Besides all this, it is quite certain that Parmenides went on to describe how the other gods were born and how they fell, an idea which we know to be Orphic, and which may well have been Pythagorean. We shall come to it again in Empedokles. In Plato’s Symposium, Agathon couples Parmenides with Hesiod as a narrator of ancient deeds of violence committed by the gods.[[483]] If Parmenides was expounding the Pythagorean theology, all this is just what we should expect; but it seems hopeless to explain it on any of the other theories which have been advanced on the purpose of the Way of Belief. Such things do not follow naturally from the ordinary view of the world, and we have no reason to suppose that Herakleitos expounded his views of the upward and downward path of the soul in this form. He certainly did hold that the guardian spirits entered into human bodies; but the whole point of his theory was that he gave a naturalistic rather than a theological account of the process. Still less can we think it probable that Parmenides made up these stories himself in order to show what the popular view of the world really implied if properly formulated. We must ask, I think, that any theory on the subject shall account for what was evidently no inconsiderable portion of the poem.
Physiology.
95. In describing the views of his contemporaries, Parmenides was obliged, as we see from the fragments, to say a good deal about physiological matters. Like everything else, man was composed of the warm and the cold, and death was caused by the removal of the warm. Some curious views with regard to generation were also stated. In the first place, males came from the right side and females from the left. Women had more of the warm and men of the cold, a view which we shall find Empedokles contradicting.[[484]] It is just the proportion of the warm and cold in men that determines the character of their thought, so that even corpses, from which the warm has been removed, retain a perception of what is cold and dark.[[485]] These fragments of information do not tell us much when taken by themselves; but they connect themselves in a most interesting way with the history of medicine, and point to the fact that one of its leading schools stood in close relation with the Pythagorean Society. Even before the days of Pythagoras, we know that Kroton was famous for its doctors. A Krotoniate, Demokedes, was court physician to the Persian king, and married Milo the Pythagorean’s daughter.[[486]] We also know the name of a very distinguished medical writer who lived at Kroton in the days between Pythagoras and Parmenides, and the few facts we are told about him enable us to regard the physiological views described by Parmenides not as isolated curiosities, but as landmarks by means of which we can trace the origin and growth of one of the most influential of medical theories, that which explains health as a balance of opposites.
Alkmaion of Kroton.
96. Aristotle tells us that Alkmaion of Kroton[[487]] was a young man in the old age of Pythagoras. He does not actually say, as later writers do, that he was a Pythagorean, though he points out that he seems either to have derived his theory of opposites from the Pythagoreans or they theirs from him.[[488]] In any case, he was intimately connected with the society, as is proved by one of the scanty fragments of his book. It began as follows: “Alkmaion of Kroton, son of Peirithous, spoke these words to Brotinos and Leon and Bathyllos. As to things invisible and things mortal, the gods have certainty; but, so far as men may infer ...”[[489]] The quotation unfortunately ends in this abrupt way, but we learn two things from it. In the first place, Alkmaion possessed that reserve which marks all the best Greek medical writers; and in the second place, he dedicated his work to the heads of the Pythagorean Society.[[490]]
Alkmaion’s chief importance in the history of philosophy really lies in the fact that he is the founder of empirical psychology.[[491]] It is certain that he regarded the brain as the common sensorium, an important discovery which Hippokrates and Plato adopted from him, though Empedokles, Aristotle, and the Stoics reverted to the more primitive view that the heart performs this function. There is no reason to doubt that he made this discovery by anatomical means. We have some authority for saying that he practised dissection, and, though the nerves were not yet recognised as such, it was known that there were certain “passages” which might be prevented from communicating sensations to the brain by lesions.[[492]] He also distinguished between sensation and understanding, though we have no means of knowing exactly where he drew the line between them. His theories of the special senses are of great interest. We find in him already, what is characteristic of Greek theories of vision as a whole, the attempt to combine the view of vision as an act proceeding from the eye with that which attributes it to an image reflected in the eye. He knew the importance of air for the sense of hearing, though he called it the void, a thoroughly Pythagorean touch. With regard to the other senses, our information is more scanty, but sufficient to show that he treated the subject systematically.[[493]]
His astronomy seems surprisingly crude for one who stood in close relations with the Pythagoreans. We are told that he adopted Anaximenes’ theory of the sun and Herakleitos’s explanation of eclipses.[[494]] It is all the more remarkable that he is credited with originating the idea, which it required all Plato’s authority to get accepted later, that the planets have an orbital motion in the opposite direction to the diurnal revolution of the heavens.[[495]] This, if true, probably stood in close connexion with his saying that soul was immortal because it resembled immortal things, and was always in motion like the heavenly bodies.[[496]] He seems, in fact, to be the real author of the curious view which Plato put into the mouth of the Pythagorean Timaios, that the soul has circles revolving just as the heavens and the planets do. This too seems to be the explanation of his further statement that man dies because he cannot join the beginning to the end.[[497]] The orbits of the heavenly bodies always come full circle, but the circles in the head may fail to complete themselves. This new version of the parallelism between the microcosm and the macrocosm would be perfectly natural for Alkmaion, though it is, of course, no more than a playful fancy to Plato.
Alkmaion’s theory of health as “isonomy” is at once that which most clearly connects him with earlier inquirers like Anaximander, and also that which had the greatest influence on the subsequent development of philosophy. He observed, to begin with, that “most things human were two,” and by this he meant that man was made up of the hot and the cold, the moist and the dry, and the rest of the opposites.[[498]] Disease was just the “monarchy” of any one of these—the same thing that Anaximander had called “injustice”—while health was the establishment in the body of a free government with equal laws.[[499]] This was the leading doctrine of the Sicilian school of medicine which came into existence not long after, and we shall have to consider in the sequel its influence on the development of Pythagoreanism. Taken along with the theory of “pores,”[[500]] it is of the greatest importance for later science.
[422]. Diog. ix. 21 (R. P. 111). For the foundation of Elea, see Herod. i. 165 sqq. It was on the coast of Lucania, south of Poseidonia (Paestum).