Chambers of the Sun Part 11

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"If you dare trample on these, be free"

Aspawa Pension, Pamukkale - September 16th, Evening

Kuşadası may be an unashamed fleshpot, but it does make a very convenient base for tracing the lines of Greek thought back to their very inception, with a man whose name is renowned worldwide and whose thoughts are hopelessly obscured by time. Thales of Miletus, and his successors Anaximander and Anaximenes with him, are known almost universally as the first philosophers because they were the first to cast off the tyranny of the arbitrary. As anybody who has tried will know all too well, the further back the filigree'd tracery of science is taken, the more impossible it becomes to make any sure statement, and so I shall make no pretensions to incontrovertible truth. Out of a wish for brevity and fluency, I have no desire to have to prefix every statement with "in my opinion," so I shall warn all readers to take the following outline with a fair-sized shaker of salt.

What exactly did Thales do that marked the beginning of philosophy? Truth be told, we have no idea. He may have said that everything is made of water. He may equally have said that everything comes from the water, or rests upon it, which is actually not terribly original or philosophical. All that we have on the subject are a couple of testimonies from Aristotle, who, sublime tidier of mind that he was, was inclined to bang square-shaped Presocratic pegs into round holes. If all that Thales said was that the earth was begotten from the waters, parallel myths in the Babylonian and Egyptian traditions say this too. If he really thought that all things were somehow constituted from water, we can but conjecture why he thought so.

What I find persuasive about Thales is his apocryphal context; he was the kind of man who accrued his own mythology. One of my favourite stories, mentioned by Plato, has a pretty Thracian girl mocking the old man for falling into a well "while he was observing the stars and gazing upwards." On a more practical level, we are told by Herodotus (who is always right) that he accurately predicted a solar eclipse to within a year. This is not only credible, it is important, because the prediction of an eclipse - which would have been based on untold hundreds of observations - is a recognisably scientific operation. It relies on the underlying idea that under the same conditions things will act in the same way twice. With the help of centuries of precedent - probably borrowed from the Babylonian astronomers - Thales not only marks a pattern, he extrapolates from it. This need for applicable rules to govern the universe, to throw off the ineffable horror of uncertainty, is, if not philosophy, at least the sister of philosophy. It can also fairly be inferred from accounts of the work of Anaximander and Anaximenes, who followed hot on his heels, that in their theories of arche, the original mother-substance, they were developing a concept that already had a shape and possibly a name.

Thales was the first philosopher because he was the first to see not just the rule, but the future implied by the rule. The Egyptians probably had some notion of similar triangles before Thales, but it was he who first applied it to measurement at sea. This ability, this compulsion, to project is the basis of rational thought, and an irreplacable element in the Ionian mind.

Miletus was not just a symbol of intellectual revolution. Caught up inextricably with the restless expansion of the realms of mind, silent and pervasive as light, was a need for resonating action. Thralldom to the Persian client state of Lydia became intolerable to a race that was looking to the stars rather than to man for guidance, and Miletus proved the breaking point. Aristagoras, an exiled leader of the city, and his uncle Histaeus, who was beginning to feel distinctly uncomfortable as a creature of the Persian administration in Sardis, set a light to Ionia, and she caught in spectacular fashion. At first they were constrained to communicate in secret - so much so that they hit on the famous idea of shaving a messenger's head, writing the message and then letting his hair grow back again - but then Aristagoras took off to the Greek mainland. Having failed in solliciting the Spartans for help, he spoke before his mother city, Athens, and won twenty triremes over to his cause. They acted with astonishing swiftness, sweeping over Mount Tmolus and descending upon Sardis before the defenders could so much as raise the gates. They fired the city, and fled as quickly as they had come.

I remember, during the GCSE History course, seeing a cartoon from the time of the Mukden incident where Japan is chopping away quietly at the tale of a sleeping Chinese dragon. This was precisely the case with the Ionian revolt; Persia's very bulk prevented her from acting immediately, and so the revolution took hold in Caria, Crete and Aeolia. Yet the news flowed like hot blood through the veins of the sleeping empire, as the news sped down the Royal Road to the "Capital of the World," Susa. Darius authorised instantaneous force, and lots of it. An enormous body was assembled, and the two armies met by Ephesus with the fate of the enlightenment at stake. The Ionians were crushed. Still, sustaining losses on all sides, the Ionians fought on, and each city had to be subdued at immense cost to the empire. It is said that Darius was so enraged by this insurrection that, when told that it had been aided and abetted by the Athenians, he bid a slave whisper three times a day in his ear, "Remember, O Master, the Athenians."

It is best not to Disneyfy - I hope that's how you spell it - the revolt to too great an extent. Aristagoras had previously had a big hand in a Persian invasion of the Cyclades, and his uncle was a slippery sod if ever there was one; it is also likely that money was the main motivation for many of the cities, and when the clouds of defeat began to gather, they folded and sued for peace faster than the French. Lest we forget, Ionian forces fought on the Persian side at Thermopylae. Yet I cannot but feel pride in standing atop the hill at Miletus, and looking down upon the first city that stood - though they may not have realised it - for something greater than mere political gain.

Not that Aristagoras or Thales would have been able to recognise much of the site as we see it. The city is dominated by a vast Hellenistic amphitheatre expanded by the Romans, which rears back into the hillside and grasps at the innards of the slope with tunnels like great sinews. The scale and implausibility of the engineering are quite magnificent. The rest
is something of a mish-mash with a total contempt for town planning. The echoing bulk of the Caldarium in the Baths of Faustina - the wife of Marcus Aurelius - is as big a bathhouse as I have seen outside the Terme di Diocleziano in Rome, and a few blocks remain of what must have been a highly original monument to the victory at Actium, but, like the rest of the site's beguiling fragments, these are but testaments to the greatest tyranny of all - the rule of Time. Civil largesse has raised some astonishing monuments throughout this city, and the voice still whispers hoarsely, "remember me," in the enormous stoa, in the shattered remnants of the Nymphaeum - once as great a facade as that of the library of Celsus at Ephesus - and in the pediment of the Serapeum.

It was while picking my way through the Nymphaeum that I came across Professor C-, one of the world's leading epigraphers, on "holiday" with his brilliant son M-. Of course, there is no such thing as a holiday for a serious man, and they were picking their way through the shards of the friezes like mudlarks. My father has always maintained (doubtless following many before him) that "there are two things in life that you should never see being made: laws and sausages." To this company I would add archaeological discoveries; I am very glad that somebody makes them, for they yield much that is useful to literature, but I always feel vaguely uncomfortable when they are going on around me. Watching them arguing about the styling of a rho, however, I felt that wholesome pleasure which we know when we see a job being done with skill and application. They had just come from Oenomander in Lycia, where an enormous epigram detailing the doctrine of Epicurus is just coming to light. We have only recovered a third of it, but already it has added usefully to what little we know about the Epicuri de grege porci from Lucretius and Philodemus. "And," says M- with a broad smile, "you can see the word hedone." I cannot but smile with him; such genuine feeling for a subject is too rare to scorn.

The setback about Miletus, I discovered, is that there are no buses leaving the place. I walked out into the road and waved my hand up and down in the air like a man bouncing a basketball - when in Rome...A kind man with a phenomenal moustache dropped me safely back in Söke two hours later.

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Comments

[Noreen]

Mind spin
R u a teacher? I felt like I was reading a school assignment. R u on Holiday? Or on a research trip? :)

[olivernmoody]

Put your mind at rest
It's a bit of both! I'm a student but I take research way too seriously, and let it get in the way sometimes; I guess travel just for the sake of travel feels a bit childish. Thanks for reading, though!