Some time around the year 466 BCE – in the second year of the 78th Olympiad, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder tells us – a massive meteor blazed across the sky in broad daylight, crashing to the earth with an enormous explosion near the small Greek town of Aegospotami, or ‘Goat Rivers’, on the European side of the Hellespont in northeastern Greece. Pliny’s younger contemporary, the Greek biographer Plutarch, wrote that the locals still worshipped the scorched brownish metallic boulder, the size of a wagon-load, that was left after the explosion; it remained on display in Pliny and Plutarch’s time, five centuries later.
Both writers connect the meteorite with the Greek scientist Anaxagoras, who had a widely-known theory that heavenly bodies are made of the same sort of matter found on earth. The amazed Greeks took the stone as spectacular confirmation of this crazy idea, and Anaxagoras’s name would be linked to it forever afterward.
To get a better idea of this meteorite’s figurative impact, consider a parallel from closer to our own time. Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity in 1915, a decade after the narrower special theory of relativity had established a secure scientific reputation for him, along with other important papers he published in 1905, his annus mirabilis. Few physicists could follow the ins and outs of general relativity, and its immediate influence was slight. But one of those few was Arthur Eddington, whose widely publicised 1919 observations of a solar eclipse appeared to confirm Einstein’s revolutionary prediction that gravity bends light. ‘LIGHTS ALL ASKEW IN THE HEAVENS’ ran the delightful headline in The New York Times. ‘Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations. EINSTEIN THEORY TRIUMPHS.’ Overnight, Einstein’s name became synonymous with genius; two years later he won a Nobel Prize.
If we took that level of agog and multiplied it hundredfold, we might begin to approach the shockwave of the Aegospotami meteorite – and its effect on Anaxagoras’s reputation. For one thing, revolutionary as it was, Einstein’s improvement on Newton was subtle, not only in being hard to grasp but also in the sense that the effects Einstein predicted will never be perceptible to normal people under normal circumstances. Anaxagoras’s ‘general theory’ of the heavens completely shattered normal circumstances. The sky would never be the same.
For a modern person, grasping Anaxagoras’s audacity takes some doing, but it will help to recall that the chief organ of sight is not the eye but the brain. In other words, it’s our brains, not our eyes, that tell us what we’re looking at. When people in the ancient world looked up at the night sky, like us they saw lights. But that’s where the shared experience stops. Our brains tell us most of those lights are distant suns, and a handful of others are floating spheres in orbit around our sun, like the earth. Their brains told them all those lights were gods or mythical creatures. The idea that they might be objects floating in space didn’t exist yet. We look at the sun and see a giant ball of hydrogen converting itself into helium through a process of nuclear fusion; an ancient Greek saw the god Helios, driving a blazing chariot. We look at the moon and see a cold, airless, dusty ball of rock partly lit by the sun; an ancient Greek saw the goddess Selene, aglow with her own soft luminosity. The cosmos was alive, brimming with gods and goddesses, and their movements were omens. A basically well-ordered place – the Greek word cosmos originally meant “order” – its stability was nonetheless always under threat by the unruly. It quivered with agency and import, and it was all connected in an organic whole, from great to small alike.
The first to split this seamless cosmos was Thales, who lived perhaps just over a century before Anaxagoras, in the region of coastal Anatolia (modern Turkey) known to the Greeks as Ionia. Ionia’s principal city was the fabulous trading port of Miletus, where Thales was from, so he is known to history as Thales of Miletus. If the Greek world were a quiet pond and we threw a stone representing ‘the tradition of free rational inquiry’ into it, Miletus would be the site of the splash. From there, the waves spread outward within a few generations. Thales had students, his students had students, those students had their own students, and so on. Thales and his successors recognised that there’s a real world out there, that it’s governed by orderly operations of its own, and that we don’t need gods or spirits to explain how those operations work. They cracked the world in two parts, natural and supernatural, and in doing so they pushed the supernatural off to one side. Together, they are the first scientists. And, yes, they made waves.
The achievements of these early scientists have long been dismissed by scholars, largely because, with the benefit of hindsight, they seem so basic. And it’s true that compared with the rapid progress Greek science made starting a bit later, in Plato and Aristotle’s time, those contributions might well appear trifling. Not to mention compared with today. Yet science had to start somewhere. A more accurate assessment might judge them not against what came after, but against what came before. From this perspective, these earliest insights were astonishing and unparalleled, as Daniel Graham, a classicist and historian of science at Brigham Young University, has now demonstrated in his authoritative 2013 book Science Before Socrates.
Graham paints a new picture of early science that gives central roles to Anaxagoras and his perhaps slightly older contemporary, Parmenides. Both could trace their intellectual ancestry back to Thales through teacher-student relationships. While invoking natural causes for things, Thales had stuck to the conventional view that the earth is a flat plate supported by something. As far as we know, the intuitive idea of a flat earth was common to all cultures the world over, though the supporting arrangement runs the gamut from turtles for the Maya to pillars for the Hebrews to elephants for the Indians. Thales’s student Anaximander was the first to propose the earth as an object floating in space. According to him, it was shaped something like a bongo drum, with a flat surface at either end. The sky was generally seen as a dome or vault above the flat earth, across which the sun, moon, planets and stars moved or were pulled in regular patterns. One of Anaximander’s students, Xenophanes, envisaged a sort of grid universe in which the earth is an infinite plane with numerous suns and moons crossing it in straight lines. Another thinker, Heraclitus (of not-being-able-to-step-in-the-same-river-twice fame), claimed the moon is a bowl of fire. He, too, thought we get a new sun every day – the size of a human foot. It’s understandable that modern scholars might dismiss such notions as wildly speculative and ungrounded in empirical observation.
Not so fast, says Daniel Graham. Even Heraclitus had worked out his fiery bowl theory of the moon so that it agreed with the observable lunar phases. What makes his theory feel out of touch to us is not so much the bowl part (after all, why not?) as the part where the moon is giving off its own light. That was the universal belief at the time, however, and not senseless at all, but common sense.
This is where Parmenides comes in, a student of Xenophanes from the Greek colony of Elea in southern Italy. Long understood only as a feverish theoriser caught up with abstruse questions of being and nothingness (which, admittedly, he was), Parmenides is also revealed by Graham’s careful research to have been a hard-headed empirical astronomer. For it was he who figured out that the moon gets its light from the sun, an insight now so pervasive as to be entirely taken for granted by little children. Yet there it is for the first time in the few surviving scraps of Parmenides’s poem On Nature, in which he strikingly describes the moon as ‘a lamp by night, wandering around the earth with borrowed light’ and ‘ever gazing toward the rays of the sun’. That second part suggests how Parmenides worked: by methodically observing lunar phases, and noticing what Heraclitus had not – that the bright part of the moon always faces the sun. Before Parmenides, other theorists, like Heraclitus, all portray the moon as generating its own light; after him, they all understand that moonlight is actually reflected sunlight. Heliophotism, this idea has been dubbed recently, in the way scientists still like to use Greek. Or, in English, ‘sunlightism’. It is arguably the first genuine scientific discovery, and quite possibly the most productive. Much else would be illuminated by it.
Right away, Parmenides’s explanation shone a bright light on the sphere, sphaira in Greek. Heliophotism entails that the moon is a sphere – it doesn’t make sense any other way. And if the moon is a sphere, why not the earth? Parmenides’s other great contribution follows naturally: he was the first thinker to suggest the sphericity of the earth, building on the earlier conception of the earth as an object floating in space. Soon to follow: orbits, and, eventually, rotation.
All well and good, but straightway heliophotism also put a spotlight on the mother of all omens: eclipses.
Cut to Athens in the year 478 BCE, on the morning of February 17th. The Aegospotami meteorite’s landfall is twelve years in the future. It’s an extraordinary time for the Athenians, cresting a wave after the decisive defeat of invading Persian forces over the previous couple of years. The city has been reduced to rubble – but no matter. The Athenians had deliberately abandoned it to fight at sea, under the leadership of the brilliant Themistocles. The strategy paid off at nearby Salamis, where Greek ships under Athenian command routed the numerically superior Persian navy under the stunned gaze of Xerxes himself, the Persian king. Now the Persians are on the run, chased back across the Aegean Sea. Not far from Aegospotami, Sestus, the main Persian base on the Hellespont, is about to fall to Athenian-led forces after a long siege that began the previous summer.
A few minutes before noon, however, Athens literally turns gloomy. The sky darkens, and the sun dims to a dusky disc encircled by a ring of fire. Disaster looming, despite the recent run of luck? Nemesis rearing its ugly head over the hubristic Athenians? Perhaps not. Or at least not yet. Eclipses had always – always – been taken as portents of catastrophe, but Daniel Graham argues that this one is different. This solar eclipse, he suggests, is the first one in history to be understood at the time it was happening – for one Ionian theorist, at least, the first disenchanted eclipse, with no evil spirit, no malicious demon eating the sun god, just the shadow of a sphere moving across the earth. Before Anaxagoras, philosophers floated lots of different ideas about eclipses, ideas that may seem ridiculous now, but notice that none of them involve the gods. A ring around the sun closes and opens. Clouds block the sunlight. The sun runs out of fuel temporarily. Heraclitus, we are not terribly surprised to hear, said the sun is a fiery bowl and its light is blocked now and then by the rim. Like Anaxagoras, Thales, too, was credited by some later writers with figuring out eclipses, but, again, Graham emphasises the timing. After Anaxagoras, everyone seems to understand that in a solar eclipse the moon casts a shadow on the earth, and that in a lunar eclipse the earth casts a shadow on the moon.
Eclipses, then, another point of contact with Einstein and relativity, were Anaxagoras’s ‘special theory’, establishing a secure but modest reputation for him with other thinkers. He could easily have learned from sailors’ eyewitness reports what modern computer models show: the path of this solar eclipse had passed directly over the Peloponnesus, the large roughly circular landmass that makes up the southern Greek mainland, and of which Sparta was the chief city. The eclipse’s umbra was about the same size, putting nearly the entire Peloponnesus neatly in the shade. Later reports said Anaxagoras claimed the moon was about the size of the Peloponnesus, and the sun somewhat larger, which is of course partly true, technically.
That sort of investigation was in keeping with the Ionian tradition in which Anaxagoras had been trained. It was called historia, which, owing to its popularisation a scant generation later by Herodotus, has come down to us as ‘history’. But its basic meaning is inquiry, and it still applied to the natural world. Only later, after Herodotus, would it take on the meaning of inquiry into the human past. At this time, Herodotus was a boy, growing up just south of Ionia. He knew it well and may have lived there for a time. When he came to write his groundbreaking history of the wars with Persia, he too would interview witnesses, asking questions and most likely buying drinks.
Science and history both got their start in this Ionian tradition, but Ionia had been a war zone for decades by 460 BCE, around the time Anaxagoras probably came to Athens, where he is said to have stayed thirty years, as the Athenians told stories about him as an old man. Many have the feel of tales told to burnish an image of eccentric and cosmopolitan genius. When asked if he was interested in his home country, Anaxagoras gestured to the sky and replied that, yes, he was very interested in his home country. Plutarch says Anaxagoras let his house fall to ruin ‘while he pursued his lofty thoughts and his passion for speculation’, which couldn’t have pleased his poor neighbours much. One of his lofty thoughts was that the universe is governed by a principle he called ‘Mind’, so the salty Athenians’ nickname for him, naturally, was ‘Mind’. Not so lofty, perhaps, was his insistence, against Parmenides, that the earth was flat – in another parallel with Einstein, also a refugee scientist who balked at some of the implications of his own discoveries.
His ‘prediction’ of the Aegospotami meteorite had secured Anaxagoras’s reputation as a full-on genius. He must have spent the years between the eclipse and the meteorite pondering the implications of heliophotism, and of his own theory of eclipses, which rested on it. Among his conclusions, as Graham sees it, are that the moon is a solid body, like the earth. It blocks sunlight completely, rather than letting some of it shine through, the way clouds do. And if the moon is a solid body, there could be other solid bodies up there too. Again, this seems basic to us, but remember – no one at the time had the foggiest notion what was up there. Or rather, a foggy notion was exactly what they had. A common theory about the moon held that it was cloud-like in its makeup, so Anaxagoras really was going out on a limb (so to speak). In fact, the prevailing view among his predecessors was that celestial and atmospheric phenomena were all of a piece. Clouds, stars, sun, moon – pretty much the same light, airy stuff.
This is why the Aegospotami meteorite hit so hard, and why it was taken as Anaxagoras’s prediction. He didn’t predict the time or place, but he did predict the possibility. That prognostication went not only against common sense, but against the best science as well. There are rocks in the sky! Lights all askew in the heavens! Chicken Little, look to your laurels. If there had been a New York Times, it would have read ANAXAGORAS THEORY TRIUMPHS. A voice in the wilderness was suddenly and dramatically vindicated. Men of science were completely agog.
And possibly women too. One of Anaxagoras’s fellow Ionians in Athens was Aspasia, a brilliant and highly cultivated refugee from Miletus. Prominent in Athenian society, she’s also one of the few women we know anything about in ancient Greece, which was highly patriarchal. But Plutarch says she taught rhetoric in her home, and that Socrates was among her students. Pericles, the Athenian democratic leader who lent his name to the age, famously divorced his wife to pursue a relationship with Aspasia. As Pericles himself was also very close to Anaxagoras, it would have been easy for the highly curious Aspasia to keep herself up on the latest scientific developments. In fact, some sources paired her with Anaxagoras as well, though that might just be historians’ gossip. Later writers portray her as a courtesan, but that too may reflect male discomfort.
As for Pericles, Plutarch says that Anaxagoras, about five years the politician’s senior, was the ‘one man more closely associated with Pericles than any other’. Expounding on the favourable influence of Anaxagoras and science generally, he writes that Pericles ‘learned from his teaching to rise above the superstitious terror which springs from an ignorant wonder at the common phenomena of the heavens. It affects those who know nothing of the causes of such things, who fear the gods to the point of madness and are easily confused through their lack of experience. A knowledge of natural causes, on the other hand, banishes those fears and replaces morbid superstition with a piety which rests on a secure foundation supported by rational hopes.’
Or not, as the case may be. Plutarch’s rationalistic idea of piety resembled that of those eminent Victorians who embraced science and the established church with equal nonchalance. But if Plutarch had lived in Victorian times, he would certainly have known Newton’s third law of motion: ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”’
The backlash came sooner rather than later, though it certainly came late too. Scientific explanation wasn’t the only Greek novelty. Plutarch himself tells the story, which the Irish classicist ER Dodds revisited in his iconoclastic 1951 book The Greeks and the Irrational. At the height of classical Athens, an era future generations would hold up as a shining triumph of reason and enlightenment, ‘most of the leaders of progressive thought’ were prosecuted for offences against religion, Dodds wrote. Evoking Newton, perhaps, he described this campaign in a chapter titled ‘Rationalism and Reaction in the Classical Age’.
And it started with the trial and banishment of Anaxagoras. The charges against Anaxagoras, Plutarch says, were brought by a diviner named Diopeithes, one of those whose livelihoods were based on the interpretation of eclipses and other omens; his decree proposed ‘that anybody who did not believe in the gods or taught theories about celestial phenomena should be liable to prosecution’. This is history’s first anti-intellectualism, and the first science-bashing by the pious, though hardly the last of either. It’s also the first recorded attempt at state-sponsored thought control, a good eight centuries before the Christian church staked out that territory with the backing of Roman imperial power, and indeed (as far as I can tell) the first explicit mention of religious belief at all, as opposed to practice. Plutarch’s account suggests Anaxagoras delayed publishing his only book, perhaps for several decades, out of concern for precisely such a backlash – in much the way Charles Darwin would during the Victorian era, another age of scientific progress and religious reaction (respectable nonchalance notwithstanding). ‘Pericles,’ Plutarch says, ‘was so alarmed for Anaxagoras’s safety that he smuggled him out of the city.’ Banished from Athens, the old philosopher settled in Lampsacus, across the Hellespont from Aegospotami, where he lived out his days a stone’s throw from the meteorite that had brought him fame. The people there, we’re told, held him in great esteem; after his death he was given a solemn funeral and a fine memorial.
In Athens they’d had enough astronomy for the moment. ‘Public opinion was instinctively hostile to natural philosophers …’ Plutarch writes in explaining the spree that began with Anaxagoras’s trial, ‘since it was generally believed they belittled the power of the gods…’ It was this instinctive suspicion of ‘natural causes’ – ho physikos logos in Plutarch’s Greek – that the opportunistic, disgruntled diviner Diopeithes took advantage of to attack Anaxagoras, Athens’s poster-boy for scientific genius.
But why would the Athenians in particular turn against science in this way? Starting in 431 BCE, the city became embroiled in a war against Sparta that Pericles, an Athenian expansionist, had pushed for. Pericles died in the war’s second year, a victim of the great plague that killed perhaps one in three Athenians as they were penned into the city by Spartan forces. Known as the Peloponnesian War, this long, destructive conflict lasted nearly thirty years. As Dodds suggested, and as the Romanian classicist Alexander Rubel demonstrates in his book Fear and Loathing in Ancient Athens (first published in German in 2000 but translated into English only in 2014), the war exacerbated the suspicions many Athenians already harboured against philosophers and scientists, giving traction to religious fears, misgivings, and resentments that might have lain dormant in less anxious times. Rubel and Richard Janko, a British classicist currently at the University of Michigan, have proposed the year 430 BCE, not too long after the outbreak of war and plague – and right after another eclipse that was followed by a disastrous military expedition under Pericles’ command – for Anaxagoras’s exile. (Anaxagoras’s dates are notoriously difficult, and the sources are contradictory. Richard Janko, who accepts Graham’s main points about the scientific picture, offers a different timeline for Anaxagoras’s movements, which I have followed in this essay.) Prosecutions for impiety continued. One Diagoras of Melos, popularly known as ‘the Atheist’, was convicted of impiety and exiled around the middle of the war. So was another associate of Pericles, the sophist Protagoras, a suspected espouser of moral relativity and secular inquiry, which – then as now – carried a whiff of subversion to the nostrils of true believers. The progressive playwright Euripides, whose razor-sharp dramas incorporated the latest ideas in philosophy and science (making him the Tom Stoppard of classical Athens), is said to have been acquitted of similar charges.
Influential Oxford scholars like Hugh Lloyd-Jones and Kenneth Dover – Dodds’s own student – rejected Dodds’s interpretation, questioning the historicity of these incidents, including Plutarch’s account of the Diopeithes decree, which is the only place it’s mentioned. Yet Dodds has enjoyed a bit of a comeback lately. A conference at Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 2014 produced Rediscovering E. R. Dodds: Scholarship, Education, Poetry, and the Paranormal (2019), a somewhat backhanded appreciation that leaves an impression of Dodds as a formidable scholar and subtle thinker who unfortunately happened to be wrong about everything. More recently, Daisy Dunn’s Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars (2022) offers an engaging and perceptive account of Dodds’s socially fraught career at Oxford, from his arrival in 1912 as an Irish boy with ‘dilapidated shoes’ to his controversial appointment as Regius Professor of Greek and eventual recognition as ‘one of the most vibrant intellectuals of the twentieth century’. And other classicists have defended Dodds more forcefully than the Corpus group, including Alexander Rubel and Richard Janko: the latter, writing in The Journal of Hellenic Studies in 2020, grounds ‘the Athenians’ war on science’ in the sources and sees ‘a failure of imagination’ in Dodds’s critics. As both Rubel and Janko observe, it’s true Plutarch can be unreliable, but it’s also true he had sources we do not. It feels tendentious to disqualify him, along with many other sources, so seemingly arbitrarily. Dodds might yet have the last word.
Because, finally, there was Socrates. In 399 BCE, at age seventy, the Athenian philosopher was tried, convicted, and executed for ‘impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens’ with his teaching. It was just five years after the Spartan victory, during the war’s violent and oppressive aftermath (and six years after its last major battle, the crushing defeat of the Athenian navy at none other than Aegospotami). The story of Socrates’s trial and death is familiar enough in its outlines. Hidden deep beneath this popular understanding, however, lies the curious possibility that in condemning Socrates, the Athenians were, in effect, really avenging themselves on Anaxagoras, decades after his escape to Lampsacus.
Socrates himself thought so, at least as Plato portrays him in the Apology. Accused – falsely, he maintains – of not believing in the gods, he says to the contrary that ‘just like the rest of humanity’ he believes the sun and moon are indeed gods. If his students ever heard otherwise, it was only because he was relating the theories of Anaxagoras, whose book was readily available (if overpriced) in the market. And everyone knows that they were Anaxagoras’s theories. It would have been ridiculous to attempt to pass them off as his own opinions, he argues, so don’t tar him with that brush. ‘Do you think you are accusing Anaxagoras?’
Elsewhere, Plato has Socrates say that he did study Anaxagoras’s theories and those of the other scientists as a young man. At first, Socrates tells us in the Phaedo, he ‘was tremendously eager for the kind of wisdom which they call investigation [historia] of nature.’ He was especially interested in knowing the true causes of things, but found esoteric discussions of being and nothingness and change quite confusing. ‘Then one day I heard a man reading from a book, as he said, by Anaxagoras, that it is Mind that arranges and causes all things.’ This felt right to him, as it answered his deep desire for a power that ‘arranges everything and establishes each thing as it is best for it to be’. So he read every scroll of Anaxagoras’s book, determined to learn ‘about the sun and the moon and the other stars, their relative speed, their revolutions, and their other changes, and why the passive or active condition of each of them is for the best’.
That ‘glorious hope’ was quickly dashed, however. In Anaxagoras’s account, it seemed to Socrates, Mind had no agency other than initially setting things in motion, and no morality. Things weren’t arranged for the best, they were merely arranged. In what strikes me as the first articulation of the concept we know as supernatural power, Socrates says he’s looking for a supreme being with ‘divine force’ (daimonia ischys in Plato’s Greek), but Anaxagoras’s Mind was a dud. For this reason, Socrates tells us plainly, he completely lost interest in the heavens, in science, and in physical reality (ta onta, ‘the things that are’).
Plato’s Socrates, then, was clearly disenchanted with disenchantment, though it goes against his modern image as an enlightened secular thinker. Instead, as I have worked on a book about the historical and psychological origins of religious faith, I’ve reluctantly come to see Socrates as a herald of woo. The very same distaste for natural causes expressed by Socrates and observed by Plutarch ultimately gave rise to a tsunami of triumphalist supernaturalism, which ER Dodds chronicled in fascinating detail in a later book, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (1965). We might call the seismic impulse behind it science shock. After all, you can’t have a concept of ‘supernatural’ unless you already have a concept of ‘natural’ – but once you do, it follows right away. The stronger the bonds of nature are perceived to be, the stronger must be the ‘divine force’ that bends or breaks them; the more concrete the boundary, the bigger the thrill of transgression. As science grew more established in Hellenistic and then Graeco-Roman culture, slowly neutering the old gods of nature, this psychological effect set the stage for the new prominence of miracles in the crisis-ridden centuries of the early Christian era. In the same way, it also ratcheted up the power of the new Christian god, who stood above nature, and whose totalising authority made not just Zeus but even YHWH look rather anaemic by comparison.
St Paul offered a panacea for the trauma of disenchantment, a lifeboat that bobbed easily on the rising tide of supernaturalism. Writing in the time of Pliny and Plutarch, Paul extolled pistis, ‘faith’, defining it in a way Socrates surely would have recognised: ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’. He even used the quintessentially Socratic word elenchus, here translated as ‘conviction’, which is not the only verbal echo of Plato in this short formulation. His truly ingenious move was to exalt not just one supernatural figure, like other mystery cults, but the very concept of supernatural power itself – and to promise believers a share in that power for themselves. If Jesus was McDonald, a fellow with a great burger shack, Paul was Ray Kroc, establishing the franchise in the name of the founder and issuing standardising directives to Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians, Thessalonians. He erected a warm and personal supernatural system to stand against the cold, impersonal natural system of science. His constituency was not just any old gentiles, but precisely those gentiles first crushed under the heavy hand of natural laws: the Greeks. And so (as I’ve argued in more detail elsewhere) the first global franchise was set up on an anti-science basis. We associate the ‘war on science’ with modern faith, or with historical figures such as Galileo or Giordano Bruno. But faith itself grew out of the war on science.
Science shock and triumphalist supernaturalism are as old as science itself – but no older – and they’re still with us today, concealed beneath layers of love and fellowship and suicide vests and assassinated abortion doctors. Gorgeous or gross, such items are little more than tribal window dressing. Faith can do without them and they without it. But faith can’t do without affirming the triumph of the supernatural. This common denominator is what Diopeithes (and even Socrates) share with the preachers flogging Covid-19 snake oil in the form of ‘supernatural healings’ a few years ago to their megachurch flocks, who were enjoined to touch their TV screens and be healed through the mighty power of Jesus. Humans, it seems, have an instinctive affinity for supernatural thinking that science offends. Wherever science has been, there also has been science shock, which has expressed itself not only in religious faith, but also in a long list of pseudosciences and occult fads from astrology to theosophy to today’s New Age Goopies and anti-vaxxers. It can lie dormant in good times, when it might evoke little more than a plaintive protest resembling that of the immortal Peggy Lee, who (so enchantingly) asked, ‘Is that all there is?’ At other times – well, let’s just say it can flare up with a vengeance when things go south, if that rings a bell for those following recent events in, say, Washington, DC’s Department of Health and Human Services. Or anywhere else on this floating sphere of rock and water, for that matter, currently burning, boiling, plastic-strangle and addled by chaotic electronic impulses into something resembling a sort of global epilepsy. Age of Anxiet anyone? Paging Mr ER Dodds …
If Socrates rejected Anaxagoras and his ideas so strongly, we might well wonder, how did he end up in the dock for him? Somehow, despite the differences between them, Socrates had inherited from Anaxagoras the role of Athens’s resident intellectual. Partly, no doubt, it was because Socrates himself played up to it, with his relentless questions and disputations and definitions and symposiums. Perhaps this was why the comic playwright Aristophanes, in his hilarious send-up of rational inquiry, The Clouds, had chosen to name his mad-scientist villain, who was clearly inspired by Anaxagoras, ‘Socrates’. From his school, the Think Tank, ‘Socrates’ puts ‘the clouds’ in place of the gods, complete with a secular explanation taken straight from Anaxagoras, that clouds are bags of air, and thunder and lightning – Zeus’s special ordnance, no less! – are simply what happen when they bump into each other. Plato’s Socrates mentions this play, written years earlier in the middle of the war, as something that helped turn the public against him. At the end, the Think Tank is burned down, and ‘Socrates’ is beaten and chased off the stage to cries of ‘Revenge! Revenge for the injured gods!’
As Dodds observed, the revenge taken against the real Socrates was misplaced. When a truer revenge came, ironically, it would take the form of something very much like the higher power that Plato’s Socrates vainly sought in the godless scrolls of Anaxagoras. Today, Anaxagoras’s successors detect echoes of the Big Bang in the background heat of his cosmos. In much the same way, we’re also still living with the reverberations of that long-ago impact at Aegospotami.
1/7/2025
Colin Wells writes about history, culture, and religion. His books include Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World and A Brief History of History: Great Historians and the Epic Quest to Explain the Past. After graduating magna cum laude from UCLA with a double major in English and History, Wells read Greats (Greek and Latin language and literature) for three years at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, taking an Upper Second in his exams. His articles have been published in Arion, The Hedgehog Review and elsewhere. Links are available at his website, colinwellsauthor.com. He is currently working on two books, one about the alphabet and another about the origins of religious faith. He follows Bartleby on social media.
