lectual positions with inconsistencies generated by a more abstract analysis.
The cultural capital here came originally from Heraclitus’ and Parmenides’
breakthroughs, now shorn of ontological content. Heraclitus’ doctrine was
generally taken to consist of the flux, ignoring the logos which holds sway
above it. Parmenides was regarded as the source of paradoxical statements
about the impossibility of change. The two great opposites were united in
arguing for the impossibility of an uncontradictory worldview. Parmenides
directly taught the Sophists’ network, while Heracliteans were noisy at Ephesus
with their flaunted contradictions. One of their number, Cratylus, was reputed
to have refused to speak at all, and could only gesture, to avoid contradicting
himself (Guthrie, 1961–1982: 2:358); he shows up at Athens at the time of
Socrates and Plato. This space in the intellectual lineup would be filled by the
Megarians and the Skeptics long after the external political conditions which
first made the Sophists possible had disappeared.
Down to the generation of Socrates, there are many contenders for intel-
lectual attention, but essentially four positions maintain themselves longitudi-
nally. The element-seekers divide into three long-standing schools: the atomists,
who hold a strongly materialist stance and counter the arguments of Par-
menides with a view of combinations of hard elements of Being moving in the
void; at the other end, the Pythagoreans, who increasingly have moved to a
conception of Number as an abstraction above the material level; in the middle,
Empedocles’ four-element doctrine is carried on especially in the schools of
medicine in the theory of the four humors. The fourth position is that of
paradoxing and relativism, a turf which includes the nature of argument itself,
and some self-consciousness about the nature of logic and abstractions. In
short, three substantive positions, and a fourth as “plague on all houses.”
In the network (Figure 3.2) Socrates is a pivot; he is connected with virtually
every chain prior to his time, often by debate, and from him flow most of the
organized schools of the next generation. This network centrality is the source
of his fame. Substantively I believe Socrates’ originality is overrated. Contem-
porary accounts—especially that of Aristophanes, and apparently other drama-
tists (Guthrie, 1961–1982: 3:40)—depict him as another fast-talking exponent
of the physical cosmologies, another member of the lineage of Anaxagoras;
when he was condemned to death in 399 b.c.e. for impiety against literalist
religion, it was on much the same charge as that on which Anaxagoras was
expelled from Athens around 430. What is transmitted in the Platonic dia-
logues is to a large extent Plato’s own sophistication about epistemology, and
the theory of Forms seems to be Plato’s generalization of Pythagorean number
philosophy.
Nevertheless, if Socrates is only an emblem, he represents a crucial change
in the structure of intellectual networks. What “Socrates” did (if in combina-
Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^87