Daredevils. How the First Philosophers Threw a Gauntlet at the Gods

28 May 585 BCE. On the banks of the Halys, in Asia Minor, the armies of Lydia and Media stand facing each other. Their war is in its sixth year. And then – in the middle of the day – the sun goes out. Dusk falls across the field, and the soldiers drop their weapons. Peace is sworn where they stand.

All of this would have happened anyway. Eclipses do not care about human calendars. What matters is this: fifty kilometers to the east, in the port city of Miletus, one man already knew it was coming. His name was Thales.

How did he know? He doesn't say. Most likely from Babylonian records, a long register of observations that reached the Ionians through Sardis. But here we must be exact: Thales foretold the year, not the day. That the eclipse fell on the very day of the battle was pure luck, as was the fact that it could be seen near Ionia at all. The wonder is not the pinpoint accuracy. The wonder is the thought itself – that the sky is periodic, that up there a lawful order runs and repeats and can be reckoned in advance. Thales did not read the entrails of a sacrifice or beg Apollo. He counted.

This is the moment philosophy is born. Not because Thales said everything was water – we remember that sentence only because it was first. But because suddenly, in one human head in one Greek city, a wholly new thought appears: the gods are beside the point. The world is a system one can understand.

This is not atheism. Thales probably believed in the gods, as everyone did. But for the first time, someone was assuming that underneath the gods there is an order to which the human mind has access. His successor in Miletus, Anaximander, went a step further. He named the origin of all things the apeiron, the Boundless, and said of it what the Greeks said only of gods: it is immortal and indestructible, it "encompasses all things and governs all things." Here, as Werner Jaeger noticed, the very concept of "the Divine" appears for the first time. These men did not kill the gods. They moved the divine inside the world, into the order a mind can reach. It is the most dangerous thought ever thought – dangerous precisely because it came dressed as a new piety. The city would put these men on trial for re-describing the divine, and that is stranger than mere unbelief.

Half a century before Anaxagoras, a wandering poet named Xenophanes of Colophon raised the same challenge – and did it in his own words, not in a disciple's report. He looked at the gods of Homer and Hesiod and saw thieves and adulterers, gods saddled with everything shameful among men. He noticed a strange thing: the Ethiopians paint their gods snub-nosed and black, the Thracians theirs blue-eyed and red-haired. Each race makes its gods after itself. Then he landed a blow that cannot be parried: if oxen and horses and lions had hands and could draw, they would draw the forms of the gods like oxen and horses and lions.

And yet Xenophanes was no atheist. In place of that crowd of man-shaped godlings he set "one god, greatest among gods and men, in no way like mortals in body or in thought." Jaeger stresses the thing easy to miss: Xenophanes prays to his purified god. He declared war on the old gods to give the city a worthier one. And, tellingly, no one persecuted him. He lived to about ninety – which already spoils the tidy ledger of "philosophy is a crime."

A hundred and thirty years after Thales, Anaxagoras came from Ionia to Athens. There he found what Miletus did not have: power. The Athens of the 460s is an empire, and Pericles is the most influential man in the Greek world. And Anaxagoras becomes his personal teacher.

He teaches him philosophy in the Ionian manner: nature is matter in motion. Mind (nous) gave it the initial push and stepped back. The cosmos runs on its own laws.

Now pay attention. For a Greek, the sun is Helios, a god. The moon is Selene. The stars are divine beings. Anaxagoras says: no. The sun is a red-hot stone, larger than the Peloponnese. The moon is an earth-like body that reflects the sun's light. This is geology, not theogony.

He lived in Athens for thirty years and was the most respected intellectual figure in the city – until a trial brought catastrophe. Exactly when is something the ancient sources cannot agree on: somewhere between the 450s and the 430s, and possibly there were two prosecutions. Pericles' political enemies could not touch Pericles. So they touched what was closest to him: Anaxagoras. The charge was asebeia – impiety. Denying the divinity of the heavenly bodies.

Pericles defended him in court personally. It did not help. Anaxagoras was either sentenced to death and fled (one version), or simply exiled (another). He spent the rest of his life in Lampsacus. On the day of his death, the story goes, he asked that every year afterward the children of the city be given a holiday – in joy. The Lampsacenes honored this request for centuries.

The lesson seems plain: in fifth-century Athens, to say the sun was a stone could cost you your head. Though even here a caveat is due: the asebeia charge was first of all a political weapon against Pericles, with impiety serving as the convenient pretext. Still, the bare fact that celestial geology could be turned into a capital suit speaks loudly enough.

Protagoras of Abdera was the first man to call himself a sophist – and the first to charge for it. Large sums. He was the intellectual superstar of his age – arriving in a city, giving paid lectures, selling young rich men the thing they wanted: eloquence, subtlety, the ability to win any argument.

"Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not." This is his most famous sentence. You can already feel how dangerous it is. If man is the measure, the gods do not stand above him. If man is the measure, justice is whatever the strong can impose on the weak. If man is the measure, the law of the city is not a sacred nomos but a contract that can be rewritten.

In his book On the Gods he opens with this sentence: "Concerning the gods, I cannot know either that they are or that they are not. For many things stand in the way of knowing: both the obscurity of the matter, and the brevity of human life."

This is not atheism. It is worse. The atheist at least makes a claim. Protagoras says: we do not know. Perhaps we cannot know. Perhaps the question is undecidable. In that sentence the polis senses something more frightening than denial – the experienced mind's indifference to the thing that holds the community together.

The story goes that the Athenian authorities collected every copy of On the Gods they could find and burned them in the agora, and tried Protagoras for impiety. Honesty requires a caveat: this account is attested late, centuries after the fact, and some scholars take it for an embellished legend. But it is how the tradition remembered its own fear – a book that doubts the gods is too dangerous to let survive. Protagoras fled the city, and by legend drowned at sea escaping the court.

This is the Athens before Socrates.

Not every Pre-Socratic threw the gauntlet at the city through its gods. Some threw it at the city itself.

Heraclitus was born into the royal house of Ephesus. He was to inherit the position of priest-king. He refused – and handed it over to his younger brother. Then he went into the mountains and lived alone. He despised the crowd on principle. "Most people behave as though they had a private intelligence of their own," he wrote. "Many do not understand the things they meet with. Nor are they aware of them when they learn them. Only to themselves do they seem wise."

He did not explain. He wrote the way oracles wrote: short, dark, without extra words. The ancients called his book The Obscure. Two and a half millennia later Heidegger would say that all of Western philosophy is a long footnote to Heraclitus.

But contempt for the crowd is not the whole truth about Heraclitus. Underneath it lies a theology. He held that behind all human laws stands a single divine one: "all the laws of men are nourished by one law, the divine law." That is why the people, he wrote, "must fight for the law as for the city wall." The cosmos for him is a hidden order, an everliving fire kindling and going out in measures according to the logos. The man who despised the crowd also cast himself as the prophet of that order. And his "a man's character is his fate" reads like a command: live by the measure written into the fabric of things.

Heraclitus was not killed by the polis. Simply because he despised the polis so thoroughly that he did not allow it to touch him. He was the first philosopher to say: the crowd will never understand, the crowd does not need to understand, the crowd exists to be a crowd, and the one who thinks exists apart.

This mood passes student to student, through centuries. Plato inherits it – in the part of his soul that despises democracy. Nietzsche inherits it – in the part of him searching for the Übermensch. Every time a young mind has the experience of "my god, I see what they cannot see," they are having Heraclitus's moment.

This too is philosophy: not only telling the truth to the gods' faces, but telling the truth to the crowd's face. Sometimes – especially the crowd's.

It is worth pausing on a voice that denies this whole story. The classicist Peter Kingsley argues that the clean split between "prophecy" and "calculation" we began with is a later invention of the winners. Excavations at Velia in southern Italy (1958–1962) turned up a line of inscriptions: "healer," "Pholarchos – Lord of the Lair," "Ouliades," "iatromantis," and at last "Parmenides, son of Pyres, Ouliades, Physikos." On Kingsley's reading, the "father of logic" was a priest of Apollo, a healer-prophet whose poem records a descent into the underworld to a goddess. "Moses brought his laws down from Mount Sinai; Parmenides brought his back from the depths of hell." The reading is contested and held by a scholarly minority. But it keeps us honest: philosophy's beginning may have been prophetic before it was calculating, and the story of the lone reckoner may have won that fight rather than simply recorded it.

Let's look at the Pre-Socratic balance sheet.

– Anaxagoras: trial, escape or exile. Died in exile. – Protagoras: books burned, flight, possibly death during escape. – Diagoras of Melos (whom I have barely mentioned): nicknamed "the atheist," with an officially posted bounty on his head. Fled. – Pythagoras: attacked in Croton when a mob set fire to the house where his school met – Diogenes has him escape the blaze and die soon after in flight. The locals did not like that the school did not admit everyone. – Empedocles: by legend, threw himself into Mount Etna to prove his own divinity. Etna spat back one of his sandals. – Heraclitus: voluntary exile in the mountains. Died unknown; the later tale of a death from dropsy packed in cow dung is a Hellenistic fabrication spun from his own dark sayings.

Now for some honesty. Half of these deaths are legend. Empedocles almost certainly did not leap into Etna, and the dung story about Heraclitus is a late slander. This is the tradition's memory of its own fear more than a chronicle – later generations dramatized the risk into martyrdoms. But the risk was real. One generation on, Athens would raise the cup of hemlock to a philosopher, and that is no legend. And it is worth hearing what actually frightened the polis: as Jaeger saw, these daredevils did not deny the gods so much as re-describe the divine. The city heard atheism in it, when what it was is a rival piety – and that made it frighten all the more.

These are the people who made philosophy. None of these lives ended in comfort. None died in an academic office with a cup of tea. They all knew that thinking is a political action, and politics does not forgive. Pierre Hadot would later generalize it: philosophy was a way of life, and a way of life that overturns a city's values collides with the state as a matter of course.

When you, in the twenty-first century, read about "freedom of thought" as an abstraction – remember that this freedom was not granted. It was clawed for. It was clawed for by Anaxagoras, Protagoras, Heraclitus, Diagoras, Pythagoras. It was clawed for by the one who closed this epoch: Socrates.

Without them, your right to ask "is there a God?" would not exist.

Here the Pre-Socratic epoch ends. In 399 BCE Athens finally catches a philosopher and does to him what they did not do to Anaxagoras (Pericles stood behind him) and could not do to Protagoras (he had time to flee).

Socrates was caught. Socrates did not flee. And what happened next is the single event in Western thought that changed everything. That is the next lecture.