98 sqq. 2 This is surely a simpler hypothesis than that of Sir Arthur Evans, who postulates (loc. cit. p. 288) "an earlier Minoan epic taken over into Greek." The epic dialect has most points of contact with Arcadian and Cypriote, and it is wholly improbable that the Arcadians came from the North. There are sufficient parallels for the prowess of the conqueror being c~lebrated by a bard of the conquered race (Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece, vol. i. p. 664). Does this explain the name #oµ,,,pos, " hostage " ? 3 Professor Ridgeway (Early Age ojGreece, i. p. 674) points out that the specifically Achaian names, such as Achilles, Odysseus, Aiakos, Aias, Laertes and Peleus, cannot be explained from the Greek language, while the names of the older race, such as Herakles, Erichthonios, Erysichthon, etc., can. No doubt Agamemnon and Menelaos have Greek names, but that is because Atreus owed his kingship to the marriage of Pelops with a princess of the· older race. It is an instance of the process of assimilation which was going on everywhere.