INTRODUCTION

The Precursors of Philosophy: Homer and Hesiod

Before Greek philosophy, there was Homer (c. 750 BCE), the cornerstone of all early Greek writings. He offers two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey.1 The Iliad is a story about rage, courage, and honor. The Odyssey is a story for training in leadership and excellence (arete). Athena mentors Telemachus until Odysseus returns. The epic poems employ the gods as anthropomorphic and immortal beings. The gods meddle in natural and human events. They have demigod children with humans, and they suffer the same emotions as humans. Homer employs a worldview that he inherits and weaves into his epic poems. He mentions the heavens, the gods, and the underworld. He treats natural phenomena, such as rivers, as gods. He puts gods on the battlefield. When Ares gets wounded in battle, he wails like a baby and runs back up to Olympus.2 What he does not offer is an account of the heavens, the earth, the underworld, or gods in their own right. Still, for the early Greek philosophers and Plato, these are essential readings. The philosophers do not adopt the teachings. They critique the stories and propose alternative views. Any student of ancient Greek philosophy should read these works carefully.

It might seem that Homer's works were the Bible of the ancient Greek world. This accurately places Homer at the center of Greek thought, but it ignores certain important points. There are two main differences between Homer's texts and the Bible. The Bible is sacrosanct; it excludes any alternative view. Its stories cannot be altered or varied without heresy. The ancients took Homer's stories as more fluid. A poet could claim, for instance, that Helen was not to blame for the war on Troy since the Helen in Troy was a specter. Helen all the while was somewhere else. Modern religions do not allow reinterpretation of their scripture. Historically, every Christian who wrote a book to distinguish all the heretics eventually became a heretic. Heretics did not fare well. Good luck for the Greeks, since they did not interpret Homer as sacrosanct.

Hesiod (c. 700 BCE) offers an importantly different approach to the archaic Greek perspective. Though he inherits the worldview, Hesiod is concerned to offer a more detailed and systematic treatment of the heavens, the earth, the gods, and human beings. Theogony and Works and Days offer an account of the topics. "Theogony" means the coming to be of the gods, or the birth of the gods.3 The story that Hesiod tells connects the birth of the gods with the birth of the Kosmos, the ordered world. Works and Days tells of the cycles in the agricultural calendar, the regular cycles of the seasons, and the cycles in the many different ages of mankind.4 In this work, we get the story of Prometheus and Pandora. We also get the five ages of man.

According to Hesiod, the god Khaos (chaos) came into being first or has always been. This god is the space between heaven and earth. Next come the goddess Gaia (earth) and the god Ouranos (heaven). Then came the gods Tartaros (underworld) and Eros (love). Khaos begets Erebos (night). Erebos begets the gods Aether (topmost air) and Hemera (day). Gaia begets starry Ouranos (heaven) and makes him equal to her size. Heaven is so nice that it is begotten twice, according to Hesiod. She also begets mountains and nymphs. Gaia and Ouranos beget the twelve Titans. First comes Oceanos (sea); it encircles the earth and flows around it. Then they beget Kronos (time), Tethys (rivers), and Themis (justice). Oceanus and Tethys beget Metis (wisdom). In the beginning, Ouranos ruled all the gods and nature. Ouranos ruled as the father of the other gods. One of Ouranos' Titans, Kronos, overthrew him and forced his way to rule. Time, then, comes to rule the gods and nature. Through time, Kronos and the Titaness Rhea (mother) beget six children. Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Poseidon, and Hades were her first five children. Kronos ruled through power. He was warned that his offspring would overthrow him, just as he had done to his father. So, Kronos swallowed his first five children whole. There, the five swallowed immortal gods were contained in him. Eating the children seems odd, but there are not many options for containing and controlling an immortal being. Zeus was the sixth offspring. Rhea saved Zeus by giving Kronos a rock to swallow, instead of her child. She hid Zeus in Gaia. Over time and by might, Zeus challenged and overthrew Kronos by giving him a potion that made him vomit. Thereby, he freed all his siblings that had been swallowed by Kronos. Zeus did not take kingship straightaway after freeing his siblings and overthrowing Kronos. After overthrowing Kronos, the gods voted to elect a ruler. Zeus won the election. He then swallowed Metis (wisdom), who was his first wife, and Themis (justice). Zeus rules through wisdom and justice. He provides rational and moral order to the Kosmos.

Hesiod adds curious features to his account. He says that heaven is the same size as earth. Possibly, though we do not know, he holds that the underworld is the same size as earth and heaven. He says that the distance between heaven and earth is calculated by the amount of time it would take for an iron anvil to fall for ten days and nine nights. The same calculation is used for the distance between the earth and the underworld. So, the earth is equidistant between heaven and the underworld. Hesiod offers a rational proportion among the top, the bottom, and the between of what is. In Hesiod's cosmology, an account of the Kosmos, the Kosmos is intelligible. Human beings can use reason to understand it and language (logos) to account for it. The Kosmos is guided by wisdom and ordered through justice.

Suppose we ask Homer or Hesiod how they learned such marvelous things. How might I discover such things? From the texts that we have, we can see that neither Homer nor Hesiod would have a justification that went beyond an appeal to tradition and an appeal to authority. They could say, "Believe me because we Greeks have always believed this or have believed it for a very long time." They might say, "Believe me because I am an authoritative source." As philosophers today, we can say that believing something because it has been believed for a long time or believing something because of who said it are instances of the informal fallacies of appeal to tradition and appeal to authority. Homer and Hesiod had popular accounts of the Kosmos, and there was no comparable rival. The philosophers would change this by offering a different sort or kind of explanation.

This Is Ancient Greek Philosophy

The sources that we have for conveying information about the early Greek philosophers are far removed from the original texts. Manuscripts from the era were disseminated by scribes, making copies of a text. The text that formed the basis for the scribe was more likely than not a copy of a copy of a copy. Scribes are imperfect conduits of information. In addition to the challenges faced in ascertaining the accuracy of the base text, there are errors that often occur in the transcription of the base text. There are errors of omission: Homeoteleuton occurs when a transcription skips words because a subsequent word has the same or a similar ending. Homeoarchy occurs when the transcriber skips lines because of the similarity of the beginnings of the lines. Haplography occurs when the transcriber copies a term that appears twice in the base text. There are errors in addition. Dittography occurs when the transcriber writes a term twice that appears only once in the base text. Contamination occurs when a transcriber inserts text that is not in the base text. There are errors in transposition. Metathesis occurs when a transcriber reverses letters, words, or phrases from the base text. Finally, but not exhaustively, there are errors of alteration. These errors occur when a transcriber attempts, deliberately or not, to make sense of the base text in the transcription.

We would be fortunate if we had confidence that our sources were copies of copies that could trace their preceding texts straight through to the original text. We are not so fortunate. Instead, we encounter the ideas of the early Greek philosophers through subsequent texts that offer information that is drawn from original texts or copies of original texts. Since we do not have the original texts, we cannot determine what sort the base text was for the author recounting the thoughts of his predecessors. Our sources offer information of two sorts. Testimonia offers paraphrases of a focal author's text, of a transcription of the focal author's text, or of the focal author's ideas or reputed ideas. Fragments offer a quotation from the focal author's text or a transcription at some remove from the author's text. The fragments might be a quotation of a word, phrase, or selection of varying length from a base text. We are fortunate today to have valuable collections of reference texts. This book makes use of certain standard sources.5

Ancient philosophy is distant in time and distant linguistically from us today. The manuscripts that we have often conflict with each other or only partially preserve the text. The expanse of time resulted in many works being partially or entirely lost to us. The ancient Greek language presents challenges of its own, since many of its terms cannot be directly translated into English. In this text, I have...