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The Ionian Civilization

"Nature prefers to hide from our gaze."
Heraclitus of Ephesus

The period from 1200 to 750 sc in Greece is called `the Dark Age', partly because little is known of what happened during that time, and partly because of the brilliance of the classical period which followed.

We do know, however, that a century after the waves of Thracian invaders had overthrown the Hittite Empire and destroyed the unity of Anatolia, the Dorians began to invade Greece around 1100 sc. These Indo-Europeans were barbarians compared to the inhabitants of the long civilized regions. The assimilation of the new arrivals by the indigenous or previously established populations, and the development of new cultural identities was not the work of a day. For example, it took a full four centuries for the Thracian tribes to be absorbed into the local population, and so produce the Phrygians from the synthesis.

During this time Anatolia experienced several other immigrations. That of the Ionians, who came from Attica, took place about the year 1000 sc.

Homer has practically nothing to say about the Ionians. They had no heroic age, and their arrival in Asia Minor was not `historic'. `The circumstances which have most influence on the happiness of mankind. . . the transition . . . from ignorance to knowledge. . . from ferocity to humanity' are `noiseless revolutions'.

Although the arrival of these new populations destroyed the political unity of Anatolia and the imperial structure, it did not put an end to the use of an advanced technology- that of the Iron Age - nor did it interrupt commercial exchange by land and sea. It was these conditions (absence of large political entities, presence of commerce and industry) that explain the development of city-states all along the Aegean coast.

Political liberties and rights first evolved at Miletus, and this city served as a kind of experimental laboratory for their development. The freedom of man was not a deliberate choice but a natural consequence of this process, before the initiation of which words such as `individual', `self', and `ego' had not previously existed in the language. The Ionians hated war, just as the people of Çatalhöyük, Minoan Crete, and Troy, on whom war had been imposed, had done. This was in contrast to the Mycenaeans (Achaeans), militarist Sparta, and imperial Athens. The situation in the Aegean region at that time can be likened to that in Italy at the beginning of the Renaissance when towns formed themselves into states after the Papacy and the Empire had been mutually weakened by long conflict.

The Ionians were very successful in commerce. Miletus alone was said to have founded more than seventy colonies. Despite the presence of aristocracies, the regime of city-states allowed certain categories of citizen to become wealthier, and saw the beginning of a process whereby political power was shared by economic power. Indeed this political struggle occupied the whole period. The partïcipation of the citizen in political life, in practice or at least in principle, gradually became established through assemblies in the market-place which brought together the whole population. The atmosphere of freedom created by these first attempts at democracy undoubtedly encouraged the flowering of science, philosophy, and the arts.

It is known that Greek civilization in the mainland was not yet very advanced when the Ionians emigrated to Anatolia. Nowhere is there any mention of an advanced culture which they could have brought with them when fleeing from the Dorians. How is it then that Homer could appear scarcely a century after their arrival in Anatolia?

In her Prolegomena to the Study Of Greek Religion (Cambridge,1903), Jane Harrison observes:

For literature Homer is the beginning, though Homer presents not a starting point but a culmination, a complete achievement, an almost mechanical accomplishment. . .

I am not the first to question the circumstances of Homer's appearance. Numerous commentators have wanted to date him as being born in the sixth century BC in order to relate him to the classical period, that is to say, to Athens. But it is generally agreed today that he was born in the ninth century BC at Izmir (Smyrna) or at Colophon.

In the Iliad. Homer allows us to perceive, beneath the generous impartiality of the poet, a penchant in favour of the Trojans, who showed great respect for women, had close and affectionate family ties, acted in war collectively rather than individually, and resigned themselves to ill-fate with dignity. He ranges on their side not only Aphrodite but also the two Anatolian gods, Apollo and his sister Artemis.

Homer's descriptions show the poet's deep love for the Aegean shores of Anatolia, as well as a nostalgic attachment to Minoan Crete. He depicts the Achaeans as rather coarse, vindictive, and cruel, as Toynbee does when he calls them `post-Minoan barbarian war-lords'. As to the gods, supposedly subject to the same passions as human beings, they form a boisterous and lustful troop, whom Homer at times gives the impression of not taking seriously. He seems more in favour of the Anatolian rites of collective feasting than the human and animal sacrifices of the Achaeans.

Most commentators accept Homer as the poet who gave form to traditional epic poems telling of battles already four centuries old. It is known that after three centuries, during which the Iliad and the Odyssey were handed down orally, a commission was set up by Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens, or more probably by his son Hipparchus in the sixth century BC, charged with establishing the authentic text and putting it into writing. All the versions that we possess contain numerous obscurities, repetitions, differences, interpolations, etc.

In the nineteenth century the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh, which dates from more than one thousand five hundred years before Homer, was discovered in the library of the Assyrian King Assurbanipal at Nineveh. Later, a translation in Hittite was found during excavations at Hattusas, indicating that this epic was known in Anatolia in the year 1200 sc. It is reasonable to suppose therefore that, in a country with a bardic tradition, Homer knew it too.

One might reasonably conclude that Gilgamesh provided Homer with a number of literary conventions-the general structure of an epic poem, the concept of the hero, and of his relationship with the gods.

Homer would seem, therefore, to be pre-eminently Anatolian. His lack of sympathy for his country of origin, its men, and its gods reveals him to have been influenced by the multicultural nature of the society in which he lived, which included elements inherited from Mesopotamian civilizations. If the Iliad represents more a culmination than a beginning, it must be attributed as much to the richness of the Anatolian cultural environment as to the genius of Homer himself.

In the words of Herbert J. Muller:

The Greeks of Asia Minor were stimulated by closer association with old peoples who began educating them long before Homer. Our incalculable debt to the ancient peoples of the Near East gives reason for some embarrassment as well as humility.

The Ionians had at their disposal the cultures inherited from Mesopotamia-Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian - the Anatolian cultures of the Hattians/Hittites, Hurrians, and others and, further to the south, that of Crete. Therefore, culturally, Homer turned eastward to Anatolia and Mesopotamia, and southward to Crete, whose civilization had strong Anatolian traits, in order to create his saga. In such a context Homer can equally be considered as the precursor of the Ionian Physicists who came later; they also were resolutely Anatolian. The hypothesis that the Ionians went to Attica from Anatolia, as some have suggested, could perhaps be a better explanation of the enigma of Homer.

Comparison of Anatolian poets and philosophers with those of Greece between 900 and 500 BC shows clearly that the appearance of Homer in Anatolia did not happen by chance. To say this should not, of course, be construed as an attempt to deprive the Greeks of their cultural heritage, but rather to stress the contribution of Anatolia, our country, to Greek civilization.

During three centuries, Asia Minor-particularly Ionia and the islands-gave to the world a group of seven poets each of whom was the initiator of a genre: Archilockus of Paros; Alcman, born in Sardis in Lydia; Terpander of Lesbos; Alcaeus of Mytilene; Sappho, a contemporary and compatriot of Alcaeus of Mytilene, perhaps the greatest poetess; Mimnermus of Colophon, and Thaletas of Crete.

There were also seven thinkers whose meditations on men, gods, and nature laid the foundations of science, philosophy, history, and geography.

Dictionaries describe Thales of Miletus as `mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, and philosopher'. The same town of Miletus was also the birthplace of Anaximander, who not only drew the first maps but put forward in On Nature a system of ideas which two thousand five hundred years later would be called Transformism. His disciple, Anaximenes, devised a cosmogony in which air was the fundamental principle of the universe.

Pythagoras, born at Samos, philosopher and mathematician, founded communities at Croton for the followers of his esoteric teaching. Xenophanes of Colophon, philosopher of the Eleatic school, demonstrated great independence of mind in denouncing the anthropomorphic and immoral character of the gods as represented in Homer and Hesiod.

Finally, history in prose owes everything to two Ionians of Miletus: Cadmus, its creator, and Hecataeus, its illustrator.

In contrast to these two groups, mainland Greece offers us only one great poet, Hesiod, and Solon, also a poet but principally the statesman who, by means of the constitution with which he endowed her, initiated Athens' passage to democracy.

Admittedly, between Homer and Archilochus there exists an interval of more than a century, but this can be considered as the gestation period for the new mind which would give rise to science.

Thales of Miletus, of reputedly Phoenician origin, gives us the first fruits of rational inquiry. He calculated that an eclipse of the sun would take place on 25 May 585 BC. The Medes and the Lydians were at war with each other at the time, but when the event predicted by Thales duly occurred, the opponents laid down their arms and drew up a treaty. What a step forward, at a time when the sun and the moon were worshipped as gods! Thales was also able to measure elevations by means of trigonometry, and he laid the foundations of geometry. In his view, water was the fundamental substance from which the universe was derived.

Anaximander did not accept the primordial nature of water. He advanced the idea that the universe had not been created as claimed by mythology, but that it resulted from a process of evolution, and that life was itself evolution, caused by the eternal struggle between the one and the many. He even proposed that the transformation could be made in the direction of progression or regression.

Anaximenes considered air to be the primordial material. Condensation of air produced water, that of water made earth and rocks. Thus the process of transformation consisted of condensation and rarefaction.

Xenophanes, poet and philosopher, soared above anthropomorphism, describing God as an all-powerful spiritual force. Such a concept of the divine allowed men to escape from the limitations of a religion founded on mythology, and to attain rational thought.

The superiority of Ionian Anatolia over Athens during the archaic period is therefore indisputable. It is claimed, on the other hand, that during the classical period Athens eclipsed Ionia. However, let us examine what Asia Minor and Attica produced during the sixth and fifth centuries BC.

Asia Minor provided more poets: Simonides of Ceos, his nephew Bacchylides - rival of Pindar at Syracuse - and Timothy.

Attica admittedly had greater poets, with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, although it is as authors of tragedies and comedies that they were creators of genres. Pindar was a Dorian from Thebes. The names of Socrates and Plato are impressive and their work appears to the uninitiated to constitute the essence of philosphy, but devotees know that it would not be what it is-particularly today-without Heraclitus (of Ephesus), Anaxagoras (of Clazomenae), Protagoras (of Abdera, colony of Clazomenae, or rather of Teos in Thrace) Leucippus (of Miletus), Democritus (of Abdera also), and finally Diogenes (of Sinope), who died in the fourth century. In history, Thucydides and Xenophon were the counter- parts of Herodotus (of Halicarnasse), though they were one or two generations younger and died in the fourth century. As for Aristotle, he was Macedonian and belonged entirely to the fourth century.

A distinction, rather than a comparison, becomes evident from the foregoing: in Asia Minor there was a different concept of philosophy from that of Attica. Rather than being true philosophers, the natives of Anatolian Ionia were, as the Greeks themselves called them, physiologoi, that is to say fundamentally Physicists-men who sought especially to understand nature and matter.

Heraclitus of Ephesus is the successor of the Milesian School. He denied the existence of an eternal matter, or atoms of eternal matter, as proposed by his predecessors, and made `change' the fundamental reality. He enunciated the principle:

Everything moves, nothing stops anywhere, everything flows unceasingly.

Being is only the convenient antithesis of not-being, no more than merely a word, because nothing is, all is becoming: it is the `eternal becoming'. And if everything changes and exists only by this very changing, everything encloses within itself that which it excludes; everything is, at the same time, itself and its opposite. The law of becoming reverts to the law of the identity of contraries. Everything is born of their struggle.

The first man who expounded the idea of causality was Leucippus of Miletus (about 450 BC). He stated that nothing took place without cause, everything obeyed a `necessity', the `necessity' being harmony with a natural whole, or with nature itself. Leucippus gave the name of `indivisibles' (atoms) to the smallest particles of substance. Dispersed in infinite space in an unlimited number of forms, these particles of `being' were separated one from another by that which is `non-being', that is to say empty space. Becoming, or being, resulted essentially from the movement of atoms in space and from their accidental union.

As for Democritus, disciple and friend of Leucippus, it was he who made causality a universal law of nature. Wishing to reconcile plurality and becoming, that is to say experience, with the thesis of Parmenides on the permanence and identity of being, he responded with atomism. He saw the cosmos as formed from an infinite number of eternal atoms moving in an infinite void, growth and death being the result of the union and separation of the elementary atoms. The movement of the atoms resulted from an anterior movement, and so on to infinity.

Thus are found in Democritus the great principles of modern science: indestructibility of matter, permanence of energy, exclusion of final causes. The work of Democritus, abundant and written in a language the clarity of which rivals, it is said, that of Plato, resulted in his being regarded by the ancients as the Aristotle of the fifth century.

The manner in which the Anatolian Physicists distanced themselves from the mythology and theology of the day, and their materialistic ideas, brought upon them the suspicion, indeed the opposition, of Athens. Protagoras, who had gone there to teach that `man is the measure of all things', was accused of blasphemy towards the gods and condemned to death.

Anaxagoras, who visited Athens at the invitation of Pericles, very nearly suffered the same fate: he was condemned to death for impiety. In his capacity as an astronomer he had explained that the sun was not a god, but an incandescent rock not much bigger than the Peloponnese. Pericles had to deploy all his eloquence to save him. Nevertheless, for thirty years Anaxagoras taught philosophy to the Athenians who were not familiar with it. Democritus, doubtless more shrewd, preferred to depart incognito from Athens, and rapidly left the town.

Pythagoras was the first to employ mathematics in a demonstrative way; though later, committed to mysticism and magic, he became an Orphic priest. According to him, to deny the absolute and the immutable signified the negation of knowledge. He maintained that a thing changing indefinitely could not exist, and he was particularly opposed to Heraclitus. Plato was greatly influenced by his views.

Diogenes of Sinope, although a disciple of the Athenian Antisthenes, founder of the cynical school of philosophy, is more celebrated than his master. He thought that happiness was to be found in liberating oneself from desire and need. But he added to strictly cynical views a sort of rough biting humour which was very Anatolian, and the opposite of Atticism. A well-known example is his response to Alexander the Great who asked what he desired: `That you get out of my light!', a rejoinder which became a proverb in Anatolia.

In Diogenes are to be found traces of Aesop (of Phrygia) who preceded him. Their stories have survived among us through the intermediaries of Nasreddin Hoca and the Bekta?is. Aesop is the model and the source for all the European and Arabian fable-tellers.

I hope that I have not given the impression - which would be mistaken - of wishing to minimize the role of Athens. I know, as everyone does, how much we owe to the theatre of Athens, to its architects and its sculptors, to its philosophers and poets, but it seems to me fair to insist on the fact that Anatolia inaugurated the era of science. The Ionians were `clear-eyed and fearless' observers of nature. They refused to let themselves become ensnared in archaic a priori concepts. They grasped reality in time and space, without ever sliding towards idealism or mysticism.

They took an interest in science in order to ensure for man a better life in his natural surroundings. Among their innovations were town planning, undertaken with a view to improving hygiene, and medicine.

Hippoçratus (of Caria) and Galen (of Pergamum) were the precursors of scientific medicine. Hippodamus, in drawing up plans for Priene, was the initiator of functional town planning. The houses were laid out in rectangular blocks and benefitted from drainage systems and running water. In this respect small Priene differed greatly from Athens.

Towards the third century BC, Pergamum developed the preparation of skins as parchment and made books possible. The Ionians, having added vowels to the Phoenician alphabet, started to write prose. The radius of cultural influence was thus considerably extended.

The Ionian Physicists, who sought to associate them- selves with science, with determinism, atomism, the `dialectic' of Heraclitus, the study of numbers, the search for a rationality, were therefore the precursors of the most modern movements in philosophy. However, the Ionians failed to develop the two practices which have made science such a force in the modern world: that of systematically applying their knowledge, and consistently checking their thought against experience. Nevertheless, some of their speculations, such as the evolution theory of Anaximander and the atomic theory of Democritus, displayed brilliant anticipation of modern scientific know- ledge.

The Athenian philosophers, on the other hand, opted for dualism, the distinction between the body and the mind. The mind could not, according to them, arrive at know- ledge without distancing itself from the body. The phenomena perceived by the five senses were to their eyes only appearances. True knowledge was that of `ideas' which, being eternal and unchangeable, were the only `reality'. Everything that changed was deceiving. One could not have knowledge of it, neither could one even form an opinion. What they called an `idea' was an abstraction, that is to say, the reduction of the infinite number of circles of life to a single abstract spiritual circle. These philosophers had renounced nature and the material environment of man. Amelioration of living conditions appeared to them a purpose unworthy of philosophy, the objective of which was, in their view, much more ambitious: philosophy should orient itself essentially towards knowledge of the absolutes-Beauty, Goodness, Truth.

Athenian philosophy, the product of high intellectual speculation, was therefore very different from Ionian scientific inquiry. Pre-eminently logical and metaphysical, Athenian philosophy has exerted considerable influence on religious faiths. I will return later to the subject of its relationship with Islam, and its role in the transition to the Renaissance.

The political system and freedoms put into practice for the first time in the city-state on the Anatolian shores of the Aegean underwent a partial evolution before finding their full expression at Athens, but with different consequences for Athens and Ionia. Ionia became pre-eminent for science; Athens for theatre and philosophy.

Although the flowering of Ionian culture preceded that of Athens, Attica and Ionia appeared to be complementary. However, this was only in appearance, for the two cultural centres represented distinct poles. It was not by chance that Athens could not sustain a scientific movement, and that Ionia did not foster either philosophy or tragedy as did Athens. Their cultural differences did not allow it.

They differed both in religion and tradition, in the sense that Athens had a patriarchal regime, whereas Ionia had retained the matriarchal customs of Anatolia and the Meonians. Only Ionia, therefore, could give rise to an illustrious poetess such as Sappho, because in Athens, where goddesses could be reduced to Pandora, dispenser of all evils, women had a low status.

In the political domain, despite a considerable evolution in a liberal direction, Athens does not seem to have achieved the same degree of liberty of thought and worship as Ionia, which is demonstrated by the condemning to death of Ionian Physicists in Athens. On the other hand, mystical tendencies, such as those resulting from Orphism and the mysteries of Eleusis, were much more widespread in Athens.

Better organized politically, and of superior commercial power, mainland Greece was more bellicose, open to the exterior and, at times, imperialist. I will cite the following anecdote. Some Athenians of the classical epoch, wishing to ridicule some Cymaeans (from Cyme, a city of Aeolian Anatolia) reproached them for having no history. The Cymaeans replied that they had no history because they had had no wars. `Trees grow in silence,' they said, `and without banging a drum. In contrast, it is with great noise that they fall and crash to earth.'

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