deriving from Thales; from Pherecydes, possibly connecting with the “sage”
Pittacus (2 in the key); and from Xenophanes.
This activity took place in what must have been a self-conscious commu-
nity. Miletus, the largest city and major trading port on the Ionian coast, was
only 20 miles from the island of Samos, where Pythagoras originated; Pherecy-
des was from Leros, an island 40 miles off Miletus; Heraclitus at Ephesus was
in the next city north of Miletus, 30 miles away; Xenophanes at Colophon
was another 15 miles inland, a day’s journey from Ephesus; slightly farther up
the coast was Clazomenae (home of Anaxagoras), with Sardis (home of the
cosmological poet Alcman, who later migrated to Sparta) 20 miles inland. Even
the systematizers of mythology were from this region: Homer is reputed to
have lived (or at least his tradition was perpetuated) at Smyrna, a day’s sail
(20 miles) up the coast from Clazomenae, and Cyme, the home of Hesiod’s
father, was another 30 miles north.^4 Unquestionably the rival “cosmologists”
knew about one another. In this network of towns, the bigger ones 30,000 to
65,000 in population, with a good deal of coastal travel, and intellectual life
carried on in public recitations, it is unlikely that there would not have been
much personal contact.^5 A competitive community of Ionian intellectuals ex-
isted, from the poets of around 700 b.c.e. onward, down through the next
half-dozen generations.
External political forces broke up this local structure in the late 500s.
Xenophanes left in the Persian conquest of Ionia in 545 (DSB, 1981: 14:536),
Pythagoras perhaps 15 years later. The shift in philosophy that came with the
move to Magna Graecia is not a matter of geographical determinism. The
“Italian” or “Eleatic” schools were continuations of the Ionian networks; the
“Italian” (actually Sicilian) Empedocles produced an eclectic combination four-
element scheme (earth, air, fire, water) by recombining the material elements
of Ionian cultural capital.^6 What was occurring was the crystallization of a new
set of oppositions in the intellectual world. The element-seekers had become
too numerous, with nothing to give precedence to one position or another.
Empedocles’ eclectic combination represents the kind of alliance on the mate-
rial element front one might expect from the law of small numbers. In this
Empedocles was extremely successful, boiling down the Ionian philosophies to
a piece of cultural capital that was to prove enormously resilient over the next
two thousand years.
A new opposition emerged against the whole movement of element-seeking.
Characteristically, there was a two-pronged attack in the same generation.
Heraclitus moved toward disowning the concrete level entirely; the constituents
of the universe consist instead of a process, the flux, and also of a structure
regulating and patterning it, the logos. Heraclitus was the first to break through
and recognize a higher level of abstraction. The Pythagoreans, with their
Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^85