The story of the birth of the gods was not unique to the Greeks. Other cultures had similar stories involving different gods. For instance, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, and the Babylonians all had their own stories and often (like the Greeks), more than one version of the birth of the gods and the creation of the human race. The Hebrews had a story about one God who created the world and the human race, but that is a story for another time.
But what happened in Greece in the sixth century BCE was unique. Some Greek thinkers offered stories about how the world came to be that did not involve or, to be more precise, did not depend upon, the actions of gods. In their stories, the world came to be, not through the birth of gods with superhuman powers, but through a natural process. The world itself was born in a naturalistic way, in a cosmogony, not in a divine birthing, a theogony.
The thinkers who developed these stories were not poets—they told their stories in prose, not in verse, at a time when they wrote some of the earliest prose treatises. The Greeks had had a written language, known to modern scholars as Linear B, in the Bronze Age, from around 1450 BCE, and then lost it in a time of invasions, mass migrations, and cultural upheaval in the twelfth century BCE. In the eighth century BCE Greeks invented a new writing system—so new, in fact, that it was the first true alphabet. Borrowing the writing system of the Phoenicians, which was an “abjad,” using letters for consonants but not for vowels, they found themselves with some extra letters (for sounds they did not have in their language), which they assigned to vowels. Now they could represent every meaningful sound in the language with one letter, requiring only twenty-odd symbols instead of dozens for a system with a symbol for each syllable (like Linear B) or hundreds for a system with a symbol for each word (like Egyptian hieroglyphics). Suddenly, the Greeks had a writing system so simple that even a child could learn it.
The Greek thinkers who told the new creation stories were intellectuals who were trying to figure out how the world came to be independently of religious traditions. We may call them the first philosophers—though the word had not yet been invented, and when it was, it did not at first signify a kind of profession or vocation.
The first philosopher who seems to have embarked on this intellectual journey was Thales, known as one of the Seven Sages of Greece. He famously “predicted” a solar eclipse—though at the time it was impossible to reliably predict one. It is not clear that he wrote down his theories; at least by the time of Aristotle two centuries later, his writings were probably unknown. He lived in Miletus, a prominent city of Ionia, on the west coast of Anatolia, modern Turkey. Miletus was the mother city of a number of colonies stretching from the Black Sea to the mouth of the Nile River in Egypt.
Thales is reported to have said that everything came from water. He said that the earth was like a log or raft floating on a vast ocean; when the surface of the ocean was disturbed, the raft shook: this was the origin of earthquakes.
Thales was said to have been the teacher of Anaximander, also of Miletus, who did write a treatise. According to him, in the beginning there was just an expanse of indeterminate stuff he called the Boundless (to apeiron). Out of it emerged hot and cold, wet and dry. He envisaged a circular earth surrounded by a cylinder of fire, like bark around a tree. The fiery stuff burst and formed into a system of concentric rings of fire, enclosed in opaque air, which became the heavenly bodies. A hole in the ring would allow the light to shine out, while the slowly rotating ring provided the orbit of the heavenly body.
The Earth consists of a disk with a height one-third its diameter. There is a ring of stars innermost, with a diameter of nine earth diameters. Then there is a ring of the moon, with a diameter of eighteen. Then there is a ring of the sun, with a diameter of twenty-seven. The Earth lies in the center of the rings and stays still because it is in equilibrium, and hence has no reason to move out of its place.
According to Anaximander, there is a constant tension between opposites: hot and cold, wet and dry, that we see in the patterns of day and night, summer and winter. When one condition becomes too dominant—when, he says, trespasses on its opposite, it must pay restitution, by a kind of principle of cosmic justice (B1). So a bright day is followed by a dark night, and vice versa; a hot, dry summer is followed by a cold, wet winter, and vice versa.
Anaximander had a student also, Anaximenes of Miletus. Anaximenes said that in the beginning there was air. Air is the source of intelligence, and it is the most adaptable of all things. If you rarify it, it turns into fire; if you condense it, it turns into wind; condense it more, and it turns into mist or cloud; condense it still more, and it turns into (in order), water, earth and stones. And every change is reversible.
According to Anaximenes, some of the original air turned into earth, produce the Earth we live on. The Earth then became a platform where the different stuffs that arise out of air could coexist. Heavenly bodies formed from fire fed by fuel evaporated from the Earth’s surface. The flat Earth floated on a cushion of air. The sun and other heavenly bodies moved in a circle above the Earth, but the sun was hidden by mountains in the north, creating night.
While Anaximander was vague about how the different kinds of matter originate and function, Anaximenes offered a simple but elegant account. Air is the default state of matter. But when conditions rarify or condense it, they turn it into the other kinds of matter we need to build a world, and the cyclical process of heating and cooling, rarefaction and condensation, maintains a constant world through day and night, summer and winter.
With Anaximenes we seem to be arriving at a point where nature is independent and autonomous. But there are hints that in early Greek thought, nature is never conceived of in a mechanistic way (as in the modern period). Anaximander, at least, held that the Boundless “contains all things and steers all things,” and that it is “deathless and imperishable”—that it has a kind of controlling power and divine attributes (A15, B3). Anaximenes also seems to have held that air has divine powers. He did not deny the existence of the Olympian gods, but seems to have said they were composed of divine air.[1]
There are a number of important ideas advanced by the early Greek thinkers. The most important seem to have been that there was a starting-point for the a process of world-making. The starting-point (archē) was some fundamental type of stuff: water or air or the boundless, that could turn into every other kind of stuff, so as to provide the building blocks of the world. Some sort of process (in Anaximenes’ version: rarefaction and condensation) could make one stuff out of another, and the process could be reversed (what is rarefied can be condensed and vice versa) and balanced so as to maintain a cosmic equilibrium. The world did not come to be out of nothing, but it did come to be out of something relatively simple and ubiquitous.
At some point this story came to be thought of as naïve and old-fashioned. But in the mid-twentieth century, a similar theory re-emerged as an option for the origin of the universe. Branded the Big Bang theory by its opponents and accused of being naïve and absurd, it nevertheless won the scientific sweepstakes to become the only game in town.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
[1] Hippolytus 1.7.1 = A7.