Listening to the Logos: Speech and the Coming of Wisdom in Ancient Greece

Listening to the Logos

STUDIES IN RHETORIC/COMMUNICATION

Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor

LISTENING to the LOGOS

Speech and the

Coming of Wisdom

in Ancient Greece

CHRISTOPHER LYLE JOHNSTONE

© 2009 University of South Carolina

Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2009

Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina,

by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012

www.sc.edu/uscpress

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

Johnstone, Christopher Lyle, 1947–

Listening to the logos : speech and the coming of wisdom in ancient

Greece / Christopher Lyle Johnstone.

   p. cm. — (Studies in rhetoric/communication)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-57003-854-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Logos (Philosophy) 2. Philosophy, Ancient. 3. Rhetoric, Ancient. I. Title.

B187.L6J635 2009

180—dc22

2009021900

ISBN 978-1-61117-175-4 (ebook)

To my maternal grandfather, Robert I. Plomert, who encouraged me

to ask questions. He was the wisest person I ever knew in real life.

Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein as in a firmament, the nature of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its property. . . .

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Contents

Series Editor’s Preface

In Listening to the Logos: Speech and the Coming of Wisdom in Ancient Greece, Christopher Lyle Johnstone explores how the ancient Greeks thought about the connections between wisdom and speech. He finds not a unified idea of how these connections can or should develop but a consistent inquiry into the issues of speech, language, dialogue, and argument on the one hand and the pursuit of wisdom on the other. Are these separate, perhaps even competing or incompatible, disciplines and practices, or interacting principles, or resources for one another?

Johnstone focuses on the Greek world in the period 620–322 B.C.E., when, according to his account, understandings of the world that had been grounded largely in myth were joined rapidly by new rational, naturalistic, and philosophical modes. The three centuries studied in this work saw the interacting development of what came to be called philosophy and rhetoric. Johnstone’s book is not so much a history of early Greek philosophy or early Greek rhetoric as a synthetic account of the emerging and enduring sense of the connections between speech and wisdom from early Greek thought to the flowering of systematic rhetorical and philosophical thought.

Johnstone traces the complex relations among language and thought as variously understood in Homer, Hesiod, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Protagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle. At the same time, Johnstone draws widely on generations of scholarship that inform our understandings of these issues and thinkers.

Johnstone provides an appreciation of the achievements of fourth-century B.C.E. Greek rhetorical and philosophical thought without, however, losing his simultaneous appreciation of the earlier modes of thought and expression from which they emerged. Listening to the Logos is the fruit of one scholar-teacher’s lifetime of study and reflection and a book to which scholars and students of rhetoric may turn for instruction and refreshment.

THOMAS W. BENSON

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful for permission to use previously published material from the following sources: "Sophistical Wisdom: Politikê Aretê and ‘Logosophia,’ " Philosophy and Rhetoric 39, no. 4 (2006): 265–89, © 2006 by the Pennsylvania State University, by permission of the Penn State University Press, University Park; ‘Speech Is a Powerful Lord’: Speech, Sound, and Enchantment in Greek Oratorical Performance, Advances in the History of Rhetoric 8 (2005): 1–20, © 2005 by the American Society for the History of Rhetoric, by permission of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric; Eros, Logos, and Sophia in Plato: Philosophical Conversation, Spiritual Lovemaking, and Dialogic Ethics, in Communication Ethics: Between Cosmopolitanism and Provinciality, edited by Kathleen Glenister Roberts and Ronald C. Arnett (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 155–86, © 2008 by Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., used by permission of Peter Lang Publishing.

Research for this book commenced during a 1986–87 sabbatical leave supported by the Pennsylvania State University and by Dennis Gouran, then head of the Department of Speech Communication. I am also grateful to the Classics Faculty Library at Cambridge University for granting me visiting-scholar status during the summer of 1986 and to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece, for my appointment as senior associate member in 1987 and again in 1991, 1997, 2002, and 2007. I am especially appreciative to Richard Leo Enos, Edward Schiappa, and Janet Atwill, all of whom read early versions of several chapters and provided encouraging and helpful feedback. Stephen Browne, Thomas Benson, and Michael Hogan provided useful guidance in the later stages of the project. Bill Rawlins read and provided very helpful comments about my discussion of Plato and engaged me in loving conversation about key ideas in it. I also want to acknowledge Michael Hyde, who once asked me, Why study the Greeks? In a way, this book is my answer to his question.

Over the years when I was studying the materials on which I draw here, I taught both graduate and undergraduate courses that focused on one or another set of these texts. Discussions and debates with the students in those courses were important sources of insight into the ideas I write about in this book. I cannot name them all here, but among those who deserve my acknowledgment and gratitude are George Elder, Pat Gehrke, Gina Ercolini, David Tell, and David Dzikowski. Thank you for taking these texts, questions, and ideas seriously. I am also indebted to two reviewers for the University of South Carolina Press, whose comments, suggestions, and encouraging responses to the manuscripts were instructive and affirming. The second reader in particular and James Denton, acquisitions editor at the press, provided valuable guidance and exhibited great patience. Finally, I owe more than words can ever express to my soul mate and life partner, Patty, for never losing faith in me and this project.

Prologue

Early in my career I published three essays (1980, 1981, 1983) that, in examining how ethical standards for communication might be devised, focus on connections between speech and wisdom—between oral expression, sophia, and phronêsis. In the first of these essays I conclude from a synthetic reading of the Nicomachean Ethics, the Rhetoric, and the Politics that Aristotle conceived rhetoric as an exercise of phronêsis or practical wisdom and of the latter as fundamentally rhetorical. Following a trajectory set by Aristotle’s notion (Nic. Eth. 1.7) that the (morally) good or happy life for a human being lies in the fulfillment of his/her proper function or work (ergon), the second essay sets out explicitly to situate guidelines for ethical speech in a commitment to the realization of our fundamental nature as human beings. The third essay examines the implications for a rhetorical ethics of John Dewey’s moral theory and his conception of communication, and it points toward a contemporary conception of practical wisdom.

A point of departure for the present work comes from a passage in the second essay, where I consider the ethical implications of our species designation, Homo sapiens, understood as the wise human (as distinct from the upright-walking human, Homo erectus, and the adaptable human, Homo habilis): A humanistic ethic that embraces [this conception] of human nature will commit its adherents to the pursuit of wisdom, for in this pursuit lies the fulfillment of human being (Johnstone 1981, 180). In the remainder of the paragraph I sketch a conception of wisdom that informed my thinking at that time. Human wisdom, I write, "involves a kind of knowing, as is indicated by the significance of sapience. Wisdom is both a grasping of ‘the way things are’—of the patterns and regularities in human experience and of how these fit into the kosmos—and an appreciation of the truths thus grasped. . . . It is generated by apprehensions of the truths of human nature, by one’s realization or understanding of how humanness ‘fits into’ the nature of things."

I am particularly interested in the relationship between wisdom and speech—between what Aristotle termed the most finished form of knowledge and the instrumentalities of language. What is wisdom, and how is it acquired? Can it be communicated or taught to others? What is the role of speech, language, dialogue, argument—that is, of logos—in its attainment? If the pursuit of wisdom is taken as the highest moral end of human conduct, what are the implications for how language ought to be used in the conduct of everyday life? How, more particularly, can the resources of rhetoric be employed in the quest for wisdom? These are some general questions that animate the present inquiry.

Narrower questions concentrate on events in a relatively small area of the eastern Mediterranean during the brief span of three centuries—roughly from 620 to 322 B.C.E.—when understanding of the world expanded from a purely mythopoetic view to include a naturalistic/cosmological/philosophical orientation. During the intellectual movement from mythos to a philosophic/scientific outlook, how did meanings of sophia evolve? As emergent explanations for natural phenomena shifted causality from the actions of deities to the operation in nature of a rational principle, what occurred in the relationship between wisdom and the divine (to theion)? What was the role of logos in the emergence and substance of a cosmological/scientific/philosophic worldview? What was distinctive about the form and content of this worldview?

I begin with an awareness and appreciation of the fact that something profoundly important happened in the Greek world during the archaic and classical eras. A flowering of human intelligence, poetic imagination, and cultural expression occurred that is unrivaled in the West for its originality and enduring impact. In our own time science and art, education and academic inquiry, government and politics, athletics and entertainment all bear the stamp of Greek ideas and values. Preserved in the written record of that ancient flowering are insights and understandings that may be as important and useful now as they were then.

The discussion proceeds chronologically, beginning with the mythopoetic tradition embodied in the epic verse of Homer and Hesiod, progressing through the emergence of a naturalistic worldview disclosed in the writings of the Presocratic thinkers, to the humanistic turn of Socrates and the Sophists, and culminating in the letters and orations of Isocrates, the dialogues of Plato, and the treatises of Aristotle, in whom the insights and methodologies of the earliest Greek thinkers find their fullest and most systematic expression. The central terms to be traced through the course of this development are logos and sophia, but other significant terms include mythos, kosmos, archê, nous, physis, theion, and phronêsis. Through an examination of the changing meanings of and relationships among such terms, I reconstruct (to the extent possible) the understandings and insights that constituted the sophia of the earliest Western thinkers and seek finally to illuminate the ways in which logos functions in the coming of wisdom. This focus highlights the nexus of philosophy and rhetoric in a way that illuminates the origins and early development of these ideas and the relations between them.

ONE

The Greek Stones Speak

Toward an Archaeology of Consciousness

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

The relationship between wisdom and utterance, reflected at times in more specific connections between philosophy and rhetoric, has been a focus of intellectual interest in the West since at least the time of Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca. 500 B.C.E.). Parmenides, Empedocles, Protagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Bacon, Vico—all have been concerned, either directly or indirectly, with the links between speech or eloquence and what they take to be the highest form of knowledge. Recent scholarship has pursued this relationship along several related lines of inquiry, though sometimes obliquely. Some investigators have examined the role of speech in the creation of all human knowledge.¹ Others have concentrated more particularly on the role of rhetoric in the creation and exercise of wisdom.² In an effort to illuminate the ancient foundations of these connections, several scholars have lately studied the link between language and thought in Greek philosophy and rhetoric.³

This book synthesizes these lines of inquiry. I examine the relationship between speech and wisdom—between logos and sophia—in early Greek thought both to illuminate Greek conceptions of wisdom and to clarify the role of the word—especially the spoken word—in its acquisition and exercise. Changes in the idea of wisdom from the mythopoetic tradition of Homer and Hesiod to its systematic elaboration in the works of Plato and Aristotle arise from certain social and linguistic developments that are foregrounded in order to illuminate the contexts in which new ways of thinking and using language emerged and were refined. The appearance of literacy and prose composition during the archaic period, the expansion of trade along the Ionian coast during the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E., the formation of the polis and the growing importance of public debate in Greek political life, the elaboration of a philosophical vocabulary and syntax by the Presocratics, the suzerainty of Athens over the Aegean city-states following the Persian Wars, the Sophists’ challenge to established custom and to the new philosophical doctrines, the challenges and excesses of democracy in Athens during the late fifth and the fourth centuries—all influenced intellectual developments throughout this brief period in Western history.

These tracings are by no means a comprehensive history of or a commentary on Greek speculative thought. A number of such studies have been produced, beginning perhaps with Aristotle and continuing throughout the Western intellectual tradition. Rather, I follow the career of an idea, wisdom, from its roots in the mythic mind to its systematic articulation by the most prodigious intellect the Greek world produced. Similarly I am not reconstructing the historical development of rhetorical theory in ancient Greece.⁴ Instead, I examine the intellectual, conceptual, and linguistic milieu in which Greek rhetorical theory emerged, and I illuminate the ideas and terms with which the speaker’s art had to deal from the outset: wisdom, truth, knowledge, belief, prudence, justice, reason. These concepts have a history that predates that of rhetoric, and we can appreciate the development and substance of Greek rhetorical theory more fully by understanding that history. However one conceives such fourth-century ideas as rhetoric, poetics, and dialectic, the association of speech and wisdom in the earliest Greek texts—whether rhetorical, poetical, or philosophical—is present from the outset and persists throughout the intellectual tradition of the archaic and classical periods. Indeed Aristotle’s distinction between rhetorical proof and scientific demonstration mirrors his distinction between practical and speculative wisdom. The grounds for these classifications can be grasped fully only when we see how speech and wisdom are related in the tradition upon which he drew.

Several important conclusions emerge from these inquiries. Greek conceptions of wisdom evolved over time, from the identification of sophia with the poet’s skill and early belief in the mantic powers of the priest, the soothsayer, and the oracle to the Platonic/Aristotelian idea of sophia as speculative knowledge of fundamental cosmic principles. This evolution was neither wholly linear nor progressive. Nonetheless certain key elements persist or recur, and there are loci of coherence in the account. Moreover the idea of wisdom generally (though not always) included some sense of divine knowledge, and the relationships among to theion (divinity), physis (nature), and o kosmos (the world-order) are central to wisdom in many of its incarnations. Indeed rational cosmology and natural philosophy retained important links to myth and poetic language, and the "transition from mythos to logos" (as it is sometimes expressed) signaled not so much a break with the past as the emergence of a new form of consciousness that coexisted with and was infused by a mythopoetic mind set as old as humanity itself. Greek views of wisdom also included a practical, moral dimension wherein knowledge of the divine or universal realm had important implications for practical decision and thus for personal conduct. Wisdom, consequently, came to comprehend both sophia (speculative or cosmological knowledge) and phronêsis (practical sagacity or prudence). Hence the ontological and moral realms at some points converge.

The oral use of language figures centrally in the acquisition and exercise of wisdom, though the invention of alphabetic writing in the eighth century B.C.E. made an essential contribution. From the tales of epic poets and conversations among the Ionian nature philosophers to the speeches of the Sophists and the dialectical exchanges of the Socratics, it was the spoken word that most directly inspired, awakened, or deepened the insights and understandings that are comprehended under the idea of wisdom. The philosophical or wisdom-creative efficacy of speech can be understood in terms of both content and form, and the substantive and formal characteristics of such speech can be identified and their operation explained. One Hellenic conception of wisdom features the cosmic principle of balance/proportion/equilibrium/reciprocity—the logos according to which all things come to pass—and the ability to live in harmony with this principle. This principle, which steers all things through all, is disclosed in natural events and processes, in human intelligence, and in speech. Another conception emphasizes the limits of human knowledge and our reliance on perception in determining how to live. This is the conceptual milieu in which the speaker’s art—the principles of rhetoric—first appeared during the fifth century B.C.E. and in which the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy developed. Understanding this milieu enables us to grasp and appreciate the ideas and terms that shaped the art and its connections with philosophical speculation.

My overarching goals here are to disclose, to the extent possible, the major insights of these ancient thinkers, to make accessible whatever wisdom they themselves—by their own accounts—may have possessed, and to discern the role and functions of reasoned speech in the attainment and exercise of this wisdom. The emergence of naturalistic accounts of the origins and operations of the world and their competition with mythopoetic explanations took place over several centuries, beginning with the Ionians and culminating during the classical era in the writings of Aristotle. Moreover, even as intellectuals inquired into the material origins and natural workings of the world around them, the concept of the divine was not so much displaced as it was transformed.⁵ The real intellectual revolution in Greece was not so much a shift from theos (god) to physis (nature) as a shift from a supernatural to a naturalistic understanding of divinity and the causes of world events. What emerges from the record of this shift is that, rather than being ruled by immortal, anthropomorphic beings who exist outside nature, the world-process is governed by an indwelling rational principle that is at once natural and divine.

This ancient wisdom both initiated the scientific quest in which we are still engaged for the archê or origin of the universe and anticipated some of the insights this quest has yielded. Recent books herald, as Stephen Toulmin puts it, a return to cosmology. Beginning perhaps with Carl Sagan’s immensely popular Cosmos (1980), the scientific search for ultimate truths in the universe has entered the popular consciousness and excited the popular imagination. Toulmin’s own foray into the territory—The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (1982)—reveals a spirit remarkably close to what we find in early Greek cosmological speculations. Likewise, such volumes as Timothy Ferris’s Coming of Age in the Milky Way (1988), Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988), Dennis Overbye’s Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Story of the Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe (1991), and Lee Smolin’s The Life of the Cosmos (1997) show contemporary cosmological inquiry to be working out ideas and testing theories that have their roots in the thinking of Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Democritus, among others. The ancient search for universal wisdom beckons us still.

A culture’s ways of accounting for its own existence and for its experience of the world—its creation myths and stories, its theogonies and cosmogonies, its philosophies and cosmologies—articulate various ways of relating to the world and of dwelling in it. These ways are embodied in artifacts as diverse as painted or carved images, religious rituals and objects, preserved stories and tales, metaphysical doctrines, and cosmological theories. Each discloses a sense of being-in-the-world that is rooted in convictions about the essential character of the world and our place in it.⁶ There is an architecture in consciousness, a structure or framework in terms of which one comes to understand one’s experiences. My aim in examining some of the artifacts that manifest mythopoetic and naturalistic ways of seeing the world is to illuminate the forms of consciousness they express and the relationships between these.

The artifacts to be examined here, of course, are texts rather than stones, structures, tools, or coins, but they are embedded in their historical and cultural milieu as surely as any bronze weapon or painted potsherd is.⁷ By examining certain features of this milieu we can make probabilistic determinations of how these artifacts functioned in their contexts—of what they meant, of the purposes and thoughts they embodied, and of the forms of consciousness they bespoke. From analysis of intrinsic and contextual clues in the artifacts, informed efforts can be made at reconstructing a social history. Such reconstructions are always in some degree speculative or conjectural, and the legitimacy of any particular reconstruction rests finally on how persuasively it accounts for the evidence discovered. In other words, the reconstruction of social history from archaeological evidence is fundamentally rhetorical, and competing reconstructions compel adherence only within the limits of probability. Again within probabilistic limits, alternative reconstructions—competing readings of the evidence—can impose equivalent claims on our adherence, so that often several possible readings must be considered as having equal legitimacy. This is especially so when the evidence is incomplete and/or ambiguous.⁸

My reading of texts representing the Greek wisdom-tradition proceeds in this spirit. The very notion of seeking through textual analysis to retrieve and reconstruct ancient ideas strikes some scholars as being problematic, if not impossible (Poulakos 1990). Nonetheless, the distinction between historical reconstruction and contemporary appropriation can be useful in contrasting different approaches to reading and interpretation.⁹ Even granting that any statement we make about the past is anchored in the present, [and] that the past-as-it-was is [ultimately] irretrievable (Poulakos 1990, 221; also see Segal 1984–85), there is a difference between treating a thinker "as within our own philosophical framework and seeking to reconstruct how the [ancient] author and his or her contemporaries [might have] understood the text."¹⁰ The former aims at appropriating the terms of earlier writers in constructing contemporary ideas and illuminating contemporary problems. The latter aims, like the work of the archaeologist and the historian, at using the available evidence to speculate about what might have existed or occurred long ago and to determine the relative probabilities of competing reconstructions of past ideas, events, and conditions.

So it is with our texts. Some readings are more readily sustained by the evidence than others, or multiple readings claim our consideration simultaneously.¹¹ Accordingly my readings aim at recovering to the extent possible the insights the authors themselves sought to express and, more generally, the forms of consciousness or modes of awareness that disclose themselves in different ways of accounting for the world. Such recovery is based on determining, within the writers’ own intellectual and linguistic contexts, what ideas can be associated with certain terms and phrases and then discerning which interpretations are more compelling than others (Schiappa 2003, 32–33). Moreover we must recognize that multiple correct interpretations are possible for a given text inasmuch as writers can and do exploit the ambiguities of certain terms with a view to expressing multiple meanings.¹²

The interpretation of Greek texts is inevitably problematic, but we can sometimes distinguish between more and less likely readings by recognizing the centrality in Greek philosophical and protoscientific writing of metaphorical expression and of analogical thinking. Ricoeur (1977) insists that the downward movement of analysis—the archaeological investigation of texts—must be complemented by an upward movement of interpretation, an ascending dialectic through which the metaphorical meanings of a text are illuminated and its ontological implications discerned. This approach is particularly appropriate when texts exhibit emerging metaphorical expressions in the development of a philosophical vocabulary. In his account of Presocratic thought, Havelock emphasizes that the language of philosophical inquiry and argument did not come ready-made to those who charted the path from a mythopoetic to a naturalistic consciousness. From the standpoint of a sophisticated philosophical language, such as was available to Aristotle, what was lacking was a set of commonplace but abstract terms which by their interrelations could describe the physical world conceptually. . . . The history of early philosophy is usually written under the assumption that this kind of vocabulary was already available to the first Greek thinkers. The evidence of their own language is that it was not. They had to initiate the process of inventing it (1983, 14).¹³

One of Havelock’s examples of such linguistic invention is the word kosmos, employed by Plato (Gorgias 508A) and other classical thinkers to denote the ordered world or universe but perhaps introduced with this meaning by Heraclitus. "It was doubtfully put forth by the Milesians, but this [DK 30] is the first fully attested entry of the term into philosophical language. It has been borrowed from the epic vocabulary, in particular from previous application to the orderly array of an army controlled by its ‘orderer’ (cosmêtôr); but it is now ‘stretched,’ so to speak, . . . to cover a whole world or universe or physical system, and to identify it as such" (Havelock 1983, 24; also see Kahn 1960, 193).

A key to understanding the development of abstract philosophical language as it appears in Plato and Aristotle is to recognize that earlier conceptual advances necessitated the metaphorical use of older terms to express novel ideas.¹⁴ Thus thought precedes and instigates the development of terminology precisely because there are ideas—not yet formed into concepts—for the expression of which no terms exist. The Presocratics’ task of stretching the language is performed through the figurative use of such archaic terms as genesis, logos, physis, kosmos, theos, and archê to express new ways of perceiving the causes of events and the relations among them. In this sense, much philosophical and scientific language even now is metaphorical. We can understand this language and its implications fully only when we read its archaic significance into it by considering the root metaphors of key terms—only, for instance, insofar as we read into the term generate the wholly organic process of procreation and birth, of bringing forth; or into physics (as a study of nature) the idea of organic growth and natural change. Thus do the seeds of new ways of thinking about the world precede expression, and the resources of language are extended and augmented metaphorically precisely because people have ideas for which there are no words.

This may seem to be at odds with what Havelock implies when he states, As is the level of language, so is the level of consciousness (1983, 16). One implication of this statement—and one reading of Havelock’s thesis—is that advances in thinking and conceptualization cannot precede linguistic advances. Because the linguistic task of the Presocratics was to invent a vocabulary and syntax necessary for constructing abstract philosophical concepts, these men could not themselves have achieved levels of abstraction that were accessible to later thinkers, who could exploit the possibilities of these linguistic advances. However, Havelock also notes Parmenides’ awareness of the need for a new level of consciousness to achieve the new language. . . . The Presocratics all search variously for terms by which to identify this kind of consciousness. They are seeking to isolate what we might describe as an act of cognition or intellection, directed toward grasping conceptual abstractions rather than narrating and describing events (27). This suggests that these thinkers already had in mind some new ideas about the origins and workings of the world, and that they stretched existing terms and developed a new syntax precisely in order to give expression to these ideas.

It is just this sort of linguistic evolution that made speculative, positivist thought possible. Something happens when we examine the world through the prism of language. When an archaic term is used in a novel sense—that is, metaphorically rather than literally—the mind can extend and elaborate concepts through the process of playing out the implications of the terminology (Ricoeur 1977, 216ff.). As one considers and reflects on a certain term and experiments with meanings, implications, and constructs, one both stretches the way in which the term can be used and has new and more elaborate ways of understanding things. What this means for the interpretation of ancient philosophical and protophilosophical texts is that, in seeking to illuminate an author’s ideas when he employed a given term or expression, we should consider the senses suggested by a metaphorical/analogical reading. This seems especially fitting when we recognize that conceptions of wisdom accompanying the emergent cosmological consciousness manifest a radically new way of understanding the world. Perhaps more fully than any other verbal technique, metaphorical expression reveals the form of consciousness, the world vision, behind any naturalistic account of the way of things.

The principal evidence for a mythopoetic consciousness lies in the poems of Homer and Hesiod, in the Homeric Hymns, and in ancient drama, wherein the characters and actions of the gods are portrayed and their impact on world events and human experience is described.¹⁵ Examining the earliest of these sources—that is, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days—permits us to reconstruct the worldview that manifested itself in Greek mythology and religious practice and that was disclosed in later poetry and drama.

The case of the Presocratic thinkers is more troublesome. Their earliest writings are preserved only in fragmentary quotations and in references and accounts of later philosophers, commentators, and compendiasts whose own intellectual agendas and conceptions often shaped their interpretations and restatements of older writings.¹⁶ Likewise, though such later sources as Plutarch, Sextus, Clement, and Diogenes Laertius are considered reliable, even here it is problematic to conclude that what we have are the ipsissima verba of the ancient authors. In many instances we will find close paraphrases rather than actual quotations. This makes the task of reconstruction difficult, and one must exercise great caution in attributing thoughts and ideas to these authors. For all this caution, however, Kirk, Raven, and Schofield conclude that it is legitimate to feel complete confidence in our understanding of a Presocratic thinker . . . when the Aristotelian or Theophrastean interpretation . . . is confirmed by relevant and well-authenticated extracts from the philosopher himself (1983, 6). For my part, I am cognizant of potential problems posed by the state of the evidence, and I argue for my interpretations with whatever level of confidence seems warranted.

What has been said regarding the sources for Presocratic texts also holds for the writings of the older Sophists. What remains of these writings is often fragmentary, and they come to us principally via quotations, paraphrases, commentaries, and imitations in the works of later authors. As with the Presocratic thinkers, the sometimes-fragmentary texts concerning the fifth-century Sophists are collected in Diels and Kranz, which for the purposes of this study is considered the authoritative source of such fragments. My reading of sophistical texts proceeds in the same cautious spirit with which I approach the earlier thinkers.

Something must be said, at least preliminarily, about the Socratic problem. One cannot examine the development of a Greek conception of wisdom without considering what Socrates had to say about it. The problem, of course, is that Socrates apparently did not commit to writing what he thought or said. Any conclusions about Socratic speech and thought will be qualified by unresolved questions of authorship, but even with this caveat we can infer some things about his sense of wisdom and the role of speech in its attainment. We have some diversity of sources upon whom to draw: Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle, plus an important entry in Diogenes Laertius.¹⁷ From such diversity we can perform a kind of triangulation, comparing various accounts of specific features of Socratic talk and, where there are consistencies, inferring with some degree of confidence that we are seeing an authentic portrait.¹⁸ Moreover, even granting that personal motives and viewpoints might distort any single source, each has a legitimate tale to tell about Socrates as a person and as a thinker, and from any one of them might come a singular piece of information that contributes credibly to the composite portrait. These matters will be considered more fully in chapter 4.

So the sources—the stones on the ground—are sometimes problematic, but still they can yield information that will allow us to draw reasonable inferences about the thoughts behind the words and to reconstruct histories of some important ideas. Perhaps, if we just listen, we can hear what these stones have to say.

TWO

Singing the Muses’ Song

Myth, Wisdom, and Speech

I begin my song with the Helikonian Muses;

they have made Helikon, the great god-haunted mountain, their domain;

their soft feet move in the dance that rings the violet-dark spring and the altar of mighty Zeus.

. . . On Helikon’s peak they join hands in lovely dances and their pounding feet awaken desire.

From there they set out and, veiled in mist, glide through the night

and raise enchanting voices to exalt aegis-bearing Zeus and queenly Hera, the Lady of Argo who walks in golden sandals;

gray-eyed Athena, daughter of aegis-bearing Zeus,

and Phoibos Apollon and arrow-shooting Artemis.

They exalt Poseidon, holder and shaker of the earth,

stately Themis and Aphrodite of the fluttering eyelids,

and gold-wreathed Hebe and fair Dione.

And then they turn their song to Eos, Helios, and bright Selene,

to Leto, Iapetos, and sinuous-minded Kronos, to Gaia, great Okeanos, and black Night,

and to the holy race of the other deathless gods.

It was they who taught Hesiod beautiful song as he tended his sheep

at the foothills of god-haunted Helikon.

Hesiod, Theogony 1–23

The visions of wisdom bequeathed to us by ancient Greeks find their fullest expression in classical thought, but they originate in the vision of the seer, the revelation of the oracle, and the verse of the poet, whose utterances are products of the psychic state of entheos, full of the god or inspired.¹ The prophetic powers of the seer spring from a knowledge that is greater than human. The song of the rhapsôdos is inspired by his Muse, who gives him words to speak. The wisdom of the seer, the oracle, the priestess, and the poet is divine, sacred. It comes not from the human soul but from the gods. It concerns what is wholly other, beyond the ken of normal experience. The sophos (f. sophê) sees, hears, and experiences things that are not present to ordinary folk. He or she stands in direct contact with divine beings, communicates with gods and spirits. Through the prophecies of the seer, the diviner, and the oracle, through the verse of the poet, through the song of the rhapsode, such divine wisdom is made accessible to others. Thus do the traditional myths become sources of inspiration to the nonpoet: the speech of mythopoesis and prophecy is the language of divine wisdom.

Walker (2000) observes that rhetoric as an art of epideictic argumentation and persuasion "derives originally from the poetic tradition and . . . extends, in ‘applied’ versions of itself, to the practical discourses of public and private life (viii, italics in original). One might likewise propose that philosophy," as it came to be known, derives originally from the mythic tradition in which oral poetry is the voice of wisdom. In order to understand rhetoric and its relationship to philosophy in the fourth century, we should start with the mythopoetic tradition from which it derives. Likewise, to recover whatever wisdom may be preserved in the writings of Thales, Anaximander, Xenophanes, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus, for example, and later in the works of Plato and Aristotle, we must begin by understanding the mythopoetic consciousness from which these writings emerged and from which, in significant ways, they ultimately departed. Connections between rhetoric and philosophy in the classical era have their roots in the magical powers of poetic speech to carry ordinary listeners into the realm of the immortals and to give them a share, however diluted, in divine wisdom. Particularly important in the poet’s ability to open his listeners to divine wisdom is the power of speech itself—the potency of the oral word—to move the soul. The link between persuasion and orality is explicitly recognized in Gorgias’s fifth-century pronouncement that speech is a powerful lord (Helen, DK 82 B 11.8), but it derives from the psychological potency of oral poetry.

Mythology—defined now as the study of myths and their meanings—has a rich and complex history. As objects of anthropological, literary, sociological, psychological, and philosophical scrutiny, myths from various cultures have yielded insight into these cultures’ senses of themselves as well as into a number of transcultural themes. We can study myth as a means to learn what happened in the prehistoric past, to interpret history, to understand religious concepts, to probe the secret mind of an individual or a tribe, to determine the universals in human thinking.² My present interest embraces all these perspectives. A mythopoetic consciousness is not specific to a given culture or even to a particular era; rather, it is a way of being and thinking rooted in a worldview in which all events—natural, social, and personal—are manifestations of divine power(s). The fundamental beliefs that constitute such a worldview see in such powers the origins of things and the causes of events. By examining specific myths in terms of their content, forms, and language we can discern how members of a particular culture understood the workings of the world and their place in it. We can see, in short, how their myths gave meaning to experience. Myths, as expressions of social beliefs about the origins and significance of events, are a portal into the very heart of a society, into its secret mind.

The root of myth is mystery. To a self-conscious, observant creature—one who perceives a distinction between things that can be controlled and things that are beyond controlling, one who views events with intellectual curiosity—the world around us is at once familiar and bewildering. Things change, and they stay the same. The sun rises every morning and sets every evening, but not in precisely the same place. As time passes, the points on the horizon where sunrise and sunset occur shift to the south, linger there for a time, and then migrate north again. What makes it happen so? Sometimes there is much rain; sometimes it is hot and dry. Why? Sometimes the meadow by the river is full of grazing animals and the hunting is good; other times no game is seen for months. Sometimes the river is alive with fish and many can be caught; at other times there are few. Why do these things happen as they do? Sometimes a person falls into the sleep from which there is no awakening, and what is left behind becomes dirt and bones. When this happens, where has she gone? Who has taken her? Will she need her body where she is? Will she need tools? Food? Clothing? Where have our people come from? Who are the ancestors of our ancestors? How have we come to be in this land?

Such perplexities are the mother of myth: they compel the mind to seek an explanation, an accounting. Michalopoulos writes:

folklore and myth are primitive man’s earliest articulate expression of his bewilderment and awe as he is confronted by the overwhelming forces of Nature, which he is unable to predict, to control, or to understand. . . . For a very long time during the early period of his evolution, he is baffled and often terrified by Nature’s violent or disquieting phenomena, such as thunder and lightening, storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, or by the eerie rustling of leaves in the darkness of the forest, or by the majestic progress of sun, moon, and stars across the vast dome of the skies. These are all deep mysteries, and mystery fills the primitive soul with fear. In order to remove fear, the savage endeavors to placate the unknown powers which cause it. Since he knows nothing of nature, his untutored imagination creates . . . divinities as numerous and as varied as the phenomena they appear to produce. (1966, 13–14)³

A people’s mythology provides first of all just such an explanation of why things happen as they do and of how the world came to be as it is, with us in it. Myth is a way of giving order to the variety and variability in what happens around us and of apprehending the causes behind events.⁴ In its primal meaning mythos comprehends the idea of telling a story, of presenting a narrative that enables a people—a tribe, a clan, a culture—to make sense of the mysterious.⁵ It is a saying, an utterance that satisfies the uniquely human desire to grasp what is behind the events of daily experience, to know the beginnings of things. Myth, says Eliade, "has no other function than to reveal how something came into being . . . how worlds are born and what happened afterward" (1977, 16).

As a way of making sense of things, myth is distinctive in how it answers the question, why? In general, the answer of myth is, because some very powerful beings, who have dominion over the heavens and the earth and the seas, and who make things happen through their own wills and acts, have made it so. As Eliade puts it, "Myth tells how, through the deeds of Supernatural Beings, a reality came into existence, be it the whole of reality, the Cosmos, or only a fragment of reality—an island, a species of plant, a particular kind of human behavior, an institution. Myth, then, is always an account of a ‘creation’; it relates how something was produced, began to be. . . . The actors in myths are Supernatural Beings" (1963, 5–6).⁶ Thus do the seasons change through the actions of gods; thus does the rain come, or not; thus is the harvest rich, or not; thus is the hunt successful, or not. What is distinctive about myth is that it locates what Aristotle would later term the efficient causes of events in the actions of superhuman beings—powerful, sometimes terrible, usually immortal. The objects and events that hold sway over human experience—sun and moon, thunder and rain, fire and water, earth and sky, war and peace, pestilence and death—are perceived either as embodying such beings or as manifesting their power. Each being has its own character; each has