An Essay on Violence, Tradition and Modernity

Rafael Leyre ( Rafael_Leyre@yahoo.com)       Third Edition - February 2007

Greece

Colonization, warfare and cultural exchange

During the seventh century BCE population pressure pushed Greek emigrants to conquer footholds and to establish colonies around the Mediterranean Sea, around the Black Sea and in the Nile Delta.476 As always, this crossing of borders was followed by exchange of ideas. Although Western historians have depicted Greek colonization as a civilizing mission giving ‘foreign people the opportunity to get to know the Greek civilization’,477 there was not all that much civilization to learn from this ‘scum of Greece’, as Archilochus, a poet who witnessed the emigrations, has called them. Cultural exchange went in all directions, but one of the most prevalent exchanges was that the Greeks learned from Egypt the carving of hard granite and marble, and the construction of large monumental buildings. And this implied simultaneous transfer of the necessary skills in engineering, mathematics and astronomy.

One century later, when Persia conquered Lydia and Babylon to arrive at the borders of the Aegean Sea, some Greeks in the Asian colonies became attracted to the cosmopolitan atmosphere of an almost unlimited empire. Those Greeks substituted their fighting togs by long white robes eastern style, and put on, testified Xenophanes, decadent perfumes and conspicuous ornaments:

They learnt dainty and unprofitable ways from the Lydians, so long as they were free from hateful tyranny; they went to the market-place with cloaks of purple dye, not less than a thousand of them all told, vainglorious and proud of their comely tresses, reeking with fragrance from cunning salves.

Among those ‘dainty and unprofitable ways’ were philosophy and science.

Although closely related with Greece, the Asian colony of Miletus and its neighbours had their own dialect, lived under the rule of Lydia and were regarded Asian by the Greeks of Europe. Prosperous Miletus maintained crucial commercial relations with Egypt and Babylon, and at regular intervals merchants entertained travellers in their houses, exchanging amusing tales and exotic wisdom while their caravans gathered or their ships waited for favourable winds. Those encounters of merchants and nobles formed a network allowing ideas to travel from China to the Mediterranean within a few years – seconds on the chronometer of history - while distortions of strange imageries sometimes might contribute to the rise of new concepts. The importance of those distortions – occasionally genuine meme mutations – should not be underestimated, even more so as translators were usually children raised in mixed marriages, by parents of different tongues. Those parents might be either educated citizens or illiterate slaves.

What the Greeks later would call philosophy started in this milieu. The word did not set apart men who ‘loved wisdom’, as the name might suggest, because many other people loved wisdom too – an abundant wisdom literature flourished in Asia and Africa, and was recited for centuries, before attentive audiences, in slums and palaces. New was the combination of the lore of shamans, healers and sorcerers with fresh, abundant knowledge. For a century those men preferred to recite visions in a theatrical way to guarantee their reputation and singularity, and claimed the origin of their knowledge divine, rather than to point out the actual sources. Their propositions can be divided over three types: common knowledge, following the older customs, is granted an exotic origin, like Egypt or Babylon; propositions of fellow Greeks are criticized and refuted, if mentioned at all; finally the own propositions are presented as divine inspirations or visions, unmotivated and in dark, poetic wording. Only at a later stage divine inspiration was going to take the form of introspection and turn into the myth of pure reason.

The philosophers among those colourful pretenders can roughly be divided in engineers and professors: the first sold their knowledge to kings, ministers and generals, the second to princes and wealthy citizens.478 The first brought about bridges, temples and besiege machinery or defence works, the second brought about improvements in social areas like politics, business and law; the first were interested in geometry and physics, the latter in morals and discourse; the first were enumerated by means of endowments and gifts, the second by means of wages. There is no ground whatsoever to claim that this was a Greek peculiarity, absent or even impossible in similar societies.

The Persian armies had scored the entire earth from Egypt to India with an iron plough, and as a result philosophy must have prospered wherever wealth was gathered - at the courts of Tehran, Sousa, Saïs and Kandahar, and in many cities forgotten since - in the same manner and for the same reasons as in Miletus and Athens. But because the writings of Plato and Aristotle remained of some value to ideologists who attained power afterwards, copies of their works are the only remaining testimony of ancient science.

The Milesian philosophers known to us – Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes - can all be considered professional engineers, since they were occupied with astronomy, geometry, navigation, mechanics and hydrology, while their speculations about a material substratum of the world (water, fire, the boundless, ether), was the inclusion of Eastern speculations in the constructionist paradigm of their profession. This happened centuries after the first Upanishads. Thales, the certified first philosopher, travelled to Egypt, studied Babylonian science, and was enlisted in various Lydian military campaigns for his engineering skills. He was honoured as the ‘father of philosophy’ two thousand years after the Egyptians had consecrated Imhotep for analogous accomplishments.

Persian influence

Persia was the unambiguous turntable of Asian and African imageries, and since the Greco-Persian Wars Greece underwent Persian influence in its turn.

It would have been a genuine ‘Greek miracle’ if the Greeks, throughout this turmoil, had remained isolated by a thick blind wall, and that Indian, Persian and Egyptian imageries had raced around without ever influencing Athens – but it would not be a miracle to be proud of.

In reality, Greeks who were raised under Persian influence took yet unknown ideas westward when they fled for the brutal defeater. Teos, a city on the Asian coast, was destroyed by the Persians in 540 BCE. Its citizens escaped to Abdera, the birthplace, a century later, of Protagoras and Democritus. At about the same time Pythagoras and Xenophanes escaped from Asia and fled into Southern Italy. Pythagoras founded his famous sect at Croton, and Xenophanes went to Elea, a city founded in 535 BCE by Asian Greek refugees. In Elea Xenophanes influenced Parmenides, at that time a follower of Pythagoras.479

In 494 BCE, Miletus was sacked and part of the population was enslaved and deported. Heracleitus however stayed at Ephesus under Persian rule until his death. He named the world ‘an ever-living Fire’ which ‘will judge and convict all things’480 – a distinctly Zoroastrian imagery.

After the earthquake of the Persian wars, philosophers travelled from city to city and from palace to palace, selling their knowledge as private professors. Those men had not only acquainted foreign insights like the engineers mentioned above - they took one step more: confronted with the traditions of various civilizations, they were struck by the variety of truth claims defended by each of them. If other countries had other gods, other oracles, other laws and customs, the own community tumbled down to one of many provinces of the world, and there was no reason any more to trust that the own traditions are always right.

Athens

Athens became the official treasurer of the Greek alliance, and took the lead in the hostilities with Persia. The resulting prosperity attracted philosophers chased from Asia, together with their pupils: Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Gorgias, Parmenides, all under direct or indirect Persian influence, gave Athens the philosophical splendour in which Plato thrived, and which at last attracted Aristotle and his followers. With Aristotle, the link with Persian philosophy becomes irrefutable by anyone not entangled in Western ideology.

As always when shattering of borders engender modernity, the reaction of those in power was severe. The Athenian leaders – both despotic and so-called democrats - detested free thinking: Anaxagoras, Protagoras and others were accused of impiety, or of Medism, a word giving away the Persian origin of the despised novelties.481 Book burnings, death penalties and banishments have for consequence that our knowledge about those philosophers depends almost entirely on the words of their greatest enemy, the conservative Plato, who named them ‘sophistes’ in the meaning of ‘quibbling swindlers’. Plato, one of the most distinguished notables of Athenian aristocracy, was a supporter of the terror regime of 404 BCE in which several of his relatives functioned. He quitted his ambitions as a playwright to spend most of his time composing dialogues in which the ‘sophistes’ are ridiculed and molested by a morally and intellectually super-human, Socrates. The former playwright continuously puts purposely ridicule propositions in the mouth of the sophistes, to have them countered by Socrates, who says to know nothing and yet knows everything better - a religious zealot, leaving no one at rest but never fully speaking his mind himself.

When convicted to drink poison, the Socrates of Plato refused even a permissible way out, only to become the celebrated martyr of absolute obedience, not motivated by justice or critical philosophy, but by some dark religious principle. Right before drinking the lethal cup this Socrates defended for his last time religious submission, as opposed to free thinking and free acting:

There is a doctrine uttered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away; this is a great mystery, which I do not quite understand. Yet I, too, believe that the gods are our guardians, and that we are a possession of theirs. 482

Plato added the first conservative voice to philosophy – a real innovation, if not a contradiction -, and thus became a well known conservative icon and the first philosopher who’s works survived succeeding despotic powers. He was the head of a corporation, later known as the Academy, where the leading classes worshipped the Muses and studied the skills of totalitarian statesmanship. This Academy, with its religious nature, with its social network and with the political ambitions of its founder, can hardly be imagined as the independent, private and speculative institute it is called by most scholars today, and Plato was not a tragic leader who had failed in his unselfish ambitions or, following Plutarch, could not persuade anyone because of his unpleasant character.483 In reality the corporation was an ally of power like many other temples, convents, ministries and academies.

Despite the assertions of Western historians that the Greek miracle was never seriously influenced by other cultures, Plato, In his work Laws, deemed it necessary to plead for a restraint on such exchanges:

Intercourse of cities with one another is apt to create a confusion of manners; strangers are always suggesting novelties to strangers...

And poetry and music are only a cause of

disobedience to rulers; and then the attempt to escape the control and exhortation of father, mother, elders, and when near the end, the control of the laws also; and at the very end there is the contempt of oaths and pledges, and no regard at all for the Gods ...

In the Phaedo the horrors already caused by this ‘intercourse of cities’ are summed up by Socrates:

[Some] mention as causes air and ether and water and many other strange things [..] one man surrounds the earth with a vortex to make the heavens keep it in place, another makes the air support it like a wide lid. As for their capacity of being in the best place they could possibly be put, this they do not look for, nor do they believe it to have any divine force, but they believe that they will some time discover a stronger and more immortal Atlas to hold everything together...

The Indian ether, the Zoroastrian vortex (also found in the bible book Ezekiel), the Egyptian firmament: Plato gives a good summary of ‘novelties’ from all over the known world, and in the same sentence complains that people are no longer grateful for their own familiar place.

Plato repeatedly gave away that he would love nothing more than to repair the regime of terror that collapsed before his eyes: unremitting submission to undisputed power was the essence of his ideal society. Ironically, and maybe unnoticed by him, it was a foreign, Persian philosophy - the Boundless Light filled with unmoving, intangible Fravashis - that helped him to his famous imagery that we live ‘in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light’. To Plato the light stands for an higher reality of imperishable forms, of which the actual world is but a transitional shadow. In this manner a Persian scientific theory became a political ideology. This ideology has been recycled without end to give a profound ring to plain reactionary conservatism, and eventually influenced Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim civilizations. If Plato should be renown for anything, it should be for the merging of an imported universal superstructure with local political provincialism, thereby paving the way for parish ideologies assaulting the world community with a pity sentiment of righteousness.

Alexander the Great

Following the Persian Wars, Greece was allowed peace for only sixty years. Then Alexander of Macedonia started his looting campaigns - a chain reaction continually fuelled by ever new uprooted men, joining the next plunder after their own environment was ruined.

Despite being depicted as a fierce warrior, Alexander ‘the Great’ was 1.40 meter high, and can only have been grossly fat because of his voracious appetite for roasted chicken and wine. Even his horse, a bag of bones more than twenty years of age, is commonly depicted as a wild steed. After the murder of his father, of which historians have acquitted him for lack of evidence, Alexander had all his rivals and potential opponents killed, including his own brothers. He became heir to an army eager to plunder every town in sight, Greek, Persian or whatever, and was drawn behind this army as a spoiled kid walking bloodhounds, constantly surrounded by lifeguards who paid with their lives for the slightest negligence. He relentlessly feasted with prostitutes and courtiers at each encampment: Persepolis was set on fire by this loud-mouthed gang, but not before all treasures had been towed away by the rank and file for many days. It was the drunk Alexander who threw the first torch in the Hall of a Thousand Pillars, only for the fun of the fireworks. In Sousa he organized the biggest mass rape in history by paying his grumbling soldiers with ten thousand local women – a performance still acclaimed by historians today as an act of cultural fraternizing, as if ten thousand local women had suddenly fallen in love with an entire army after it invaded and looted their country. It was customary that the women of a taken city were booty for the soldiers; the novelty was that the taking of the booty was turned into a pompous ceremony by a warring tribesman who had discovered the splendour of the kingdoms he was destroying.

Some of Alexander’s companions died in drinking contests after days of agony, while they were tended better than wounded soldiers in tents erected for this purpose only. When intoxicated, Alexander became (or remained) a dangerous murderer, even killing his best friend in a rush when the latter alluded to his incompetence. He is said to have established an enormous empire, but there was never a central metropolis, and even when sober Alexander was unable to coordinate, let alone unify the territories ransacked by the hordes operating in his name, and left behind in the hands of ruthless governors and tax collectors. In Babylon, where he hoped to soak up splendour of the city like grease dripping off a plate with roasted meat, he crammed himself unconscious and died after days of agony. Within a few years his ‘empire’ fell apart: he had by then sacked whole countries for vulgar profit and destroyed numerous cities in the most hideous manner, repeatedly crucifying thousands of resisters, while selling ten times as many children and women into slavery.

The demolition of borders initiated by this warfare, was accelerated by masses of roaming armies and refugees eventually settling on alien ground. In this context the retinue of Alexander confiscated treasures of Persian and Babylonian science, already correlated with Indian, Chinese and Mongol knowledge. The Persian Book of Nativities484 reads:

When Alexander conquered the kingdom of Darius, he had all books translated in Greek. Then he burnt the original copies which were kept in the treasure houses of Darius, and killed everyone whom he thought might be keeping away any of them, except that some books were saved through the protection of those who safeguarded them, and he who could escape from Alexander by running away to the islands of the seas and the mountain tops. Then when they returned to their homes after the death of Alexander they put into writing those parts that they had memorized.

Another version adds that also inscriptions on stone and wood were destroyed, and that

books, along with the rest of the sciences, property, treasures and learned men that he came upon, he sent to Egypt.

When the storm was over, the Persians took the necessary steps to rebuild their intellectual institutes. The Zoroastrian Denkard recounts:

After the plunder by Alexander, successive kings commanded to all provinces to preserve, in the state in which they had come down, whatever had survived the pillage and plundering of the Macedonians of Alexander, to be brought to the court. This included writings on medicine, astronomy, movement, time, space, substance, accident, becoming, decay, transformation, logic and other crafts and skills.485

A few centuries later Muslim Jihad turned Zoroastrian Persia into a Muslim empire. Soon fundamentalist Hanbalites opposed every deductive method. What is, they said, has been revealed, it must only be described. When Saudi-Arabia officially accepted Wahabitism, it became an Hanbalite society in the twentieth century CE.

While Alexander burned down his first city – Thebes of Greece, in 335 BCE - his former tutor, Aristotle, founded the Lyceum at Athens, an academy and, according to Strabo, the first library of Greece.

It is absurd to believe that Aristotle was no longer interested in the prince he had educated, and who was now ready to storm the world, crossing, looting and burning, but also running into amazing animals, plants, imageries and customs. It is evens absurd to believe that Alexander forgot the philosopher who had dominated most of his youth. For anyone travelling east, fascination with exotic marvels was as common as the attraction of gold, and Alexander had engaged many famous scholars: Anaxarchus, from the school of Democritos at Abdera; Pyrrhon of Ellis, the father of western skepticism; Onesicratus, a disciple of Diogenes; Xenocrates, a companion of Plato, and so on.486

But even more absurd than two famous men suffering simultaneous amnesia, is to believe that while Alexander and his entourage of selected scholars were daily confronted with all those marvels, they took no interest in them, did nothing to make records or gather specimen, and saw no reason to direct such records and specimen to Athens, where the most famous scholar of their times was filling the first library of Greece with innate European wisdom.

Imagine a person overlooking a river running through a valley, of which a part is hidden by a rock. If this person should claim that the upstream river evaporates behind the rock, while the downstream river is nourished by itself, everyone would call him a fool. But if the same river is described to people who were never there, and have no distinct idea about the direction of the flows and the size of the rocks, the same foolishness could easily be accepted as a fact. This is exactly what happened when western historians state that all the science of Asia and Africa suddenly disappeared at the moment Greek science freshly emerged from the Greek mind or character.

The looting of Asia by Alexander was devastating: at Hamadan six thousand soldiers secured only part of the booty.487 Inevitably, part of this booty were books and enslaved scholars and craftsmen. When Pliny asserts that Alexander gave Aristotle access to hunters, fishermen, fowlers, and overseers of forests, lakes, ponds and cattle-ranges, he must have been referring to such booty.

The Book of Nativities maintains that Persian books were sent off to Alexandria, but only after Alexander’s death, under the Ptolemean Pharaohs, a library was established there. Demetrius of Phaleron, a disciple of Aristotle, was commissioned with its development, and the works gathered by Aristotle became the basis of the famous Museaon. Persian bookworks were indeed sent to Alexandria their intermediate station was the Lyceum of Aristotle.

Also in imitation of the Lyceum, the Museaon attracted and accommodated scholars of all nationalities: roughly half came from non-Greek Asia and from Africa, while one quarter was from unknown origin. Greek was the lingua franca, as Sanskrit or Parsian had been before, and Latin or English would become afterwards. But not everyone with a Greek name or using the Greek language was from Greek birth, just as Desiderius Erasmus was no Roman citizen.

Alexandria was the perfect location for massive duplication of texts. Its location amidst the vast papyrus marshes of the Nile Delta made that almost a million books were eventually gathered by agents inspecting archives in temples and palaces throughout the world, and examining shiploads in the harbour. Either copies were prepared for the library, or books were confiscated and the original owner was satisfied with a copy made at once by the Mouseion scholars. A legion of translators and copyists prepared the texts in and out Greek, Assyrian, Persian, Egyptian, Jewish, Indian, and other languages.

Fusion and diffusion of Persian, Indian and Egyptian imageries

Despite the traditional designation of this period as ‘Hellenism’, it surpassed by far the character of an achievement inspired by Hellas: it was the merger of Asian, African and Greek knowledge in African Alexandria that engendered a period of modernity of the magnitude of Babylon, akin to the Indian episode of the oldest Upanishads, and to the African and Mesopotamian eposides testified by artworks from the third millennium BCE.488

An important paradigm of this period was the natural history of air and its relatives, wind and words. In the oldest Indian Upanishads all fluids – ether, air, water – were serious candidates to be substrate of the universe. For a millenary the imagery of the ‘breath of life’, and air, wind and (magical) words had attested the constant presence of spirits in daily life.

In Alexandrian times air degraded to an ordinary object of physical science and mechanical engineering. Some Gnostics tried to save the doctrine by applying the name pneuma (air) to a new medium of finer matter, but soon a new candidate, the Boundless Light of the Persian Zoroastrians, gained momentum.489 Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, Sufism and alchemy all eventually turned to light as the substratum of the spiritual world, and started a permanent conflict between scientific and spiritual aspirations. In the Gnostic gospel of Thomas Jesus says:

“If they say to you, ‘Where did you come from?’, say to them, ‘We came from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established itself and became manifest through their image.’”490

The fourth gospel of the Christian Bible, leaning heavily on Gnosticism itself, borrows the ancient imagery of air, winds and words in Genesis,491 but connects it with the new metaphor of light:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God [..] In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.492

Plotinus, the father of Neo-Platonism, wrote that ‘to dispel the darkness, and thus come to knowledge of its inner content, [the soul] must thrust towards the light.’493

Euclid of Alexandria, in his Optica, had studied the relationship between the apparent sizes of objects and their angle occupied at the eye. To Euclid, light streamed from the eye to the object; to Plotinus, light streamed from the celestial world into this world, filling it with matter. Therefore Plotinus could not agree that some parts of the seeing eye would not receive light:

Those attributing the reduced appearance to the lesser angle occupied, allow by their very theory that the unoccupied portion of the eye still sees something beyond or something quite apart from the object of vision, if only air-space.494

The Boundless Light found its way back to its Persian origin in the Iranian Sufist al-Ghazali:

The light upon the floor is owed to that upon the wall, and the light on the wall to that in the mirror, and the light in the mirror to that from the moon, and the light in the moon to that from the sun, for it is the sun that radiates its light upon the moon. [..] even so are the Lights of the celestial realm ranged in an order; and that the highest is the one who is nearest to the Ultimate Light. It may well be, then, that the rank of Seraphiel is above the rank of Gabriel [..] the name light is most of all due to this Heavenly Light, above which there is no light at all, and from which light descends upon all other things.495

Thomas Aquinas, himself an eager student who quoted al-Ghazali over thirty times, adapted the idea:

intellectual knowledge itself is called sight, or vision. And because bodily vision is not accomplished except through light, the means whereby intellectual vision is fulfilled borrow the name of light. That disposition therefore whereby a created intelligence is raised to the intellectual vision of the divine substance is called the ‘light of glory.’’

The alchemical treatise Liber de Arte Cemica, attributed to Marcilio Ficino, explains the supreme light as follows:

there is nothing in the soul of the firmament, beside a soul, which represents a greater similitude of God than light itself. Since everything does challenge to itself so much of God, as I may say, as they are capable of light. And since nothing is more conspicuous bright-eyed than the sun, many of the platonics chiefly imitating Orpheus herein have termed the sun, the eye of the world.496

Light would remain at the centre of European philosophy until the scientific work of Galileo led to the shocking but undeniable conclusion that it is just a natural phenomenon.497