Ancient Philosophy

Pre-Socratics

The Emergence of Greek Civilization

Throughout history, nothing is more astonishing and difficult to explain than the sudden emergence of civilization in Greece. Many elements that constitute civilization had long existed in Egypt and Mesopotamia, spreading from there to neighboring regions. However, certain critical aspects were missing until they were provided by the Greeks. Their achievements in art and literature are well-known, yet what they accomplished in the realm of pure intellect is even more remarkable. They invented mathematics, science, and philosophy; they placed history at the forefront instead of mere chronicle; they engaged freely in contemplation of the nature of the world and the purpose of life, unshackled by the constraints of any traditional orthodoxy. This transformation was so extraordinary that people have remained in awe, indulging in mystical discussions about the Greek genius up to the present day. However, it is entirely possible to understand the development of Greece in scientific terms, and such an inquiry is well worth the time invested.

Philosophy begins with Thales. Fortunately, we can easily ascertain the period in which he lived, as Thales predicted an eclipse that occurred, according to astronomical calculations, in 585 B.C.E. Thus, philosophy and science—initially indistinguishable—emerged in the early sixth century. What transpired in Greece and neighboring lands prior to this period? While one can only speculate, our modern era benefits from archaeological advancements that provide far more knowledge than was available to our forebears.

The art of writing was invented in Egypt around 4000 B.C.E., with Babylon not far behind. In each country, writing began with pictograms depicting the subjects in question. These drawings soon took on a conventional character, with words represented not by images but by ideograms, as is still the case in modern China. Over millennia, this cumbersome system evolved into an alphabetic script.

The early development of civilization in Egypt and Mesopotamia can be attributed to the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates, which made agriculture the easiest and most productive endeavor. It bears similarity to the civilization encountered by the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru. The deified king wielded despotic power; in Egypt, he owned all the land. The king maintained a particularly intimate relationship with the supreme deity, who crowned a polytheistic religion. There existed both military and priestly aristocracies. Should the king prove weak or preoccupied with a protracted war, the priestly aristocracy felt empowered to encroach upon royal authority. The lands were cultivated by slaves owned by the king, the aristocracy, and the priesthood.

Significant theological differences exist between Egyptian and Babylonian beliefs. The Egyptians focused more on death, believing that the souls of the deceased descended into the underworld, where they awaited judgment by Osiris, whose decision was determined by their earthly conduct. They believed that, ultimately, the soul would return to the body. This conviction was reflected in the embalming of the dead and the construction of grand pyramids, built by various pharaohs from the end of the fourth millennium to the early third millennium B.C.E. Thereafter, Egyptian civilization adopted an increasingly stereotypical nature, with progress becoming impossible due to religious conservatism. Around 1800 B.C.E., Egypt was invaded by the Semitic Hyksos, who ruled the land for approximately two centuries. They exerted little significant influence on Egypt, but their presence likely contributed to the spread of Egyptian civilization into Syria and Palestine.

The history of Babylon was more martial than that of Egypt. The ruling race was initially not Semitic but rather the so-called Sumerians, whose origins remain obscure. The Sumerians invented cuneiform writing, which was subsequently adopted by the conquering Semites. Before Babylon rose to prominence and established an empire, various independent city-states existed, often at war with one another. The gods of other cities became subordinate, while the god of Babylon, Marduk, assumed a position akin to that which Zeus later occupied in the Greek pantheon. A similar situation occurred in Egypt, but much earlier.

Like other ancient religions, the religions of Egypt and Babylon initially revolved around fertility cults. The earth was personified as female, while the sun represented the male. The bull was commonly seen as the embodiment of male fertility, and bull gods were universally recognized. The highest among the goddesses in Babylon was Ishtar, the goddess of the earth. Throughout Western Asia, the Great Mother was revered under various names. Greek colonists, establishing temples to this goddess in Asia Minor, named her Artemis and adopted the existing cult, giving rise to the “Diana of the Ephesians.” Christianity transformed her into the Virgin Mary. It was at the Council of Ephesus that the title “Mother of God,” associated with our Blessed Virgin, was officially sanctioned.

Political motives, particularly where religion was intertwined with imperial governance, significantly contributed to the transformation of its primitive characteristics. A god or goddess became associated with the state and was expected to facilitate not only bountiful harvests but also military victories. The wealthy priestly caste developed the ritualistic aspects and theology, incorporating several deities from the constituent parts of the empire into the pantheon.

As a result of the connection between religion and government, deities also became linked with morality. Legislators received their codes from the divine; thus, transgression of the law became a manifestation of disbelief. The earliest known legal code is that of Hammurabi, a Babylonian king (circa 21st century B.C.E.); as the king claimed, this code was imparted to him by Marduk. Over time, the connection between religion and morality in ancient times grew increasingly tight-knit.

In contrast to the Egyptian focus, Babylonian religion was more concerned with prosperity in this world than with happiness in the afterlife. Magic, divination, and astrology, while not exclusive to Babylon, were nonetheless developed there to a greater extent than elsewhere. It was chiefly through Babylon that these practices gained influence in the later periods of antiquity. Babylon also contributed to science: the division of the day into 24 hours, the circle into 360 degrees, and the discovery of the periodicity of eclipses, which enabled the accurate prediction of lunar eclipses and a reasonable estimation for solar ones. As will be seen later, these Babylonian achievements were utilized by Thales.

Both Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations were agricultural, whereas the surrounding tribes initially maintained pastoral lifestyles. The rise of trade, initially exclusively maritime, introduced a new element. Until the first millennium B.C.E., weapons were crafted from bronze, and tribes lacking the necessary metals on their own territory had to acquire them through trade or piracy. Piracy was a temporary solution. In regions where social and political conditions became sufficiently stable, trade emerged as a more profitable endeavor. The island of Crete seemingly took the lead in trade, as for approximately eleven centuries, likely from the 25th to the 14th century B.C.E., Crete fostered an advanced artistic culture known as Minoan civilization. What has survived of Cretan art conveys a sense of vitality and nearly decadent luxury; it stands in stark contrast to the forbidding somberness of Egyptian temples.

Little was known about this significant civilization until the excavations conducted by Sir Arthur Evans and others. It was a maritime civilization, closely linked (except during the time of the Hyksos) with Egypt. Egyptian paintings reveal that Cretan sailors engaged in substantial trade between Egypt and Crete. This trade reached its zenith around 1500 B.C.E. Cretan religion apparently shared many elements with the religions of Syria and Asia Minor, but its art displays a greater resemblance to Egyptian art, although Cretan artistry is highly original and astonishingly cheerful. The center of Cretan civilization was the so-called “Palace of Minos” in Knossos, which is remembered in the traditions of classical Greece. Cretan palaces were grand structures but were likely destroyed by Greek invaders around the end of the 14th century B.C.E. The chronology of Cretan history is based on Egyptian artifacts found in Crete and Cretan artifacts discovered in Egypt. Here, our knowledge is heavily reliant on archaeological evidence.

The Cretans worshipped a goddess, or perhaps several goddesses. The most certain of these deities was the "Lady of the Animals," who was a huntress and may have been a precursor to the classical Artemis. She, it seems, was also a mother figure, with her young son being the only male god, aside from the "Master of the Animals." There is some evidence of a belief in an afterlife, wherein, as in Egyptian beliefs, earthly deeds are rewarded or punished. However, judging by their art, the Cretans appear to have been a cheerful people, not greatly burdened by gloomy superstitions. They delighted in bullfighting, during which both men and women, as toreadors, displayed astonishing acrobatic skills. These bullfights were religious festivals, and Sir Arthur Evans believed that the performers were from the highest aristocracy, though this view is not universally accepted. The surviving paintings are full of dynamism and realism.

The Cretans had a form of linear writing, though it has not yet been deciphered. At home, they were peaceful, and their cities were not surrounded by fortifications. Without doubt, their protection lay in their naval power.

Before its fall, the Minoan culture spread to mainland Greece around 1600 BCE, where it continued in a gradually degenerating form until nearly 900 BCE. This mainland civilization is known as Mycenaean, and we know of it through royal tombs and the hilltop fortresses, which suggest a greater fear of military attack than was present in Crete. Both the tombs and fortresses continued to captivate the imagination of classical Greece. The earliest works of art in the palaces were indeed either Cretan or closely related to Cretan art. The Mycenaean civilization, glimpsed through the haze of legend, was described by Homer.

Much remains uncertain about the Mycenaeans. Did they owe their civilization to conquest by the Cretans? Did they speak Greek or belong to an older, native race? No definite answers can be given, but it seems likely that they were Greek-speaking conquerors, and that at least the aristocracy consisted of fair-haired invaders from the north, who brought with them the Greek language. The Greeks entered Greece in three successive waves: first the Ionians, followed by the Achaeans, and lastly the Dorians. The Ionians, though conquerors, seem to have assimilated Cretan culture as thoroughly as the Romans later absorbed Greek civilization. But they were dispersed and almost entirely expelled by their successors, the Achaeans. From Hittite tablets discovered near the city of Boghazkoy, we know that the Achaeans created a large organized empire in the 14th century BCE. The Mycenaean civilization, weakened by war between the Ionians and Achaeans, was practically destroyed by the Dorians—the last of the Greek invaders. While earlier conquerors had largely adopted the Minoan religion, the Dorians preserved the native Indo-European religion of their ancestors. However, the religion of the Mycenaean era persisted, especially among the lower classes. Thus, the religion of classical Greece became a mixture of two traditions. In fact, some of the classical goddesses were of Mycenaean origin.

Though this description seems plausible, we should remember that we do not know for certain whether the Mycenaeans were Greeks. What we do know is that their civilization collapsed, that around the time of its decline iron replaced bronze, and that naval supremacy for a time passed to the Phoenicians.

In the final period of the Mycenaean era and after its fall, some of the conquerors settled down as landowners, while others ventured further, first to the islands and Asia Minor, and later to Sicily and southern Italy, where they founded cities sustained by maritime trade. It was in these coastal cities that the Greeks first made a qualitatively new contribution to civilization; the ascendancy of Athens came later, and when it did, it too was linked to naval power.

The Greek mainland is a mountainous region, much of it barren, though there are fertile valleys with access to the sea, cut off from one another by mountains, which hinder easy land communication. In these valleys, small independent communities arose, engaged in agriculture, centered around a city and usually located near the sea. In such circumstances, it was natural that when the population of a community outgrew its resources, those unable to live off the land were forced to turn to the sea. Cities on the Greek mainland often founded colonies in places where it was easier to sustain life than at home. Thus, in the earliest historical period, the Greeks of Asia Minor, Sicily, and Italy were wealthier than those of mainland Greece.

Social systems varied greatly across different regions of Greece. In Sparta, a small aristocracy lived off the labor of enslaved helots from another race. In poorer agricultural regions, the population mainly consisted of peasants who worked their land with the help of their families. But where trade and industry flourished, free citizens grew rich by exploiting slaves: men in the mines, women in textile production. In Ionia, slaves were primarily from neighboring barbarian tribes, and they were generally acquired through warfare. As wealth increased, noble women became more isolated and later played little role in various aspects of Greek civilization, with the exception of Sparta and Lesbos.

The development followed a fairly uniform pattern: first monarchy, then aristocracy, followed by a cycle of tyranny and democracy. Kings did not hold absolute power as in Egypt or Babylon; they ruled with the advice of a council of elders and could not flagrantly violate customs. "Tyranny" did not necessarily mean bad governance but referred to the rule of a man whose claim to power was not based on inheritance. "Democracy" meant rule by all citizens, excluding women and slaves. The first tyrants, akin to the Medici, gained power by being the wealthiest members of the ruling plutocracies. Often, their wealth came from ownership of gold and silver mines, made more profitable by the new institution of coinage, which had come from the neighboring Lydian kingdom of Ionia. It seems that coinage was invented shortly before the 7th century BCE.

One of the most important outcomes of Greek trade and piracy—activities that were hardly distinguishable at first—was the acquisition of the art of writing. Although writing had existed for millennia in Egypt and Babylon, and the Minoan Cretans had a form of writing that turned out to be a variant of Greek, the time when the Greeks adopted alphabetic writing remains unknown. They learned this skill from the Phoenicians, who, like other inhabitants of Syria, had been influenced by Egypt and Babylon and had retained naval and maritime trade dominance until the rise of Greek cities in Ionia, Italy, and Sicily. In the 14th century BCE, Syrians still used Babylonian cuneiform in their correspondence with Akhenaten, the "heretical" pharaoh of Egypt, but Hiram of Tyre (969—936 BCE) already used the Phoenician alphabet, which likely developed from Egyptian writing. The Egyptians originally employed purely pictorial script, but gradually the drawings became more symbolic, representing syllables (the initial syllables of the names of depicted objects), and finally, individual letters by the principle of, for instance, "L stood for 'Lance,' which struck a frog." This last achievement, completed in a finished form not by the Egyptians but by the Phoenicians, marked the creation of the alphabet with all its advantages. The Greeks, borrowing this invention from the Phoenicians, modified the alphabet to serve their language, making important innovations by adding vowels, while the Phoenician alphabet consisted only of consonantal signs. There can be no doubt that acquiring this efficient writing system greatly accelerated the progress of Greek civilization.

Homer was the first distinguished product of Hellenic civilization. All judgments concerning Homer are speculative, but perhaps the most reasonable view is that the name conceals not one individual, but a series of poets. The completion of the Iliad and Odyssey likely required around two hundred years. Some believe these epics were composed between 750 and 550 BCE, while others maintain that "Homer" was almost completed by the end of the 8th century BCE. The Homeric poems, in the form we now know them, were brought to Athens by Lycurgus, who ruled intermittently from 560 to 527 BCE. From this point onward, Athenian youth memorized Homer, which became the most important part of their education. In some parts of Greece, particularly Sparta, Homer gained recognition only at a later time.

Homer's epics, much like the chivalric romances of the late Middle Ages, reflected the worldview of a refined aristocracy, which dismissed certain prejudices still preserved among the populace as plebeian. In later times, many of these prejudices resurfaced. Based on anthropological data, modern scholars conclude that, far from being a product of primitive barbarism, Homer was a reformer who upheld the higher ideals of urban enlightenment. He resembled the rationalizers of ancient myths in the 18th century. The Olympian gods, representing religion in Homer, were by no means the only objects of Greek worship, whether in Homer's time or later. Folk religion contained darker, wilder elements, driven underground by Greek intellect during its flourishing period, but they awaited only a moment of weakness or fear to reemerge. In times of decline, beliefs discarded by Homer and half-buried during the classical period continued to survive, a fact that explains much of what would otherwise appear contradictory or surprising.

Primitive religion everywhere bore a tribal, rather than personal, character. It involved specific rituals intended, through sympathetic magic, to further the tribe's interests, especially concerning fertility—of crops, animals, and people. The winter solstice was seen as a time when the sun needed encouragement to regain its strength, and spring and harvest also required corresponding rites. These rituals often provoked strong collective excitement, in which individuals lost their sense of separateness and felt themselves as one with the tribe. At a certain stage of religious evolution, all over the world, rituals involving the killing and consumption of sacred animals and humans existed. Different regions experienced this stage at different times. The offering of humans to the gods generally persisted longer than the ritual consumption of human victims. In Greece, human sacrifice was occasionally practiced even in the early historical period. Fertility rites without such cruelties were common throughout Greece, particularly the Eleusinian Mysteries, which in their symbolism were essentially agricultural festivals.

It must be admitted that religion in Homer is not particularly religious. His gods are fully human; they differ from men only by their immortality and possession of superhuman powers. Morally, they are not superior to men, and it is hard to see how they could inspire much reverence. In some passages, likely of later origin, Homer treats them with a Voltairean irreverence. The genuinely religious feelings found in Homer relate not so much to the Olympian gods as to more nebulous entities like Fate, Necessity, or Destiny, which even Zeus must obey. The concept of Fate had a profound influence on Greek thought and may have been one of the sources from which science derived its belief in natural law.

Homer's gods are the gods of a conquering aristocracy, not the gods of those who worked the land for its fertility. Gilbert Murray writes: "The gods of most nations claimed to have created the world. The Olympians did not. At most, all they ever did was conquer it... What do they do after having conquered their realms? Do they govern? Do they promote agriculture? Engage in trade or industry? Not at all. Why should they toil honestly? They find it easier to live off annual revenues and strike down with lightning those who fail to pay. They are conquering leaders, royal pirates. They fight, feast, play, make music; they drink to excess and laugh uproariously at the lame smith who comes to them. They fear no one but their own king. They never lie, except when it comes to war or love."

Homer’s heroes are not particularly virtuous either. The leading family is that of Pelops, but it could hardly serve as a model of happy family life. "Tantalus, the Asiatic founder of the dynasty, began his career with an offense against the gods. He is said to have attempted to deceive the gods into consuming human flesh, killing his own son Pelops for this purpose. The latter, miraculously restored to life, in turn angered the gods. He won the famous chariot race against his opponent Oenomaus, king of Pisa, with the help of the latter’s charioteer, Myrtilus, whom he promised a reward but later threw into the sea to rid himself of his accomplice. The curse passed on to Pelops' sons—Atreus and Thyestes—taking the form of what the Greeks called arc, a powerful, if not irresistible, impulse toward crime. Thyestes, by seducing his brother’s wife, managed to steal the ’fortune’ of the family—the famed golden-fleeced ram. In turn, Atreus, who had ensured his brother's exile, pretended to wish for reconciliation and invited Thyestes to a feast, where he served him the flesh of his own sons. The curse was then inherited by Atreus' son Agamemnon, who offended Artemis by killing her sacred deer, and was forced, to appease the goddess and secure safe passage for his fleet to Troy, to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. In turn, he was killed by his unfaithful wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover Aegisthus, Thyestes’ surviving son. Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, avenged his father by killing his mother and Aegisthus."

Homer, as a complete and consummate achievement, was a product of Ionia, that is, a part of Hellenic Asia Minor and the adjacent islands. The Homeric epics were written down and preserved in their present, finalized form no later than sometime during the 6th century BCE. It is in this very century that Greek science, philosophy, and mathematics begin. At the same time, in other parts of the world, events of extraordinary importance were unfolding. Confucius, Buddha, and Zoroaster, if they existed at all, may be attributed to this same century. In the middle of this century, Cyrus founded the Persian Empire. The Greek cities of Ionia, granted limited autonomy by the Persians, by the end of the 6th century undertook a futile revolt, which was crushed by Darius. The best men of these cities became exiles. Some philosophers of this period were refugees, wandering from city to city within the still unconquered parts of the Hellenic world, spreading the civilization that had until then been concentrated mainly in Ionia. In their wanderings, they encountered favorable reception.

Xenophanes, whose period of activity flourished in the latter part of the 6th century BCE, recounts:

This is what ought to be spoken of in wintertime,
By the hearth, lying on soft beds, well-sated,
Sipping sweet wine, nibbling on peas:
'Who are you? Where are you from? How old are you, dearest?
How old were you when the Median came?’

The rest of Greece managed to preserve its independence in the battles of Salamis and Plataea, after which Ionia was freed for an extended period. Greece was fragmented into a multitude of small independent states, each consisting of a city and the surrounding countryside. The level of civilization varied greatly across different parts of the Greek world, with only a few cities contributing to pan-Hellenic achievements. Sparta, about which I will speak more later, was significant in military matters but not at all in cultural terms. Corinth was a wealthy and prosperous city, a major trading center, but it too was poor in great men.

There were also purely agrarian, rural societies, like the famous Arcadia, which to city dwellers appeared idyllic but in reality was filled with ancient barbaric horrors. The Arcadians worshiped Hermes and Pan. They had many fertility cults, in which often a simple upright pillar took the place of a god’s statue. The goat symbolized fertility, as the peasants were too poor to own bulls. When food supplies ran low, the statue of Pan was punished. (Such practices still occur in remote Chinese villages.) There was also an entire tribe of people considered to be werewolves, likely due to the survival of human sacrifices and cannibalism. According to legend, anyone who tasted the flesh of a sacrificed human would become a werewolf. There was also a cave dedicated to Zeus Lycaeus (Zeus the Wolf); in this cave, no one found salvation, and anyone who entered would die within a year. All these superstitions still flourished in classical times.

Pan, who originally bore the name “Paon” (as some believe), meaning either “feeder” or “shepherd,” acquired his more famous title after his cult was adopted by Athens in the 5th century BCE, following the Greco-Persian wars. This title was interpreted as signifying the All-Encompassing Deity.

However, in ancient Greece, we can find much that might be considered religion in our modern sense of the term. This religion is not connected with the Olympian gods, but with Dionysus, or Bacchus. This name naturally conjures in our minds the image of a god with a dubious reputation — the god of wine and drunkenness. Yet the way in which the cult of Bacchus gave rise to a profound mysticism, which had such a significant influence on many philosophers and even played a role in shaping Christian theology, is remarkable and must be understood by anyone who seeks to study the development of Greek thought.

Dionysus, or Bacchus, was originally a Thracian god. The Thracians were far less civilized than the Greeks, who regarded them as barbarians. Like all peoples with primitive agriculture, the Thracians had their fertility cults, and they worshipped a god who promoted fertility—this god was Bacchus. It was never entirely clear whether Bacchus appeared in the form of a man or a bull. When the Thracians learned to brew beer, they began to associate the state of intoxication with divinity and offered praise to Bacchus. Later, when they discovered wine and began to consume it, the worship of Bacchus increased even more. His role as a promoter of fertility gradually became subordinate to his new function associated with grapes and the divine madness brought about by wine.

It is unknown when the cult of Bacchus was transferred from Thrace to Greece, but it seems to have happened shortly before the dawn of the historical era. This cult was met with hostility by the orthodoxy but nevertheless took root in Greece. It contained many barbaric elements, such as tearing wild animals to pieces and eating them raw. It also had a curious element of feminism. Noble matrons and young women, gathered in large groups, spent entire nights on open hills, dancing in ecstatic frenzies and intoxicated, partly by alcohol but mostly by mysticism. This practice greatly irritated husbands, but they did not dare oppose religion. Euripides, in his play The Bacchae, depicted both the beauty and barbarism of this cult.

The success of Bacchus in Greece is not surprising. Like all people who quickly come to civilization, the Greeks—or at least a certain part of them—developed a love for the primal. They longed for a more instinctual and passionate way of life than the one prescribed by conventional morality. For a man or woman, who must be more cultured in behavior than in feelings, rationality is wearisome, and virtue seems burdensome and enslaving. This leads to a corresponding reaction in thought, feeling, and behavior. We will be primarily concerned with the reaction in thought, but it is necessary to say a few words about the reaction in feeling and behavior as well.

The civilized person differs from the savage primarily by prudence, or, to use a slightly broader term, foresight. The civilized person is willing to endure suffering in the present for the sake of future pleasures, even if these pleasures are quite distant. This habit becomes important with the advent of agriculture. Neither an animal nor a savage would labor in the spring to secure food for the next winter, aside from a few purely instinctive forms of activity, such as bees gathering honey or squirrels hoarding nuts. But even in these cases, there is no foresight, only a direct impulse to action, the usefulness of which for the future can be demonstrated only by an observing human. True foresight arises only when a person does something not because of an immediate impulse, but because reason tells them that in the future, they will benefit from their labor. Hunting does not require foresight, for it brings pleasure, but cultivating the soil is toil and cannot be done under the influence of a spontaneous impulse.

Civilization controls impulses not only through foresight, which represents self-governing restraint, but also through laws, customs, and religion. This control is inherited from barbarism, but civilization makes it less instinctive and more systematic. Certain actions are classified as criminal and are punished, while other actions, though not prosecuted by law, are deemed immoral, and those who commit them are subject to social condemnation. The institution of private property entails the subordination of women and, generally, the emergence of a class of slaves. On the one hand, societal goals exert pressure on the individual, and on the other hand, the individual, having acquired the habit of viewing their life as a whole, increasingly sacrifices the present for the future.

Clearly, this process can go very far, as we see, for instance, with misers. But even without such extremes, prudence can easily lead to the loss of many of the finest aspects of life. The devotee of Bacchus rebels against prudence. In physical or spiritual intoxication, he regains the intensity of feeling that prudence has destroyed; the world appears to him once more as full of pleasure and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly freed from the prison of everyday concerns. The cult of Bacchus gave rise to what is called "enthusiasm," a word etymologically meaning the indwelling of a god in the worshipper, who believes in his union with the deity. This element of intoxication, a certain departure from prudence under the influence of passion, plays a part in many of humanity's greatest achievements. Life would be uninteresting without the Bacchic element, though its presence also makes it dangerous. Prudence and passion—this conflict runs through the entire history of humankind. Yet it is not a conflict where we must side entirely with one party or the other.

Roughly speaking, sober civilization in the realm of thought is synonymous with science. But science in its pure form does not satisfy man; people also need passion, art, and religion. Science may limit knowledge to certain boundaries, but it cannot and should not set limits on the imagination. Among the Greeks, as among later philosophers, some leaned toward science, others toward religion, and the latter owe much, directly or indirectly, to the religion of Bacchus. This is particularly true of Plato, and through him, this influence spread to later schools of thought, which eventually found expression in Christian theology.

The cult of Dionysus, in its original form, was barbaric and in many ways repellent. However, it was not in this original form that it influenced philosophers, but in its spiritualized version attributed to Orpheus—a form that replaced physical intoxication with spiritual ecstasy.

Orpheus is a vague but fascinating figure. Some claim he was a real person; others consider him a god or a mythical hero. Tradition holds that Orpheus, like Bacchus, came from Thrace, though it seems more likely that he (or the movement associated with his name) originated in Crete. It is certain that Orphic doctrines contain much that appears to have its roots in Egypt, and Egypt's influence on Greece was primarily channeled through Crete. Orpheus is said to have been a reformer, torn to pieces by frenzied maenads incited by Bacchic orthodoxy. Orpheus's affinity for music is less apparent in the early legends compared to later ones. Initially, he was a priest and a philosopher.

Whatever the teachings of Orpheus himself (if he indeed existed), the teachings of the Orphics are well known. They believed in the transmigration of souls and taught that in the afterlife, the soul would face either eternal or temporary torment, depending on its conduct during life. They sought "purification," partly through cleansing ceremonies and partly through avoiding pollution. The most devout Orphics abstained from animal food, except in rituals where the food was consumed sacramentally. They believed that man is partly earthly, partly heavenly; through a pure life, the heavenly part grows, while the earthly part diminishes. Ultimately, one could become united with Bacchus and be called "Bacchus." The Orphics developed a sophisticated theology in which Bacchus was born twice: first from his mother Semele, and second from the thigh of his father Zeus.

There are many forms of the Dionysian myth. In one, Dionysus is the son of Zeus and Persephone; while still a child, he was torn to pieces by the Titans, who devoured all his flesh except his heart. Some say the heart was given by Zeus to Semele, others that Zeus himself swallowed it. In any case, this led to the second birth of Dionysus. The tearing apart of a wild animal and the eating of its raw flesh by the Bacchae was seen as a reenactment of what the Titans did to Dionysus, with the animal serving, in a sense, as the incarnation of the god. The Titans were of earthly birth, but after they ate the god, they possessed a divine spark. Likewise, man is partly earthly, partly heavenly, and the Bacchic rites help bring him closer to complete divinity.

Euripides places the following instructive confession in the mouth of an Orphic priest:

Son of Zeus, Dionysus, I am here among the Thebans.
Semele, daughter of Cadmus, once brought me forth
Untimely, struck by Zeus's lightning.
From god, I became man in appearance,
And I approach the streams of my native rivers.
There is my mother's lightning-scorched grave:
By the palace lie the ruins,
Where the heavenly fire still smolders,
Hera's proud, undying wrath against my mother…
Cadmus has made her shrine impregnable;
He covered it with vines, with clusters of tender grapes.
Leaving the fields of golden Lydia,
And Phrygia, and the plains of Persia
Scorched by midday rays,
And the walls of Bactria, and knowing the winter cold of the Medes,
I visited the blessed Arabs and traversed all Asia
That stretches along the salty sea:
There in the cities, the towering walls rise high,
And Greeks live there together with barbarians.

Orphic tablets have been found in tombs, containing instructions for the soul of the deceased on how to find its way in the afterlife and what to say to prove its worthiness of salvation. These tablets are broken and incomplete; the most complete (the Petelia tablet) contains the following:

You will find to the left of the house of Hades a spring,
Beside it stands a white cypress.
Do not approach this spring.
But you will find another near the Lake of Memory,
Cool waters flowing, and before it stands a guardian.
Say: "I am a child of Earth and Starry Heaven,
But my lineage is from Heaven alone. This you yourselves know.
I perish with thirst; give me, quickly,
Cool water flowing from the Lake of Memory."
And they will give you to drink from the sacred spring,
And after that, you will have a place among the other heroes…

Another tablet says: "Hail, thou who hast endured suffering... From a man, thou hast become a god." And yet another: "Blessed and fortunate, you who are destined to become a god from mortal man."

The spring from which the soul must not drink is Lethe, the source of forgetfulness; the other spring is Mnemosyne, memory. In the afterlife, if the soul seeks salvation, it must not forget anything. On the contrary, it must attain a memory that surpasses the natural. The Orphics were an ascetic sect, for whom wine was only a symbol, much as communion later became for Christians. The intoxication they sought was enthousiasmos, union with the god. They believed that through this union, they would acquire mystical knowledge, inaccessible by ordinary means. This mystical element was introduced into Greek philosophy by Pythagoras, a reformer of Orphism, much as Orpheus had reformed the religion of Dionysus. From the Pythagoreans, the Orphic element passed into the philosophy of Plato, and from there into the later philosophies, which became fully religious.

Certain Bacchic elements persisted wherever Orphism held influence. One such element was feminism. This was prominent in Pythagoras, and in Plato, the feminist element led to the call for complete political equality for women. "The female sex," says Pythagoras, "is by nature more pious." Another Bacchic element was the reverence for strong passion. Greek tragedy emerged from the rituals of Dionysus. Euripides, in particular, venerated the two chief gods of Orphism: Dionysus and Eros. He had little respect for the cold, self-satisfied, virtuous individual, who, in his tragedies, is typically driven mad or otherwise brought low by gods enraged by his impiety.

It is often said that the Greeks possessed a delightful serenity, an Olympian calm that allowed them to contemplate passion from a distance, approaching it aesthetically. But this is a highly one-sided view. It may be true of Homer, Sophocles, and Aristotle, but it is entirely false for those Greeks who were influenced directly or indirectly by Bacchic or Orphic thought. At Eleusis, where the Eleusinian Mysteries formed the most sacred part of the Athenian state religion, they sang a hymn which included the following:

With your raised cup,
With your wild feast,
Come, O Bacchus, to Eleusis’ blooming valley,
To you we sing hymns, to you we hail!

In Euripides' The Bacchae, the chorus of Maenads exhibits a blend of poetic beauty and savagery that stands in stark contrast to serenity. They exult in the joy of tearing apart wild animals and devouring them raw on the spot:

Oh, how I love the glades,
When, racing in frenzy,
From my light-hearted comrades,
I fall to the ground in fatigue,
Clad in sacred disarray.
Craving the prey,
I rush to Phrygian mountains,
Hunting for the fresh goat's blood,
Chasing it down the hill’s slope.

The Maenads' dance on the mountain slope was not mere madness—it was an escape from the burdens and cares of civilization, into a world of non-human beauty and freedom, of wind and stars. In a less frenzied mood, they sing:

Sweet night, will you come?
To Bacchus I will give all of myself,
To the dance—white feet,
And my neck to the cool dew.
The young fawn rejoices
In the green meadow’s pleasure.
She has escaped the trap,
Evaded the hunter’s net.
Though the hunter whistles,
Sending hounds after her,
The wind runs with her feet,
In the open field—she is free.
Though her limbs ache with exhaustion,
She delights in the solitude,
In the silent embrace of the green forest.

Before repeating the claim that the Greeks were "serene," try imagining the matrons of Philadelphia behaving this way—even in a play by Eugene O’Neill.

The Orphic is no more "serene" than the earlier worshipper of Bacchus. For the Orphic, life in this world is suffering and weariness. We are bound to a wheel that, turning endlessly, creates infinite cycles of birth and death. Our true life is among the stars, but we are chained to the earth. Only through purification, self-denial, and an ascetic life can we escape this cycle and finally achieve the ecstasy of union with God. This is far from the perspective of those for whom life is light and pleasant. It is more akin to the spiritual lamentation of the Negro spiritual:

“I’m gonna tell God all my troubles, When I get home.”

Not all Greeks, but many, were people tormented by passions, unhappy souls at war with themselves, drawn by intellect in one direction and by passions in another; they were endowed with imagination that reached toward the heavens and a rebellious will that created their own hell. They had the rule of the "golden mean," but in reality, they were excessive in everything: in pure thought, in poetry, in religion, and in sin. It was this combination of intellect and passion that made them great while they remained so, and no one has transformed the world for future ages quite like they did. Their archetype in mythology is not Zeus of Olympus but Prometheus, who brought fire from heaven and suffered eternal torment for it.

However, attributing this characterization to all Greeks would be as one-sided as the view that assigns "serenity" to them. In reality, two tendencies coexisted in Greece: one emotional, religious, mystical, otherworldly; the other bright, empirical, rationalistic, focused on gaining knowledge of the diversity of facts. The latter is represented by Herodotus, the earliest Ionian philosophers, and to a certain extent, Aristotle. Following his description of Orphism, Beloch writes:

“But the Greek nation was too filled with youthful vigor to accept, in its entirety, a faith that rejected this world and transferred true life to the beyond. Accordingly, the influence of Orphic teachings was confined to a relatively narrow circle of initiates; Orphism had no influence whatsoever on state religion, even in societies that, like Athens, transformed the celebration of the Mysteries into state rituals and took them under the protection of law. It would take a full millennium before these ideas, albeit in entirely different theological garb, triumphed in the Greek world.”

This, it seems, is an exaggeration, particularly when speaking of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were deeply infused with Orphism. Broadly speaking, those with a religious temperament turned to Orphism, while rationalists despised it. The position of Orphism can be compared to the status of Methodism in England at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries.

We know more or less what an educated Greek absorbed from his father, but we know very little about what he absorbed in his earliest years from his mother, who was largely removed from the civilization that brought pleasures only to men. It seems likely that even in the best of times, educated Athenians, for all their rationalism expressed in conscious intellectual processes, retained the more primitive mode of thought and feeling absorbed from childhood and tradition, a mode destined to dominate in moments of intense emotion. Therefore, any simplified analysis of the Greek worldview is unlikely to be accurate.

Until recently, the influence of religion, especially the non-Olympian kind, on Greek thought was insufficiently recognized. Jane Harrison’s revolutionary work Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion emphasized the presence of both primitive and Dionysian elements in the religion of ordinary Greeks. F. M. Cornford’s From Religion to Philosophy sought to highlight for students of Greek philosophy the influence of religion on philosophy, but this work cannot be fully accepted, as its conceptions, especially its anthropology, are unreliable.

To my knowledge, the most persuasive theory is that of John Burnet in his Early Greek Philosophy, particularly in Chapter II, "Science and Religion." He argues that the conflict between science and religion arose from "the religious revival that swept over Hellas in the 6th century B.C." along with the shift of focus from Ionia to the West. “The religion of mainland Hellas,” he says, “and the religion of Ionia developed in very different directions. In particular, the cult of Dionysus, which came from Thrace and is only briefly mentioned in Homer, contained within it the seeds of an entirely different way of understanding man’s relationship to the world. It would, of course, be wrong to attribute any very elevated views to the Thracians; but there can be no doubt that the Greeks saw in the phenomenon of ecstasy a confirmation that the soul was more than a mere shadowy double of the ’self,’ and that only ’outside the body’ could the soul reveal its true nature...

All of this made it seem as though Greek religion was on the verge of rising to the level already reached by the religions of the East. It is hard to say what could have stopped this tendency if science had not emerged. It is often said that the Greeks were saved from an Eastern-style religion by the absence of a priesthood, but this is merely the mistaken identification of cause and effect. Priesthoods do not create dogmas, though they preserve them once they are established. Furthermore, in the early stages of their development, Eastern peoples had no priesthood in any real sense of the term. What saved Greece was not so much the absence of a priesthood as the presence of scientific schools.

The new religion — for in one sense it was new, though in another it was as old as humanity — reached its height with the establishment of Orphic communities. As far as we can tell, their original home was in Attica, but they spread rapidly elsewhere, particularly in Southern Italy and Sicily. These communities were, above all, associations that practiced the cult of Dionysus, but they differed in two ways, both novel among the Hellenes. They looked to revelation as the source of religious authority, and they were organized as special institutions. The poems containing their theology were attributed to the Thracian Orpheus. He had descended into Hades, and thus was considered a reliable guide through the perils surrounding the disembodied soul in the afterlife.”

Burnet further notes the striking similarities between Orphic beliefs and those prevalent in India at roughly the same time, though he asserts that there was no contact between them. He then examines the original meaning of the word “orgy.” For the Orphics, the term referred to “communion.” The purpose of communion was to purify the believer’s soul and help it escape the cycle of rebirth. Unlike the priests of the Olympian cults, the Orphics founded what we might call "churches"—religious communities where anyone, regardless of race or gender, could be initiated. Through the influence of these communities, the idea of philosophy as a way of life was born.