Flora Unveiled

From Empedocles to Theophrastus j 211

211 211

For grasshoppers sit only for a month

Chirping upon twigs; but our Athenians

Sit chirping and discussing all the year

Perched upon points of evidence and law.^2

Over time, Greeks developed faith in the collective wisdom of their citizen assemblies

and juries to arrive at the truth of any question. As such, the decisions of the democratic

assemblies and juries came to be regarded as expressions of the will of the gods. Conditions

were thus ripe for the earliest Greek philosophers to apply the rules of logic and persuasion

to answer questions about both natural phenomena and the divine order.

The Pre- Socratic Philosophers

The Ionian city of Miletus provided the backdrop for the first speculations of the pre-

Socratic philosophers. Miletus was by then a large and powerful city bordering Lydia, a

remnant of the former Hittite empire. The principal founder of the Milesian school of phi-

losophy was Thales. Thales and the other Ionian pre- Socratic philosophers were strongly

influenced by their more technologically advanced neighbors in the Near East, especially

Babylonia and Egypt. Thales is best known for his belief that water is the fundamental

building block of all matter, giving rise to air. Thales water theory was probably based on

Babylonian cosmology, in which water (Apsu, the goddess of salt water, and Tiamat, the

god of fresh water) preceded the creation of earth, sky, and the heavens.

In the latter half of the sixth century bce, the Milesian philosopher Anaximenes, a stu-

dent of Anaximander, asserted that air, not water, was the fundamental element that gave

rise to all things. Then, in the early fifth century bce, Heraclitus of Ephesus claimed that

fire was the fundamental element. Finally Empedocles, a citizen of Agrigentum in Sicily,

added the fourth basic element, earth. According to Aristotle, Empedocles was the first to

propose that all material things on earth are composed of the four basic elements— water,

air, fire, and earth.^3

The pre- Socratic philosophers also formulated theories that became the basis of clas-

sical Greek cosmology. In the early sixth century bce, Anaximander presented the first

mechanical model of the universe as a series of moving, concentric rings. The outermost

ring containing the stars was crystalline and divine.

Anaximander understood the creation of material things to be the result of the opposi-

tion of “ justice” and “injustice.” Heraclitus proposed that matter was driven by the forces of

“crime” and “revenge.” During winter, for example, cold commits a crime against heat, and

heat exacts revenge in the summer. Such theories were clearly inspired by the Greek system

of justice. In the words of historian Stephen Mason:

The notion that there was a principle of retribution in natural processes was derived

by analogy from the customs of human society in which the practice of vengeance

preceded that of the due process of law. ... Such a notion was replaced ultimately by

the conception that nature, like human society, was governed by laws.^4