Such a resolution, in light of the ruin visited upon the house of Oedipus, seemed barely adequate to the terrifying nature of the divine order that had sanctioned it. Yet it seems unlikely, as the stage was cleared and the spectators rose to leave the theatre, that many were brought to question the glaring contradictions that lay at the heart of how they conceived the gods. That the immortals were held to be simultaneously whimsical and purposeful, amoral and sternly moral, arbitrary and wholly just, did not perturb most Athenians. Leaving the theatre of Dionysus, they would have been able to look up at the brilliant array of monuments on the rock above them, where Athena, the divine virgin whose name their city bore, had her greatest temple. No god better exemplified the paradoxes that characterised how most Greeks comprehended the divine. To enter the Parthenon and to look upon its colossal statue of Athena, fashioned out of gold and ivory, magnificent, imperious and sublime, was to behold a deity who offered up a mirror to the Athenian people themselves. Like them, she was famed both for her wisdom and for her quicksilver moods; like her city, she was mistress both of handicrafts and of ‘the clamorous cry of war’.31 Although, in the theatre below her temple, the Athenians were content every year to watch new drafts of the stories told of the gods, and be brought by the spectacle either to laugh or to weep, it did not prompt most of them to smooth out the inconsistencies in their attitudes to the divine. Most preferred not to worry. Most barely paused to reflect that their beliefs might perhaps be a bit inconsistent.
Most – but not all.
Lovers of Wisdom
A century and more after Aristophanes had mocked the pretensions of the Persian king in The Acharnians, a great array of bronze statues began to appear across Athens. By 307 BC, the city had come to be dotted with over three hundred of them, some equestrian, some complete with chariot, but all portraying the same man. Demetrius of Phaleron was a native of the old port of Athens, and from a resolutely working-class background – indeed, according to his enemies, he had once been a slave.* Nevertheless, while still only in his early thirties he had secured a more absolute authority over the city than anyone had wielded since the founding of the democracy. Blessed as a youth with the kind of long-lashed beauty that was liable to make Athenian statesmen go weak at the knees, Demetrius had not hesitated to capitalise on the head-start this advantage gave him. Even as he continued to dye his hair blond and make liberal use of mascara, he had also proven himself, over the course of the decade that he had ruled as the master of Athens, an effective legislator. Not merely a statesman, he was also bred of the city’s intellectual marrow: a philosophos.
‘Lover of wisdom’, the word literally meant. Although it had become a recognisable job only a few decades previously, the origins of philosophy were venerable.† For two centuries and more, while most Greeks had been perfectly content to rely upon Homer for their understanding of the gods, and upon local tradition, and upon what custom defined as the dues of sacrifice, there had been some who were not. To these thinkers, the contradictions between the timeless laws that were presumed to prescribe correct behaviour, and the readiness of the immortals in the Iliad to ignore them, were a scandal. Homer and his fellow poets, so the philosopher Xenophanes complained, ‘have attributed to the gods all kinds of things that among humans are shameful and matters of reproach: theft, adultery, deceit’.32 Were cattle only capable of drawing, he scoffed, they would portray their deities as bulls and cows. Yet this bracing scepticism – although in time it would tempt some thinkers to atheism – did not in the main result in a godless materialism. Quite the opposite. If philosophers disdained to believe in the quarrelsome and intemperate immortals of song, then it was generally so that they might better contemplate what was truly divine about both the universe and themselves. To fathom what underlay matter was also to fathom how humans should properly behave. ‘For all the various laws of men are nourished by the single law – which is divine.’33
Beyond the buzzing of flies above a sticky altar, beyond the statues of gods smiling or frowning in shadow-cooled temples, beyond all the manifold variety and flux of human custom, there existed a pattern to things. Eternal and perfect, it needed only to be identified. It was not in the lies of poets but in the workings of the cosmos that it was to be located. Nowhere was this conviction more fruitfully explored than in Athens. By the time that Demetrius of Phaleron was born, some time around 350 BC, it had come to be accepted by the city’s most celebrated philosophers that the seemingly irregular motions of the stars in truth obeyed unchanging geometric laws. The universe itself stood revealed as rational – and hence divine. Xenophanes, a century and a half before, had proclaimed the existence of a single ungenerated and morally perfect deity, who guided everything through the sheer power of his consciousness – his nous. Demetrius, studying as a young man, could trace in the movements of the stars the evidence for a subtler, and yet no less chilly conception of the divine. ‘There is something which moves without being moved – something eternal.’34 So wrote Aristotle, a philosopher from the north of Greece who, settling in Athens, had established a school so influential that it continued to flourish even after his death in 322. In the heavens, so Aristotle had taught, beyond the sublunar world to which mortals were confined, bodies were eternal and obedient to unchanging circular orbits; and yet these movements, perfect though they were, depended in turn upon a mover which itself never moved. ‘This, then, is the god – the principle on which heaven and nature depend.’35 Such a deity – off-puttingly metaphysical though it might appear to those without a schooling in philosophy – was properly the object of every mortal’s love. Whether that love was reciprocated, however, appeared exceedingly improbable. Aristotle certainly disdained to say that it might be. The sublunar world, lacking as it did the inerrant order of the stars, and far distant from them, could hardly be expected to concern the unmoving mover.
Nevertheless, the earth as well as the heavens bore witness to its controlling nous. Aristotle, to a degree unprecedented among philosophers, sought to fathom its workings by anatomising whatever he could. Sometimes, whether dissecting a cuttlefish or examining the stomach of an elephant, he would do so literally: for even amid the slipperiness of a dead creature’s intestines there was proof to be found of the eternal structure of the cosmos. To love wisdom, so Aristotle taught, was to train the mind in the skills required to trace its laws. This was why, not content with studying as many different organisms as he could, he also investigated the numerous ways that humanity sought to organise itself: ‘for man alone of animals is capable of deliberation’.36 The goal, as ever with Aristotle, was not merely to compile a catalogue, but to distinguish the lineaments of a cosmic order. The need to achieve this was evident. Only the law that pervaded the universe, and was equivalent to the divine nous, could truly provide a city with proper governance, ‘for to be ruled by men, whose appetites will be something feral, and whose passions – no matter how upstanding they may be – are bound to warp them, is to be ruled by wild beasts’.37
Yet there lurked in this conviction, for any philosopher anxious to act upon it, a familiar puzzle. How, when the affairs of the world so signally failed to mimic the smooth and regular movement of the heavens, was a city best to be ordered? Naturally, there were certain fundamentals upon which everyone could agree. It hardly required an anatomist of Aristotle’s genius to observe the most obvious ways in which society should obey the laws of nature. ‘He used to say, it is reported, that he thanked Fortune for three things: “first, that I am a human and not a beast; second, that I am a man and not a woman; third, that I am a Greek and not a barbarian”.’38 This anecdote, so widely repeated that it was told of several philosophers, was certainly nothing with which Aristotle disagreed. Satisfied as he was that humans were superior to all the other 494 species he had identified over the course of his researches, that man was the master of woman, and that barbarians were fitted by nature to be the slaves of Greeks, he drew the logical – indeed, the only possible – conclusion. ‘That one should command and another obey is not just necessary but expedient.’39