The Historians' History of the World 04

With the term “philosophy” as our guide, we have made a rapid superficial survey of the progress of the studies it included in these eleven hundred years of development (585 B.C.-529 A.D.). We will now consider in somewhat fuller detail the three phases which cover the Greek epoch proper, i.e., the first three centuries, from Thales to Pyrrho (585-270), with a special view to the study of their internal evolution.

The Greek nation is almost the last of all the civilised peoples of the ancient world to enter upon the scene of history and bulk largely in the minds of men. The long period during which the Greeks dwelt among their Aryan kindred, fruitful in intellectual progress as their language proves it to have been, has passed utterly out of the historic memory of the race. And yet the beginnings of scientific knowledge must have fallen within this period, in so far as the dim prevision of eternal and perpetual motion dawned upon men’s minds from the observation of the moon (mēnē, from the root mē, to measure), from chronology, and the consequent observation of cosmic laws. Nor have any other than mythical records come down to us from the first thousand years in which the Hellenes dwelt in the Balkan peninsula, then-future home, side by side with the original inhabitants and other migratory tribes; but from the buildings and monuments which the earth has yielded to Schliemann’s and Evans’ spades we can form some conception of the might of these rulers and the splendour of the knightly life they led.

A faint reflection of the Middle Age of Greece has been preserved in the epic poetry of Homer, the most ancient portions of which date back to the year 1000 B.C., while the latest bring us down to the time of Thales, that is to say, to the sixth century. The Homeric bards do not philosophise as the Stoics fancied they did, they look upon life with living eyes in the true artist spirit, and reproduce it “not sickbed o’er with the pale cast of thought.” Only in a few later passages of the Iliad and the Odyssey do we catch strange notes that harmonise ill with that joie de vivre which is the keynote of the epics. We see that in those strenuous days, when the Greeks were bent upon carrying their commerce to the uttermost ends of the earth and satisfying the ever increasing clamour of the populace for food and power, the nation begins to pass over from the light-hearted carelessness of the epic of chivalry to the harsher and more reflective didactic poetry of Hesiod. Indeed, in one of the later passages of the Odyssey (Nekyia) we note an evident reflex of the Orphic cosmologies, in which, under the name of a Thracian bard of remote antiquity, a mournful and pessimistic strain of poetry, dealing with sin and penitence, stands contrasted with the optimistic acceptance of the existing order of things which is characteristic of Homer.

The forces which brought philosophy, properly so called, to the birth at the beginning of the sixth century were three in number. First, the poetry then extant, which had cast into artless shape a number of speculative observations on the subject of the Cosmos—such as the conceptions of Oceanus encircling the earth, of Zeus dwelling in ether above it, of Tartarus beneath it, and so forth. Nothing but a cool head and a turn for systematisation was needed to convert these images into “ideas” and to combine the latter into a homogeneous and coherent conception. Another service was rendered by the study of geography, mathematics, and astronomy, developed as it had been by the long voyages of Milesians and Phocæans in the Mediterranean after they had supplanted the Phœnicians. A school of navigation came into being at Miletus, which city had successfully opened up the Euxine in the seventh century; and both Thales and Anaximander were trained in it. Miletus, where the trade with Egypt was started about the same time and the establishment of permanent factories like Naucratis taken in hand, likewise constituted the meeting-place of the geometry and astronomy of the Egyptians, whose learning was formerly much over estimated, with the far superior astronomical science of the Babylonians. The reports of mariners, charts, the catalogue of the stars, all combined with Oriental tradition and the unbiassed perspicacity of the Greeks to give the world the first science, i.e., research built upon a basis of empiricism, tested by the methods of mathematics and logic, and aiming at a harmonious interpretation of the Cosmos. To give a name to this study the Ionians evolved the idea of Historia, which in the sixth century took the place of Philosophia; the latter not coming into use until the fifth century.