Chapter V
FREETHOUGHT IN GREECE
The highest of all the ancient civilizations, that of Greece, was naturally the product of the greatest possible complex of culture-forces;[1] and its rise to pre-eminence begins after the contact of the Greek settlers in Æolia and Ionia with the higher civilizations of Asia Minor.[2] The great Homeric epos itself stands for the special conditions of Æolic and Ionic life in those colonies;[3] even Greek religion, spontaneous as were its earlier growths, was soon influenced by those of the East;[4] and Greek philosophy and art alike draw their first inspirations from Eastern contact.[5] Whatever reactions we may make against the tradition of Oriental origins,[6] it is clear that the higher civilization of antiquity had Oriental (including in that term Egyptian) roots.[7] At no point do we find a “pure” Greek civilization. Alike the “Mycenæan” and the “Minoan” civilizations, as recovered for us by modern excavators, show a composite basis, in which the East is implicated.[8] And in the historic period the connection remains obvious. It matters not whether we hold the Phrygians and Karians of history to have been originally an Aryan stock, related to the Hellenes, and thus to have acted as intermediaries between Aryans and Semites, or to have been originally Semites, with whom Greeks intermingled.[9] On either view, the intermediaries represented Semitic influences, which they passed on to the Greek-speaking races, though they in turn developed their deities in large part on psychological lines common to them and the Semites.[10]
As to the obvious Asiatic influences on historic Greek civilization, compare Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, 1872, p. 64; Von Ihering, Vorgeschichte der Indo-Europäer, Eng. tr. (“The Evolution of the Aryan”), p. 73; Schömann, Griech. Alterthümer, 2te Aufl. 1861, i, 10; E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alterth. ii, 155; A. Bertrand, Études de mythol. et d’archéol. grecques, 1858, pp. 40–41; Bury, introd. p. 3. It seems clear that the Egyptian influence is greatly overstated by Herodotos (ii. 49–52, etc.), who indeed avows that he is but repeating what the Egyptians affirm. The Egyptian priests made their claim in the spirit in which the Jews later made theirs. Herodotos, besides, would prefer an Egyptian to an Asiatic derivation, and so would his audience. But it must not be overlooked that there was an Egyptian influence in the “Minoan” period.
A Hellenistic enthusiasm has led a series of eminent scholars to carry so far their resistance to the tradition of Oriental beginnings[11] as to take up the position that Greek thought is “autochthonous.”[12] If it were, it could not conceivably have progressed as it did. Only the tenacious psychological prejudice as to race-characters and racial “genius” could thus long detain so many students at a point of view so much more nearly related to supernaturalism than to science. It is safe to say that if any people is ever seen to progress in thought, art, and life, with measurable rapidity, its progress is due to the reactions of foreign intercourse. The primary civilizations, or what pass for such, as those of Akkad and Egypt, are immeasurably slow in accumulating culture-material; the relatively rapid developments always involve the stimulus of old cultures upon a new and vigorous civilization, well-placed for social evolution for the time being. There is no point in early Greek evolution, so far as we have documentary trace of it, at which foreign impact or stimulus is not either patent or inferrible.[13] In the very dawn of history the Greeks are found to be a composite stock,[14] growing still more composite; and the very beginnings of its higher culture are traced to the non-Grecian people of Thrace,[15] who worshipped the Muses. As seen by Herodotos and Thucydides, “the original Hellenes were a particular conquering tribe of great prestige, which attracted the surrounding tribes to follow it, imitate it, and call themselves by its name. The Spartans were, to Herodotos, Hellenic; the Athenians, on the other hand, were not. They were Pelasgian, but by a certain time ‘changed into Hellenes and learnt their language.’ In historical times we cannot really find any tribe of pure Hellenes in existence.”[16] The later supremacy of the Greek culture is thus to be explained in terms not of an abnormal “Greek genius,”[17] but of the special evolution of intelligence in the Greek-speaking stock, firstly through constant crossing with others, and secondarily through its furtherance by the special social conditions of the more progressive Greek city-states, of which conditions the most important were their geographical dividedness and their own consequent competition and interaction.[18]
The whole problem of Oriental “influence” has been obscured, and the solution retarded, by the old academic habit of discussing questions of mental evolution in vacuo. Even the reaction against idolatrous Hellenism proceeded without due regard to historical sequence; and the return reaction against that is still somewhat lacking in breadth of inference. There has been too much on one side of assumption as to early Oriental achievement; and too much tendency on the other to assume that the positing of an “influence” on the Greeks is a disparagement of the “Greek mind.” The superiority of that in its later evolution seems too obvious to need affirming. But that hardly justifies so able a writer as Professor Burnet in concluding (Early Greek Philosophy, 2nd ed. introd. pp. 22–23) that “the” Egyptians knew no more arithmetic than was learned by their children in the schools; or in saying (id. p. 26) that “the” Babylonians “studied and recorded celestial phenomena for what we call astrological purposes, not from any scientific interest.” How can we have the right to say that no Babylonians had a scientific interest in the data? Such interest would in the nature of the case miss the popular reproduction given to astrological lore. But it might very well subsist.
Professor Burnet, albeit a really original investigator, has not here had due regard to the early usage of collegiate or corporate culture, in which arcane knowledge was reserved for the few. Thus he writes (p. 26) concerning the Greeks that “it was not till the time of Plato that even the names of the planets were known.” Surely they must have been “known” to some adepts long before: how else came they to be accepted? As Professor Burnet himself notes (p. 34), “in almost every department of life we find that the corporation at first is everything and the individual nothing. The peoples of the East hardly got beyond this stage at all: their science, such as it is, is anonymous, the inherited property of a caste or guild, and we still see clearly in some cases that it was once the same among the Hellenes.” Is it not then probable that astronomical knowledge was so ordered by Easterns, and passed on to Hellenes?
There still attaches to the investigation of early Greek philosophy the drawback that the philosophical scholars do not properly posit the question: What was the early Ionic Greek society like? How did the Hellenes relate to the older polities and cultures which they found there? Professor Burnet makes justifiable fun (p. 21, note) of Dr. Gomperz’s theory of the influence of “native brides”; but he himself seems to argue that the Greeks could learn nothing from the men they conquered, though he admits (p. 20) their derivation of “their art and many of their religious ideas from the East.” If religion, why not religious speculation, leading to philosophy and science? This would be a more fruitful line of inquiry than one based on the assumption that “the” Babylonians went one way and “the” Greeks another. After all, only a few in each race carried on the work of thought and discovery. We do not say that “the English” wrote Shakespeare. Why affirm always that “the” Greeks did whatever great Greeks achieved?
On the immediate issue Professor Burnet incidentally concedes what is required. After arguing that the East perhaps borrowed more from the West than did the West from the East, he admits (p. 21): “It would, however, be quite another thing to say that Greek philosophy originated quite independently of Oriental influence.”