The Greek Quest for Ideal Order

THE FORERUNNERS: THE MINOANS OF ANCIENT CRETE

We start our story with the Minoans -- a people living on the island of Crete in the Middle of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. We know very little about them. Their writing has never been deciphered. We know of them mainly through the magnificent palaces and some of the artwork which survived them -- and the ancient myths told about them later by the Greeks.

They established a very prosperous maritime trading culture in the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean Seas -- reaching the height of their power and wealth around 1800-1600 BC. Their sea power seems to have been so great that no enemy could reach their island stronghold. Thus Crete itself is uniquely devoid of fortrresses and town walls -- but instead a scene of undisturbed peace and prosperity.

The Minoans dominated all the Aegean peoples -- including the earliest of the Greek migrants into the Northern Aegean area. How much influence Crete left with budding Greek culture is uncertain. But certainly it put before the rather primitive Greeks some idea of a higher life.

Then suddenly decline set in for the Minoans. The island of Thera to the north of Crete suddenly exploded (ca. 1600 B.C.) in a volcanic eruption which destroyed life extensively in the central Aegean and seems to have set up a huge tsunami wave that apparently destroyed the Cretan naval fleet on the north shore of the island. (Was this the source of the story Plato told of the island civilization of Atlantis that so dramatically came to an end in the sea?)

The Cretans seem to have recovered -- though not completely. Soon after this (1500s) troubles hit Crete in the form of sea raiders -- in great part the Mycenean Greeks, who had also taken to the sea by this time. (Was this the foundation of the story about Theseus of Athens and his destruction of the Cretan Minotaur?) The Minoans seemed to have survived this -- but not well. Within a couple of centuries the culture seemed simply to have withered away to insignificance. The Greek Mycenaens -- at least in part -- seemed to have risen to take the place of prominence in the Aegean.

THE MYCENEAN GREEKS

Mycenaeans or Achaeans

At some very distant point in time, dating anywhere between 1900 and 1500 BC, a number of different Greek-speaking peoples moved westward from southwestern Russia and invaded/settled in wave after wave into the land we know as Greece. There they established fortified towns in the valleys between the many mountainous ridges that reach down to the sea and divide Greece into a number of distinct geographic units.

The Mycenaeans or Achaeans were the first of these Greeks that we know of by name and by deeds. These were the adventures who attacked the Trojans in nearby coastal Asia Minor (1200 BC?), whose exploits were retold many centuries later (750 BC?) by the bard Homer in his great epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The Dorians

But this Mycenian/Achaean strength eventually began to decline and after approximately 1150 BC Greek culture fell into a 400-year long Dark Age. This was either caused by, or led to, yet another wave of Greek invaders from the Northeast, the "Dorians." All archeological evidence seems to indicate that probably (though not certainly: debate lingers on) the Dorians disrupted life in Greece in a very major sort of way.

Certainly the Doric invasion set off a secondary wave of Greek migrations in around 1000 BC--principally to the shores of Western Asia Minor. Dorians themselves continued their migration across the Aegean to the southern shores of Asia Minor, as well as Crete. Ionians from Attica (around Athens) retreated across the Aegean to the central-western shores of Asia Minor (to Miletus) and Aeolians (perhaps a later group of Greeks to appear on the scene) settled the north-western shores of Asia Minor.

In any case, the warlike Dorians eventually settled themselves into the Peloponnesian peninsula--where they ruled over the helots, the enslaved or enserfed Greeks who had originally lived in the area. Sparta grew up as a sort of country town at the heart of Doric culture.

Interestingly, Athens (and its hinterland of Attica) managed to fend of the Dorians--and retained its older Achaean culture.

Further Migrations

As things settled down in Greece, the population increased--causing a serious strain on the marginal agricultural environment that Greece offered. At the same time the surrounding seas, which the Greeks viewed not as a barrier but as a source of life (in fact a superhighway for them to move across), once again offered them an escape from their problems--this time the problem of land-hunger.

In a new wave of migrations (extensive during the 700s and 600s BC) they sailed east and west and discovered lands that they could colonize with their excess population (much as other cultures were doing at the time, notably the Phoenecians--located along the Syrian coast--with whom the Greeks had active commerical relations).

From the city of Corinth colonies were established to the West on the island of Sicily and on the southern Italian peninsula. One of those colonies, Syracuse (founded in 733 BC), soon became a major city by its own right. Some of the Euboean towns (just north of Attica) sent settlers to the Syrian coast. From Miletus and other Ionian towns in Asia Minor settlers were sent through the straits into the Black Sea and established Ionian towns around the coast. Settlers crossed to the Egyptian and Libyan coasts of Africa. Others sailed west beyond Sicily and established towns along the French coast (modern-day Marseille). By the 500s they were reaching to Spain and northern Italy.

The Extent of "Greece"

Thus in the course of the 600s BC "Greece" came to describe an area much larger than the land we today call Greece. In those ancient days "Greece" encompassed a whole huge area along the northern half of the Eastern and central Mediterranean Sea. And if we include the various Greek cities planted along the coast of the Western Mediterranean (such as Marseille in southern France) we are describing a culture that was very extensive.

But it was also in competition with the Phoenecians, and the Phoenecian daughter-culture of Carthage (in North Africa opposite Sicily). And soon enough it would be in serious competition with yet other rising powers: the Persians to the East, the Macedonians (a semi-Greek people) to the North, and the Romans to the West.

THE GREEK COSMIC VISION

From Chaos to Order

Greek culture had grown up in a cosmos of rather fickle and often cruel gods who, from Mount Olympus, called the shots on earth. It was often a wild and crazy affair--as witnessed in the sagas of Homer: the Iliad and the Odyssey. But by 700 BC, the poet Hesiod was describing an Olympic realm in which the gods themselves lived under a divine order--with Zeus as the presiding figure over this order.

We need to be cautious here as we depict the Greeks as thinking this or that. Unlike their contemporaries, including the Jews, the Greeks as individuals were an independent-minded lot. They had no strong priestly hierarchy to discipline the people to a particular orthodoxy. So while some Greeks gave further thought to this matter of the divine order--others continued quite gladly to worship the Olympian gods of the heights or skies (Zeus, Apollo, Athena) or the older pre-Olympian gods of the earth/underworld (Pan, Dionysus, Demeter) with passion and even frenzy suitable to the passion and frenzy of their gods.

The Materialists

As time progressed, during the 600s and 500s BC, from Greek Southern Italy in the West to Greek Western Asia (modern-day Turkey) in the East, Greek thinkers or philosophers were reflecting deeply on this matter of a basic order underlying all creation. To Thales, Anixamander, Heraclitus and many others this order was noticeable--even obvious. But the source of this order was a mystery to these thinkers. They speculated that this order might be the product of the actions of a singular substance which undergirded all matter--such as fire, air or water.

Those that sought an answer to this question by searching for such a single substance or material as the foundation of all creation we categorize as "materialists." These materialistic philosophers were early forerunners of our modern scientists--with this same tendency to look to the material order for answers to the structure and dynamics of the universe.

Pythagoras

Pythagoras (mid-late 500s BC) whom we may remember as being an astute mathematician, took a different course. He was a mystic--deep into the Orphic mysteries. To him the geometric patterns which he discerned the world to be made up of were really religious formulas which opened up the deeper spiritual realities which lay beyond the immediately visible world!

The Athenian Greats: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle

But it was three philosophers living in Athens during the 5th and 4th centuries BC--Socrates, Plato and Aristotle--who brought this sense of underlying order to full view for the Greeks.

Socrates (mid-late 400s BC) was fully persuaded that the cosmos or universe was fundamentally an orderly place--every part of the great cosmos (including humans like ourselves--at least ideally) operating in accordance with a divine spirit of "justice" that flowed through all life, giving it purpose and structure. Moreover, human reason--when properly cultivated and judiciously applied to the study of this order--was capable of discovering the basic features of this divine order.

Plato (early-mid 300s BC) was an Athenian pupil of Socrates who carried the thinking of his teacher even further. Plato sought to formulate the actual structure or nature of this divine order. He came up with the (quite Pythagorean) idea of Forms (or Ideas) as basic designs inherent in all things, abstract forms that give precise character to every distinct thing.

But these Forms were not just related to physical being. These Forms also gave rise to such things as nations or city-states, families, professions. As an Athenian typically very interested in public life, he vigorously sought to know these Forms which undergirded the life of the good city or republic. He wanted to understand these Forms in order to design a better society--better than the one (Athens) which had ordered the death of his beloved teacher, Socrates..

Aristotle (mid 300s BC) was a more "down to earth" (materialistic) thinker than his idealistic teacher Plato. He was much more focused on the question of how we come to understand the immediate world around us--and how we ought to interact with it.

Thus he worked hard to develop categories and rules for orderly thinking in logic, ethics, science, politics. Further, with regard to the immediate world around him, he was an "empiricist," one who was more focused on the things that could be directly seen and studied through the human senses. He viewed the world around him as a material entity, a physical structure open to the human senses for observation and study, a physical structure whose basic character was, through the workings of the human mind, open to our understanding and even control.

He had little use for Plato's Forms--that is, the divine order that supposedly stood above or behind physical reality. He prefered simply to study "reality" itself. He reserved his understanding of divinity for the starry realm above the earth.

Democritus

Less well known to us today is Democritus (mid-late 400s: a contemporary of Socrates) of Abdera (Thrace). In his own day he was widely recognized as a brilliant thinker who brought to the ancient Greek world the atomic theory of the cosmos. Basically his view was that all life is merely the composite structure of invisibly minute particles of hard matter: atoms. These atoms (eternal in their being) are structured into the more visible material entities we observe in our world--through laws of motion (also eternal in their existence).

Democritus was also a profound materialist in his view of human life. To him life is simply patterns of motion of these soul-less atoms--operating in accordance with equally soul-less laws. The human soul itself is simply a brief pattern in the working of the atoms--a pattern which forms in the human womb, developing and then breaking down over a human lifetime until it simply ceases to exist when we draw our last breath. To Democritus there was no such thing as eternal life. Likewise, God or Divinity was to him simply a construct of human thought--and had no real existence in the cosmos.

In so many ways Democritus anticipated--by thousands of years--the direction science would take in its development within the modern West!