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

28 May 585 BCE. The armies of Lydia and Media face each other across the Halys River in Asia Minor. They have been at war for six years. And then — in the middle of the day — the sun goes out. The soldiers drop their weapons. A treaty is signed on the spot.

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. Perhaps Babylonian records. Perhaps his own calculation. The point is that he knew. He did not prophesy through sacrifices or pray to Apollo. He calculated. And he was right.

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. It is the most dangerous thought ever thought.

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 in 432 catastrophe arrived. 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 is plain: in fifth-century Athens, to say that the sun was a stone could cost you your head. Not a metaphorical head. The law against asebeia existed. It was used.

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 Athenian authorities collected every copy of On the Gods they could find and burned them in the agora. This is not later Christian invention. It is attested fact. Protagoras fled the city — and according to 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, eating grass and roots. 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.

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.

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: killed in Croton when a mob burned the building where his school met. 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 — they say while trying to cure his own dropsy by burying himself in cow dung.

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.

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.