Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0081/00817.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 33KB | 514 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00817}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter III: Part II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Foot Moore, George}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{mysteries
gods
footnote
god
things
religion
anaxagoras
eleusinian
life
earth}
$Date{1913}
$Log{}
Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Religions Of Greece
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Chapter III: Part II

     Upon this doctrine of retribution beneath the earth the transmigration of
souls is superimposed, and is itself made retributive. ^1 This aspect of the
Orphic teaching was apparently particularly cultivated in Pythagorean circles;
we shall meet it again in the eschatology of Plato.

[Footnote 1: The same combination was made in India in the same way.  See
above, p. 276.]

     The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells how the goddess bade the people of
Eleusis rear her a temple before the city, and how the king fulfilled the
command.  Before she ascended to Olympus she taught the princes the ritual of
her cult, and instituted the hallowed mysteries which may not be divulged.
"Blessed is that man, of dwellers on the earth, who has seen these things!
But he who dies without initiation and participation in the sacred rites, in
the dank gloom below will not have so happy a lot." The mysteries of Eleusis
were thus, in origin, a local cult of Demeter the conduct of which was in the
hands of certain noble families of the city. Of its character the poet gives
no hint, but he says expressly that those who were admitted to the mysteries
received the assurance of a blessed life beyond the tomb.  The whole content
of the Hymn makes it clear, further, that the ground of this assurance was the
deliverance of Kore from Hades, which is the gist of the myth.  It is another
instance of the resuscitation of plant life after the winter's death taken as
the promise and proof that man, too, may rise to newness of life.  To us, the
seed of grain falling into the ground in the autumn and dying, coming to life
in the spring, flourishing and fruitful, seems but a poetical analogy or a
symbol.  To primitive apprehension, however, life in plant and animal was one;
the overcoming of death was as much a divine wonder in the seed or the tree as
in man, and the gods who wrought the one had the secret of the other. ^1 It
would be quite in accord with these notions if, as some have supposed, the
supreme moment in the ritual of Eleusis was the exhibition to the epopts of an
ear of wheat.

[Footnote 1: It is not meant that these conceptions were in the minds of the
Greeks of the fifth century; to them, and long before them, Demeter and Kore
were great personal deities, and the dramatic myth was certainly for them no
allegory of the corn-maiden.]

     Eleusis was annexed to Attica, probably in the seventh century, and the
mysteries were taken under public control, the chief offices remaining,
however, hereditary in the family of the Kerykes and the ancient Eleusinian
gens of the Eumolpidai.  In contrast to the Orphic mysteries, which always
remained sectarian conventicles, the Eleusinian mysteries were a recognised
branch of the established religion, though only the initiated were admitted to
their secret rites.  This privilege, which may once have been restricted to
certain Eleusinian clans, was extended not only to all Athenian citizens but
to all Greeks without distinction of city or race; women as well as men were
eligible, even minors and slaves; only such as were defiled by blood guilt
were excluded, as they were, indeed, from the public cults.  When Athens
became the centre of Greek life, the Eleusinian mysteries became a Panhellenic
institution as truly as the Delphian oracle of Apollo.  In later times Romans
also were admitted.

     The first step of one who wished to be initiated into the Eleusinian
mysteries was to apply privately to a member of either of the two families in
whose charge the celebration of the mysteries was, the Kerykes or the
Eumolpidai, who admitted him to the first stage by rites which resemble a
purification from blood guilt.  The next degree was initiation into the Lesser
Mysteries, celebrated in Agrai, a suburb of Athens, in February. The Great
Mysteries fell in the autumn.  The participants gathered in Athens in the
middle of Boedromion (September); the observances began with a proclamation by
the hierophant warning the unworthy not to profane the mysteries by their
presence.  On the 16th they went down to the shore and purified themselves by
a sea-bath. The two following days were spent in Athens.  On the 19th the
great company, dressed in white and escorted by the armed ephebi, set out for
Eleusis by the Sacred Street, carrying with them the image of the god Iakchos,
and loudly calling on his name. ^1 The progress of the procession was slow,
not only by reason of its numbers, but because there were numerous halts along
the way, which was lined with monuments, hero-shrines, and temples.  The
arrival at the bridge over the Kephissos was the signal for an outburst of
scurrilous abuse, which spared no station nor reputation; every man took the
licence of the hour to loose his tongue against such as offended the
democratic sense by being leading citizens, or those against whom he had some
private grudge, so that "bridging" was common Attic slang for wanton
vilification. ^2

[Footnote 1: Iakchos is identified by Sophocles with Bacchos (Dionysos). His
temple was in Athens, and he had no shrine in Eleusis, from which it is
inferred that his relation to the mysteries is adventitious and due to
Athenian influence.  The matter is, however, very obscure.]

[Footnote 2: It is likely that the custom had originally a religious motive,
abuse being a familiar apotropaic exercise.]

     The ceremonies at Eleusis lasted two or three days.  There were offerings
to the gods of the Eleusinian circle and others at the temples, and dances by
torchlight out-of-doors; but the properly mystic rites took place in a great
oblong hall to which only those who had been previously initiated into the
Lesser Mysteries were admitted.  On all sides of this hall were rising seats
for the spectators, as in a theatre; in the middle was a raised platform or
stage.  The secret of what went on within these walls was so well kept that
very little is definitely known about it.  One point conclusively established
is that the Eleusinian mysteries did not profess to impart an esoteric
doctrine concerning the future life.  The important thing in them was not what
was said, but what was done; not instruction, but impression. ^1

[Footnote 1: The initiated do not learn what they must do, but feel certain
emotions are put in a certain suitable frame of mind." - Aristotle.]

     It is probable that scenes from the myth of Demeter were acted or
presented in tableaux vivants - the rape of Kore, the grief of the mother, the
return of the lost daughter from the nether world, the institution of the
mysteries.  Such representations were not uncommon in the public cults; but
here they were surrounded by every circumstance that could quicken
imagination, kindle emotion, and give substance to things hoped for, reality
to things not seen.  This solemn mystery-play was, however, not all.  There
was a higher degree which could not be taken under a year after admission to
the Greater Mysteries at Eleusis. To those who attained it were displayed the
contents of the ark, the nature and significance of which were explained by
the hierophant.  It may be conjectured that these objects, the sight of which
inspired the deepest awe, were things which the goddess was believed herself
to have used in inaugurating the mysteries, so that the rite resembled the
exhibition of the most venerated relics in a Christian church. ^2 This
exhibition must have been at a different time from the mystery-play, perhaps
on the following night.  The attendance was doubtless much less numerous; and
it seems probable that the epopts in small groups drew near to the anaktoron,
or raised platform, on which the shrines containing the sacred objects were
placed, while the hierophant displayed and explained them.

[Footnote 2: For example, the Seamless Robe at Trier or the Sudarium
(Veronica) at Rome.  It may not be irrelevant to remark that John of Damascus
expresses the doctrine of the church when he says that Christ offers the
relics to Christians as a means of grace.  The legends of the Holy Grail show
the mediaeval feeling.]

     Rites of a sacramental character, also, had a place in the Eleusinia. One
such rite preceded admission to the spectacle in the great hall; each of the
mystae partook of the kukeon, a kind of gruel which the mourning Demeter, when
she broke her nine days' fast, refusing wine, bade the queen, Metaneira,
prepare for her of barley-groats, water, and pennyroyal leaves rubbed fine.
Other sacramental acts are indicated in the password of the Eleusinian
mysteries as reported by Clement of Alexandria: "I fasted, I drank the gruel,
I took from the ark, and having tasted, ^1 I put it away in the basket, and
from the basket into the ark." If the text is rightly restored, the reference
would appear to be to some sort of communion bread, or cake.

[Footnote 1: So the text is emended by Lobeck.  The manuscript reading is
"having wrought."]

     Whatever obscurity surrounds the rites at Eleusis, there is no
concealment of the faith of those who took part in them.  From the Homeric
Hymn on, the assurance of a blessed immortality is the good which men seek and
find in the mysteries; it is this which gave them their persistent attraction
not only for the multitudes, but for the noblest souls among the Greeks.  Thus
Pindar: "Blessed he, who having seen them, passes beneath the hollow earth; he
knows the end of life, and knows its god-given origin"; and Sophocles: "O
thrice-blessed those mortals, who having beheld these mysteries descend to
Hades; to them alone it is given there to live; for the rest all evils are
there."

     These quotations make it clear, also, that salvation was only for the
initiated - as we should say, for members of the church.  It does not appear
that moral defects, so far as they did not, like blood guilt, involve
religious defilement, excluded either from the church or its salvation,
whereas the foreigner (the man of non-Greek speech) was not admitted.  The
sarcasm of Diogenes was as apt to the Eleusinian mysteries as to the Orphic
thiasoi.  But here, too, the moral common sense of the community refused the
consequences of ecclesiastical logic; the growing belief in the inexorably
just judgment after death also conflicted with it.  Thinkers like Heraclitus
ridicule the superstition that physical purifications can purge the soul of
moral defilement.  Finally, the great thought breaks through at least here and
there, "Purity is holy-mindedness." ^1

[Footnote 1: Quoted by Porphyry through Theophrastus from an inscription at
Epidaurus.]

     Branches of the Eleusinian mysteries were established in numerous places,
but none of them rivalled the fame of the original.  Among other mysteries
which flourished in the same age the most notable were those of Samothrace,
which according to Herodotus had been adopted by the Greeks from the earlier
inhabitants of the island ("Pelasgians").  They attained their great
importance, however, in the fourth century, and in the Hellenistic and Roman
times stood second only to the Eleusinia, enjoying the peculiar favour of the
rulers.  The name of the Kabeiroi, who figure in the Samothracian religion,
has commonly been interpreted as Phoenician ("the great gods"), ^2 and it has
accordingly been supposed that the cult was introduced by Phoenician traders,
who may early have had a factory on the island.  In the age when we know
anything about it there seems to be nothing distinctively Semitic in the
religion.  Demeter was one of the great deities of the island; her daughter
Kore was associated with her, and the pair was grouped in divers ways with the
two Kabeiroi.  At Thebes, where also the Kabeiroi were worshipped, the elder
of the two was identified with Dionysos, while in Lemnos he was Hephaistos.
The mysteries of Andania in Messenia also enjoyed great repute in this period.
The Eleusinian pair was here joined with the two ancient local deities, Apollo
Karneios and Hermes Kriophoros.

[Footnote 2: The etymology is perfectly good; it can be matched with an
equally good Indo-Germanic possibility.]

     Ample provision would seem thus to be made for every man to be saved in
the fashion that best suited his temperament, from the decorous solemnity of
the spectacle at Eleusis to the orgiastic enthusiasm of the Bacchic thiasoi.
But besides these mystery-churches, voluntary or under state supervision,
there was a peculiar evangelistic movement, which became prominent in the
fourth century, though its beginnings probably lie much farther back.  Small
bands of men and women went about the country with a donkey-load of stuff -
including the ceremonial fawn-skins and the apparatus of initiation, drums and
tambourines, their books, and tame snakes - gathering curious hearers and
preaching the Orphic salvation, purifying their converts from the sin and
uncleanness, and admitting them to the mystic fellowship.  Demosthenes taunts
his opponent, Aeschines, with having, when a young man, acted as acolyte to
his mother, who seems to have been a captain in one of these branches of the
Salvation Army. When she had an initiation on hand, Aeschines read the liturgy
and attended to a variety of other arrangements:

     In the night time wearing the fawn-skin and mixing the bowl; purifying
the candidates, and swabbing them off with mud and bran; then making the man
arise from his purification, and bidding him say, "I have escaped evil, I have
found a better thing" - priding yourself that nobody ever shouted so loud. . .
. By day leading the fine companies marching through the streets, wearing the
chaplets of fennel and poplar-leaves, hugging their brown snakes and raising
them above their heads, bawling Euoi saboi!  and dancing to the tune of Hues
attes! attes hues! while old women salute you by the titles of Leader, Guide,
Ark-bearer, Sieve-bearer, and the like.  For such services you were paid with
sops and twisted rolls and fresh-baked cakes - who would not count himself a
lucky dog to fare so well?

     Demosthenes' malicious portrait of his rival may or may not be an
accurate description of the doings of the particular band with which
Aeschines' mother trained, but it gives a vivid picture of the kind of thing
his hearers had seen many a time; that was what gave his satire its telling
point.

     The demand for remedies for the ailments of the soul produced also a
multitude of quacks, who peddled infallible purges and panaceas of salvation.
Of peculiarly evil note among those who thus preyed on the credulous
superstition of the masses were the mendicant devotees of the Phrygian goddess
Cybele, the Metragyrtai, whose name describes their vocation - agyrtes is a
man who takes up a collection.  They dealt in necromancy and magic as well as
purifications, and earned for agyrtes its secondary meaning, 'vagabond,
impostor.' Others practised according to the Orphic school and called
themselves "Orpheotelestai."

     The sixth century, in which the orgiastic cults of Dionysos and his
congeners were overrunning Greece and religion was taking the nether-worldly
turn which has been described above, witnessed also the beginning of
philosophy.  In the age of colonial and commercial expansion the Ionian cities
had taken the lead, and they held the primacy not only in wealth and
enterprise but in culture and intellectual life.  There the logographers made
the first essays in writing prose, and attempted to extract from the epics,
the temple legends, and the often fictitious pedigrees of noble families, a
history of the cities - particularly of their foundation - set in a
chronological scheme, becoming thus precursors of the historians; there
Hecataeus of Miletus, as the fruit of his travels and inquiries, composed in
the form of a guide-book, The Tour of the World, the first descriptive
geography; there, also, Greek philosophy was born.

     The Ionian thinkers went straight at the problem of the origin and
constitution of the universe.  This problem had been prepared for them by
theology.  The Theogony of Hesiod, as we have seen, was at the same time a
cosmogony.  Cosmogonic powers such as Chaos, Gaia (Earth), Eros (Love),
however invested with mythical personality, are not gods of the popular
religion to whom the role of world-makers has been assigned, but, in this
capacity, creatures of nascent speculation.  The first philosophers also often
express themselves in mythical language and think in mythical forms - how
could they do otherwise?  But while the theological cosmogony is only a
prelude to the divine genealogies and mythical doings of the gods in heaven
and on earth, the end of the philosophers, more or less clearly conceived, was
to explain the existence of the world and the phenomena of nature by natural
causes.

     They seek, therefore, a primordial matter, or world-stuff, not inert and
passive, but endowed with an immanent energy which, working in accordance with
physical laws, produces all the changes of the phenomenal world.  With the
exception of Heraclitus, to whom we shall return, the early Ionians seem to
have gone their serene way, regardless of the bearing of their speculations on
religion, nor does it appear that they were assailed for their opinions.  It
is clear, however, that if they gave the name of gods to anything in their
materialistic universe, they had really no use for them.

     A sharp attack upon religion in the name of reason and morals was made by
Xenophanes, a native of Colophon, who, driven from home at the age of
twenty-five, spent a considerable part of his life in Sicily. Xenophanes found
many things wrong in his world - the luxury which his countrymen at home had
learned from the Lydians, as well as the Sicilian passion for athletic
competitions and the honours and privileges heaped on Olympian winners.  His
self-esteem, like that of many another professor, is wounded when he sees a
man who has won a horse-race more thought of than himself for all his
learning.  It is all wrong to prefer brawn to brains!  He satirises
anthropomorphic notions of the gods: Mortals think that the gods are born and
have human speech and form.  The Ethiopians imagine their gods flat-nosed and
black; the Thracians, blue-eyed and red-haired; and if cattle and horses or
lions had hands and could draw, horses would draw the gods as horses and
cattle as cattle - each kind would make its gods in its own likeness.  Worse
than this, the poets represent the gods with all the moral weaknesses of men.
"Homer and Hesiod ascribe to the gods everything that among men is a shame and
a disgrace - theft, adultery, and deceit." And everybody learns about the gods
from Homer!  Over against the vulgar polytheism Xenophanes sets his own idea
of god: "There is one god, greatest among gods and men, not like mortals
either in form or in thought." ^1 This god "without effort swings the universe
by the purpose of his mind." "He ever abides in the same place, nor moves at
all; it does not beseem him to wander hither and thither." The One of
Xenophanes is not, however, a supramundane god, but the universe itself,
endued with sense and thought and purpose.

[Footnote 1: Xenophanes rejects mental anthropomorphism as well as physical.]

     Heraclitus expressly denies that the universe had a beginning or a
creator: "This cosmic order, the same for all beings, no god or man made, but
it always was and is and will be, ever-living fire, blazing up and dying down
in measure." The uniformity of natural law is poetically asserted in another
passage: "The sun will not overstep his bounds (literally, measures); for if
he does, the Erinyes, the avenging handmaids of justice, will find him out."
The pure elemental fire, the first principle, is intelligence.  In his
oracular style, Heraclitus says of it: "One, the alone wise, is unwilling and
yet is willing to be called by the name of Zeus." That is, if you think of god
as the vulgar do, it is no god; but if you understand what god is, it is the
supreme god.

     Man is a microcosm, like the macrocosm compact of earth and water and
fire, and the same process of change is continually going on in him.  The
soul, the conscious and intelligent in man, is of the same nature with the one
wisdom of the universe, of which it is indeed a spark; it is, however, not the
pure elemental fire, but a dry heat; when this leaves the body, the rest, mere
earth and water, is worth only to be cast on the dung heap. It is death to the
soul to turn to water; the pleasures that irrigate the soul, like drunkenness
which drowns intelligence and consciousness, are evil - "Dry sunlight; wisest
and best soul!" ^1

[Footnote 1: The original of the Baconian "dry light" of reason.  A plausible
emendation, adopted by many moderns is, "The dry soul is the wisest and
best."]

     The most highly reputed authorities fare badly at Heraclitus' hands:
Homer and Archilochus ought to be turned out of the lists and flogged. Hesiod
is most men's teacher, and is credited with knowledge of many things - a man
who did not know day nor night!  "Varied learning does not teach a man to have
sense, or it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, or again Xenophanes and
Hecataeus."

     Of the popular religion Heraclitus speaks with a keener scorn than
Xenophanes: "Men pray to the idols - just as if one were to converse with
houses, knowing not what is the nature of gods and heroes!" If a man who had
stepped into the mud should wash himself off with mud, every one would take
him for mad; to purify a man of blood guilt by blood expiations is no less
absurd.  The Bacchic mysteries had reached Ionia, and they stirred the honest
man's bile; he rails at the "night roamers, magians, bacchants, wild women,
mystae." The initiations are accomplished with unholy rites: "Were it not
Dionysos in whose honour they march in procession and sing their obscene song
(the phallic hymn), it would be a most scandalous performance.  The Dionysos
to whom they rave and revel is no other than Hades!"

     Parmenides, the founder of the Eleatic school, raised the physical
problem of the Ionians into a metaphysical problem, the nature of reality. ^1
Starting with the antithesis of being and non-being, he argues that being is,
and that its existence is necessary; but non-being is unthinkable and
therefore non-existent, for what is must be thinkable. Being is eternal: it
cannot have its origin in any other being, for there is no other besides the
one; nor can it have arisen out of non-being, for it has been proved that
there is no such thing.  It does not fall under the category of time; we
cannot say of it, "It was," nor "It will be," but only, "It is." Reality is
unchangeable, for in all change something that was not becomes something that
is, involving the transition from non-being to being, which has been
demonstrated to be absurd.  In short, all manifoldness, qualitative
difference, becoming, change, passing away, are excluded from the idea of
reality.  This conception of being became classic.  Through Plato and
Aristotle it passed into theology; the scholastic definitions of God in
Christianity and Mohammedanism repeat this idea of metaphysical perfection,
which caused trouble enough when the attempt had to be made to reconcile it
with the conception of a living God such as religion requires.

[Footnote 1: Whether Parmenides himself conceived it metaphysically is another
question.]

     Instead of trying to derive everything from one principle as the Ionians
had done, Empedocles took the four elements as he found them - fire, air,
water, earth.  These elements are eternal and irreducible; they are combined
in different groupings and proportions by "friendship," and the combinations
are broken up again into their constituents by "strife" - attraction and
repulsion, we should say, or affinity and incompatibility. Thus the endless
variety of things, arising, changing, dissolving, was accounted for by the
four material elements and the two polar forces.  In Empedocles' description
of the origin of living nature there are curious speculations about evolution
and the survival of the fittest.  He also elaborated a theory of
sense-perception.

     The gods of the popular religion, "living long ages through and excelling
in honours," spring, like trees, and men and women, beasts, birds, and
water-nourished fishes, "all things that are or will be," from the same
elements.  The Sphere, that is, the universe itself, is god in a higher sense,
and Empedocles uses of it language reminiscent of Xenophanes on the One.

     Empedocles was a many-sided character - philosopher, democratic
politician, and man of science, a preacher of the Orphic-Pythagorean gospel,
and an expert in the purification of souls.  His extravagant professions are
doubtless to blame that he comes down to us as a miracle-monger with a
distinct touch of the charlatan.  In his religious writings, which bear the
significant title Purgations, the transmigration of souls is a ruling idea. He
says of his own metamorphoses: "I was once a youth, a maiden, a plant, a bird,
and a mute sea-fish." The slaughter of animals for food or in sacrifice is a
deadly sin, for a father may be slaying his own son, a son his father,
children their mother.  Those who have stained their hands with blood or sworn
false oaths are doomed for thrice ten thousand seasons to roam far from the
blessed, being born in course of time in every kind of mortal form, exchanging
one grievous path of life for another.  "For the mighty air chases them to the
sea, and the sea spits them out on the land, the earth to the rays of the
shining sun, and this tosses them into the whirlwinds of the air; one element
receives them from the other, and all hate them. To these I now belong, an
exile from God and a wanderer, because I yielded to the impulse of mad
strife."

     Anaxagoras of Clazomenae was the last of the Ionian succession. Instead
of the four "roots" of Empedocles he assumed that all substances were
elementary.  These "seeds," or germs, were infinite in number and
infinitesimal in magnitude, and were mingled in a primordial matter which had
none of the distinguishing qualities of individual things - no colour, for
example, because all colours were mixed in it.  What gives importance to
Anaxagoras in the history of philosophy is not, however, his theory of the
constitution of matter, but the fact that, abandoning the monistic hypotheses
of his predecessors, he introduces a second principle, Nous (Mind).  Starting
at one centre, the Nous sets up an ever-extending rotary motion in matter, in
consequence of which particles of like nature assemble, separating themselves
from the unlike, forming first the ether and the worlds.  As the process
proceeds the various substances arise, consisting chiefly of the same element
and named from this predominance, but containing, nevertheless, larger or
smaller portions of all other elements, so that "there is something of
everything in everything." The question whether the Nous of Anaxagoras was
material or immaterial has been the subject of some unprofitable argument: it
was certainly not material in his sense, ^1 and there is no reason to suppose
that it was immaterial in the Platonic sense; it would probably be nearer the
truth to compare his conception with the Stoic Pneuma.

[Footnote 1: This is the meaning his definition: "The other things contain a
portion of everything, but Nous is infinite and self-determined, and is
mingled with nothing, but is alone independent."]

     In the Phaedo of Plato, Socrates expresses his disappointment that
Anaxagoras, having introduced mind into the universe, gave it so little to do.
The idea that mind ordered the world and was the cause of all things seemed to
Socrates a true and fruitful one, but when he got hold of the book he
discovered that the author made no use of mind at all, but explained things by
physical causes, "airs and ethers and fluids, and many other absurdities."
Aristotle's criticism is in the same vein: "Anaxagoras employs mind as a deus
ex machina to get the world made, and lugs it in when he is at a loss to
explain why anything must be as it is, but, for the rest, makes everything
rather than mind a cause of what comes to pass." But however incompletely
Anaxagoras may have apprehended the scope and consequence of his own idea, the
fact remains that he begins an era of dualistic systems in Greek philosophy.

     Up to this time philosophy had flourished in the Ionian cities, in
southern Italy, and in Sicily; the mother country had taken no part in the
movement.  Athens was, however, beginning to draw to itself men of note from
all parts of the Hellenic world.  Among these was Anaxagoras, who made that
city his home for some thirty years (ca. 462-432).  There he moved in the
brilliant Periclean circle, and enjoyed the intimacy of Pericles himself.  In
the little city he was doubtless a familiar figure; the wits on the street
nicknamed him "Nous." As the Peloponnesian war was casting its shadows before,
the temper of the masses became ugly; they could not reach Pericles himself,
but more than one of his friends had to suffer for his favour.  Pheidias was
one of these, Anaxagoras another.  A certain Diopeithes got a vote passed in
432 B. C. that persons should be prosecuted who did not observe the ordinances
of religion or promulgated theories about the heavens.  Thereupon Anaxagoras
was brought up for his offence against the state religion in teaching that the
sun was a red-hot mass of rock. ^1 Conflicting stories are told about what
followed; the only thing certain is that the philosopher left Athens and
returned to Asia Minor, where not long after he died at Lampsacus.  It was the
first exhibition of the religious intolerance of the Athenians which not only
Socrates, but Protagoras, Aristotle, Stilpon, and Theophrastus were to
experience.

[Footnote 1: And therefore no god.  Anaxagoras taught that the sun was a
red-hot mass of rock, larger than the Peloponnesus, and that the moon was a
cold earth, with hills and valleys, and that it was inhabited.]

     The antipodes of Anaxagoras' dualism of matter and mind was the atomic
theory of Democritus, the last word of materialistic monism. ^1 Democritus was
the most learned and many-sided of the philosophers before Aristotle, a man
who had travelled widely, a thinker of notable acumen, a fertile author, and a
writer whose style was thought by ancient critics worthy to be compared to
Plato.  The properties of Being had been convincingly demonstrated by the
Eleatics: what truly is must be simple, eternal, and unchangeable.  Their
mistake was in denying the existence of empty space; ^2 the void is as real as
body.  There is an infinite number of atoms, too minute to be perceived by any
sense, qualitatively exactly the same, but differing in shape, position, and
arrangement.  To these atoms belong the predicates which the Eleatics gave to
the universe.  The atoms move eternally in the infinite void, but with
different rates corresponding to their size and weight.  In consequence of
collision and composition of motions, rotary movements arise, and worlds are
formed. Under purely physical laws, atoms of similar form and weight group and
arrange themselves in innumerable ways, constituting thus the elements and
bodily objects.  Under the same laws these combinations are broken up, things
change and decay, worlds are dissolved; only the atoms are unchangeable.

[Footnote 1: The founder of this system was Leucippus; but his doctrine is
sufficiently known only as developed by Democritus.]

[Footnote 2: For the Eleatics empty space was "non-being."]