Читать книгу A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Ancient and Mediæval Philosophy онлайн

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The Environment of the Early Greek.

(1). His Geographical Environment. The Greece into which philosophy was born was much larger than the Greece of to-day. Ancient Greece consisted of all the coasts and islands which were washed by the Mediterranean Sea from Asia Minor to Sicily and southern Italy, and from Cyrene to Thrace. The motherland, the peninsula of Greece, at first played an insignificant rôle. The leadership was in the hands of the Ionians, who had colonized the coasts of Asia Minor. In the seventh century B.C., when the first Greek philosophy appears, these Ionians commanded the world’s commerce among the three continents. Over the coasts of the entire Mediterranean they had extended their trade and established their colonies. Miletus became the wealthiest of these colonies and the cradle of Greek science. Its wealth afforded leisure to its people and therefore the opportunity for reflection.

(2). His Political Environment. An understanding of the Greek political world, in which its first philosophy appeared, requires an historical explanation of its rise. It takes us back four centuries to the age of the Epic (1000–750 B.C.). During more than two centuries of the age of the Epic two changes occurred which were to influence future Greek civilization: (1)The oligarchy which had supplanted the ancient patriarchal monarchy became firmly established; and (2)the Epic was formed. The importance of the Epic of Homer lies not so much in the fact that a great poem was constructed, as that it was the formulation of the Greek religion, the Greek æsthetic polytheism. Its writing indicates that the earlier unorganized, primitive, and savage forms of religion had given way, among the ruling classes at least, to an æsthetic polytheism, which in a general way was fixed by the Epic itself.