‘Thrice ten thousand are the servants of Zeus, immortal, watchmen over mortal men; these watch deeds of justice and of wickedness, walking all ways up and down the earth, clothed in the mist[14].’
But it is in his ethical standards that Hesiod is more directly a forerunner of the Stoic school: for neither the warlike valour nor the graceful self-control of the hero appeals to him, but the stern sense of justice and the downright hard work of the plain man.
‘Full across the way of Virtue the immortal gods have set the sweat of the brow; long and steep is the path that reaches to her, and rough at the beginning; but when you reach the highest point, hard though it is, in the end it becomes easy[15].’
The Orphic poems.
34. Between Epic and Attic literature stands the poetry of the ‘Orphic’ movement, belonging to the sixth century B.C., and exercising a wide influence over various schools of philosophy in the succeeding centuries. For an account of this movement the reader must look elsewhere[16]; here we can only notice that it continued the cosmological speculations of Hesiod’s Theogony, and in particular developed a strain of pantheism which is echoed in the Stoic poets. According to an Orphic poet
‘Zeus is the first and the last, the head and the foot, the male and the female, Earth and Heaven, Night and Day; he is the one force, the one great deity, the creator, the alluring power of love; for all these things are immanent in the person of Zeus[17].’
Here amidst the fusion of poetry and theology we first see the budding principle of philosophic monism, the reaching after a unity which will comprehend all things. To the same school is attributed the doctrine that ‘the human soul is originally and essentially divine[18].’
The Hylozoists.
35. To the sixth century B.C. belong also the earliest Greek philosophers who are known to us by name. In all of these the early polytheism is either abandoned or becomes so dim in its outlines that the origin and governing force of the universe is sought in quite other directions. The philosophers of Ionia busied themselves with the problem of the elements. Thales of Miletus was a man of many attainments; he had travelled both in Egypt and in Babylon, and was an active political reformer. To him water was the primary substance, from which all others proceeded and to which they returned[19]. Anaximander of the same town was the first who undertook to give the Greeks a map of the whole known world. To him it seemed that the primary matter could not be the same as any visible substance, but must be a protoplasm of undefined character (ἄπειρον), capable of assuming in turn all shapes[20]. Anaximenes (once more of Miletus) assumed air as the first principle, and derived the other elements from it by processes of condensation (πύκνωσις) and rarefaction[21]. But on one point all the Ionian philosophers were agreed: the primary substance was the cause of its own motion; they were ‘hylozoists,’ since they hold that matter (ὕλη) is a living thing (ζῷον). They are from the standpoint of physics ‘monists,’ as opposed to those who hold matter and life, or matter and force, to be two things eternally distinct, and are therefore ‘dualists’ in their theory[22].