Here’s something else I’ve missed recently. Recently the 5000^th photo was uploaded to the Chiron pool at Flickr. That’s over 5000 photos connected to antiquity which you can pick up and use in presentations or blogs for free. It’s due in no small part to the submissions by Ovando and MHarrsch, but there’s 130 other members. It’s a simple interface and an excellent example of what you can do with Flickr.

You can see the latest additions to Chiron in the photobar at the top of the page and you can visit the website of the people who had such a good idea at Chironweb.

One of the things I’m working on has moved a step closer to fruition. I say I’m working on, Alexandra Smith at Cardiff is doing most of the work at the moment. Anyway, there’ll be a session on Classics, Astronomy and Interdisciplinarity at the Classical Association 2008 Meeting in Liverpool. There’ll be four papers:

• Astronomy and Ancient Greek Cult: New Perspectives to Greek Religious Architecture and Cult Practices. Dr. Efrosyni Boutsikas (Leicester)
• Astronomy, Stoicism and Politics in Aratus’ Phaenomena. Stamatina Mastorakou (Imperial)
• Impossible to Ignore? Some Uncomfortable Implications of the Antikythera Mechanism. Prof. Mike Edmunds (Cardiff University and The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project)
• Eclipses as a Tool of Chronology. Alexandra Smith (Cardiff)

I’m not giving a talk as sessions are limited to four spaces. I already know what I would say and think I’d benefit more from listening to someone else speak. However I am listed as compère session chair. We don’t have a firm date yet, though I’m told it’s more likely to be on the weekend rather than the Friday.

I’ll put up more information when it goes live on the Liverpool site. I’ve no desire to annoy them as they’re doing a fantastic job. Some of the requests I put in were unusual. The dates for your diary are the 27^th to the 30^th of March.

Athens is the city that gave the world democracy. While the idea has been inherited, the reality was rather different to a modern democracy. In ancient Athens all the citizens voted on the laws, whereas these days people vote for people who vote for the laws. Or even vote for the person who will unilaterally decide the laws for themselves. While that might make Athens more democratic, in some ways Athens was also less free. Certainly all the citizens voted but so be a citizen you had to be male, quite old and the son of Athenian parents. If your parents were slaves or metics (resident foreigners or Athenians deprived of citizen status) then you had no vote. A lot of these differences are the meat and drink of usual studies into ancient democracy. But it wasn’t just the human world which was viewed differently, so was the divine. This is the subject Bowden’s book Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle: Divination and Democracy examines, the relationship between the will of the Gods and the will of the people in ancient Athens. Specifically he looks at the will of Apollo as it was revealed by the Delphic Oracle. The introduction makes the case for doing this well:

What is the relationship between religion and democracy? More precisely, to what extent should religious considerations affect the decisions taken by citizens in a democracy? In the modern world it is generally thought that religion and politics occupy, or should occupy, two different spheres. Religion may promote moral goodness, and moral goodness may be considered desirable in a community, but the idea of giving preference to the divine will — however it is established — over the will of the people — as revealed by a vote — would be seen as fundamentally undemocratic. This understanding pervades not only approaches to modern democracies, but also the study of democracy in the ancient world.

For the rest of the book Bowden shows how this cannot be the case for the ancient world. In world where the Gods are thought to umbrage and exact revenge in unpleasant ways it’s a brave ruler to defies them.

It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to think about the role of religion in modern politics at the moment. Usually matching ancient Greek religion with modern fundamentalism would make a classicist wince. The idea of fundamentalism is that there is a canonical will of the God(s) which can be known. Greek religion in contrast had no core texts, but Bowden makes a couple of very good points. One is that fundamentalism is about the practice of religion. It is possible to debate the finer points of religion with a fundamentalist, so long as you follow the practices. If you’re a woman for instance you’d have to cover your head, stay silent and not express any opinions. Which is very similar to the idealised position of women in ancient Greece. Bowden says that Greek religion was also about practice of religion and notes Margaret Attwood’s fundamentalist Christian state in A Handmaid’s Tale is similar to the ancient Greeks in their treatment of women. He’s not arguing that Greeks were fundamentalists, but that there other ways of thinking about how religion interacts with democracy. This is all from the first couple of pages of the introduction.

The first chapter tackles the problem of how the Oracle worked. This is arguably the most reknowned religious site in ancient Greece (some people would say Olympia). This is a problem because surprisingly little information survives about how the oracle operated. That wouldn’t normally be surprising. There’s not a lot known about the Eleusinian Mysteries either, but the thing about the Eleusinian Mysteries is that they were a secret cult, so it was considered impious to discuss it. Delphi on the other hand had no such restrictions, so why do we know so little? The best guess I think is from Parke who said that the method of the Oracle was so well known that there was no need to specifically document it.

Bowden makes a strong case that the Oracle remained politically neutral during its operation. In his description he makes clear that there could have been too many randomising factors to sustain a specific political programme and there would be little to gain from doing so. He also challenges the notion that Delphi’s influence peaked in the sixth century BC and from then the sanctuary entered a graceful decline. This, he argues, is based on a reading of Herodotus which isn’t supported by other sources. There may be a desire to see the rise of ‘rational’ politics in the classical period, but there is no corresponding decline in religious practices.

Chapter Two asks What did the Athenians think of the Delphic Oracle? and chapter Three What did Historians and Philosphers say about the Delphic Oracle? Both chapters show the influence of the oracle on civic life. Chapter two paints a picture of a city where the Gods are as unavoidable in civic life as other citizens. There are the thousands of images known from pottery, the references in the plays attended by citizens as well as the many festival days. This contrasts with the more fragmentary view of the Oracle in the texts of the philosophers and historians. In the works of Xenophon and Thucydides Bowden notes there are very few reference to the Oracle, certain when compared to Herodotus. This leads him to conclude that all the historical texts should be treated with caution whether they are effusive or silent on the Oracle.

Chapters four and five are How and why did the Athenians consult the Delphic oracle and What did the Athenians ask the Delphic oracle? This is a difficult question. If you have people deciding actions what do you need the gods for? One example given is whether certain lands on sacred boundaries can be farmed. The ancient Greeks like moderns talk to the gods, but they also liked the Gods to talk back. He also gives a novel reading of the oracles to Themistocles.

With the Persians set to invade Athens, the Athenians sent out to the oracle at Delphi for advice. The first response was to flee. The Phocaeans had already done this leaving their city on the shores of Anatolia to settle in the western Mediterranean. Themistocles decided this was not an acceptable answer and asked again, to which the oracle replied that they should shelter behind the wooden walls. After much debate this was agreed to be a reference to the navy. It was through crafty seamanship that the Athenian navy defeated the superior Persian forces.

The puzzle is why send for a second oracle? Bowden argues, with justification, that this is an artefact of Herodotus, the source for the story. Herodotus’s work isn’t history as an impartial tale of how things happened. It’s also an effort to create an epic tale, like those the Greeks were familiar with, with known people in the starring roles. Splitting one oracle into two halves increases the dramatic tension. Bowden argues Herodotus got away with it because it flattered the Athenians. On the other hand as well as Father of History he was also known as Father of Lies.

These chapters again illustrate the importance of the supernatural in ancient Greece. Indeed a division between natural/supernatual is almost certainly anachronistic. In this situation is makes sense for people to consult the gods for solutions to problems they cannot answer.

The last chapter before the conclusion initially appears to be slightly askew from the others: Why did the Athenians (and other Greek cities) go to war? This is another insight into how different ancient society was. To be a citizen was to be a soldier. A citizen was someone who would fight for his home city, and to be allowed to fight in a city’s army was to be a citizen. From this point of view war becomes almost a necessity because how else are you to fight alongside your comrades without a war?

War for the Athenians was a dangerous business. If you attacked another city they could fight back, which is not an experience familiar to all modern democracies. The uncertainty meant that divine approval was sought on a frequent basis, for any substantial action. Bowden notes that the two constants of life for the Athenian democracy were farming and war — two activities in which chance played a large part.

The conclusion neatly draws this all together. It is tempting to say that a democracy in a state of perpetual war guided by God(s) neatly parallels one or two modern examples. There are similarities, but there are also differences. Bowden notes that the divine doesn’t make much of an appearance in the constitution of modern democracies. We might ask God to save the Queen or insist that in God we trust, but these he argues are post-enlightenment additions. They are not part of the roots of the democracy. Athenian religion in contrast is very different. Bowden argues that democracy was a means for establishing the will of the Gods.

It’s an excellent book and affordable. Occasionally it can be easy to be lost in specialisms. I don’t know of any researcher in Athenian Democracy who would say ritual was unimportant, nor of anyone researching ancient ritual that would say the politics of a city were irrelevant. Yet by specialising it can be possible to lose this wider view. Ancient religion can be difficult to get a grip on. In the classical past it was extremely close to politics in its practice. This book is a fantastic demonstration of how closely the two were intertwined. It’s also well-written, well-referenced and well-indexed. In the latter case there’s an intelligible index of the ancient passages he uses to make his case as well as the standard index.

You can also read a review of the book at BMCR.

This is where I think the archaeologist Paul Bahn goes wrong. I like the book Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Bahn a lot. I also think that Paul Bahn is a good writer and an interesting archaeologist. But I struggle with his views on Gender Archaeology. The following is part of a section on a wider range of archaeological theory. It picks up from a bit where he says why Gender Archaeology arose.

The explicit emphasis now being placed on gender studies is therefore welcome not only for its attempt to create a much greater awareness of the need to extend gender equality into all aspects of contemporary life, including academia, but also for the substantial contribution that it is making to our understanding of how ancient societies may have worked. However, what is called ‘Gender Archaeology’ is actually feminist archaeology — sisters are doing it for themselves.

The avowed aim is to focus on gender (in the sense of social and cultural, rather than biological, distinctions between the sexes) in the archaeological record. But despite assurances to the contrary it is clear that the major aim is not so much to reclaim women and men in non-sexist ways in prehistory, as to make women visible in the past. A perfectly laudable aim, and one that is highly fashionable at present, with books proliferating on Women in Prehistory, in Ancient Egypt, in the Roman period, in the Viking period, or any other era. Part of the ‘feminist’ approach to the past, whose goal is to shed new light on hitherto neglected aspects of the archaeological record, this phenomenon is accompanied by an ever-increasing number of conferences around the world, usually organized by or starring the same cast of characters. Although billed as concerning ‘gender in archaeology’, these events concentrate overwhelmingly on the female gender, and are attended by a host of female archaeologists, plus a few brave males who perhaps aspire to political correctness. The very word ‘gender’, therefore, is in serious danger of being hijacked, like the word ‘gay’ before it.

…

The proper antidote to male chauvinism about the past is an egalitarian and neutral archaeology, not a feminist archaeology. If, as the proponents claim, they are not simply trying to make women visible in the archaeological record, is a ‘feminist archaeology’ needed at all? There is still a long way to go, but the real way forward is a balanced, non-sexist archaeology rather than a feminist kind, which is just the flip-side of the traditional coin.

Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Bahn. pages 83–5 and 87

The reason I find the above interesting and worth disagreeing with is that some of it is founded in truth. Take the line …this phenomenon is accompanied by an ever-increasing number of conferences around the world, usually organized by or starring the same cast of characters. I think that’s true. But it’s also true of any new sub-discipline. GIS conferences are usually attended by people with an interest in GIS. Reception is a big growth area in Classics and you can predict a lot of the delegates and often the titles of some of the papers. One reason for this is partly ignorance by the mainstream of how useful a sub-discipline can be to someone who is not immersed in it. Another reason is that people tend to be more comfortable in cliques. For sensible reasons it’s a lot more fun to present a paper to an audience who can appreciate your work than spend half of your limited time slot explaining the basics and trying to explain why people should be excited about what they’re about to be told. It’s a problem. How do you deal with it?

When I attended the 2004 AMPAH conference at Manchester, pretty much the only thing that disappointed me was the lack of attendance in the “Women in Antiquity” session. AMPAH is an annual conference for Classics post-grads and this could have been an opportunity for two speakers with two very good papers to get used to speaking to a large audience. Instead it was poorly attended.

For the 2005 meeting Anna McCullough offered, “Not a Pretty Girl: Female Gladiators in the Roman World, Augustus to 200 A.D.” and Michelle Davy “Nero’s women — powerful inversions of the traditional female role?” We had two papers in each session, so the women could have been put in their own session to talk about femininity and so on. Instead Michelle went in a session discussing Roman politics and Anna was paired with a paper on the Spartacan Revolt*. It’s the one thing from the meeting I was most pleased about because it created two well-attended gender sessions. I don’t know if anyone noticed. Rather than just talking about female gladiators as something feminine people or the man in politics people were able to contrast the genders and think about both.

This is why I think Gender is fascinating. It’s not about scoring PC points, it’s because history and archaeology thrive on difference. We study the transition to farming or Romanisation or any other change between what was and what followed. Gender is a constant difference in humanity. Rather than ignoring it for a neutral approach surely there’s a richer understanding of the past if differences are explored.

It’s certainly hard to see how an understanding of colonisation is possible without acknowledging gender differences. The Spartan colonisation of Taras, modern Taranto in Southern Italy, was a deliberate action to get rid of a troubling group of males who didn’t fit into Sparta’s social order. The colonists of Taras took with them a command from the Delphic Oracle to be a plague on the natives. This is a very different form of colonisation to the settling of Alalia in Corsica or Marseilles by Greeks from Phocaea (a Greek city on the shores of what is now Turkey). The Phocaeans are said to have abandoned their city rather than be conquered by the Persian empire. They took with them at least some women to perform the relevant rituals in honour of Artemis. Ironically by reducing conflict with the natives the Phocaeans may have remained more ‘Greek’ than the Tarantines. What would a conquered Italian woman know about the correct Greek female rituals? Only what she was taught. Who would teach her proper Greek female behaviour?

This I think is the flaw in ‘an egalitarian and neutral archaeology’. That the past probably wasn’t egalitarian isn’t a problem for us, but fact that it certainly wasn’t gender-neutral is. If a convenient plague had struck the Roman Empire and killed all males above the age of twelve months, then the next generation of men would not be like the previous generations. There was no neutral ‘Roman’ culture there was arguably a Roman extelligence, but individuals could only access specific parts of it. At the very least there were tandem and symbiotic Roman male and female cultures. The problem with a neutral archaeology is that there has been a tendency in the past to perceive the male culture as the norm and the female as being defined in relation to that. Given that young children of both sexes were usually cared for by a woman in the early stages of life there is at least a strong an argument that female culture is the norm and male defined as what is not female.

You can probably come up with your own examples of something supposedly neutral that is in fact male. If you can’t it’s Olympic time. The study of games and competition in the ancient world is an example of gender studies that concentrates on the male. Any classicist will be able to tell you that’s because women didn’t compete at the ancient Olympics. Isn’t that a clue that there’s something really interesting going on in how you define masculinity? There are certainly plenty of conferences that concentrate on exclusively male experiences but because of the equation “male=normal” they’re not recognised as gender studies events.

I also feel a bit bad about taking this one section of Bahn’s book and attacking it, because it is an excellent book. If you read the whole section on gender it’s also clear that Bahn isn’t a dinosaur protecting male interests. I think the biggest difference between his position and mine is that we have different perspectives. I’ll finish with his comment “…is a ‘feminist archaeology’ needed at all?”

Archaeology was largely the preserve of rich white males. Put them in an environment where they can research anything they like and what is it that they’re likely to find interesting? I wouldn’t ask “is an ‘androcentric archaeology’ needed at all?” I’d ask “is an ‘androcentric archaeology’ inevitable?” One of the spurs for interest in a subject is identification with those you study and both archaeology and classics have, in the past, been really good at drawing attention to the experience of educated male elites in antiquity. The widening of access to higher education has increased the diversity of people doing archaeology and will continue to do so. Around half of them are going to be women and, even today, their experience of society is going to be different to mine. I don’t think the real question is “is a ‘feminist archaeology’ needed at all?” It’s “is a ‘feminist archaeology’ inevitable?” The future belongs to those who can combine the experiences of the genders to produce a gendered history or archaeology.

If you’re interested in reading more of the Gender Archaeology section in Paul Bahn’s book, Amazon UK allows you to search inside. If you visit the book’s page and click the search inside link and then search for gender it’ll bring up pages 83 and 85–7. Page 84 is a cartoon. This is an attempt to a direct link to the search results, but I don’t know if it’ll work.

* I half regret the session title “I’m Spartacus and so’s my wife”.

I’m not sure what I can say. A lot of it I didn’t understand and some of the bits I did understand I probably wasn’t supposed to.

A good thing about CUCD is that its minutes are up online for all to access. It also produces an annual bulletin which is worth flipping through. This year there are a couple of intelligent opinion pieces arguing about what Reception in Classics should be.

Another thing that I was reminded of is C-web. It’s supposed to be “a one-stop information centre for anyone who wants to find out more about the Greek and Roman world” but I can’t work out what it’s for. It looks like a box-ticking exercise. Your opinion may vary and you can see it at www.classics.ac.uk.

The central chapters Zeno’s tortoise and Reality and appearance: more adventures in metaphysics both explore the relationship between thought and reality. If there is a common theme in presocratic philosophy this is perhaps it. The chapters both show an infectious enthusiasm for the subject. It’s a cliché to tell students that Classics is a subject with relevance to the here and now, but these chapters do propose problems which challenge people today.

It’s a particular challenge to tackle the Presocratics, because of the ephemeral nature of the evidence. This is the first issue that Osborne tackles. The opening chapter starts, not with the Milesian Triad, but with Empedocles — a much later philosopher. She brings out the problems in placing the fragments that survive, in other author’s texts or as scraps of papyri, into context. In a later chapter on Heraclitus she expands on this, showing how this fragmentary view can be confusing and contradictory. Though in Heraclitus’s case it’s pretty obvious that he was being deliberately awkward.

The final chapters close with an examination of what the point philosophy was. What use to did philosophers have to society? It’s in this light at Osborne looks at Pythagoras, another philosopher shrouded in mystery. She also examines the sophists. Attacked by Plato, these people were able to sell knowledge but what sort of knowledge did people want to buy?

The book is excellent. It’s not simply that Osborne knows the material, it’s also that she communicates her passion for it. If I were looking to find faults I might whine about the lack of space given to Thales et al, but that would be missing the point. The book illustrates the richness and diversity of Greek thought in the archaic period and does it beautifully. Rather than telling you all you could reasonably want to know about Presocratic philosophy, Osborne whets the appetite to find out more. Which ultimately it the biggest success a book of this size could have.

Aristophanes. Adapted from this site.

There were two major festivals with drama in ancient Athens. The City Dionysia was held the tenth day of Elaphebolion, roughly around the end of March, with tragedies following over the next three days and then a day of comedy before the winners of the competitions were announced. This festival would have coincided with the start of the sailing season and so, while it was a festival for the Athenians, foreigners would have been present as Aristophanes found out. His play the Babylionians attacked the magistrates of Athens and provoked one, Cleon, into putting Aristophanes on trial for his life for defaming the state in front of foreigners.

The other festival was the Lenaea, held on the twelfth day of Gamelion, around mid-January. This was pretty much the depths of winter and so it was a time when outsiders would not be expected in Athens. Following his experience at the hands of Cleon, Aristophanes’ next two plays were both performed at the Lenaea. In 425 he won first prize with the play Acharnians. In it he argued against the war and during the play the lead character puts his life on the line to argue for making peace with the Spartans. If Acharnians was a defence of his position then Knights was the attack.

The scene is finally erected and the chorus in place. Even from the back row there is a vague sense of unease. Their costumes are plain with only a perfunctory nod to the notion of them being knights. Compared to the extravagance of the previous performances, the play is lacklustre. Yet rather than leading to disappointment, the atmosphere is more one of tension. It seems that some of the gossip in the taverns was right, Aristophanes hadn’t found a backer for his play and was having to fund it himself. What could possibly be in it that had scared people from supporting the champion?

The above is speculation, though it is based on fact. Traditionally the rich men of the city would provide the funds for the production of a play. Drama was performed within a religious festival and so it was a civic duty and, at least if you supported a good play, a prestigious public service. Aristophanes’ three earlier plays were produced by Callistratus, who also funded his later plays Birds and Lysistrata. Another known producer was Philonides, who is known to have funded Wasps in 422. Yet in 424 Aristophanes funded the play himself. He may have self-funded other plays, but no known record of this survives. This is the only play we know was paid for out of his own pocket. After winning the previous year, why did he do this? Was it because he wanted to take more glory for himself, or was it because he couldn’t find someone willing to pay for the play when they saw what was going to be?

The play starts with two servants of Demos, Nicias and Demosthenes, bewailing their fate at the hands of a new slave. They plot an escape while discussing masturbation. The tension eases. Despite appearances it seems that the play is celebrating the god Dionysos. In desperation they turn to wine for inspiration of ridding themselves of their pest.

If he were around today Dionysos would be the god of sex, drugs (or at least an excess of wine) and rock ‘n’ roll. He was said to be accompanied by the Maenads, wild women driven into a sexual frenzy by dance and alcohol. It is said that the rural Dionysia was partly preceded by a procession of a phallus, so reference to masturbation could be an echo of the ritual surrounding that. Or it could just be that Aristophanes knew his audience liked knob jokes.

Nicias and Demosthenes were both military leaders who served Athens. The people of Athens are represented by the old man Demos of the Pnyx. Demos was the Greek word for people and the Pnyx where they met. This might seem a bit surreal, but this was par for the course for Old Comedy. Aristophanes other plays included birds blockading the heavens and people sending out for peace treaties in a wineskin. Demos, in comparison, is rather a blunt point that Aristophanes is making, but Knights isn’t a subtle play.

There is a slight frission of danger building around the theatre. A couple of references have been made to ‘the Paphlagonian’, a tanner’s son. The references are obvious to everyone in the city. Though they don’t mention his name, he could only be Cleon.

A man walks onto the stage from behind the scene. ‘Cleon’ is making his entrance, but the theatre falls silent. Something is wrong. Unlike the other actors who all wear their gaudy masks, this person’s face is visible covered only by the stain of wine dregs. The actor is clearly Aristophanes himself.

‘The Paphlagonian’ is an insult to Cleon. It refers to a slave. It makes sense in the context of the play, the Paphlagonian like Nicias and Demothenes is a slave to the Demos. The use of Nicias and Demosthenes names shows they are Athenians, but to refer to Cleon as a Paphlagonian emphasises his lower birth. So too the references to the tanner’s son. Real men make their living from having people work their land. Tannery is trade and, with the use of urine in curing hides, not a particularly admired one. While technically you didn’t need to own land to be citizen in Athens, people were still aware of their places in the pecking order, and Cleon should have been one of the pecked rather than pecking.

Aristophanes’ entrance was probably a show-stopper. Traditionally drama was performed by actors wearing masks. The traditional masks seen in theatres today are drawn from tragedy and comedy. The masks could have had exaggerated features to emphasise who they were portraying. There is no reason why Aristophanes couldn’t have worn a mask to play Cleon, but it is said that he didn’t. The reason he performed in the play himself, it is said, is that no actor was brave enough to take on the role and subject Cleon to ridicule. By showing his face Aristophanes was openly defying Cleon. It is said he merely stained his face purple with wine to emphasise Cleon’s drunkenness.

In the front row of the audience a stonily faced Cleon looks impassively on. On the stage his parody is in full flow of abuse. Aristophanes is a surprisingly good mimic of Cleon’s bluster, but he appears to have met his match. The Sausage-Seller put his arm around Demos and proclaims to the crowd, “You see this poor Demos without a cloak and that at his age too! So little do you care for him, that in mid-winter you have not given him a garment with sleeves. Here, Demos, here is one, take it!” and with a flourish the cloak is turned inside out. What appeared to be somewhat plain and coarse cloak now shimmers in purple and gold.

The Sausage-seller waves his arms theatrically, “No, it’s your own tricks that I am borrowing, just as a drunken guest, when he has to take a crap, seizes some other man’s shoes.”

The hurling of insults at each other was an attack on Cleon’s place in the Agora. Aristophanes had argued that Cleon was using the war for his own political gain. He saw Cleon as an opportunist, a person of limited intelligence or loquacity but of unlimited ambition who was appealing to the basest instincts of the electorate. As long as the war continued Cleon assured his place at the centre of power. The Sausage-Seller is not the anti-Cleon, he is just like Cleon but even more brazen.

His aim was to highlight how Cleon was a man with no plan and no eloquence, and just enough intelligence to twist the public mood by a mix of bribes and smears of his opponents. Aristophanes was not the only prominent Athenian to face the wrath of Cleon’s crude political bullying, but it could not work without the will of the people to accept such behaviour. This section is therefore a challenge to the audience to think about their rôle in the decline of Athenian politics.

‘Cleon’ has been vanquished and now the Sausage-Seller is restoring peace to the city. The play has been a triumph but standing by the side of the stage Aristophanes looks even more sullen than Cleon. Now the message of the play, the possibility of peace is being offered to Demos, yet no-one is listening. They’re already repeating the row between Cleon and the Sausage-seller to each other. A resentful Aristophanes is left contemplating the bitter truth that even a comic Cleon can bawl out rational debate of the war.

The play won first prize, but as a call for peace it was a failure. Cleon knew his position of power could only be sustained as long as there was an enemy to face. He continued to manipulate the people into supporting the war that didn’t need to be fought until his death leading the Athenian force at Amphipolis in 422. His death led to a truce, but on considerably worse terms than they would have been.

It’s hard to know how to open something on Anaximander. Herodotus had the right idea. “This is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, some by the barbarians, not lose their glory…”

Unfortunately Herodotus, whose history is the earliest that survives, was writing a couple of centuries too late to record Anaximander and that’s shame. From the scant information that does survive Anaximander may be one of the all-time greats of science, up there with Newton, Darwin and Einstein. Unlike Archimedes or Pythagoras none of his ideas remain in use in science today, but his achievement is that he is arguably the man whose work made science possible.

There are plenty of reasons to like Anaximander. One is that he should be a very easy philosopher to be an expert on. Only two fragments of what appear to be his own words survive.

1. ‘Immortal and indestructible,’ ‘surrounds all and directs all.‘
2. ‘(To that they return when they are destroyed) of necessity; for he says that they suffer punishment and give satisfaction to one another for injustice.’

Translation by Arthur Fairbanks, The First Philosophers of Greece

By themselves they look pretty meaningless and short. Apart from memorise them there’s not a lot else you can do. Job done. However you’re supposed to look at them in context, and Anaximander has an awful lot of context.

Anaximander is considered to be the second of three philosophers known as the Milesian Triad. These were three philosophers based in the Greek city of Miletos, now the Turkish town of Milet, around the sixth century BC. Thales was the first and is said to have been the teacher of Anaximander. The third was Anaximenes, who is said to have been Anaximander’s student.

We don’t have dates for Thales’ birth or death but he’s said to have predicted the solar eclipse of 585BC over Asia Minor, so he would appear to have been active in the early part of the sixth century BC. Thales is an even easier philosopher to be an expert on than Anaximander, nothing written of his survives. From later authors like Aristotle we learn that Thales was was said to have invented Natural Philosophy. His big idea was that the cosmos grew from a seed, an arche, which he said was water. He’s said to have had a few other ideas, like the earth floated on water, and earthquakes occurred when the earth shook on this bed. He’s also thought to have said there are gods in all things and that rocks have souls. The latter statement might refer to magnetism, but it’s hard to say. I wouldn’t want to belittle Thales. He was a genius and even if he hadn’t invented philosophy then his name would still have survived because he was a canny political thinker. So while Thales deserves immense credit for inventing the idea, Anaximander is the person that really got to grips with Natural Philosophy. He showed where you could take it and was so amazing that he ensured it wouldn’t become a neglected good idea, like so many that litter Greek history.

The first fragment . ‘Immortal and indestructible,’ ‘surrounds all and directs all.’ refers to Anaximander’s idea of the arche. He wondered how things like fire could come from water. What prevented fire from drying out all the water, or water dissolving all the earth? He worked out that the arche couldn’t be a normal element. It had to be something special. He used the word apeiron, which roughly translates as ‘boundless’ or ‘infinite’. This was an indestructible substance that all others came from. From this came the Earth, Water, Air and Fire that made up the cosmos. This steps past one problem, it’s quite smart, but what prevents Fire from quenching Water? This is the second fragment.

‘(To that they return when they are destroyed) of necessity; for he says that they suffer punishment and give satisfaction to one another for injustice.’

He said that the elements were constantly emerging and dissolve back into the apeiron. The force that kept it all in balance was justice. This sounds a bit mad, and this is why I’m wary of the term ancient science. It’s not mad if you look at the time Anaximander lived in.

This was a period when the polis system, the city states that the Greeks lived in, was forming. In later periods you could justify power by saying “We’ve always done it this way.” In this period you couldn’t do that. Writing was in its infancy. The Greeks were having a big argument over what was the right way to live. In Athens, Solon had recently introduced trial by jury and by the end of the sixth century Cleisthenes would lay the foundations of the democratic state. Around the same time Sparta was conquering Messenia and following a different route becoming the ultimate military state. In the new colonies street plans were laid out in sites that had no (Greek) history. How should cities be built? Obviously you can’t ignore Gravity and just build them with upper floors, nor can you ignore electromagnetism and the fact the light travels in straight lines creating shadows. The Greeks also though you couldn’t ignore justice either. In the tales such as the Iliad, justice is a force that not even the gods can ignore. In the Greek world order was created in the cities by rules and laws, if there was order in the cosmos then it too must have law. Tellingly the very word κοσμος means ‘order’. What could operate the cosmos better than justice? Anaximander looked hard at the world. Everything he saw come into being came from a seed, and then thought about it logically to decide what seed could create a universe.

Anaximander created the first detailed model of the universe we have. The Earth was flat, after a fashion. In fact he held it was drum-shaped, with a depth of about a third of its diameter and that the flat surface on the other side of the Earth was also inhabitable. The Earth was in the centre of the cosmos. It stayed there because it was equidistant from other points, there was no more reason for it to move down than up, so it stayed where it was. The stars were holes in the sky showing the fire beyond, and the planets, which in ancient Greece included the Sun and Moon, were like cartwheels which spun round the Earth, with a hole in the rim through which fire burned. The circle of the Moon was eighteen times the Earth’s diameter and the circle of Sun twenty-times the Earth’s diameter. Eclipses occurred, he argued, when the holes in these rims became blocked.

Now you could just say he was wrong and laugh at the idea of a drum-shaped Earth. But a drum is not an obvious shape for a world and suggests that this wasn’t a whim. Rather like the ratios of the circles there was probably a reason and it’s a shame that reason has been lost. It’s not whether or not he got it right that matters, it’s the way he was making the attempt. He was trying to pry the cogs of the universe apart using his mind as a crowbar. Observe and theorise. One of the most striking examples of this was his theory of the origins of humans.

He observed that baby humans were incapable of looking after themselves. One woman’s baby is another animal’s lunch, so how did the first humans survive?

Alexander of Miletus says he thinks that from hot water and Earth there arose fish, or animals very like fish, that humans grew in them, and that the embryos were retained inside up till puberty whereupon the fish-like animals burst and men and women emerged already able to look after themselves.

Censorinus On Birthdays IV 7, trans. Jonathan Barnes.

Another mad idea? Not if you read Plutarch’s Table Talk[730DF] which notes that some sharks care for their young by keeping them cosseted. Some people use this as an example that Anaximander foresaw Evolution, which is unfair on him and Darwin. What he did do is recognise a problem and observe the world closely for an answer.

It may seem obvious to us that Inquiry is the way to solve a problem, but even today people ask why we should bother with “blue-sky research”. The answer should be if we knew why, then we wouldn’t have to do it. In Anaximander’s time people knew what they needed to know. They planted and harvested crops, raised families and were doing pretty well. They regarded themselves as the most advanced civilisation in history. In fact they too made fun of pure research. A tale is told of Thales that he was so intent on studying the stars one night that as he walked he fell into a well. Yet if he hadn’t been finding answers to unnecessary questions it seems likely that no-one would have ever realised what the necessary questions were, let alone ask them. Anaximander’s acute observation of birds led him to predict an earthquake in Sparta. His astronomical work introduced the sundial to Greece at a time when the Greeks would argue what month in the year it was, let alone what hour in the day.

Thales was a genius but there were many geniuses in ancient Greece whose great ideas effectively died with them. Natural Philosophy was just one of the many things Thales did. Anaximander deserves to be remembered alongside Archimedes or Pythagoras for ensuring that Natural Philosophy was recognised as a Good Idea and passed on to future generations. His example that explanations could be more than simply the will of the gods led to a debate about the nature of the cosmos that continues to this day. I don’t know if it’s fair to say there was a lot of science in Anaximander’s work, but there’s a lot of Anaximander in both the Sciences and Humanities.

A post-mortem of my paper yesterday will follow, but I’m a little tired and want to think a bit more about it. On the whole I thought it went surprisingly well.

Instead I’ll share a press release I got today.

New research into the Ancient Greeks shows their knowledge of travel inspired early forms of fantasy and science fiction writing

New research into the Ancient Greeks shows their knowledge of travel inspired early forms of fantasy and science fiction writing.

There is a long tradition of fantasy in Greek literature that begins with Odysseus’ fantastic travels in Homer’s Odyssey. Dr Karen Ni-Mheallaigh, at the University of Liverpool’s School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, is exploring fantasy in ancient literature, examining theories of modern science fiction writing and how these can be applied to texts from the ancient world.

Dr Ni-Mheallaigh is looking at the work of 2nd century AD writer, Lucian of Samosata, who wrote True Histories, a travel narrative that includes an account of a trip to the moon and interstellar warfare. Antihanes of Berge — who wrote about his travels in the far north of Europe, where it was so cold that conversations ‘froze in the air,’ — will also be examined, as well as the writer Herodotus who wrote about ‘flying snakes; and ‘giant gold-digging ants’ in India.

Dr Ni-Mheallaigh explains: “Fantasy writing in the ancient world is still relatively unexplored from a literary perspective. What is so interesting about these fantastical journeys is that many of them are written in the form of truthful travel logs and historical texts. The Greeks had a fascination with the exotic and other worlds and some writers travelled to the north and Far East to satisfy their intrigue. The cultures they found there were so different from their own that they were inspired to fantasize and speculate about even more remote and exotic worlds.

“The Greeks seemed to have had an anxiety about writing pure fiction, and so writers who were notorious for their ‘tall’ tales – such as Ctesias, Antiphanes and Megathenes — would write about their adventures in the form of travel logs, or back up their findings with pseudo-documentary evidence, such as ‘rediscovered’ texts or invented inscriptions.

“It was Lucian who was the first to admit that everything he wrote was untrue and could never occur. His writing-style is however calculated to convince his reader that all his adventures are in fact true. His writing plays a very clever game with the reader’s mind, and, like all science fiction and fantasy writing today, allows the reader to ponder, what if…?

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Dr Ni-Mheallaigh’s findings will be published in 2006.

It’s interesting stuff and Lucian’s Vera Historia (True History) is an interesting read. I also think the parallels are worth investigating. You don’t have to be an Arthur C Clarke fanatic to draw the connection between SF and the Odyssey. I’m just a bit baffled that it’s a press release now.

Probably not an example of ancient Greek science fiction