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![gods will not be angry with him.” The gods, it seems, could not
pardon the inquisitive mortal who deliberately pried into their
secrets. Amidst the ornaments with which Athens was decorated
during the free working of her democracy, the glories of Marathon of
course occupied a conspicuous place. The battle was painted on one
of the compartments of the portico called Pœkilê, wherein, amidst
several figures of gods and heroes,—Athênê, Hêraklês, Theseus,
Echetlus, and the local patron of Marathon,—were seen honored and
prominent the polemarch Kallimachus and the general Miltiadês,
while the Platæans were distinguished by their Bœotian leather
casques.[671] And the sixth of the month Boëdromion, the
anniversary of the battle, was commemorated by an annual
ceremony, even down to the time of Plutarch.[672]
Two thousand Spartans, starting from their city, immediately after
the full moon, reached the frontier of Attica, on the third day of their
march,—a surprising effort, when we consider that the total distance
from Sparta to Athens was about one hundred and fifty miles. They
did not arrive, however, until the battle had been fought, and the
Persians departed; but curiosity led them to the field of Marathon to
behold the dead bodies of the Persians, after which they returned
home, bestowing well-merited praise on the victors.
Datis and Artaphernês returned across the Ægean with their
Eretrian prisoners to Asia; stopping for a short time at the island of
Mykonos, where discovery was made of a gilt image of Apollo carried
off as booty in a Phenician ship. Datis went himself to restore it to
Dêlos, requesting the Delians to carry it back to the Delium, or
temple of Apollo, on the eastern coast of Bœotia: the Delians,
however, chose to keep the statue until it was reclaimed from them
twenty years afterwards by the Thebans. On reaching Asia, the
Persian generals conducted their prisoners up to the court of Susa,
and into the presence of Darius. Though he had been vehemently
incensed against them, yet when he saw them in his power, his
wrath abated, and he manifested no desire to kill or harm them.
They were planted at a spot called Arderikka, in the Kissian territory,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-51-2048.jpg)
![one of the resting-places on the road from Sardis to Susa, and about
twenty-six miles distant from the latter place: Herodotus seems
himself to have seen their descendants there on his journey between
the two capitals, and to have had the satisfaction of talking to them
in Greek,—which we may well conceive to have made some
impression upon him, at a spot distant by nearly three months’
journey from the coast of Ionia.[673]
Happy would it have been for Miltiadês if he had shared the
honorable death of the polemarch Kallimachus,—“animam exhalasset
opimam,”—in seeking to fire the ships of the defeated Persians at
Marathon. The short sequel of his history will be found in melancholy
contrast with the Marathonian heroism.
His reputation had been great before the battle, and after it the
admiration and confidence of his countrymen knew no bounds: it
appears, indeed, to have reached such a pitch that his head was
turned, and he lost both his patriotism and his prudence. He
proposed to his countrymen to incur the cost of equipping an
armament of seventy ships, with an adequate armed force, and to
place it altogether at his discretion; giving them no intimation
whither he intended to go, but merely assuring them that, if they
would follow him, he would conduct them to a land where gold was
abundant, and thus enrich them. Such a promise, from the lips of
the recent victor of Marathon, was sufficient, and the armament was
granted, no man except Miltiadês knowing what was its destination.
He sailed immediately to the island of Paros, laid siege to the town,
and sent in a herald to require from the inhabitants a contribution of
one hundred talents, on pain of entire destruction. His pretence for
this attack was, that the Parians had furnished a trireme to Datis for
the Persian fleet at Marathon; but his real motive, so Herodotus
assures us,[674] was vindictive animosity against a Parian citizen
named Lysagoras, who had exasperated the Persian general
Hydarnês against him. The Parians amused him at first with
evasions, until they had procured a little delay to repair the defective
portions of their wall, after which they set him at defiance; and](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-52-2048.jpg)
![Miltiadês in vain prosecuted hostilities against them for the space of
twenty-six days: he ravaged the island, but his attacks made no
impression upon the town.[675] Beginning to despair of success in his
military operations, he entered into some negotiation—such at least
was the tale of the Parians themselves—with a Parian woman named
Timô, priestess or attendant in the temple of Dêmêtêr, near the
town-gates. This woman, promising to reveal to him a secret which
would place Paros in his power, induced him to visit by night a
temple to which no male person was admissible. He leaped the
exterior fence, and approached the sanctuary; but on coming near,
was seized with a panic terror and ran away, almost out of his
senses: on leaping the same fence to get back, he strained or
bruised his thigh badly, and became utterly disabled. In this
melancholy state he was placed on ship-board; the siege being
raised, and the whole armament returning to Athens.
Vehement was the indignation both of the armament and of the
remaining Athenians against Miltiadês on his return;[676] and
Xanthippus, father of the great Periklês, became the spokesman of
this feeling. He impeached Miltiadês before the popular judicature as
having been guilty of deceiving the people, and as having deserved
the penalty of death. The accused himself, disabled by his injured
thigh, which even began to show symptoms of gangrene, was
unable to stand, or to say a word in his own defence: he lay on his
couch before the assembled judges, while his friends made the best
case they could in his behalf. Defence, it appears, there was none;
all they could do, was to appeal to his previous services: they
reminded the people largely and emphatically of the inestimable
exploit of Marathon, coming in addition to his previous conquest of
Lemnos. The assembled dikasts, or jurors, showed their sense of
these powerful appeals by rejecting the proposition of his accuser to
condemn him to death; but they imposed on him the penalty of fifty
talents “for his iniquity.”
Cornelius Nepos affirms that these fifty talents represented the
expenses incurred by the state in fitting out the armament; but we](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-53-2048.jpg)
![may more probably believe, looking to the practice of the Athenian
dikastery in criminal cases, that fifty talents was the minor penalty
actually proposed by the defenders of Miltiadês themselves, as a
substitute for the punishment of death. In those penal cases at
Athens, where the punishment was not fixed beforehand by the
terms of the law, if the person accused was found guilty, it was
customary to submit to the jurors, subsequently and separately, the
question as to amount of punishment: first, the accuser named the
penalty which he thought suitable; next, the accused person was
called upon to name an amount of penalty for himself, and the jurors
were constrained to take their choice between these two,—no third
gradation of penalty being admissible for consideration.[677] Of
course, under such circumstances, it was the interest of the accused
party to name, even in his own case, some real and serious penalty,
—something which the jurors might be likely to deem not wholly
inadequate to his crime just proved; for if he proposed some penalty
only trifling, he drove them to prefer the heavier sentence
recommended by his opponent. Accordingly, in the case of Miltiadês,
his friends, desirous of inducing the jurors to refuse their assent to
the punishment of death, proposed a fine of fifty talents as the self-
assessed penalty of the defendant; and perhaps they may have
stated, as an argument in the case, that such a sum would suffice to
defray the costs of the expedition. The fine was imposed, but
Miltiadês did not live to pay it; his injured limb mortified, and he
died, leaving the fine to be paid by his son Kimon.
According to Cornelius Nepos, Diodorus, and Plutarch, he was
put in prison, after having been fined, and there died.[678] But
Herodotus does not mention this imprisonment, and the fact appears
to me improbable: he would hardly have omitted to notice it, had it
come to his knowledge. Immediate imprisonment of a person fined
by the dikastery, until his fine was paid, was not the natural and
ordinary course of Athenian procedure, though there were particular
cases in which such aggravation was added. Usually, a certain time
was allowed for payment,[679] before absolute execution was
resorted to, but the person under sentence became disfranchised](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-54-2048.jpg)
![and excluded from all political rights, from the very instant of his
condemnation as a public debtor, until the fine was paid. Now in the
instance of Miltiadês, the lamentable condition of his wounded thigh
rendered escape impossible,—so that there would be no special
motive for departing from the usual practice, and imprisoning him
forthwith: moreover, if he was not imprisoned forthwith, he would
not be imprisoned at all, since he cannot have lived many days after
his trial.[680] To carry away the suffering general in his couch,
incapable of raising himself even to plead for his own life, from the
presence of the dikasts to a prison, would not only have been a
needless severity, but could hardly have failed to imprint itself on the
sympathies and the memory of all the beholders; so that Herodotus
would have been likely to hear and mention it, if it had really
occurred. I incline to believe therefore that Miltiadês died at home:
all accounts concur in stating that he died of the mortal bodily hurt
which already disabled him even at the moment of his trial, and that
his son Kimon paid the fifty talents after his death. If he could pay
them, probably his father could have paid them also. And this is an
additional reason for believing that there was no imprisonment,—for
nothing but non-payment could have sent him to prison; and to
rescue the suffering Miltiadês from being sent thither, would have
been the first and strongest desire of all sympathizing friends.
Thus closed the life of the conqueror of Marathon. The last act of
it produces an impression so mournful, and even shocking,—his
descent from the pinnacle of glory to defeat, mean tampering with a
temple-servant, mortal bodily hurt, undefended ignominy, and death
under a sentence of heavy fine, is so abrupt and unprepared,—that
readers, ancient and modern, have not been satisfied without finding
some one to blame for it: we must except Herodotus, our original
authority, who recounts the transaction without dropping a single
hint of blame against any one. To speak ill of the people, as
Machiavel has long ago observed,[681] is a strain in which every one
at all times, even under a democratical government, indulges with
impunity and without provoking any opponent to reply; and in this
instance, the hard fate of Miltiadês has been imputed to the vices of](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-55-2048.jpg)
![ground for such a change; and in the case of Miltiadês, that question
must be answered in the affirmative.
In regard to the charge of ingratitude against the Athenians, this
last-mentioned point—sufficiency of reason—stands tacitly admitted.
It is conceded that Miltiadês deserved punishment for his conduct in
reference to the Parian expedition, but it is nevertheless maintained
that gratitude for his previous services at Marathon ought to have
exempted him from punishment. But the sentiment upon which,
after all, this exculpation rests, will not bear to be drawn out and
stated in the form of a cogent or justifying reason. For will any one
really contend, that a man who has rendered great services to the
public, is to receive in return a license of unpunished misconduct for
the future? Is the general, who has earned applause by eminent skill
and important victories, to be recompensed by being allowed the
liberty of betraying his trust afterwards, and exposing his country to
peril, without censure or penalty? This is what no one intends to
vindicate deliberately; yet a man must be prepared to vindicate it,
when he blames the Athenians for ingratitude towards Miltiadês. For
if all that be meant is, that gratitude for previous services ought to
pass, not as a receipt in full for subsequent crime, but as an
extenuating circumstance in the measurement of the penalty, the
answer is, that it was so reckoned in the Athenian treatment of
Miltiadês.[682] His friends had nothing whatever to urge, against the
extreme penalty proposed by his accuser, except these previous
services,—which influenced the dikasts sufficiently to induce them to
inflict the lighter punishment instead of the heavier. Now the whole
amount of punishment inflicted consisted in a fine which certainly
was not beyond his reasonable means of paying, or of prevailing
upon friends to pay for him, since his son Kimon actually did pay it.
And those who blame the Athenians for ingratitude,—unless they are
prepared to maintain the doctrine that previous services are to pass
as full acquittal for future crime,—have no other ground left except
to say that the fine was too high; that instead of being fifty talents,
it ought to have been no more than forty, thirty, twenty, or ten
talents. Whether they are right in this, I will not take upon me to](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-57-2048.jpg)
![pronounce. If the amount was named on behalf of the accused
party, the dikastery had no legal power of diminishing it; but it is
within such narrow limits that the question actually lies, when
transferred from the province of sentiment to that of reason. It will
be recollected that the death of Miltiadês arose neither from his trial
nor his fine, but from the hurt in his thigh.
The charge of ingratitude against the Athenian popular juries
really amounts to this,—that, in trying a person accused of present
crime or fault, they were apt to confine themselves too strictly and
exclusively to the particular matter of charge, either forgetting, or
making too little account of, past services which he might have
rendered. Whoever imagines that such was the habit of Athenian
dikasts, must have studied the orators to very little purpose. Their
real defect was the very opposite: they were too much disposed to
wander from the special issue before them, and to be affected by
appeals to previous services and conduct.[683] That which an
accused person at Athens usually strives to produce is, an
impression in the minds of the dikasts favorable to his general
character and behavior. Of course, he meets the particular allegation
of his accuser as well as he can, but he never fails also to remind
them emphatically, how well he has performed his general duties of
a citizen,—how many times he has served in military expeditions,—
how many trierarchies and liturgies he has performed, and
performed with splendid efficiency. In fact, the claim of an accused
person to acquittal is made to rest too much on his prior services,
and too little upon innocence or justifying matter as to the particular
indictment. When we come down to the time of the orators, I shall
be prepared to show that such indisposition to confine themselves to
a special issue was one of the most serious defects of the assembled
dikasts at Athens. It is one which we should naturally expect from a
body of private, non-professional citizens assembled for the
occasion, and which belongs more or less to the system of jury-trial
everywhere; but it is the direct reverse of that ingratitude, or
habitual insensibility to prior services, for which they have been so
often denounced.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-58-2048.jpg)
![The fate of Miltiadês, then, so far from illustrating either the
fickleness or the ingratitude of his countrymen, attests their just
appreciation of deserts. It also illustrates another moral, of no small
importance to the right comprehension of Grecian affairs; it teaches
us the painful lesson, how perfectly maddening were the effects of a
copious draught of glory on the temperament of an enterprising and
ambitious Greek. There can be no doubt, that the rapid transition, in
the course of about one week, from Athenian terror before the battle
to Athenian exultation after it, must have produced demonstrations
towards Miltiadês such as were never paid towards any other man in
the whole history of the commonwealth. Such unmeasured
admiration unseated his rational judgment, so that his mind became
abandoned to the reckless impulses of insolence, and antipathy, and
rapacity;—that distempered state, for which (according to Grecian
morality) the retributive Nemesis was ever on the watch, and which,
in his case, she visited with a judgment startling in its rapidity, as
well as terrible in its amount. Had Miltiadês been the same man
before the battle of Marathon as he became after it, the battle might
probably have turned out a defeat instead of a victory.
Dêmosthenês, indeed,[684] in speaking of the wealth and luxury of
political leaders in his own time, and the profuse rewards bestowed
upon them by the people, pointed in contrast to the house of
Miltiadês as being noway more splendid than that of a private man.
But though Miltiadês might continue to live in a modest
establishment, he received from his countrymen marks of admiration
and deference such as were never paid to any citizen before or after
him; and, after all, admiration and deference constitute the precious
essence of popular reward. No man except Miltiadês ever dared to
raise his voice in the Athenian assembly, and say: “Give me a fleet of
ships: do not ask what I am going to do with them, but only follow
me, and I will enrich you.” Herein we may read the unmeasured
confidence which the Athenians placed in their victorious general,
and the utter incapacity of a leading Greek to bear it without mental
depravation; while we learn from it to draw the melancholy
inference, that one result of success was to make the successful
leader one of the most dangerous men in the community. We shall](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-59-2048.jpg)
![benefactors; and the history of Miltiadês illustrates it in a manner no
less pointed than painful.
I have already remarked that the fickleness, which has been so
largely imputed to the Athenian democracy in their dealings with
him, is nothing more than a reasonable change of opinion on the
best grounds. Nor can it be said that fickleness was in any case an
attribute of the Athenian democracy. It is a well-known fact, that
feelings, or opinions, or modes of judging, which have once obtained
footing among a large number of people, are more lasting and
unchangeable than those which belong only to one or a few;
insomuch that the judgments and actions of the many admit of
being more clearly understood as to the past, and more certainly
predicted as to the future. If we are to predicate any attribute of the
multitude, it will rather be that of undue tenacity than undue
fickleness; and there will occur nothing in the course of this history
to prove that the Athenian people changed their opinions on
insufficient grounds more frequently than an unresponsible one or
few would have changed.
But there were two circumstances in the working of the Athenian
democracy which imparted to it an appearance of greater fickleness,
without the reality: First, that the manifestations and changes of
opinion were all open, undisguised, and noisy: the people gave
utterance to their present impression, whatever it was, with perfect
frankness; if their opinions were really changed, they had no shame
or scruple in avowing it. Secondly,—and this is a point of capital
importance in the working of democracy generally,—the present
impression, whatever it might be, was not merely undisguised in its
manifestations, but also had a tendency to be exaggerated in its
intensity. This arose from their habit of treating public affairs in
multitudinous assemblages, the well-known effect of which is, to
inflame sentiment in every man’s bosom by mere contact with a
sympathizing circle of neighbors. Whatever the sentiment might be,
—fear, ambition, cupidity, wrath, compassion, piety, patriotic
devotion, etc,[685]—and whether well-founded or ill-founded, it was](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-61-2048.jpg)
![constantly influenced more or less by such intensifying cause. This is
a defect which of course belongs in a certain degree to all exercise
of power by numerous bodies, even though they be representative
bodies,—especially when the character of the people, instead of
being comparatively sedate and slow to move, like the English, is
quick, impressible, and fiery, like Greeks or Italians; but it operated
far more powerfully on the self-acting Dêmos assembled in the Pnyx.
It was in fact the constitutional malady of the democracy, of which
the people were themselves perfectly sensible,—as I shall show
hereafter from the securities which they tried to provide against it,—
but which no securities could ever wholly eradicate. Frequency of
public assemblies, far from aggravating the evil, had a tendency to
lighten it. The people thus became accustomed to hear and balance
many different views as a preliminary to ultimate judgment; they
contracted personal interest and esteem for a numerous class of
dissentient speakers; and they even acquired a certain practical
consciousness of their own liability to error. Moreover, the diffusion
of habits of public speaking, by means of the sophists and the
rhetors, whom it has been so much the custom to disparage, tended
in the same direction,—to break the unity of sentiment among the
listening crowd, to multiply separate judgments, and to neutralize
the contagion of mere sympathizing impulse. These were important
deductions, still farther assisted by the superior taste and
intelligence of the Athenian people: but still, the inherent malady
remained,—excessive and misleading intensity of present sentiment.
It was this which gave such inestimable value to the ascendency of
Periklês, as depicted by Thucydidês: his hold on the people was so
firm, that he could always speak with effect against excess of the
reigning tone of feeling. “When Periklês (says the historian) saw the
people in a state of unseasonable and insolent confidence, he spoke
so as to cow them into alarm; when again they were in groundless
terror, he combated it, and brought them back to confidence.”[686]
We shall find Dêmosthenês, with far inferior ascendency, employed
in the same honorable task: the Athenian people often stood in need
of such correction, but unfortunately did not always find statesmen,
at once friendly and commanding, to administer it.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-62-2048.jpg)
![These two attributes, then, belonged to the Athenian democracy;
first, their sentiments of every kind were manifested loudly and
openly; next, their sentiments tended to a pitch of great present
intensity. Of course, therefore, when they changed, the change of
sentiment stood prominent, and forced itself upon every one’s
notice,—being a transition from one strong sentiment past to
another strong sentiment present.[687] And it was because such
alterations, when they did take place, stood out so palpably to
remark, that the Athenian people have drawn upon themselves the
imputation of fickleness: for it is not at all true, I repeat, that
changes of sentiment were more frequently produced in them by
frivolous or insufficient causes, than changes of sentiment in other
governments.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-63-2048.jpg)
![CHAPTER XXXVII.
IONIC PHILOSOPHERS. — PYTHAGORAS. —
KROTON AND SYBARIS.
The history of the powerful Grecian cities in Italy and Sicily,
between the accession of Peisistratus and the battle of Marathon, is
for the most part unknown to us. Phalaris, despot of Agrigentum in
Sicily, made for himself an unenviable name during this obscure
interval. His reign seems to coincide in time with the earlier part of
the rule of Peisistratus (about 560-540 B. C.), and the few and vague
statements which we find respecting it,[688] merely show us that it
was a period of extortion and cruelty, even beyond the ordinary
licence of Grecian despots. The reality of the hollow bull of brass,
which Phalaris was accustomed to heat in order to shut up his
victims in it and burn them, appears to be better authenticated than
the nature of the story would lead us to presume: for it is not only
noticed by Pindar, but even the actual instrument of this torture, the
brazen bull itself,[689]—which had been taken away from Agrigentum
as a trophy by the Carthaginians when they captured the town, was
restored by the Romans, on the subjugation of Carthage, to its
original domicile. Phalaris is said to have acquired the supreme
command, by undertaking the task of building a great temple[690] to
Zeus Polieus on the citadel rock; a pretence whereby he was enabled
to assemble and arm a number of workmen and devoted partisans,
whom he employed, at the festival of the Thesmophoria, to put
down the authorities. He afterwards disarmed the citizens by a
stratagem, and committed cruelties which rendered him so
abhorred, that a sudden rising of the people, headed by Têlemachus](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-64-2048.jpg)
![(ancestor of the subsequent despot, Thêro), overthrew and slew
him. A severe revenge was taken on his partisans after his fall.[691]
During the interval between 540-500 B. C., events of much
importance occurred among the Italian Greeks,—especially at Kroton
and Sybaris,—events, unhappily, very imperfectly handed down.
Between these two periods fall both the war between Sybaris and
Kroton, and the career and ascendency of Pythagoras. In connection
with this latter name, it will be requisite to say a few words
respecting the other Grecian philosophers of the sixth century B. C.
I have, in a former chapter, noticed and characterized those
distinguished persons called the Seven Wise Men of Greece, whose
celebrity falls in the first half of this century,—men not so much
marked by scientific genius as by practical sagacity and foresight in
the appreciation of worldly affairs, and enjoying a high degree of
political respect from their fellow-citizens. One of them, however, the
Milesian Thalês, claims our notice, not only on this ground, but also
as the earliest known name in the long line of Greek scientific
investigators. His life, nearly contemporary with that of Solon,
belongs seemingly to the interval about 640-550 B. C.: the stories
mentioned in Herodotus—perhaps borrowed in part from the
Milesian Hekatæus—are sufficient to show that his reputation for
wisdom, as well as for science, continued to be very great, even a
century after his death, among his fellow-citizens. And he marks an
important epoch in the progress of the Greek mind, as having been
the first man to depart both in letter and spirit from the Hesiodic
Theogony, introducing the conception of substances with their
transformations and sequences, in place of that string of persons
and quasi-human attributes which had animated the old legendary
world. He is the father of what is called the Ionic philosophy, which
is considered as lasting from his time down to that of Sokratês; and
writers, ancient as well as modern, have professed to trace a
succession of philosophers, each one the pupil of the preceding,
between these two extreme epochs. But the appellation is, in truth,
undefined, and even incorrect, since nothing entitled to the name of](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-65-2048.jpg)
![assumption being a difficulty common to all systems of cosmogony,
and from which even this flexible and expansive hypothesis is not
exempt.
Now when Thalês disengaged Grecian philosophy from the old
mode of explanation, he did not at the same time disengage it from
the old problems and matters propounded for inquiry. These he
retained, and transmitted to his successors, as vague and vast as
they were at first conceived; and so they remained, though with
some transformations and modifications, together with many new
questions equally insoluble, substantially present to the Greeks
throughout their whole history, as the legitimate problems for
philosophical investigation. But these problems, adapted only to the
old elastic system of polytheistic explanation and omnipresent
personal agency, became utterly disproportioned to any impersonal
hypotheses such as those of Thalês and the philosophers after him,
—whether assumed physical laws, or plausible moral and
metaphysical dogmas, open to argumentative attack, and of course
requiring the like defence. To treat the visible world as a whole, and
inquire when and how it began, as well as into all its past changes,
—to discuss the first origin of men, animals, plants, the sun, the
stars, etc.,—to assign some comprehensive reason why motion or
change in general took place in the universe,—to investigate the
destinies of the human race, and to lay down some systematic
relation between them and the gods,—all these were topics
admitting of being conceived in many different ways, and set forth
with eloquent plausibility, but not reducible to any solution either
resting on scientific evidence, or commanding steady adherence
under a free scrutiny.[692]
At the time when the power of scientific investigation was scanty
and helpless, the problems proposed were thus such as to lie out of
the reach of science in its largest compass. Gradually, indeed,
subjects more special and limited, and upon which experience, or
deductions from experience, could be brought to bear, were added
to the list of quæsita, and examined with great profit and](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-67-2048.jpg)
![by the Grecian inquirers of the fourth century B. C., the first
beginnings of geometry, astronomy, and physiology in its large and
really appropriate sense, the scientific study of nature: for the Greek
word denoting nature (φύσις), first comes into comprehensive use
about this time (as I have remarked in an earlier chapter),[693] with
its derivatives physics and physiology, as distinguished from the
theology of the old poets. Little stress can be laid on those
elementary propositions in geometry which are specified as
discovered, or as first demonstrated, by Thalês,—still less upon the
solar eclipse respecting which, according to Herodotus, he
determined beforehand the year of occurrence.[694] But the main
doctrine of his physiology,—using that word in its larger Greek
sense,—is distinctly attested. He stripped Oceanus and Tethys,
primeval parents of the gods in the Homeric theogony, of their
personality,—and laid down water, or fluid substance, as the single
original element from which everything came, and into which
everything returned.[695] The doctrine of one eternal element,
remaining always the same in its essence, but indefinitely variable in
its manifestations to sense, was thus first introduced to the
discussion of the Grecian public. We have no means of knowing the
reasons by which Thalês supported this opinion, nor could even
Aristotle do more than conjecture what they might have been; but
one of the statements urged on behalf of it,—that the earth itself
rested on water,[696]—we may safely refer to the Milesian himself, for
it would hardly have been advanced at a later age. Moreover, Thalês
is reported to have held, that everything was living and full of gods;
and that the magnet, especially, was a living thing. Thus the gods,
as far as we can pretend to follow opinions so very faintly
transmitted, are conceived as active powers, and causes of
changeful manifestation, attached to the primeval substance:[697]
the universe being assimilated to an organized body or system.
Respecting Hippo,—who reproduced the theory of Thalês under a
more generalized form of expression, substituting, in place of water,
moisture, or something common to air and water,[698]—we do not
know whether he belonged to the sixth or the fifth century B. C. But](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-69-2048.jpg)
![Anaximander, Xenophanês, and Pherekydês belong to the latter half
of the sixth century. Anaximander, the son of Praxiadês, was a native
of Milêtus,—Xenophanês, a native of Kolophon; the former, among
the earliest expositors of doctrine in prose,[699] while the latter
committed his opinions to the old medium of verse. Anaximander
seems to have taken up the philosophical problem, while he
materially altered the hypothesis of his predecessor Thalês. Instead
of the primeval fluid of the latter, he supposed a primeval principle,
without any actual determining qualities whatever, but including all
qualities potentially, and manifesting them in an infinite variety from
its continually self-changing nature,—a principle, which was nothing
in itself, yet had the capacity of producing any and all
manifestations, however contrary to each other,[700]—a primeval
something, whose essence it was to be eternally productive of
different phenomena,—a sort of mathematical point, which counts
for nothing in itself, but is vigorous in generating lines to any extent
that may be desired. In this manner, Anaximander professed to give
a comprehensive explanation of change in general, or generation, or
destruction,—how it happened that one sensible thing began and
another ceased to exist,—according to the vague problems which
these early inquirers were in the habit of setting to themselves.[701]
He avoided that which the first philosophers especially dreaded, the
affirmation that generation could take place out of Nothing; yet the
primeval Something, which he supposed was only distinguished from
nothing by possessing this very power of generation.
In his theory, he passed from the province of physics into that of
metaphysics. He first introduced into Grecian philosophy that
important word which signifies a beginning or a principle,[702] and
first opened that metaphysical discussion, which was carried on in
various ways throughout the whole period of Grecian philosophy, as
to the one and the many—the continuous and the variable—that
which exists eternally, as distinguished from that which comes and
passes away in ever-changing manifestations. His physiology, or
explanation of nature, thus conducted the mind into a different route
from that suggested by the hypothesis of Thalês, which was built](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-70-2048.jpg)
![upon physical considerations, and was therefore calculated to
suggest and stimulate observations of physical phenomena for the
purpose of verifying or confuting it,—while the hypothesis of
Anaximander admitted only of being discussed dialectically, or by
reasonings expressed in general language; reasonings sometimes,
indeed, referring to experience for the purpose of illustration, but
seldom resting on it, and never looking out for it as a necessary
support. The physical explanation of nature, however, once
introduced by Thalês, although deserted by Anaximander, was taken
up by Anaximenês and others afterwards, and reproduced with
many divergences of doctrine,—yet always more or less entangled
and perplexed with metaphysical additions, since the two
departments were never clearly parted throughout all Grecian
philosophy. Of these subsequent physical philosophers I shall speak
hereafter: at present, I confine myself to the thinkers of the sixth
century B. C., among whom Anaximander stands prominent, not as
the follower of Thalês, but as the author of an hypothesis both new
and tending in a different direction.
It was not merely as the author of this hypothesis, however, that
Anaximander enlarged the Greek mind and roused the powers of
thought: we find him also mentioned as distinguished in astronomy
and geometry. He is said to have been the first to establish a sun-
dial in Greece, to construct a sphere, and to explain the obliquity of
the ecliptic;[703] how far such alleged authorship really belongs to
him, we cannot be certain,—but there is one step of immense
importance which he is clearly affirmed to have made. He was the
first to compose a treatise on the geography of the land and sea
within his cognizance, and to construct a chart or map founded
thereupon,—seemingly a tablet of brass. Such a novelty, wondrous
even to the rude and ignorant, was calculated to stimulate
powerfully inquisitive minds, and from it may be dated the
commencement of Grecian rational geography,—not the least
valuable among the contributions of this people to the stock of
human knowledge.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-71-2048.jpg)
![Xenophanês of Kolophon, somewhat younger than Anaximander,
and nearly contemporary with Pythagoras (seemingly from about
570-480 B. C.), migrated from Kolophon[704] to Zanklê and Katana in
Sicily and Elea in Italy, soon after the time when Ionia became
subject to the Persians, (540-530 B. C.) He was the founder of what is
called the Eleatic school of philosophers,—a real school, since it
appears that Parmenidês, Zeno, and Melissus, pursued and
developed, in a great degree, the train of speculation which had
been begun by Xenophanês,—doubtless with additions and
variations of their own, but especially with a dialectic power which
belongs to the age of Periklês, and is unknown in the sixth century
B. C. He was the author of more than one poem of considerable
length, one on the foundation of Kolophon and another on that of
Elea; besides his poem on Nature, wherein his philosophical
doctrines were set forth.[705] His manner appears to have been
controversial and full of asperity towards antagonists; but what is
most remarkable is the plain-spoken manner in which he declared
himself against the popular religion, and in which he denounced as
abominable the descriptions of the gods given by Homer and Hesiod.
[706]
He is said to have controverted the doctrines both of Thalês and
Pythagoras: this is probable enough; but he seems to have taken his
start from the philosophy of Anaximander,—not, however, to adopt
it, but to reverse it,—and to set forth an opinion which we may call
its contrary. Nature, in the conception of Anaximander, consisted of a
Something having no other attribute except the unlimited power of
generating and cancelling phenomenal changes: in this doctrine, the
something or substratum existed only in and for those changes, and
could not be said to exist at all in any other sense: the permanent
was thus merged and lost in the variable,—the one in the many.
Xenophanês laid down the exact opposite: he conceived Nature as
one unchangeable and indivisible whole, spherical, animated,
endued with reason, and penetrated by or indeed identical with God:
he denied the objective reality of all change, or generation, or
destruction, which he seems to have considered as only changes or](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-72-2048.jpg)
![modifications in the percipient, and perhaps different in one
percipient and another. That which exists, he maintained, could not
have been generated, nor could it ever be destroyed: there was
neither real generation nor real destruction of anything; but that
which men took for such, was the change in their own feelings and
ideas. He thus recognized the permanent without the variable,[707]—
the one without the many. And his treatment of the received
religious creed was in harmony with such physical or metaphysical
hypothesis; for while he held the whole of Nature to be God, without
parts or change, he at the same time pronounced the popular gods
to be entities of subjective fancy, imagined by men after their own
model: if oxen or lions were to become religious, he added, they
would in like manner provide for themselves gods after their
respective shapes and characters.[708] This hypothesis, which
seemed to set aside altogether the study of the sensible world as a
source of knowledge, was expounded briefly, and as it should seem,
obscurely and rudely, by Xenophanês; at least we may infer thus
much from the slighting epithet applied to him by Aristotle.[709] But
his successors, Parmenidês and Zeno, in the succeeding century,
expanded it considerably, supported it with extraordinary acuteness
of dialectics, and even superadded a second part, in which the
phenomena of sense—though considered only as appearances, not
partaking in the reality of the one Ens—were yet explained by a new
physical hypothesis; so that they will be found to exercise great
influence over the speculations both of Plato and Aristotle. We
discover in Xenophanês, moreover, a vein of skepticism, and a
mournful despair as to the attainability of certain knowledge,[710]
which the nature of his philosophy was well calculated to suggest,
and in which the sillograph Timon of the third century B. C., who
seems to have spoken of Xenophanês better than of most of the
other philosophers, powerfully sympathized.
The cosmogony of Pherekydês of Syrus, contemporary of
Anaximander and among the teachers of Pythagoras, seems,
according to the fragments preserved, a combination of the old
legendary fancies with Orphic mysticism,[711] and probably exercised](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-73-2048.jpg)
![little influence over the subsequent course of Grecian philosophy. By
what has been said of Thalês, Anaximander, and Xenophanês, it will
be seen that the sixth century B. C. witnessed the opening of several
of those roads of intellectual speculation which the later
philosophers pursued farther, or at least from which they branched
off. Before the year 500 B. C. many interesting questions were thus
brought into discussion, which Solon, who died about 558 B. C., had
never heard of,—just as he may probably never have seen the map
of Anaximander. But neither of these two distinguished men—
Anaximander or Xenophanês—was anything more than a speculative
inquirer. The third eminent name of this century, of whom I am now
about to speak,—Pythagoras, combined in his character disparate
elements which require rather a longer development.
Pythagoras was founder of a brotherhood, originally brought
together by a religious influence, and with observances approaching
to monastic peculiarity,—working in a direction at once religious,
political, and scientific, and exercising for some time a real political
ascendency,—but afterwards banished from government and state
affairs into a sectarian privacy with scientific pursuits, not without,
however, still producing some statesmen individually distinguished.
Amidst the multitude of false and apocryphal statements which
circulated in antiquity respecting this celebrated man, we find a few
important facts reasonably attested and deserving credence. He was
a native of Samos,[712] son of an opulent merchant named
Mnêsarchus,—or, according to some of his later and more fervent
admirers, of Apollo; born, as far as we can make out, about the 50th
Olympiad, or 580 B. C. On the many marvels recounted respecting his
youth, it is unnecessary to dwell. Among them may be numbered his
wide-reaching travels, said to have been prolonged for nearly thirty
years, to visit the Arabians, the Syrians, the Phenicians, the
Chaldæans, the Indians, and the Gallic Druids. But there is reason to
believe that he really visited Egypt[713]—perhaps also Phenicia—and
Babylon, then Chaldæan and independent. At the time when he saw
Egypt, between 560-540 B. C., about one century earlier than
Herodotus, it was under Amasis, the last of its own kings, with its](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-74-2048.jpg)
![peculiar native character yet unimpaired by foreign conquest, and
only slightly modified by the admission during the preceding century
of Grecian mercenary troops and traders. The spectacle of Egyptian
habits, the conversation of the priests, and the initiation into various
mysteries or secret rites and stories not accessible to the general
public, may very naturally have impressed the mind of Pythagoras,
and given him that turn for mystic observance, asceticism, and
peculiarity of diet and clothing,—which manifested itself from the
same cause among several of his contemporaries, but which was not
a common phenomenon in the primitive Greek religion. Besides
visiting Egypt, Pythagoras is also said to have profited by the
teaching of Thalês, of Anaximander, and of Pherekydês of Syros.[714]
Amidst the towns of Ionia, he would, moreover, have an opportunity
of conversing with many Greek navigators who had visited foreign
countries, especially Italy and Sicily. His mind seems to have been
acted upon and impelled by this combined stimulus,—partly towards
an imaginative and religious vein of speculation, with a life of mystic
observance,—partly towards that active exercise, both of mind and
body, which the genius of an Hellenic community so naturally tended
to suggest.
Of the personal doctrines or opinions of Pythagoras, whom we
must distinguish from Philolaus and the subsequent Pythagoreans,
we have little certain knowledge, though doubtless the first germ of
their geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, etc. must have proceeded
from him. But that he believed in the metempsychosis or
transmigration of the souls of deceased men into other men, as well
as into animals, we know, not only by other evidence, but also by
the testimony of his contemporary, the philosopher Xenophanês of
Elea. Pythagoras, seeing a dog beaten, and hearing him howl,
desired the striker to desist, saying: “It is the soul of a friend of
mine, whom I recognized by his voice.” This—together with the
general testimony of Hêrakleitus, that Pythagoras was a man of
extensive research and acquired instruction, but artful for mischief
and destitute of sound judgment—is all that we know about him
from contemporaries. Herodotus, two generations afterwards, while](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-75-2048.jpg)
![he conceives the Pythagoreans as a peculiar religious order,
intimates that both Orpheus and Pythagoras had derived the
doctrine of the metempsychosis from Egypt, but had pretended to it
as their own without acknowledgment.[715]
Pythagoras combines the character of a sophist (a man of large
observation, and clever, ascendent, inventive mind,—the original
sense of the word Sophist, prior to the polemics of the Platonic
school, and the only sense known to Herodotus[716]) with that of an
inspired teacher, prophet, and worker of miracles,—approaching to
and sometimes even confounded with the gods,—and employing all
these gifts to found a new special order of brethren, bound together
by religious rites and observances peculiar to themselves. In his
prominent vocation, analogous to that of Epimenidês, Orpheus, or
Melampus, he appears as the revealer of a mode of life calculated to
raise his disciples above the level of mankind, and to recommend
them to the favor of the gods; the Pythagorean life, like the Orphic
life,[717] being intended as the exclusive prerogative of the
brotherhood,—approached only by probation and initiatory
ceremonies which were adapted to select enthusiasts rather than to
an indiscriminate crowd,—and exacting entire mental devotion to the
master.[718] In these lofty pretensions the Agrigentine Empedoklês
seems to have greatly copied him, though with some varieties, about
half a century afterwards.[719] While Aristotle tells us that the
Krotoniates identified Pythagoras with the Hyperborean Apollo, the
satirical Timon pronounced him to have been “a juggler of solemn
speech, engaged in fishing for men.”[720] This is the same character,
looked at from the different points of view of the believer and the
unbeliever. There is, however, no reason for regarding Pythagoras as
an impostor, because experience seems to show, that while in
certain ages it is not difficult for a man to persuade others that he is
inspired, it is still less difficult for him to contract the same belief
himself.
Looking at the general type of Pythagoras, as conceived by
witnesses in and nearest to his own age,—Xenophanês, Hêrakleitus,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-76-2048.jpg)
![Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Isokratês,[721]—we find in him chiefly the
religious missionary and schoolmaster, with little of the politician. His
efficiency in the latter character, originally subordinate, first becomes
prominent in those glowing fancies which the later Pythagoreans
communicated to Aristoxenus and Dikæarchus. The primitive
Pythagoras inspired by the gods to reveal a new mode of life,[722]—
the Pythagorean life,—and to promise divine favor to a select and
docile few, as the recompense of strict ritual obedience, of austere
self-control, and of laborious training, bodily as well as mental. To
speak with confidence of the details of his training, ethical or
scientific, and of the doctrines which he promulgated, is impossible;
for neither he himself nor any of his disciples anterior to Philolaus—
who was separated from him by about one intervening generation—
left any memorials in writing.[723] Numbers and lines, studied partly
in their own mutual relations, partly under various symbolizing
fancies, presented themselves to him as the primary constituent
elements of the universe, and as a sort of magical key to
phenomena, physical as well as moral. And these mathematical
tendencies in his teaching, expanded by Pythagoreans, his
successors, and coinciding partly also, as has been before stated,
with the studies of Anaximander and Thalês, acquired more and
more development, so as to become one of the most glorious and
profitable manifestations of Grecian intellect. Living as Pythagoras
did at a time when the stock of experience was scanty, the license of
hypothesis unbounded, and the process of deduction without rule or
verifying test,—he was thus fortunate enough to strike into that
track of geometry and arithmetic, in which, from data of experience
few, simple, and obvious, an immense field of deductive and
verifiable investigation may be travelled over. We must at the same
time remark, however, that in his mind this track, which now seems
so straightforward and well defined, was clouded by strange fancies
which it is not easy to understand, and from which it was but
partially cleared by his successors. Of his spiritual training much is
said, though not upon very good authority. We hear of his memorial
discipline, his monastic self-scrutiny, his employment of music to
soothe disorderly passions,[724] his long novitiate of silence, his](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-77-2048.jpg)
![knowledge of physiognomy, which enabled him to detect even
without trial unworthy subjects, his peculiar diet, and his rigid care
for sobriety as well as for bodily vigor. He is also said to have
inculcated abstinence from animal food, and this feeling is so
naturally connected with the doctrine of the metempsychosis, that
we may well believe him to have entertained it, as Empedoklês also
did after him.[725] It is certain that there were peculiar observances,
and probably a certain measure of self-denial embodied in the
Pythagorean life; but on the other hand, it seems equally certain
that the members of the order cannot have been all subjected to the
same diet, or training, or studies. For Milo the Krotoniate was among
them,[726] the strongest man and the unparalleled wrestler of his
age,—who cannot possibly have dispensed with animal food and
ample diet (even setting aside the tales about his voracious
appetite), and is not likely to have bent his attention on speculative
study. Probably Pythagoras did not enforce the same bodily or
mental discipline on all, or at least knew when to grant
dispensations. The order, as it first stood under him, consisted of
men different both in temperament and aptitude, but bound
together by common religious observances and hopes, common
reverence for the master, and mutual attachment as well as pride in
each other’s success; and it must thus be distinguished from the
Pythagoreans of the fourth century B. C., who had no communion
with wrestlers, and comprised only ascetic, studious men, generally
recluse, though in some cases rising to political distinction.
The succession of these Pythagoreans, never very numerous,
seems to have continued until about 300 B. C., and then nearly died
out; being superseded by other schemes of philosophy more suited
to cultivated Greeks of the age after Sokratês. But during the time of
Cicero, two centuries afterwards, the orientalizing tendency—then
beginning to spread over the Grecian and Roman world, and
becoming gradually stronger and stronger—caused the Pythagorean
philosophy to be again revived. It was revived too, with little or none
of its scientific tendencies, but with more than its primitive religious
and imaginative fanaticism,—Apollonius of Tyana constituting himself](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-78-2048.jpg)
![—and even the intimacy between Milêtus and Knidus on the one
side, and Sybaris and Tarentum on the other,—had been great and
of long standing, so that there was more than one motive to
determine him to the coast of Italy; in which direction also his
contemporary Xenophanês, the founder of the Eleatic school of
philosophy, emigrated, seemingly, about the same time,—from
Kolophon to Zanklê, Katana, and Elea.[727]
Kroton and Sybaris were at this time in their fullest prosperity,—
among the first and most prosperous cities of the Hellenic name. To
the former of the two Pythagoras directed his course. A council of
one thousand persons, taken from among the heirs and
representatives of the principal proprietors at its first foundation,
was here invested with the supreme authority: in what manner the
executive offices were filled, we have no information. Besides a
great extent of power, and a numerous population, the large mass of
whom had no share in the political franchise, Kroton stood at this
time distinguished for two things,—the general excellence of the
bodily habit of the citizens, attested, in part, by the number of
conquerors furnished to the Olympic games,—and the superiority of
its physicians, or surgeons.[728] These two points were, in fact,
greatly connected with each other. For the therapeutics of the day
consisted not so much of active remedies as of careful diet and
regimen; while the trainer, who dictated the life of an athlete during
his long and fatiguing preparation for an Olympic contest, and the
professional superintendent of the youths who frequented the public
gymnasia, followed out the same general views, and acted upon the
same basis of knowledge, as the physician who prescribed for a
state of positive bad health.[729] Of medical education properly so
called, especially of anatomy, there was then little or nothing. The
physician acquired his knowledge from observation of men sick as
well as healthy, and from a careful notice of the way in which the
human body was acted upon by surrounding agents and
circumstances: and this same knowledge was not less necessary for
the trainer; so that the same place which contained the best men in
the latter class was also likely to be distinguished in the former. It is](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-80-2048.jpg)
![not improbable that this celebrity of Kroton may have been one of
the reasons which determined Pythagoras to go thither; for among
the precepts ascribed to him, precise rules as to diet and bodily
regulation occupy a prominent place. The medical or surgical
celebrity of Dêmokêdês (son-in-law of the Pythagorean Milo), to
whom allusion has been made in a former chapter, is
contemporaneous with the presence of Pythagoras at Kroton; and
the medical men of Magna Græcia maintained themselves in credit,
as rivals of the schools of the Asklepiads at Kôs and Knidus,
throughout all the fifth and fourth centuries B. C.
The biographers of Pythagoras tell us that his arrival there, his
preaching, and his conduct, produced an effect almost electric upon
the minds of the people, with an extensive reform, public as well as
private. Political discontent was repressed, incontinence disappeared,
luxury became discredited, and the women, hastened to exchange
their golden ornaments for the simplest attire. No less than two
thousand persons were converted at his first preaching; and so
effective were his discourses to the youth, that the Supreme Council
of One Thousand invited him into their assembly, solicited his advice,
and even offered to constitute him their prytanis, or president, while
his wife and daughter were placed at the head of the religious
processions of females.[730] Nor was his influence confined to
Kroton. Other towns in Italy and Sicily,—Sybaris, Metapontum,
Rhêgium, Katana, Himera, etc., all felt the benefit of his
exhortations, which extricated some of them even from slavery. Such
are the tales of which the biographers of Pythagoras are full.[731]
And we see that even the disciples of Aristotle, about the year 300
B. C.,—Aristoxenus, Dikæarchus, Herakleidês of Pontus, etc., are
hardly less charged with them than the Neo-Pythagoreans of three
or four centuries later: they doubtless heard them from their
contemporary Pythagoreans,[732] the last members of a declining
sect, among whom the attributes of the primitive founder passed for
godlike, but who had no memorials, no historical judgment, and no
means of forming a true conception of Kroton as it stood in 530 B. C.
[733]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-81-2048.jpg)
![gods will not be angry with him.” The gods, it seems, could not
pardon the inquisitive mortal who deliberately pried into their
secrets. Amidst the ornaments with which Athens was decorated
during the free working of her democracy, the glories of Marathon of
course occupied a conspicuous place. The battle was painted on one
of the compartments of the portico called Pœkilê, wherein, amidst
several figures of gods and heroes,—Athênê, Hêraklês, Theseus,
Echetlus, and the local patron of Marathon,—were seen honored and
prominent the polemarch Kallimachus and the general Miltiadês,
while the Platæans were distinguished by their Bœotian leather
casques.[671] And the sixth of the month Boëdromion, the
anniversary of the battle, was commemorated by an annual
ceremony, even down to the time of Plutarch.[672]
Two thousand Spartans, starting from their city, immediately after
the full moon, reached the frontier of Attica, on the third day of their
march,—a surprising effort, when we consider that the total distance
from Sparta to Athens was about one hundred and fifty miles. They
did not arrive, however, until the battle had been fought, and the
Persians departed; but curiosity led them to the field of Marathon to
behold the dead bodies of the Persians, after which they returned
home, bestowing well-merited praise on the victors.
Datis and Artaphernês returned across the Ægean with their
Eretrian prisoners to Asia; stopping for a short time at the island of
Mykonos, where discovery was made of a gilt image of Apollo carried
off as booty in a Phenician ship. Datis went himself to restore it to
Dêlos, requesting the Delians to carry it back to the Delium, or
temple of Apollo, on the eastern coast of Bœotia: the Delians,
however, chose to keep the statue until it was reclaimed from them
twenty years afterwards by the Thebans. On reaching Asia, the
Persian generals conducted their prisoners up to the court of Susa,
and into the presence of Darius. Though he had been vehemently
incensed against them, yet when he saw them in his power, his
wrath abated, and he manifested no desire to kill or harm them.
They were planted at a spot called Arderikka, in the Kissian territory,](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-51-2048.jpg)
![one of the resting-places on the road from Sardis to Susa, and about
twenty-six miles distant from the latter place: Herodotus seems
himself to have seen their descendants there on his journey between
the two capitals, and to have had the satisfaction of talking to them
in Greek,—which we may well conceive to have made some
impression upon him, at a spot distant by nearly three months’
journey from the coast of Ionia.[673]
Happy would it have been for Miltiadês if he had shared the
honorable death of the polemarch Kallimachus,—“animam exhalasset
opimam,”—in seeking to fire the ships of the defeated Persians at
Marathon. The short sequel of his history will be found in melancholy
contrast with the Marathonian heroism.
His reputation had been great before the battle, and after it the
admiration and confidence of his countrymen knew no bounds: it
appears, indeed, to have reached such a pitch that his head was
turned, and he lost both his patriotism and his prudence. He
proposed to his countrymen to incur the cost of equipping an
armament of seventy ships, with an adequate armed force, and to
place it altogether at his discretion; giving them no intimation
whither he intended to go, but merely assuring them that, if they
would follow him, he would conduct them to a land where gold was
abundant, and thus enrich them. Such a promise, from the lips of
the recent victor of Marathon, was sufficient, and the armament was
granted, no man except Miltiadês knowing what was its destination.
He sailed immediately to the island of Paros, laid siege to the town,
and sent in a herald to require from the inhabitants a contribution of
one hundred talents, on pain of entire destruction. His pretence for
this attack was, that the Parians had furnished a trireme to Datis for
the Persian fleet at Marathon; but his real motive, so Herodotus
assures us,[674] was vindictive animosity against a Parian citizen
named Lysagoras, who had exasperated the Persian general
Hydarnês against him. The Parians amused him at first with
evasions, until they had procured a little delay to repair the defective
portions of their wall, after which they set him at defiance; and](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-52-2048.jpg)
![Miltiadês in vain prosecuted hostilities against them for the space of
twenty-six days: he ravaged the island, but his attacks made no
impression upon the town.[675] Beginning to despair of success in his
military operations, he entered into some negotiation—such at least
was the tale of the Parians themselves—with a Parian woman named
Timô, priestess or attendant in the temple of Dêmêtêr, near the
town-gates. This woman, promising to reveal to him a secret which
would place Paros in his power, induced him to visit by night a
temple to which no male person was admissible. He leaped the
exterior fence, and approached the sanctuary; but on coming near,
was seized with a panic terror and ran away, almost out of his
senses: on leaping the same fence to get back, he strained or
bruised his thigh badly, and became utterly disabled. In this
melancholy state he was placed on ship-board; the siege being
raised, and the whole armament returning to Athens.
Vehement was the indignation both of the armament and of the
remaining Athenians against Miltiadês on his return;[676] and
Xanthippus, father of the great Periklês, became the spokesman of
this feeling. He impeached Miltiadês before the popular judicature as
having been guilty of deceiving the people, and as having deserved
the penalty of death. The accused himself, disabled by his injured
thigh, which even began to show symptoms of gangrene, was
unable to stand, or to say a word in his own defence: he lay on his
couch before the assembled judges, while his friends made the best
case they could in his behalf. Defence, it appears, there was none;
all they could do, was to appeal to his previous services: they
reminded the people largely and emphatically of the inestimable
exploit of Marathon, coming in addition to his previous conquest of
Lemnos. The assembled dikasts, or jurors, showed their sense of
these powerful appeals by rejecting the proposition of his accuser to
condemn him to death; but they imposed on him the penalty of fifty
talents “for his iniquity.”
Cornelius Nepos affirms that these fifty talents represented the
expenses incurred by the state in fitting out the armament; but we](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-53-2048.jpg)
![may more probably believe, looking to the practice of the Athenian
dikastery in criminal cases, that fifty talents was the minor penalty
actually proposed by the defenders of Miltiadês themselves, as a
substitute for the punishment of death. In those penal cases at
Athens, where the punishment was not fixed beforehand by the
terms of the law, if the person accused was found guilty, it was
customary to submit to the jurors, subsequently and separately, the
question as to amount of punishment: first, the accuser named the
penalty which he thought suitable; next, the accused person was
called upon to name an amount of penalty for himself, and the jurors
were constrained to take their choice between these two,—no third
gradation of penalty being admissible for consideration.[677] Of
course, under such circumstances, it was the interest of the accused
party to name, even in his own case, some real and serious penalty,
—something which the jurors might be likely to deem not wholly
inadequate to his crime just proved; for if he proposed some penalty
only trifling, he drove them to prefer the heavier sentence
recommended by his opponent. Accordingly, in the case of Miltiadês,
his friends, desirous of inducing the jurors to refuse their assent to
the punishment of death, proposed a fine of fifty talents as the self-
assessed penalty of the defendant; and perhaps they may have
stated, as an argument in the case, that such a sum would suffice to
defray the costs of the expedition. The fine was imposed, but
Miltiadês did not live to pay it; his injured limb mortified, and he
died, leaving the fine to be paid by his son Kimon.
According to Cornelius Nepos, Diodorus, and Plutarch, he was
put in prison, after having been fined, and there died.[678] But
Herodotus does not mention this imprisonment, and the fact appears
to me improbable: he would hardly have omitted to notice it, had it
come to his knowledge. Immediate imprisonment of a person fined
by the dikastery, until his fine was paid, was not the natural and
ordinary course of Athenian procedure, though there were particular
cases in which such aggravation was added. Usually, a certain time
was allowed for payment,[679] before absolute execution was
resorted to, but the person under sentence became disfranchised](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-54-2048.jpg)
![and excluded from all political rights, from the very instant of his
condemnation as a public debtor, until the fine was paid. Now in the
instance of Miltiadês, the lamentable condition of his wounded thigh
rendered escape impossible,—so that there would be no special
motive for departing from the usual practice, and imprisoning him
forthwith: moreover, if he was not imprisoned forthwith, he would
not be imprisoned at all, since he cannot have lived many days after
his trial.[680] To carry away the suffering general in his couch,
incapable of raising himself even to plead for his own life, from the
presence of the dikasts to a prison, would not only have been a
needless severity, but could hardly have failed to imprint itself on the
sympathies and the memory of all the beholders; so that Herodotus
would have been likely to hear and mention it, if it had really
occurred. I incline to believe therefore that Miltiadês died at home:
all accounts concur in stating that he died of the mortal bodily hurt
which already disabled him even at the moment of his trial, and that
his son Kimon paid the fifty talents after his death. If he could pay
them, probably his father could have paid them also. And this is an
additional reason for believing that there was no imprisonment,—for
nothing but non-payment could have sent him to prison; and to
rescue the suffering Miltiadês from being sent thither, would have
been the first and strongest desire of all sympathizing friends.
Thus closed the life of the conqueror of Marathon. The last act of
it produces an impression so mournful, and even shocking,—his
descent from the pinnacle of glory to defeat, mean tampering with a
temple-servant, mortal bodily hurt, undefended ignominy, and death
under a sentence of heavy fine, is so abrupt and unprepared,—that
readers, ancient and modern, have not been satisfied without finding
some one to blame for it: we must except Herodotus, our original
authority, who recounts the transaction without dropping a single
hint of blame against any one. To speak ill of the people, as
Machiavel has long ago observed,[681] is a strain in which every one
at all times, even under a democratical government, indulges with
impunity and without provoking any opponent to reply; and in this
instance, the hard fate of Miltiadês has been imputed to the vices of](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-55-2048.jpg)
![ground for such a change; and in the case of Miltiadês, that question
must be answered in the affirmative.
In regard to the charge of ingratitude against the Athenians, this
last-mentioned point—sufficiency of reason—stands tacitly admitted.
It is conceded that Miltiadês deserved punishment for his conduct in
reference to the Parian expedition, but it is nevertheless maintained
that gratitude for his previous services at Marathon ought to have
exempted him from punishment. But the sentiment upon which,
after all, this exculpation rests, will not bear to be drawn out and
stated in the form of a cogent or justifying reason. For will any one
really contend, that a man who has rendered great services to the
public, is to receive in return a license of unpunished misconduct for
the future? Is the general, who has earned applause by eminent skill
and important victories, to be recompensed by being allowed the
liberty of betraying his trust afterwards, and exposing his country to
peril, without censure or penalty? This is what no one intends to
vindicate deliberately; yet a man must be prepared to vindicate it,
when he blames the Athenians for ingratitude towards Miltiadês. For
if all that be meant is, that gratitude for previous services ought to
pass, not as a receipt in full for subsequent crime, but as an
extenuating circumstance in the measurement of the penalty, the
answer is, that it was so reckoned in the Athenian treatment of
Miltiadês.[682] His friends had nothing whatever to urge, against the
extreme penalty proposed by his accuser, except these previous
services,—which influenced the dikasts sufficiently to induce them to
inflict the lighter punishment instead of the heavier. Now the whole
amount of punishment inflicted consisted in a fine which certainly
was not beyond his reasonable means of paying, or of prevailing
upon friends to pay for him, since his son Kimon actually did pay it.
And those who blame the Athenians for ingratitude,—unless they are
prepared to maintain the doctrine that previous services are to pass
as full acquittal for future crime,—have no other ground left except
to say that the fine was too high; that instead of being fifty talents,
it ought to have been no more than forty, thirty, twenty, or ten
talents. Whether they are right in this, I will not take upon me to](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-57-2048.jpg)
![pronounce. If the amount was named on behalf of the accused
party, the dikastery had no legal power of diminishing it; but it is
within such narrow limits that the question actually lies, when
transferred from the province of sentiment to that of reason. It will
be recollected that the death of Miltiadês arose neither from his trial
nor his fine, but from the hurt in his thigh.
The charge of ingratitude against the Athenian popular juries
really amounts to this,—that, in trying a person accused of present
crime or fault, they were apt to confine themselves too strictly and
exclusively to the particular matter of charge, either forgetting, or
making too little account of, past services which he might have
rendered. Whoever imagines that such was the habit of Athenian
dikasts, must have studied the orators to very little purpose. Their
real defect was the very opposite: they were too much disposed to
wander from the special issue before them, and to be affected by
appeals to previous services and conduct.[683] That which an
accused person at Athens usually strives to produce is, an
impression in the minds of the dikasts favorable to his general
character and behavior. Of course, he meets the particular allegation
of his accuser as well as he can, but he never fails also to remind
them emphatically, how well he has performed his general duties of
a citizen,—how many times he has served in military expeditions,—
how many trierarchies and liturgies he has performed, and
performed with splendid efficiency. In fact, the claim of an accused
person to acquittal is made to rest too much on his prior services,
and too little upon innocence or justifying matter as to the particular
indictment. When we come down to the time of the orators, I shall
be prepared to show that such indisposition to confine themselves to
a special issue was one of the most serious defects of the assembled
dikasts at Athens. It is one which we should naturally expect from a
body of private, non-professional citizens assembled for the
occasion, and which belongs more or less to the system of jury-trial
everywhere; but it is the direct reverse of that ingratitude, or
habitual insensibility to prior services, for which they have been so
often denounced.](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-58-2048.jpg)
![The fate of Miltiadês, then, so far from illustrating either the
fickleness or the ingratitude of his countrymen, attests their just
appreciation of deserts. It also illustrates another moral, of no small
importance to the right comprehension of Grecian affairs; it teaches
us the painful lesson, how perfectly maddening were the effects of a
copious draught of glory on the temperament of an enterprising and
ambitious Greek. There can be no doubt, that the rapid transition, in
the course of about one week, from Athenian terror before the battle
to Athenian exultation after it, must have produced demonstrations
towards Miltiadês such as were never paid towards any other man in
the whole history of the commonwealth. Such unmeasured
admiration unseated his rational judgment, so that his mind became
abandoned to the reckless impulses of insolence, and antipathy, and
rapacity;—that distempered state, for which (according to Grecian
morality) the retributive Nemesis was ever on the watch, and which,
in his case, she visited with a judgment startling in its rapidity, as
well as terrible in its amount. Had Miltiadês been the same man
before the battle of Marathon as he became after it, the battle might
probably have turned out a defeat instead of a victory.
Dêmosthenês, indeed,[684] in speaking of the wealth and luxury of
political leaders in his own time, and the profuse rewards bestowed
upon them by the people, pointed in contrast to the house of
Miltiadês as being noway more splendid than that of a private man.
But though Miltiadês might continue to live in a modest
establishment, he received from his countrymen marks of admiration
and deference such as were never paid to any citizen before or after
him; and, after all, admiration and deference constitute the precious
essence of popular reward. No man except Miltiadês ever dared to
raise his voice in the Athenian assembly, and say: “Give me a fleet of
ships: do not ask what I am going to do with them, but only follow
me, and I will enrich you.” Herein we may read the unmeasured
confidence which the Athenians placed in their victorious general,
and the utter incapacity of a leading Greek to bear it without mental
depravation; while we learn from it to draw the melancholy
inference, that one result of success was to make the successful
leader one of the most dangerous men in the community. We shall](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-59-2048.jpg)
![benefactors; and the history of Miltiadês illustrates it in a manner no
less pointed than painful.
I have already remarked that the fickleness, which has been so
largely imputed to the Athenian democracy in their dealings with
him, is nothing more than a reasonable change of opinion on the
best grounds. Nor can it be said that fickleness was in any case an
attribute of the Athenian democracy. It is a well-known fact, that
feelings, or opinions, or modes of judging, which have once obtained
footing among a large number of people, are more lasting and
unchangeable than those which belong only to one or a few;
insomuch that the judgments and actions of the many admit of
being more clearly understood as to the past, and more certainly
predicted as to the future. If we are to predicate any attribute of the
multitude, it will rather be that of undue tenacity than undue
fickleness; and there will occur nothing in the course of this history
to prove that the Athenian people changed their opinions on
insufficient grounds more frequently than an unresponsible one or
few would have changed.
But there were two circumstances in the working of the Athenian
democracy which imparted to it an appearance of greater fickleness,
without the reality: First, that the manifestations and changes of
opinion were all open, undisguised, and noisy: the people gave
utterance to their present impression, whatever it was, with perfect
frankness; if their opinions were really changed, they had no shame
or scruple in avowing it. Secondly,—and this is a point of capital
importance in the working of democracy generally,—the present
impression, whatever it might be, was not merely undisguised in its
manifestations, but also had a tendency to be exaggerated in its
intensity. This arose from their habit of treating public affairs in
multitudinous assemblages, the well-known effect of which is, to
inflame sentiment in every man’s bosom by mere contact with a
sympathizing circle of neighbors. Whatever the sentiment might be,
—fear, ambition, cupidity, wrath, compassion, piety, patriotic
devotion, etc,[685]—and whether well-founded or ill-founded, it was](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-61-2048.jpg)
![constantly influenced more or less by such intensifying cause. This is
a defect which of course belongs in a certain degree to all exercise
of power by numerous bodies, even though they be representative
bodies,—especially when the character of the people, instead of
being comparatively sedate and slow to move, like the English, is
quick, impressible, and fiery, like Greeks or Italians; but it operated
far more powerfully on the self-acting Dêmos assembled in the Pnyx.
It was in fact the constitutional malady of the democracy, of which
the people were themselves perfectly sensible,—as I shall show
hereafter from the securities which they tried to provide against it,—
but which no securities could ever wholly eradicate. Frequency of
public assemblies, far from aggravating the evil, had a tendency to
lighten it. The people thus became accustomed to hear and balance
many different views as a preliminary to ultimate judgment; they
contracted personal interest and esteem for a numerous class of
dissentient speakers; and they even acquired a certain practical
consciousness of their own liability to error. Moreover, the diffusion
of habits of public speaking, by means of the sophists and the
rhetors, whom it has been so much the custom to disparage, tended
in the same direction,—to break the unity of sentiment among the
listening crowd, to multiply separate judgments, and to neutralize
the contagion of mere sympathizing impulse. These were important
deductions, still farther assisted by the superior taste and
intelligence of the Athenian people: but still, the inherent malady
remained,—excessive and misleading intensity of present sentiment.
It was this which gave such inestimable value to the ascendency of
Periklês, as depicted by Thucydidês: his hold on the people was so
firm, that he could always speak with effect against excess of the
reigning tone of feeling. “When Periklês (says the historian) saw the
people in a state of unseasonable and insolent confidence, he spoke
so as to cow them into alarm; when again they were in groundless
terror, he combated it, and brought them back to confidence.”[686]
We shall find Dêmosthenês, with far inferior ascendency, employed
in the same honorable task: the Athenian people often stood in need
of such correction, but unfortunately did not always find statesmen,
at once friendly and commanding, to administer it.](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-62-2048.jpg)
![These two attributes, then, belonged to the Athenian democracy;
first, their sentiments of every kind were manifested loudly and
openly; next, their sentiments tended to a pitch of great present
intensity. Of course, therefore, when they changed, the change of
sentiment stood prominent, and forced itself upon every one’s
notice,—being a transition from one strong sentiment past to
another strong sentiment present.[687] And it was because such
alterations, when they did take place, stood out so palpably to
remark, that the Athenian people have drawn upon themselves the
imputation of fickleness: for it is not at all true, I repeat, that
changes of sentiment were more frequently produced in them by
frivolous or insufficient causes, than changes of sentiment in other
governments.](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-63-2048.jpg)
![CHAPTER XXXVII.
IONIC PHILOSOPHERS. — PYTHAGORAS. —
KROTON AND SYBARIS.
The history of the powerful Grecian cities in Italy and Sicily,
between the accession of Peisistratus and the battle of Marathon, is
for the most part unknown to us. Phalaris, despot of Agrigentum in
Sicily, made for himself an unenviable name during this obscure
interval. His reign seems to coincide in time with the earlier part of
the rule of Peisistratus (about 560-540 B. C.), and the few and vague
statements which we find respecting it,[688] merely show us that it
was a period of extortion and cruelty, even beyond the ordinary
licence of Grecian despots. The reality of the hollow bull of brass,
which Phalaris was accustomed to heat in order to shut up his
victims in it and burn them, appears to be better authenticated than
the nature of the story would lead us to presume: for it is not only
noticed by Pindar, but even the actual instrument of this torture, the
brazen bull itself,[689]—which had been taken away from Agrigentum
as a trophy by the Carthaginians when they captured the town, was
restored by the Romans, on the subjugation of Carthage, to its
original domicile. Phalaris is said to have acquired the supreme
command, by undertaking the task of building a great temple[690] to
Zeus Polieus on the citadel rock; a pretence whereby he was enabled
to assemble and arm a number of workmen and devoted partisans,
whom he employed, at the festival of the Thesmophoria, to put
down the authorities. He afterwards disarmed the citizens by a
stratagem, and committed cruelties which rendered him so
abhorred, that a sudden rising of the people, headed by Têlemachus](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-64-2048.jpg)
![(ancestor of the subsequent despot, Thêro), overthrew and slew
him. A severe revenge was taken on his partisans after his fall.[691]
During the interval between 540-500 B. C., events of much
importance occurred among the Italian Greeks,—especially at Kroton
and Sybaris,—events, unhappily, very imperfectly handed down.
Between these two periods fall both the war between Sybaris and
Kroton, and the career and ascendency of Pythagoras. In connection
with this latter name, it will be requisite to say a few words
respecting the other Grecian philosophers of the sixth century B. C.
I have, in a former chapter, noticed and characterized those
distinguished persons called the Seven Wise Men of Greece, whose
celebrity falls in the first half of this century,—men not so much
marked by scientific genius as by practical sagacity and foresight in
the appreciation of worldly affairs, and enjoying a high degree of
political respect from their fellow-citizens. One of them, however, the
Milesian Thalês, claims our notice, not only on this ground, but also
as the earliest known name in the long line of Greek scientific
investigators. His life, nearly contemporary with that of Solon,
belongs seemingly to the interval about 640-550 B. C.: the stories
mentioned in Herodotus—perhaps borrowed in part from the
Milesian Hekatæus—are sufficient to show that his reputation for
wisdom, as well as for science, continued to be very great, even a
century after his death, among his fellow-citizens. And he marks an
important epoch in the progress of the Greek mind, as having been
the first man to depart both in letter and spirit from the Hesiodic
Theogony, introducing the conception of substances with their
transformations and sequences, in place of that string of persons
and quasi-human attributes which had animated the old legendary
world. He is the father of what is called the Ionic philosophy, which
is considered as lasting from his time down to that of Sokratês; and
writers, ancient as well as modern, have professed to trace a
succession of philosophers, each one the pupil of the preceding,
between these two extreme epochs. But the appellation is, in truth,
undefined, and even incorrect, since nothing entitled to the name of](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-65-2048.jpg)
![assumption being a difficulty common to all systems of cosmogony,
and from which even this flexible and expansive hypothesis is not
exempt.
Now when Thalês disengaged Grecian philosophy from the old
mode of explanation, he did not at the same time disengage it from
the old problems and matters propounded for inquiry. These he
retained, and transmitted to his successors, as vague and vast as
they were at first conceived; and so they remained, though with
some transformations and modifications, together with many new
questions equally insoluble, substantially present to the Greeks
throughout their whole history, as the legitimate problems for
philosophical investigation. But these problems, adapted only to the
old elastic system of polytheistic explanation and omnipresent
personal agency, became utterly disproportioned to any impersonal
hypotheses such as those of Thalês and the philosophers after him,
—whether assumed physical laws, or plausible moral and
metaphysical dogmas, open to argumentative attack, and of course
requiring the like defence. To treat the visible world as a whole, and
inquire when and how it began, as well as into all its past changes,
—to discuss the first origin of men, animals, plants, the sun, the
stars, etc.,—to assign some comprehensive reason why motion or
change in general took place in the universe,—to investigate the
destinies of the human race, and to lay down some systematic
relation between them and the gods,—all these were topics
admitting of being conceived in many different ways, and set forth
with eloquent plausibility, but not reducible to any solution either
resting on scientific evidence, or commanding steady adherence
under a free scrutiny.[692]
At the time when the power of scientific investigation was scanty
and helpless, the problems proposed were thus such as to lie out of
the reach of science in its largest compass. Gradually, indeed,
subjects more special and limited, and upon which experience, or
deductions from experience, could be brought to bear, were added
to the list of quæsita, and examined with great profit and](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-67-2048.jpg)
![by the Grecian inquirers of the fourth century B. C., the first
beginnings of geometry, astronomy, and physiology in its large and
really appropriate sense, the scientific study of nature: for the Greek
word denoting nature (φύσις), first comes into comprehensive use
about this time (as I have remarked in an earlier chapter),[693] with
its derivatives physics and physiology, as distinguished from the
theology of the old poets. Little stress can be laid on those
elementary propositions in geometry which are specified as
discovered, or as first demonstrated, by Thalês,—still less upon the
solar eclipse respecting which, according to Herodotus, he
determined beforehand the year of occurrence.[694] But the main
doctrine of his physiology,—using that word in its larger Greek
sense,—is distinctly attested. He stripped Oceanus and Tethys,
primeval parents of the gods in the Homeric theogony, of their
personality,—and laid down water, or fluid substance, as the single
original element from which everything came, and into which
everything returned.[695] The doctrine of one eternal element,
remaining always the same in its essence, but indefinitely variable in
its manifestations to sense, was thus first introduced to the
discussion of the Grecian public. We have no means of knowing the
reasons by which Thalês supported this opinion, nor could even
Aristotle do more than conjecture what they might have been; but
one of the statements urged on behalf of it,—that the earth itself
rested on water,[696]—we may safely refer to the Milesian himself, for
it would hardly have been advanced at a later age. Moreover, Thalês
is reported to have held, that everything was living and full of gods;
and that the magnet, especially, was a living thing. Thus the gods,
as far as we can pretend to follow opinions so very faintly
transmitted, are conceived as active powers, and causes of
changeful manifestation, attached to the primeval substance:[697]
the universe being assimilated to an organized body or system.
Respecting Hippo,—who reproduced the theory of Thalês under a
more generalized form of expression, substituting, in place of water,
moisture, or something common to air and water,[698]—we do not
know whether he belonged to the sixth or the fifth century B. C. But](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-69-2048.jpg)
![Anaximander, Xenophanês, and Pherekydês belong to the latter half
of the sixth century. Anaximander, the son of Praxiadês, was a native
of Milêtus,—Xenophanês, a native of Kolophon; the former, among
the earliest expositors of doctrine in prose,[699] while the latter
committed his opinions to the old medium of verse. Anaximander
seems to have taken up the philosophical problem, while he
materially altered the hypothesis of his predecessor Thalês. Instead
of the primeval fluid of the latter, he supposed a primeval principle,
without any actual determining qualities whatever, but including all
qualities potentially, and manifesting them in an infinite variety from
its continually self-changing nature,—a principle, which was nothing
in itself, yet had the capacity of producing any and all
manifestations, however contrary to each other,[700]—a primeval
something, whose essence it was to be eternally productive of
different phenomena,—a sort of mathematical point, which counts
for nothing in itself, but is vigorous in generating lines to any extent
that may be desired. In this manner, Anaximander professed to give
a comprehensive explanation of change in general, or generation, or
destruction,—how it happened that one sensible thing began and
another ceased to exist,—according to the vague problems which
these early inquirers were in the habit of setting to themselves.[701]
He avoided that which the first philosophers especially dreaded, the
affirmation that generation could take place out of Nothing; yet the
primeval Something, which he supposed was only distinguished from
nothing by possessing this very power of generation.
In his theory, he passed from the province of physics into that of
metaphysics. He first introduced into Grecian philosophy that
important word which signifies a beginning or a principle,[702] and
first opened that metaphysical discussion, which was carried on in
various ways throughout the whole period of Grecian philosophy, as
to the one and the many—the continuous and the variable—that
which exists eternally, as distinguished from that which comes and
passes away in ever-changing manifestations. His physiology, or
explanation of nature, thus conducted the mind into a different route
from that suggested by the hypothesis of Thalês, which was built](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-70-2048.jpg)
![upon physical considerations, and was therefore calculated to
suggest and stimulate observations of physical phenomena for the
purpose of verifying or confuting it,—while the hypothesis of
Anaximander admitted only of being discussed dialectically, or by
reasonings expressed in general language; reasonings sometimes,
indeed, referring to experience for the purpose of illustration, but
seldom resting on it, and never looking out for it as a necessary
support. The physical explanation of nature, however, once
introduced by Thalês, although deserted by Anaximander, was taken
up by Anaximenês and others afterwards, and reproduced with
many divergences of doctrine,—yet always more or less entangled
and perplexed with metaphysical additions, since the two
departments were never clearly parted throughout all Grecian
philosophy. Of these subsequent physical philosophers I shall speak
hereafter: at present, I confine myself to the thinkers of the sixth
century B. C., among whom Anaximander stands prominent, not as
the follower of Thalês, but as the author of an hypothesis both new
and tending in a different direction.
It was not merely as the author of this hypothesis, however, that
Anaximander enlarged the Greek mind and roused the powers of
thought: we find him also mentioned as distinguished in astronomy
and geometry. He is said to have been the first to establish a sun-
dial in Greece, to construct a sphere, and to explain the obliquity of
the ecliptic;[703] how far such alleged authorship really belongs to
him, we cannot be certain,—but there is one step of immense
importance which he is clearly affirmed to have made. He was the
first to compose a treatise on the geography of the land and sea
within his cognizance, and to construct a chart or map founded
thereupon,—seemingly a tablet of brass. Such a novelty, wondrous
even to the rude and ignorant, was calculated to stimulate
powerfully inquisitive minds, and from it may be dated the
commencement of Grecian rational geography,—not the least
valuable among the contributions of this people to the stock of
human knowledge.](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-71-2048.jpg)
![Xenophanês of Kolophon, somewhat younger than Anaximander,
and nearly contemporary with Pythagoras (seemingly from about
570-480 B. C.), migrated from Kolophon[704] to Zanklê and Katana in
Sicily and Elea in Italy, soon after the time when Ionia became
subject to the Persians, (540-530 B. C.) He was the founder of what is
called the Eleatic school of philosophers,—a real school, since it
appears that Parmenidês, Zeno, and Melissus, pursued and
developed, in a great degree, the train of speculation which had
been begun by Xenophanês,—doubtless with additions and
variations of their own, but especially with a dialectic power which
belongs to the age of Periklês, and is unknown in the sixth century
B. C. He was the author of more than one poem of considerable
length, one on the foundation of Kolophon and another on that of
Elea; besides his poem on Nature, wherein his philosophical
doctrines were set forth.[705] His manner appears to have been
controversial and full of asperity towards antagonists; but what is
most remarkable is the plain-spoken manner in which he declared
himself against the popular religion, and in which he denounced as
abominable the descriptions of the gods given by Homer and Hesiod.
[706]
He is said to have controverted the doctrines both of Thalês and
Pythagoras: this is probable enough; but he seems to have taken his
start from the philosophy of Anaximander,—not, however, to adopt
it, but to reverse it,—and to set forth an opinion which we may call
its contrary. Nature, in the conception of Anaximander, consisted of a
Something having no other attribute except the unlimited power of
generating and cancelling phenomenal changes: in this doctrine, the
something or substratum existed only in and for those changes, and
could not be said to exist at all in any other sense: the permanent
was thus merged and lost in the variable,—the one in the many.
Xenophanês laid down the exact opposite: he conceived Nature as
one unchangeable and indivisible whole, spherical, animated,
endued with reason, and penetrated by or indeed identical with God:
he denied the objective reality of all change, or generation, or
destruction, which he seems to have considered as only changes or](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-72-2048.jpg)
![modifications in the percipient, and perhaps different in one
percipient and another. That which exists, he maintained, could not
have been generated, nor could it ever be destroyed: there was
neither real generation nor real destruction of anything; but that
which men took for such, was the change in their own feelings and
ideas. He thus recognized the permanent without the variable,[707]—
the one without the many. And his treatment of the received
religious creed was in harmony with such physical or metaphysical
hypothesis; for while he held the whole of Nature to be God, without
parts or change, he at the same time pronounced the popular gods
to be entities of subjective fancy, imagined by men after their own
model: if oxen or lions were to become religious, he added, they
would in like manner provide for themselves gods after their
respective shapes and characters.[708] This hypothesis, which
seemed to set aside altogether the study of the sensible world as a
source of knowledge, was expounded briefly, and as it should seem,
obscurely and rudely, by Xenophanês; at least we may infer thus
much from the slighting epithet applied to him by Aristotle.[709] But
his successors, Parmenidês and Zeno, in the succeeding century,
expanded it considerably, supported it with extraordinary acuteness
of dialectics, and even superadded a second part, in which the
phenomena of sense—though considered only as appearances, not
partaking in the reality of the one Ens—were yet explained by a new
physical hypothesis; so that they will be found to exercise great
influence over the speculations both of Plato and Aristotle. We
discover in Xenophanês, moreover, a vein of skepticism, and a
mournful despair as to the attainability of certain knowledge,[710]
which the nature of his philosophy was well calculated to suggest,
and in which the sillograph Timon of the third century B. C., who
seems to have spoken of Xenophanês better than of most of the
other philosophers, powerfully sympathized.
The cosmogony of Pherekydês of Syrus, contemporary of
Anaximander and among the teachers of Pythagoras, seems,
according to the fragments preserved, a combination of the old
legendary fancies with Orphic mysticism,[711] and probably exercised](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-73-2048.jpg)
![little influence over the subsequent course of Grecian philosophy. By
what has been said of Thalês, Anaximander, and Xenophanês, it will
be seen that the sixth century B. C. witnessed the opening of several
of those roads of intellectual speculation which the later
philosophers pursued farther, or at least from which they branched
off. Before the year 500 B. C. many interesting questions were thus
brought into discussion, which Solon, who died about 558 B. C., had
never heard of,—just as he may probably never have seen the map
of Anaximander. But neither of these two distinguished men—
Anaximander or Xenophanês—was anything more than a speculative
inquirer. The third eminent name of this century, of whom I am now
about to speak,—Pythagoras, combined in his character disparate
elements which require rather a longer development.
Pythagoras was founder of a brotherhood, originally brought
together by a religious influence, and with observances approaching
to monastic peculiarity,—working in a direction at once religious,
political, and scientific, and exercising for some time a real political
ascendency,—but afterwards banished from government and state
affairs into a sectarian privacy with scientific pursuits, not without,
however, still producing some statesmen individually distinguished.
Amidst the multitude of false and apocryphal statements which
circulated in antiquity respecting this celebrated man, we find a few
important facts reasonably attested and deserving credence. He was
a native of Samos,[712] son of an opulent merchant named
Mnêsarchus,—or, according to some of his later and more fervent
admirers, of Apollo; born, as far as we can make out, about the 50th
Olympiad, or 580 B. C. On the many marvels recounted respecting his
youth, it is unnecessary to dwell. Among them may be numbered his
wide-reaching travels, said to have been prolonged for nearly thirty
years, to visit the Arabians, the Syrians, the Phenicians, the
Chaldæans, the Indians, and the Gallic Druids. But there is reason to
believe that he really visited Egypt[713]—perhaps also Phenicia—and
Babylon, then Chaldæan and independent. At the time when he saw
Egypt, between 560-540 B. C., about one century earlier than
Herodotus, it was under Amasis, the last of its own kings, with its](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-74-2048.jpg)
![peculiar native character yet unimpaired by foreign conquest, and
only slightly modified by the admission during the preceding century
of Grecian mercenary troops and traders. The spectacle of Egyptian
habits, the conversation of the priests, and the initiation into various
mysteries or secret rites and stories not accessible to the general
public, may very naturally have impressed the mind of Pythagoras,
and given him that turn for mystic observance, asceticism, and
peculiarity of diet and clothing,—which manifested itself from the
same cause among several of his contemporaries, but which was not
a common phenomenon in the primitive Greek religion. Besides
visiting Egypt, Pythagoras is also said to have profited by the
teaching of Thalês, of Anaximander, and of Pherekydês of Syros.[714]
Amidst the towns of Ionia, he would, moreover, have an opportunity
of conversing with many Greek navigators who had visited foreign
countries, especially Italy and Sicily. His mind seems to have been
acted upon and impelled by this combined stimulus,—partly towards
an imaginative and religious vein of speculation, with a life of mystic
observance,—partly towards that active exercise, both of mind and
body, which the genius of an Hellenic community so naturally tended
to suggest.
Of the personal doctrines or opinions of Pythagoras, whom we
must distinguish from Philolaus and the subsequent Pythagoreans,
we have little certain knowledge, though doubtless the first germ of
their geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, etc. must have proceeded
from him. But that he believed in the metempsychosis or
transmigration of the souls of deceased men into other men, as well
as into animals, we know, not only by other evidence, but also by
the testimony of his contemporary, the philosopher Xenophanês of
Elea. Pythagoras, seeing a dog beaten, and hearing him howl,
desired the striker to desist, saying: “It is the soul of a friend of
mine, whom I recognized by his voice.” This—together with the
general testimony of Hêrakleitus, that Pythagoras was a man of
extensive research and acquired instruction, but artful for mischief
and destitute of sound judgment—is all that we know about him
from contemporaries. Herodotus, two generations afterwards, while](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-75-2048.jpg)
![he conceives the Pythagoreans as a peculiar religious order,
intimates that both Orpheus and Pythagoras had derived the
doctrine of the metempsychosis from Egypt, but had pretended to it
as their own without acknowledgment.[715]
Pythagoras combines the character of a sophist (a man of large
observation, and clever, ascendent, inventive mind,—the original
sense of the word Sophist, prior to the polemics of the Platonic
school, and the only sense known to Herodotus[716]) with that of an
inspired teacher, prophet, and worker of miracles,—approaching to
and sometimes even confounded with the gods,—and employing all
these gifts to found a new special order of brethren, bound together
by religious rites and observances peculiar to themselves. In his
prominent vocation, analogous to that of Epimenidês, Orpheus, or
Melampus, he appears as the revealer of a mode of life calculated to
raise his disciples above the level of mankind, and to recommend
them to the favor of the gods; the Pythagorean life, like the Orphic
life,[717] being intended as the exclusive prerogative of the
brotherhood,—approached only by probation and initiatory
ceremonies which were adapted to select enthusiasts rather than to
an indiscriminate crowd,—and exacting entire mental devotion to the
master.[718] In these lofty pretensions the Agrigentine Empedoklês
seems to have greatly copied him, though with some varieties, about
half a century afterwards.[719] While Aristotle tells us that the
Krotoniates identified Pythagoras with the Hyperborean Apollo, the
satirical Timon pronounced him to have been “a juggler of solemn
speech, engaged in fishing for men.”[720] This is the same character,
looked at from the different points of view of the believer and the
unbeliever. There is, however, no reason for regarding Pythagoras as
an impostor, because experience seems to show, that while in
certain ages it is not difficult for a man to persuade others that he is
inspired, it is still less difficult for him to contract the same belief
himself.
Looking at the general type of Pythagoras, as conceived by
witnesses in and nearest to his own age,—Xenophanês, Hêrakleitus,](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-76-2048.jpg)
![Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Isokratês,[721]—we find in him chiefly the
religious missionary and schoolmaster, with little of the politician. His
efficiency in the latter character, originally subordinate, first becomes
prominent in those glowing fancies which the later Pythagoreans
communicated to Aristoxenus and Dikæarchus. The primitive
Pythagoras inspired by the gods to reveal a new mode of life,[722]—
the Pythagorean life,—and to promise divine favor to a select and
docile few, as the recompense of strict ritual obedience, of austere
self-control, and of laborious training, bodily as well as mental. To
speak with confidence of the details of his training, ethical or
scientific, and of the doctrines which he promulgated, is impossible;
for neither he himself nor any of his disciples anterior to Philolaus—
who was separated from him by about one intervening generation—
left any memorials in writing.[723] Numbers and lines, studied partly
in their own mutual relations, partly under various symbolizing
fancies, presented themselves to him as the primary constituent
elements of the universe, and as a sort of magical key to
phenomena, physical as well as moral. And these mathematical
tendencies in his teaching, expanded by Pythagoreans, his
successors, and coinciding partly also, as has been before stated,
with the studies of Anaximander and Thalês, acquired more and
more development, so as to become one of the most glorious and
profitable manifestations of Grecian intellect. Living as Pythagoras
did at a time when the stock of experience was scanty, the license of
hypothesis unbounded, and the process of deduction without rule or
verifying test,—he was thus fortunate enough to strike into that
track of geometry and arithmetic, in which, from data of experience
few, simple, and obvious, an immense field of deductive and
verifiable investigation may be travelled over. We must at the same
time remark, however, that in his mind this track, which now seems
so straightforward and well defined, was clouded by strange fancies
which it is not easy to understand, and from which it was but
partially cleared by his successors. Of his spiritual training much is
said, though not upon very good authority. We hear of his memorial
discipline, his monastic self-scrutiny, his employment of music to
soothe disorderly passions,[724] his long novitiate of silence, his](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-77-2048.jpg)
![knowledge of physiognomy, which enabled him to detect even
without trial unworthy subjects, his peculiar diet, and his rigid care
for sobriety as well as for bodily vigor. He is also said to have
inculcated abstinence from animal food, and this feeling is so
naturally connected with the doctrine of the metempsychosis, that
we may well believe him to have entertained it, as Empedoklês also
did after him.[725] It is certain that there were peculiar observances,
and probably a certain measure of self-denial embodied in the
Pythagorean life; but on the other hand, it seems equally certain
that the members of the order cannot have been all subjected to the
same diet, or training, or studies. For Milo the Krotoniate was among
them,[726] the strongest man and the unparalleled wrestler of his
age,—who cannot possibly have dispensed with animal food and
ample diet (even setting aside the tales about his voracious
appetite), and is not likely to have bent his attention on speculative
study. Probably Pythagoras did not enforce the same bodily or
mental discipline on all, or at least knew when to grant
dispensations. The order, as it first stood under him, consisted of
men different both in temperament and aptitude, but bound
together by common religious observances and hopes, common
reverence for the master, and mutual attachment as well as pride in
each other’s success; and it must thus be distinguished from the
Pythagoreans of the fourth century B. C., who had no communion
with wrestlers, and comprised only ascetic, studious men, generally
recluse, though in some cases rising to political distinction.
The succession of these Pythagoreans, never very numerous,
seems to have continued until about 300 B. C., and then nearly died
out; being superseded by other schemes of philosophy more suited
to cultivated Greeks of the age after Sokratês. But during the time of
Cicero, two centuries afterwards, the orientalizing tendency—then
beginning to spread over the Grecian and Roman world, and
becoming gradually stronger and stronger—caused the Pythagorean
philosophy to be again revived. It was revived too, with little or none
of its scientific tendencies, but with more than its primitive religious
and imaginative fanaticism,—Apollonius of Tyana constituting himself](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-78-2048.jpg)
![—and even the intimacy between Milêtus and Knidus on the one
side, and Sybaris and Tarentum on the other,—had been great and
of long standing, so that there was more than one motive to
determine him to the coast of Italy; in which direction also his
contemporary Xenophanês, the founder of the Eleatic school of
philosophy, emigrated, seemingly, about the same time,—from
Kolophon to Zanklê, Katana, and Elea.[727]
Kroton and Sybaris were at this time in their fullest prosperity,—
among the first and most prosperous cities of the Hellenic name. To
the former of the two Pythagoras directed his course. A council of
one thousand persons, taken from among the heirs and
representatives of the principal proprietors at its first foundation,
was here invested with the supreme authority: in what manner the
executive offices were filled, we have no information. Besides a
great extent of power, and a numerous population, the large mass of
whom had no share in the political franchise, Kroton stood at this
time distinguished for two things,—the general excellence of the
bodily habit of the citizens, attested, in part, by the number of
conquerors furnished to the Olympic games,—and the superiority of
its physicians, or surgeons.[728] These two points were, in fact,
greatly connected with each other. For the therapeutics of the day
consisted not so much of active remedies as of careful diet and
regimen; while the trainer, who dictated the life of an athlete during
his long and fatiguing preparation for an Olympic contest, and the
professional superintendent of the youths who frequented the public
gymnasia, followed out the same general views, and acted upon the
same basis of knowledge, as the physician who prescribed for a
state of positive bad health.[729] Of medical education properly so
called, especially of anatomy, there was then little or nothing. The
physician acquired his knowledge from observation of men sick as
well as healthy, and from a careful notice of the way in which the
human body was acted upon by surrounding agents and
circumstances: and this same knowledge was not less necessary for
the trainer; so that the same place which contained the best men in
the latter class was also likely to be distinguished in the former. It is](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-80-2048.jpg)
![not improbable that this celebrity of Kroton may have been one of
the reasons which determined Pythagoras to go thither; for among
the precepts ascribed to him, precise rules as to diet and bodily
regulation occupy a prominent place. The medical or surgical
celebrity of Dêmokêdês (son-in-law of the Pythagorean Milo), to
whom allusion has been made in a former chapter, is
contemporaneous with the presence of Pythagoras at Kroton; and
the medical men of Magna Græcia maintained themselves in credit,
as rivals of the schools of the Asklepiads at Kôs and Knidus,
throughout all the fifth and fourth centuries B. C.
The biographers of Pythagoras tell us that his arrival there, his
preaching, and his conduct, produced an effect almost electric upon
the minds of the people, with an extensive reform, public as well as
private. Political discontent was repressed, incontinence disappeared,
luxury became discredited, and the women, hastened to exchange
their golden ornaments for the simplest attire. No less than two
thousand persons were converted at his first preaching; and so
effective were his discourses to the youth, that the Supreme Council
of One Thousand invited him into their assembly, solicited his advice,
and even offered to constitute him their prytanis, or president, while
his wife and daughter were placed at the head of the religious
processions of females.[730] Nor was his influence confined to
Kroton. Other towns in Italy and Sicily,—Sybaris, Metapontum,
Rhêgium, Katana, Himera, etc., all felt the benefit of his
exhortations, which extricated some of them even from slavery. Such
are the tales of which the biographers of Pythagoras are full.[731]
And we see that even the disciples of Aristotle, about the year 300
B. C.,—Aristoxenus, Dikæarchus, Herakleidês of Pontus, etc., are
hardly less charged with them than the Neo-Pythagoreans of three
or four centuries later: they doubtless heard them from their
contemporary Pythagoreans,[732] the last members of a declining
sect, among whom the attributes of the primitive founder passed for
godlike, but who had no memorials, no historical judgment, and no
means of forming a true conception of Kroton as it stood in 530 B. C.
[733]](https://crownmelresort.com/image.slidesharecdn.com/61178-250313035147-a4fa682d/75/Writing-a-C-Compiler-Build-a-Real-Programming-Language-from-Scratch-Nora-Sandler-81-2048.jpg)
![Oh Crap, I Forgot (Or Never Learned) C! [CodeMash 2010]](https://cdn.slidesharecdn.com/ss_thumbnails/oh-crap-i-never-learned-c-codemash-2010-100115163750-phpapp01-thumbnail.jpg?width=640&height=640&fit=bounds)
Writing a C Compiler Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch Nora Sandler
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- 6. CONTENTS IN DETAIL 1.TITLE PAGE 2. COPYRIGHT 3. DEDICATION 4. ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TECHNICAL REVIEWER 5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 6. INTRODUCTION 7. Who This Book Is For 8. Why Write a C Compiler? 9. Compilation from 10,000 Feet 10. What You’ll Build 11. How to Use This Book 12. The Test Suite 13. Extra Credit Features 14. Some Advice on Choosing an Implementation Language 15. System Requirements 16. Installing GCC and GDB on Linux 17. Installing the Command Line Developer Tools on macOS 18. Running on Apple Silicon 19. Validating Your Setup 20. Additional Resources 21. Let’s Go!
- 7. 22. PART I:THE BASICS 23. 1 A MINIMAL COMPILER 24. The Four Compiler Passes 25. Hello, Assembly! 26. The Compiler Driver 27. The Lexer 28. The Parser 29. An Example Abstract Syntax Tree 30. The AST Definition 31. The Formal Grammar 32. Recursive Descent Parsing 33. Assembly Generation 34. Code Emission 35. Summary 36. Additional Resources 37. 2 UNARY OPERATORS 38. Negation and Bitwise Complement in Assembly 39. The Stack 40. The Lexer 41. The Parser 42. TACKY: A New Intermediate Representation 43. Defining TACKY
- 8. 44. Generating TACKY 45. Generating Namesfor Temporary Variables 46. Updating the Compiler Driver 47. Assembly Generation 48. Converting TACKY to Assembly 49. Replacing Pseudoregisters 50. Fixing Up Instructions 51. Code Emission 52. Summary 53. Additional Resources 54. 3 BINARY OPERATORS 55. The Lexer 56. The Parser 57. The Trouble with Recursive Descent Parsing 58. The Adequate Solution: Refactoring the Grammar 59. The Better Solution: Precedence Climbing 60. Precedence Climbing in Action 61. TACKY Generation 62. Assembly Generation 63. Doing Arithmetic in Assembly 64. Converting Binary Operations to Assembly 65. Replacing Pseudoregisters 66. Fixing Up the idiv, add, sub, and imul Instructions
- 9. 67. Code Emission 68. Extra Credit:Bitwise Operators 69. Summary 70. Additional Resources 71. 4 LOGICAL AND RELATIONAL OPERATORS 72. Short-Circuiting Operators 73. The Lexer 74. The Parser 75. TACKY Generation 76. Adding Jumps, Copies, and Comparisons to the TACKY IR 77. Converting Short-Circuiting Operators to TACKY 78. Generating Labels 79. Comparisons and Jumps in Assembly 80. Comparisons and Status Flags 81. Conditional Set Instructions 82. Jump Instructions 83. Assembly Generation 84. Replacing Pseudoregisters 85. Fixing Up the cmp Instruction 86. Code Emission 87. Summary 88. Additional Resources
- 10. 89. 5 LOCAL VARIABLES 90. Variables,Declarations, and Assignment 91. The Lexer 92. The Parser 93. The Updated AST and Grammar 94. An Improved Precedence Climbing Algorithm 95. Semantic Analysis 96. Variable Resolution 97. The --validate Option 98. TACKY Generation 99. Variable and Assignment Expressions 00. Declarations, Statements, and Function Bodies 01. Functions with No return Statement 02. Extra Credit: Compound Assignment, Increment, and Decrement 03. Summary 04. 6 IF STATEMENTS AND CONDITIONAL EXPRESSIONS 05. The Lexer 06. The Parser 07. Parsing if Statements 08. Parsing Conditional Expressions 09. Variable Resolution 10. TACKY Generation
- 11. 11. Converting if Statementsto TACKY 12. Converting Conditional Expressions to TACKY 13. Extra Credit: Labeled Statements and goto 14. Summary 15. 7 COMPOUND STATEMENTS 16. The Scoop on Scopes 17. The Parser 18. Variable Resolution 19. Resolving Variables in Multiple Scopes 20. Updating the Variable Resolution Pseudocode 21. TACKY Generation 22. Summary 23. 8 LOOPS 24. Loops and How to Escape Them 25. The Lexer 26. The Parser 27. Semantic Analysis 28. Extending Variable Resolution 29. Loop Labeling 30. Implementing Loop Labeling 31. TACKY Generation 32. break and continue Statements
- 12. 33. do Loops 34. while Loops 35. forLoops 36. Extra Credit: switch Statements 37. Summary 38. 9 FUNCTIONS 39. Declaring, Defining, and Calling Functions 40. Declarations and Definitions 41. Function Calls 42. Identifier Linkage 43. Compiling Libraries 44. The Lexer 45. The Parser 46. Semantic Analysis 47. Extending Identifier Resolution 48. Writing the Type Checker 49. TACKY Generation 50. Assembly Generation 51. Understanding Calling Conventions 52. Calling Functions with the System V ABI 53. Converting Function Calls and Definitions to Assembly 54. Replacing Pseudoregisters 55. Allocating Stack Space During Instruction Fix-Up
- 13. 56. Code Emission 57. Calling LibraryFunctions 58. Summary 59. 10 FILE SCOPE VARIABLE DECLARATIONS AND STORAGE-CLASS SPECIFIERS 60. All About Declarations 61. Scope 62. Linkage 63. Storage Duration 64. Definitions vs. Declarations 65. Error Cases 66. Linkage and Storage Duration in Assembly 67. The Lexer 68. The Parser 69. Parsing Type and Storage-Class Specifiers 70. Distinguishing Between Function and Variable Declarations 71. Semantic Analysis 72. Identifier Resolution: Resolving External Variables 73. Type Checking: Tracking Static Functions and Variables 74. TACKY Generation 75. Assembly Generation 76. Generating Assembly for Variable Definitions 77. Replacing Pseudoregisters According to Their Storage Duration
- 14. 78. Fixing Up Instructions 79. CodeEmission 80. Summary 81. PART II: TYPES BEYOND INT 82. 11 LONG INTEGERS 83. Long Integers in Assembly 84. Type Conversions 85. Static Long Variables 86. The Lexer 87. The Parser 88. Semantic Analysis 89. Adding Type Information to the AST 90. Type Checking Expressions 91. Type Checking return Statements 92. Type Checking Declarations and Updating the Symbol Table 93. TACKY Generation 94. Tracking the Types of Temporary Variables 95. Generating Extra Return Instructions 96. Assembly Generation 97. Tracking Assembly Types in the Backend Symbol Table 98. Replacing Longword and Quadword Pseudoregisters 99. Fixing Up Instructions 00. Code Emission
- 15. 01. Summary 02. 12 UNSIGNED INTEGERS 03. TypeConversions, Again 04. Converting Between Signed and Unsigned Types of the Same Size 05. Converting unsigned int to a Larger Type 06. Converting signed int to a Larger Type 07. Converting from Larger to Smaller Types 08. The Lexer 09. The Parser 10. The Type Checker 11. TACKY Generation 12. Unsigned Integer Operations in Assembly 13. Unsigned Comparisons 14. Unsigned Division 15. Zero Extension 16. Assembly Generation 17. Replacing Pseudoregisters 18. Fixing Up the Div and MovZeroExtend Instructions 19. Code Emission 20. Summary 21. 13 FLOATING-POINT NUMBERS 22. IEEE 754, What Is It Good For?
- 16. 23. The IEEE 754Double-Precision Format 24. Rounding Behavior 25. Rounding Modes 26. Rounding Constants 27. Rounding Type Conversions 28. Rounding Arithmetic Operations 29. Linking Shared Libraries 30. The Lexer 31. Recognizing Floating-Point Constant Tokens 32. Matching the End of a Constant 33. The Parser 34. The Type Checker 35. TACKY Generation 36. Floating-Point Operations in Assembly 37. Working with SSE Instructions 38. Using Floating-Point Values in the System V Calling Convention 39. Doing Arithmetic with SSE Instructions 40. Comparing Floating-Point Numbers 41. Converting Between Floating-Point and Integer Types 42. Assembly Generation 43. Floating-Point Constants 44. Unary Instructions, Binary Instructions, and Conditional Jumps 45. Type Conversions 46. Function Calls
- 17. 47. Return Instructions 48. The CompleteConversion from TACKY to Assembly 49. Pseudoregister Replacement 50. Instruction Fix-Up 51. Code Emission 52. Formatting Floating-Point Numbers 53. Labeling Floating-Point Constants 54. Storing Constants in the Read-Only Data Section 55. Initializing Static Variables to 0.0 or –0.0 56. Putting It All Together 57. Extra Credit: NaN 58. Summary 59. Additional Resources 60. 14 POINTERS 61. Objects and Values 62. Operations on Pointers 63. Address and Dereference Operations 64. Null Pointers and Type Conversions 65. Pointer Comparisons 66. & Operations on Dereferenced Pointers 67. The Lexer 68. The Parser 69. Parsing Declarations
- 18. 70. Parsing Type Names 71. PuttingIt All Together 72. Semantic Analysis 73. Type Checking Pointer Expressions 74. Tracking Static Pointer Initializers in the Symbol Table 75. TACKY Generation 76. Pointer Operations in TACKY 77. A Strategy for TACKY Conversion 78. Assembly Generation 79. Replacing Pseudoregisters with Memory Operands 80. Fixing Up the lea and push Instructions 81. Code Emission 82. Summary 83. 15 ARRAYS AND POINTER ARITHMETIC 84. Arrays and Pointer Arithmetic 85. Array Declarations and Initializers 86. Memory Layout of Arrays 87. Array-to-Pointer Decay 88. Pointer Arithmetic to Access Array Elements 89. Even More Pointer Arithmetic 90. Array Types in Function Declarations 91. Things We Aren’t Implementing 92. The Lexer
- 19. 93. The Parser 94. Parsing ArrayDeclarators 95. Parsing Abstract Array Declarators 96. Parsing Compound Initializers 97. Parsing Subscript Expressions 98. The Type Checker 99. Converting Arrays to Pointers 00. Validating Lvalues 01. Type Checking Pointer Arithmetic 02. Type Checking Subscript Expressions 03. Type Checking Cast Expressions 04. Type Checking Function Declarations 05. Type Checking Compound Initializers 06. Initializing Static Arrays 07. Initializing Scalar Variables with ZeroInit 08. TACKY Generation 09. Pointer Arithmetic 10. Subscripting 11. Compound Initializers 12. Tentative Array Definitions 13. Assembly Generation 14. Converting TACKY to Assembly 15. Replacing PseudoMem Operands 16. Fixing Up Instructions
- 20. 17. Code Emission 18. Summary 19. 16 CHARACTERSAND STRINGS 20. Character Traits 21. String Literals 22. Working with Strings in Assembly 23. The Lexer 24. The Parser 25. Parsing Type Specifiers 26. Parsing Character Constants 27. Parsing String Literals 28. Putting It All Together 29. The Type Checker 30. Characters 31. String Literals in Expressions 32. String Literals Initializing Non-static Variables 33. String Literals Initializing Static Variables 34. TACKY Generation 35. String Literals as Array Initializers 36. String Literals in Expressions 37. Top-Level Constants in TACKY 38. Assembly Generation 39. Operations on Characters
- 21. 40. Top-Level Constants 41. The CompleteConversion from TACKY to Assembly 42. Pseudo-Operand Replacement 43. Instruction Fix-Up 44. Code Emission 45. Hello Again, World! 46. Summary 47. 17 SUPPORTING DYNAMIC MEMORY ALLOCATION 48. The void Type 49. Memory Management with void * 50. Complete and Incomplete Types 51. The sizeof Operator 52. The Lexer 53. The Parser 54. The Type Checker 55. Conversions to and from void * 56. Functions with void Return Types 57. Scalar and Non-scalar Types 58. Restrictions on Incomplete Types 59. Extra Restrictions on void 60. Conditional Expressions with void Operands 61. Existing Validation for Arithmetic Expressions and Comparisons 62. sizeof Expressions
- 22. 63. TACKY Generation 64. Functions withvoid Return Types 65. Casts to void 66. Conditional Expressions with void Operands 67. sizeof Expressions 68. The Latest and Greatest TACKY IR 69. Assembly Generation 70. Summary 71. 18 STRUCTURES 72. Declaring Structure Types 73. Structure Member Declarations 74. Tag and Member Namespaces 75. Structure Type Declarations We Aren’t Implementing 76. Operating on Structures 77. Structure Layout in Memory 78. The Lexer 79. The Parser 80. Semantic Analysis 81. Resolving Structure Tags 82. Type Checking Structures 83. TACKY Generation 84. Implementing the Member Access Operators 85. Converting Compound Initializers to TACKY
- 23. 86. Structures in theSystem V Calling Convention 87. Classifying Structures 88. Passing Parameters of Structure Type 89. Returning Structures 90. Assembly Generation 91. Extending the Assembly AST 92. Copying Structures 93. Using Structures in Function Calls 94. Putting It All Together 95. Replacing Pseudo-operands 96. Code Emission 97. Extra Credit: Unions 98. Summary 99. Additional Resources 00. PART III: OPTIMIZATIONS 01. 19 OPTIMIZING TACKY PROGRAMS 02. Safety and Observable Behavior 03. Four TACKY Optimizations 04. Constant Folding 05. Unreachable Code Elimination 06. Copy Propagation 07. Dead Store Elimination 08. With Our Powers Combined …
- 24. 09. Testing the OptimizationPasses 10. Wiring Up the Optimization Stage 11. Constant Folding 12. Constant Folding for Part I TACKY Programs 13. Supporting Part II TACKY Programs 14. Control-Flow Graphs 15. Defining the Control-Flow Graph 16. Creating Basic Blocks 17. Adding Edges to the Control-Flow Graph 18. Converting a Control-Flow Graph to a List of Instructions 19. Making Your Control-Flow Graph Code Reusable 20. Unreachable Code Elimination 21. Eliminating Unreachable Blocks 22. Removing Useless Jumps 23. Removing Useless Labels 24. Removing Empty Blocks 25. A Little Bit About Data-Flow Analysis 26. Copy Propagation 27. Reaching Copies Analysis 28. Rewriting TACKY Instructions 29. Supporting Part II TACKY Programs 30. Dead Store Elimination 31. Liveness Analysis 32. Removing Dead Stores
- 25. 33. Supporting Part IITACKY Programs 34. Summary 35. Additional Resources 36. 20 REGISTER ALLOCATION 37. Register Allocation in Action 38. Take One: Put Everything on the Stack 39. Take Two: Register Allocation 40. Take Three: Register Allocation with Coalescing 41. Updating the Compiler Pipeline 42. Extending the Assembly AST 43. Converting TACKY to Assembly 44. Register Allocation by Graph Coloring 45. Detecting Interference 46. Spilling Registers 47. The Basic Register Allocator 48. Handling Multiple Types During Register Allocation 49. Defining the Interference Graph 50. Building the Interference Graph 51. Calculating Spill Costs 52. Coloring the Interference Graph 53. Building the Register Map and Rewriting the Function Body 54. Instruction Fix-Up with Callee-Saved Registers 55. Code Emission
- 26. 56. Register Coalescing 57. Updating theInterference Graph 58. Conservative Coalescing 59. Implementing Register Coalescing 60. Summary 61. Additional Resources 62. NEXT STEPS 63. Add Some Missing Features 64. Handle Undefined Behavior Safely 65. Write More TACKY Optimizations 66. Support Another Target Architecture 67. Contribute to an Open Source Programming Language Project 68. That’s a Wrap! 69. A DEBUGGING ASSEMBLY CODE WITH GDB OR LLDB 70. The Program 71. Debugging with GDB 72. Configuring the GDB UI 73. Starting and Stopping the Program 74. Printing Expressions 75. Examining Memory 76. Setting Conditional Breakpoints 77. Getting Help 78. Debugging with LLDB
- 27. 79. Starting and Stoppingthe Program 80. Displaying Assembly Code 81. Printing Expressions 82. Examining Memory 83. Setting Conditional Breakpoints 84. Getting Help 85. B ASSEMBLY GENERATION AND CODE EMISSION TABLES 86. Part I 87. Converting TACKY to Assembly 88. Code Emission 89. Part II 90. Converting TACKY to Assembly 91. Code Emission 92. Part III 93. REFERENCES 94. INDEX
- 28. WRITING A CCOMPILER Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch by Nora Sandler San Francisco
- 29. WRITING A CCOMPILER. Copyright © 2024 by Nora Sandler. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. First printing ISBN-13: 978-1-7185-0042-6 (print) ISBN-13: 978-1-7185-0043-3 (ebook) Published by No Starch Press , Inc. 245 8th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 phone: +1.415.863.9900 www.nostarch.com; info@nostarch.com Publisher: William Pollock Managing Editor: Jill Franklin Production Manager: Sabrina Plomitallo-González Production Editor: Sydney Cromwell Developmental Editors: Alex Freed and Eva Morrow Cover Illustrator: James L. Barry Interior Design: Octopod Studios Technical Reviewer: Stephen Kell ®
- 30. Copyeditor: Rachel Head Proofreader:Audrey Doyle Indexer: BIM Creatives, LLC Figure 13-1, courtesy of Codekaizen via Wikimedia Commons, has been reproduced under CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0. The original image has been converted to grayscale, and fonts have been modified. Library of Congress Control Number: 2023058768 For customer service inquiries, please contact info@nostarch.com. For information on distribution, bulk sales, corporate sales, or translations: sales@nostarch.com. For permission to translate this work: rights@nostarch.com. To report counterfeit copies or piracy: counterfeit@nostarch.com. No Starch Press and the No Starch Press logo are registered trademarks of No Starch Press, Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, we are using the names only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the
- 31. trademark owner, withno intention of infringement of the trademark. The information in this book is distributed on an “As Is” basis, without warranty. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor No Starch Press, Inc. shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in it.
- 32.
- 33. About the Author NoraSandler is a software engineer based in Seattle. She holds a BS in computer science from the University of Chicago, where she researched the implementation of parallel programming languages. After several years as a penetration tester, she found her way back to compilers. Most recently, she worked on domain-specific languages at an endpoint security company. You can read her blog about pranks, compilers, and other computer science topics at https://norasandler.com. About the Technical Reviewer Stephen Kell is a researcher, educator, and consultant on the design and implementation of programming languages and systems. He has taught compilers and C programming in various settings over the past 12 years, served on an ISO study group on the evolution of the C language specification, and published numerous research papers on the specification, design, and implementation of C and its linking and debugging tools. These continue to be a focus of the research that he leads as an academic at King’s College London.
- 34. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I was attendingthe Recurse Center in fall 2017 when I started on the series of blog posts that eventually turned into this book. I’m immensely grateful to the Recurse Center for giving me the time and space to follow my own curiosity, in a community of kind, brilliant people, without the pressure to produce anything. Without them, I would never have attempted this project. I’m also grateful to everyone in the Recurse Center community whose advice, encouragement, and pair programming sessions shaped those initial blog posts. I’d particularly like to thank Julian Squires for pointing me toward Abdulaziz Ghuloum’s “An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction,” the article that served as the starting point for this project. I’d also like to thank Raph Levien for teaching me about the precedence climbing method for expression parsing. Thanks to Stephen Kell, this book’s technical reviewer, whose thoughtful comments made the book clearer and more accurate. I’m particularly indebted to Stephen for undertaking the monumental task of reviewing the accompanying test suite and reference implementation. Alex Freed, who first reached
- 35. out to meabout writing a book, provided invaluable editorial guidance and encouragement, and Jill Franklin and Eva Morrow shepherded the book through the final stages of editing. James L. Barry provided the fabulous cover art. Thanks also to Sydney Cromwell for overseeing the production process, Rachel Head for copyediting, and the entire team at No Starch Press for their hard work making this book a reality. Thanks to all the readers who emailed me and filed GitHub issues about earlier versions of this project, including the original blog posts and Early Access version. Their suggestions made the book better, and their enthusiasm for compilers reminded me why I was writing it. Thank you to my friend Haney Maxwell for his thorough, insightful feedback on Chapter 13. Last but never least, thanks to my partner, Brian, whose sound advice and ear for language I often relied on, who gamely agreed to “read this one paragraph and tell me whether it makes sense” whenever I asked, and who has always supported and believed in me.
- 36. INTRODUCTION When we talkabout how programming languages work, we tend to borrow metaphors from fantasy novels: compilers are magic, and the people who work on them are wizards. Dragons may be involved somehow. But in the day-to-day lives of most programmers, compilers behave less like magical artifacts and more like those universal translator earpieces from science fiction. They aren’t flashy or dramatic; they don’t demand a lot of attention. They just hum along in the background, translating a language you speak (or type) fluently into the alien language of machines. For some reason, sci-fi characters rarely seem to wonder how their translators work. But once you’ve been coding for a while, it’s hard not to feel curious about what your compiler is doing. A few years ago, this curiosity got the better of me, so I decided to learn more about compilers by writing one of my own. It was important to me to write a compiler for a real programming language, one that I’d used myself. And I wanted my compiler to generate assembly code that I could run without an emulator or virtual machine. But when I looked around, I found that most guides to compiler construction used toy languages that ran on
- 37. idealized processors. Someof these guides were excellent, but they weren’t quite what I was looking for. I finally got unstuck when a friend pointed me toward a short paper titled “An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction” by Abdulaziz Ghuloum (http://scheme2006.cs .uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf). It explained how to compile Scheme to x86 assembly, starting with the simplest possible programs and adding one new language construct at a time. I didn’t particularly want to write a compiler for Scheme, so I adapted the paper to a language I was more interested in: C. As I kept working on the project, I switched from x86 to its modern counterpart, x64 assembly. I also built out support for a larger subset of C and added a few optimization passes. By this point, I had gone way beyond Ghuloum’s original scheme (pun intended, sorry), but his basic strategy held up remarkably well: focusing on one small piece of the language at a time made it easy to stay on track and see that I was making progress. In this book, you’ll tackle the same project. Along the way, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the code you write and the system it runs on.
- 38. Who This BookIs For I wrote this book for programmers who are curious about how compilers work. Many books about compiler construction are written as textbooks for college or graduate-level classes, but this one is meant to be accessible to someone exploring the topic on their own. You won’t need any prior knowledge of compilers, interpreters, or assembly code to complete this project. A basic understanding of computer architecture is helpful, but not essential; I’ll discuss important concepts as they come up and occasionally point you to outside resources with more background information. That said, this is not a book for novice programmers. You should be comfortable writing substantive programs on your own, and you should be familiar with binary numbers, regular expressions, and basic data structures like graphs and trees. You’ll need to know C well enough to read and understand small C programs, but you don’t need to be an expert C programmer. We’ll explore the ins and outs of the language as we go. Although this book is geared toward newcomers to the subject, it will also be worthwhile for people who have some experience with compilers already. Maybe you implemented a toy language for a college class or personal project, and now you’d like to work on something more realistic. Or maybe you’ve worked on
- 39. interpreters in thepast, and you want to try your hand at compiling programs down to machine code. If you’re in this category, this book will cover some material you already know, but it will provide plenty of new challenges too. At the very least, I promise you’ll learn a few things about C. Why Write a C Compiler? I assume you’re already sold on the idea of writing a compiler— you did pick up this book, after all. I want to talk a little bit about why we’re writing a compiler for C in particular. The short answer is that C is a (relatively) simple language, but not a toy language. At its core, C is simple enough to implement even if you’ve never written a compiler before. But it’s also a particularly clear example of how programming languages are shaped by the systems they run on and the people who use them. Some aspects of C vary based on what hardware you’re targeting; others vary between operating systems; still others are left unspecified to give compiler writers more flexibility. Some bits of the language are historical artifacts that have stuck around to support legacy code, while others are more recent attempts to make C safer and more reliable. These messy parts of C are worth tackling for a couple of reasons. First, you’ll develop a solid mental model of how your
- 40. compiler fits inwith all the other pieces of your system. Second, you’ll get a sense of the different perspectives that different groups of people bring to the language, from the specification authors trying to stamp out ambiguity and inconsistency, to compiler implementers looking for performance improvements, to ordinary programmers who just want their code to work. I hope this project will make you think about all programming languages differently: not as fixed sets of rules enshrined in language standards, but as ongoing negotiations between the people who design, implement, and use them. Once you start looking at programming languages this way, they become richer, more interesting, and less frustrating to work with. Compilation from 10,000 Feet Before we go any further, let’s take a high-level look at how source code turns into an executable and where the compiler fits into the process. We’ll clear up some terminology and review a tiny bit of computer architecture while we’re at it. A compiler is a program that translates code from one programming language to another. It’s just one part (though often the most complex part) of the whole system that’s responsible for getting your code up and running. We’re going
- 41. to build acompiler that translates C programs into assembly code, a textual representation of the instructions we want the processor to run. Different processors understand different instructions; we’ll focus on the x64 instruction set, also called x86-64 or AMD64. This is what most people’s computers run. (The other instruction set you’re likely to encounter is ARM. Most smartphones and tablets have ARM processors, and they’re starting to show up in laptops too.) The processor doesn’t understand text, so it can’t run our assembly code as is. We need to convert it into object code, or binary instructions that the processor can decode and execute. For example, the assembly instruction ret corresponds to the byte 0xc3. The assembler handles this conversion, taking in assembly programs and spitting out object files. Finally, the linker combines all the object files we need to include in our final program, resolves any references to variables or functions from other files, and adds some information about how to actually start up the program. The end result is an executable that we can run. This is a wildly oversimplified view of what happens, but it’s good enough to get us started.
- 42. Aside from thecompiler, assembler, and linker, compiling a C program requires yet another tool: the preprocessor, which runs right before the compiler. The preprocessor strips out comments, executes preprocessor directives like #include, and expands macros to produce preprocessed code that’s ready to be compiled. The whole process looks something like Figure 1. Figure 1: Transforming a source file into an executable Description When you compile a program with a command like gcc or clang, you’re actually invoking the compiler driver, a small wrapper that’s responsible for calling the preprocessor, compiler, assembler, and linker in turn. You’ll write your own compiler and compiler driver, but you won’t write your own preprocessor, assembler, or linker. Instead, you’ll use the versions of these tools already installed on your system.
- 43. What You’ll Build Overthe course of this book, you’ll build a compiler for a large subset of C. You can write your compiler in any programming language you like; I’ll present key parts of the implementation in pseudocode. The book is organized into three parts. In Part I, The Basics, you’ll implement the core features of C: expressions, variables, control-flow statements, and function calls. Chapter 1: A Minimal Compiler In this chapter, you’ll build a working compiler that can handle the simplest possible C programs, which just return integer constants. You’ll learn about the different stages of compilation, how to represent a C program internally as an abstract syntax tree, and how to read simple assembly programs. Chapter 2: Unary Operators Next, you’ll start to expand your compiler by implementing two unary operators: negation and bitwise complement. This chapter introduces TACKY, a new intermediate representation that bridges the gap between the abstract syntax tree and assembly code. It also explains how to perform negation and bitwise complement in assembly, and how assembly programs store values in a region of memory called the stack.
- 44. Chapter 3: BinaryOperators In this chapter, you’ll implement the binary operators that perform basic arithmetic, like addition and subtraction. You’ll use a technique called precedence climbing to parse arithmetic expressions with the correct associativity and precedence, and you’ll learn how to do arithmetic in assembly. Chapter 4: Logical and Relational Operators Here, you’ll add support for the logical AND, OR, and NOT operators and relational operators like >, ==, and !=. This chapter introduces several new kinds of assembly instructions, including conditional instructions and jumps. Chapter 5: Local Variables Next, you’ll extend your compiler to support local variable declarations, uses, and assignments. You’ll add a new compiler stage to perform semantic analysis in this chapter. This stage detects programming errors like using an undeclared variable. Chapter 6: if Statements and Conditional Expressions In this chapter, you’ll add support for if statements, your compiler’s first control-flow structure, as well as conditional expressions of the form a ? b : c. Using TACKY as an intermediate representation will pay off here; you can
- 45. implement both languageconstructs with existing TACKY instructions, so you won’t need to touch later compiler stages. Chapter 7: Compound Statements Here, you’ll add support for compound statements, which group together statements and declarations and control the scope of identifiers. You’ll take a close look at C’s scoping rules and learn how to apply those rules during semantic analysis. Chapter 8: Loops This chapter covers while, do, and for loops, as well as break and continue statements. You’ll write a new semantic analysis pass to associate break and continue statements with their enclosing loops. Chapter 9: Functions In this chapter, you’ll implement function calls and declarations of functions other than main. You’ll have two major tasks here: writing a type checker to detect semantic errors like calling functions with the wrong number of arguments, and generating assembly code. You’ll learn all the ins and outs of the calling conventions for Unix-like systems, which dictate how function calls work in assembly. By meticulously following these conventions, you’ll be able to compile code that calls external libraries.
- 46. Chapter 10: FileScope Variable Declarations and Storage- Class Specifiers Next, you’ll add support for file scope variable declarations and the extern and static specifiers. This chapter discusses several properties of C identifiers, including linkage and storage duration. It walks through how to determine an identifier’s linkage and storage duration in the semantic analysis stage and covers how those properties impact the assembly you ultimately generate. It also introduces a new region of memory, the data section, and describes how to define and operate on values stored there. In Part II, Types Beyond int, you’ll implement additional types. This is where we’ll take the most in-depth look at the messy, confusing, and surprising bits of C. Chapter 11: Long Integers In this chapter, you’ll implement the long type and lay the groundwork to add more types in later chapters. You’ll learn how to infer the type of every expression during type checking and how to operate on values of different sizes in assembly. Chapter 12: Unsigned Integers Here, you’ll implement the unsigned integer types. This chapter dives into the C standard’s rules on integer type conversions and covers a few new
- 47. assembly instructions thatperform unsigned integer operations. Chapter 13: Floating-Point Numbers Next, you’ll add the floating-point double type. This chapter describes the binary representation of floating-point numbers and the perils of floating-point rounding error. It introduces a new set of assembly instructions for performing floating-point operations and explains the calling conventions for passing floating-point arguments and return values. Chapter 14: Pointers In this chapter, you’ll implement pointer types and the address and pointer dereference operators. You’ll validate pointer operations in the type checker and add explicit memory access instructions to the TACKY intermediate representation. Chapter 15: Arrays and Pointer Arithmetic This chapter picks up where Chapter 14 left off by adding support for array types and several related language features: the subscript operator, pointer arithmetic, and compound initializers. It digs into the relationship between arrays and pointers and lays out how the type checker should analyze these types.
- 48. Chapter 16: Charactersand Strings This chapter covers the character types, character constants, and string literals. You’ll learn about the different ways C programs use string literals, and you’ll add new TACKY and assembly constructs to represent string constants. At the end of the chapter, you’ll compile a couple of example programs that perform input/output (I/O) operations. Chapter 17: Supporting Dynamic Memory Allocation In this chapter, you’ll implement the void type and sizeof operator, which will allow you to compile programs that call malloc and the other memory management functions. The biggest challenge here is handling void in the type checker. Because void is a type with no values, the type checker will treat it very differently from the other types you’ve implemented so far. Chapter 18: Structures Structures, along with the . and -> member access operators, are the last language features you’ll add in this book. To implement them, you’ll need all the skills you learned in earlier chapters. In the semantic analysis stage, you’ll resolve structure tags according to C’s scoping rules and analyze structure type declarations to determine how they’re laid out in memory. When you generate TACKY, you’ll translate member access operators into sequences of simple memory access instructions. And when you generate assembly, you’ll
- 49. follow the callingconventions for passing structures as arguments and return values. In Part III, Optimizations, you won’t add any new language features. Instead, you’ll implement several classic compiler optimizations to generate more efficient assembly code. Part III is quite different from Parts I and II because these optimizations aren’t specific to C; they work just as well for programs written in any language. Chapter 19: Optimizing TACKY Programs In this chapter, you’ll add an optimization stage targeting TACKY programs. This stage will include four different optimizations: constant folding, unreachable code elimination, dead store elimination, and copy propagation. These four optimizations work together, making each one more effective than it would be by itself. This chapter introduces several tools for understanding a program’s behavior, including control-flow graphs and data-flow analysis. You’ll use these tools to discover ways to optimize programs without changing their behavior. Chapter 20: Register Allocation To cap off this project, you’ll write a register allocator, which figures out how to store values in the assembly program in registers instead of memory. You’ll use graph coloring to find a valid mapping from values to
- 50. Discovering Diverse ContentThrough Random Scribd Documents
- 51. gods will notbe angry with him.” The gods, it seems, could not pardon the inquisitive mortal who deliberately pried into their secrets. Amidst the ornaments with which Athens was decorated during the free working of her democracy, the glories of Marathon of course occupied a conspicuous place. The battle was painted on one of the compartments of the portico called Pœkilê, wherein, amidst several figures of gods and heroes,—Athênê, Hêraklês, Theseus, Echetlus, and the local patron of Marathon,—were seen honored and prominent the polemarch Kallimachus and the general Miltiadês, while the Platæans were distinguished by their Bœotian leather casques.[671] And the sixth of the month Boëdromion, the anniversary of the battle, was commemorated by an annual ceremony, even down to the time of Plutarch.[672] Two thousand Spartans, starting from their city, immediately after the full moon, reached the frontier of Attica, on the third day of their march,—a surprising effort, when we consider that the total distance from Sparta to Athens was about one hundred and fifty miles. They did not arrive, however, until the battle had been fought, and the Persians departed; but curiosity led them to the field of Marathon to behold the dead bodies of the Persians, after which they returned home, bestowing well-merited praise on the victors. Datis and Artaphernês returned across the Ægean with their Eretrian prisoners to Asia; stopping for a short time at the island of Mykonos, where discovery was made of a gilt image of Apollo carried off as booty in a Phenician ship. Datis went himself to restore it to Dêlos, requesting the Delians to carry it back to the Delium, or temple of Apollo, on the eastern coast of Bœotia: the Delians, however, chose to keep the statue until it was reclaimed from them twenty years afterwards by the Thebans. On reaching Asia, the Persian generals conducted their prisoners up to the court of Susa, and into the presence of Darius. Though he had been vehemently incensed against them, yet when he saw them in his power, his wrath abated, and he manifested no desire to kill or harm them. They were planted at a spot called Arderikka, in the Kissian territory,
- 52. one of theresting-places on the road from Sardis to Susa, and about twenty-six miles distant from the latter place: Herodotus seems himself to have seen their descendants there on his journey between the two capitals, and to have had the satisfaction of talking to them in Greek,—which we may well conceive to have made some impression upon him, at a spot distant by nearly three months’ journey from the coast of Ionia.[673] Happy would it have been for Miltiadês if he had shared the honorable death of the polemarch Kallimachus,—“animam exhalasset opimam,”—in seeking to fire the ships of the defeated Persians at Marathon. The short sequel of his history will be found in melancholy contrast with the Marathonian heroism. His reputation had been great before the battle, and after it the admiration and confidence of his countrymen knew no bounds: it appears, indeed, to have reached such a pitch that his head was turned, and he lost both his patriotism and his prudence. He proposed to his countrymen to incur the cost of equipping an armament of seventy ships, with an adequate armed force, and to place it altogether at his discretion; giving them no intimation whither he intended to go, but merely assuring them that, if they would follow him, he would conduct them to a land where gold was abundant, and thus enrich them. Such a promise, from the lips of the recent victor of Marathon, was sufficient, and the armament was granted, no man except Miltiadês knowing what was its destination. He sailed immediately to the island of Paros, laid siege to the town, and sent in a herald to require from the inhabitants a contribution of one hundred talents, on pain of entire destruction. His pretence for this attack was, that the Parians had furnished a trireme to Datis for the Persian fleet at Marathon; but his real motive, so Herodotus assures us,[674] was vindictive animosity against a Parian citizen named Lysagoras, who had exasperated the Persian general Hydarnês against him. The Parians amused him at first with evasions, until they had procured a little delay to repair the defective portions of their wall, after which they set him at defiance; and
- 53. Miltiadês in vainprosecuted hostilities against them for the space of twenty-six days: he ravaged the island, but his attacks made no impression upon the town.[675] Beginning to despair of success in his military operations, he entered into some negotiation—such at least was the tale of the Parians themselves—with a Parian woman named Timô, priestess or attendant in the temple of Dêmêtêr, near the town-gates. This woman, promising to reveal to him a secret which would place Paros in his power, induced him to visit by night a temple to which no male person was admissible. He leaped the exterior fence, and approached the sanctuary; but on coming near, was seized with a panic terror and ran away, almost out of his senses: on leaping the same fence to get back, he strained or bruised his thigh badly, and became utterly disabled. In this melancholy state he was placed on ship-board; the siege being raised, and the whole armament returning to Athens. Vehement was the indignation both of the armament and of the remaining Athenians against Miltiadês on his return;[676] and Xanthippus, father of the great Periklês, became the spokesman of this feeling. He impeached Miltiadês before the popular judicature as having been guilty of deceiving the people, and as having deserved the penalty of death. The accused himself, disabled by his injured thigh, which even began to show symptoms of gangrene, was unable to stand, or to say a word in his own defence: he lay on his couch before the assembled judges, while his friends made the best case they could in his behalf. Defence, it appears, there was none; all they could do, was to appeal to his previous services: they reminded the people largely and emphatically of the inestimable exploit of Marathon, coming in addition to his previous conquest of Lemnos. The assembled dikasts, or jurors, showed their sense of these powerful appeals by rejecting the proposition of his accuser to condemn him to death; but they imposed on him the penalty of fifty talents “for his iniquity.” Cornelius Nepos affirms that these fifty talents represented the expenses incurred by the state in fitting out the armament; but we
- 54. may more probablybelieve, looking to the practice of the Athenian dikastery in criminal cases, that fifty talents was the minor penalty actually proposed by the defenders of Miltiadês themselves, as a substitute for the punishment of death. In those penal cases at Athens, where the punishment was not fixed beforehand by the terms of the law, if the person accused was found guilty, it was customary to submit to the jurors, subsequently and separately, the question as to amount of punishment: first, the accuser named the penalty which he thought suitable; next, the accused person was called upon to name an amount of penalty for himself, and the jurors were constrained to take their choice between these two,—no third gradation of penalty being admissible for consideration.[677] Of course, under such circumstances, it was the interest of the accused party to name, even in his own case, some real and serious penalty, —something which the jurors might be likely to deem not wholly inadequate to his crime just proved; for if he proposed some penalty only trifling, he drove them to prefer the heavier sentence recommended by his opponent. Accordingly, in the case of Miltiadês, his friends, desirous of inducing the jurors to refuse their assent to the punishment of death, proposed a fine of fifty talents as the self- assessed penalty of the defendant; and perhaps they may have stated, as an argument in the case, that such a sum would suffice to defray the costs of the expedition. The fine was imposed, but Miltiadês did not live to pay it; his injured limb mortified, and he died, leaving the fine to be paid by his son Kimon. According to Cornelius Nepos, Diodorus, and Plutarch, he was put in prison, after having been fined, and there died.[678] But Herodotus does not mention this imprisonment, and the fact appears to me improbable: he would hardly have omitted to notice it, had it come to his knowledge. Immediate imprisonment of a person fined by the dikastery, until his fine was paid, was not the natural and ordinary course of Athenian procedure, though there were particular cases in which such aggravation was added. Usually, a certain time was allowed for payment,[679] before absolute execution was resorted to, but the person under sentence became disfranchised
- 55. and excluded fromall political rights, from the very instant of his condemnation as a public debtor, until the fine was paid. Now in the instance of Miltiadês, the lamentable condition of his wounded thigh rendered escape impossible,—so that there would be no special motive for departing from the usual practice, and imprisoning him forthwith: moreover, if he was not imprisoned forthwith, he would not be imprisoned at all, since he cannot have lived many days after his trial.[680] To carry away the suffering general in his couch, incapable of raising himself even to plead for his own life, from the presence of the dikasts to a prison, would not only have been a needless severity, but could hardly have failed to imprint itself on the sympathies and the memory of all the beholders; so that Herodotus would have been likely to hear and mention it, if it had really occurred. I incline to believe therefore that Miltiadês died at home: all accounts concur in stating that he died of the mortal bodily hurt which already disabled him even at the moment of his trial, and that his son Kimon paid the fifty talents after his death. If he could pay them, probably his father could have paid them also. And this is an additional reason for believing that there was no imprisonment,—for nothing but non-payment could have sent him to prison; and to rescue the suffering Miltiadês from being sent thither, would have been the first and strongest desire of all sympathizing friends. Thus closed the life of the conqueror of Marathon. The last act of it produces an impression so mournful, and even shocking,—his descent from the pinnacle of glory to defeat, mean tampering with a temple-servant, mortal bodily hurt, undefended ignominy, and death under a sentence of heavy fine, is so abrupt and unprepared,—that readers, ancient and modern, have not been satisfied without finding some one to blame for it: we must except Herodotus, our original authority, who recounts the transaction without dropping a single hint of blame against any one. To speak ill of the people, as Machiavel has long ago observed,[681] is a strain in which every one at all times, even under a democratical government, indulges with impunity and without provoking any opponent to reply; and in this instance, the hard fate of Miltiadês has been imputed to the vices of
- 56. the Athenians andtheir democracy,—it has been cited in proof, partly of their fickleness, partly of their ingratitude. But however such blame may serve to lighten the mental sadness arising from a series of painful facts, it will not be found justified if we apply to those facts a reasonable criticism. What is called the fickleness of the Athenians on this occasion is nothing more than a rapid and decisive change in their estimation of Miltiadês; unbounded admiration passing at once into extreme wrath. To censure them for fickleness is here an abuse of terms; such a change in their opinion was the unavoidable result of his conduct. His behavior in the expedition of Paros was as reprehensible as at Marathon it had been meritorious, and the one succeeded immediately after the other: what else could ensue except an entire revolution in the Athenian feelings? He had employed his prodigious ascendency over their minds to induce them to follow him without knowing whither, in the confidence of an unknown booty: he had exposed their lives and wasted their substance in wreaking a private grudge: in addition to the shame of an unprincipled project, comes the constructive shame of not having succeeded in it. Without doubt, such behavior, coming from a man whom they admired to excess, must have produced a violent and painful revulsion in the feelings of his countrymen. The idea of having lavished praise and confidence upon a person who forthwith turns it to an unworthy purpose, is one of the greatest torments of the human bosom; and we may well understand that the intensity of the subsequent displeasure would be aggravated by this reactionary sentiment, without accusing the Athenians of fickleness. If an officer, whose conduct has been such as to merit the highest encomiums, comes on a sudden to betray his trust, and manifests cowardice or treachery in a new and important undertaking confided to him, are we to treat the general in command as fickle, because his opinion as well as his conduct undergoes an instantaneous revolution,—which will be all the more vehement in proportion to his previous esteem? The question to be determined is, whether there be sufficient
- 57. ground for sucha change; and in the case of Miltiadês, that question must be answered in the affirmative. In regard to the charge of ingratitude against the Athenians, this last-mentioned point—sufficiency of reason—stands tacitly admitted. It is conceded that Miltiadês deserved punishment for his conduct in reference to the Parian expedition, but it is nevertheless maintained that gratitude for his previous services at Marathon ought to have exempted him from punishment. But the sentiment upon which, after all, this exculpation rests, will not bear to be drawn out and stated in the form of a cogent or justifying reason. For will any one really contend, that a man who has rendered great services to the public, is to receive in return a license of unpunished misconduct for the future? Is the general, who has earned applause by eminent skill and important victories, to be recompensed by being allowed the liberty of betraying his trust afterwards, and exposing his country to peril, without censure or penalty? This is what no one intends to vindicate deliberately; yet a man must be prepared to vindicate it, when he blames the Athenians for ingratitude towards Miltiadês. For if all that be meant is, that gratitude for previous services ought to pass, not as a receipt in full for subsequent crime, but as an extenuating circumstance in the measurement of the penalty, the answer is, that it was so reckoned in the Athenian treatment of Miltiadês.[682] His friends had nothing whatever to urge, against the extreme penalty proposed by his accuser, except these previous services,—which influenced the dikasts sufficiently to induce them to inflict the lighter punishment instead of the heavier. Now the whole amount of punishment inflicted consisted in a fine which certainly was not beyond his reasonable means of paying, or of prevailing upon friends to pay for him, since his son Kimon actually did pay it. And those who blame the Athenians for ingratitude,—unless they are prepared to maintain the doctrine that previous services are to pass as full acquittal for future crime,—have no other ground left except to say that the fine was too high; that instead of being fifty talents, it ought to have been no more than forty, thirty, twenty, or ten talents. Whether they are right in this, I will not take upon me to
- 58. pronounce. If theamount was named on behalf of the accused party, the dikastery had no legal power of diminishing it; but it is within such narrow limits that the question actually lies, when transferred from the province of sentiment to that of reason. It will be recollected that the death of Miltiadês arose neither from his trial nor his fine, but from the hurt in his thigh. The charge of ingratitude against the Athenian popular juries really amounts to this,—that, in trying a person accused of present crime or fault, they were apt to confine themselves too strictly and exclusively to the particular matter of charge, either forgetting, or making too little account of, past services which he might have rendered. Whoever imagines that such was the habit of Athenian dikasts, must have studied the orators to very little purpose. Their real defect was the very opposite: they were too much disposed to wander from the special issue before them, and to be affected by appeals to previous services and conduct.[683] That which an accused person at Athens usually strives to produce is, an impression in the minds of the dikasts favorable to his general character and behavior. Of course, he meets the particular allegation of his accuser as well as he can, but he never fails also to remind them emphatically, how well he has performed his general duties of a citizen,—how many times he has served in military expeditions,— how many trierarchies and liturgies he has performed, and performed with splendid efficiency. In fact, the claim of an accused person to acquittal is made to rest too much on his prior services, and too little upon innocence or justifying matter as to the particular indictment. When we come down to the time of the orators, I shall be prepared to show that such indisposition to confine themselves to a special issue was one of the most serious defects of the assembled dikasts at Athens. It is one which we should naturally expect from a body of private, non-professional citizens assembled for the occasion, and which belongs more or less to the system of jury-trial everywhere; but it is the direct reverse of that ingratitude, or habitual insensibility to prior services, for which they have been so often denounced.
- 59. The fate ofMiltiadês, then, so far from illustrating either the fickleness or the ingratitude of his countrymen, attests their just appreciation of deserts. It also illustrates another moral, of no small importance to the right comprehension of Grecian affairs; it teaches us the painful lesson, how perfectly maddening were the effects of a copious draught of glory on the temperament of an enterprising and ambitious Greek. There can be no doubt, that the rapid transition, in the course of about one week, from Athenian terror before the battle to Athenian exultation after it, must have produced demonstrations towards Miltiadês such as were never paid towards any other man in the whole history of the commonwealth. Such unmeasured admiration unseated his rational judgment, so that his mind became abandoned to the reckless impulses of insolence, and antipathy, and rapacity;—that distempered state, for which (according to Grecian morality) the retributive Nemesis was ever on the watch, and which, in his case, she visited with a judgment startling in its rapidity, as well as terrible in its amount. Had Miltiadês been the same man before the battle of Marathon as he became after it, the battle might probably have turned out a defeat instead of a victory. Dêmosthenês, indeed,[684] in speaking of the wealth and luxury of political leaders in his own time, and the profuse rewards bestowed upon them by the people, pointed in contrast to the house of Miltiadês as being noway more splendid than that of a private man. But though Miltiadês might continue to live in a modest establishment, he received from his countrymen marks of admiration and deference such as were never paid to any citizen before or after him; and, after all, admiration and deference constitute the precious essence of popular reward. No man except Miltiadês ever dared to raise his voice in the Athenian assembly, and say: “Give me a fleet of ships: do not ask what I am going to do with them, but only follow me, and I will enrich you.” Herein we may read the unmeasured confidence which the Athenians placed in their victorious general, and the utter incapacity of a leading Greek to bear it without mental depravation; while we learn from it to draw the melancholy inference, that one result of success was to make the successful leader one of the most dangerous men in the community. We shall
- 60. presently be calledupon to observe the same tendency in the case of the Spartan Pausanias, and even in that of the Athenian Themistoklês. It is, indeed, fortunate that the reckless aspirations of Miltiadês did not take a turn more noxious to Athens than the comparatively unimportant enterprise against Paros. For had he sought to acquire dominion and gratify antipathies against enemies at home, instead of directing his blow against a Parian enemy, the peace and security of his country might have been seriously endangered. Of the despots who gained power in Greece, a considerable proportion began by popular conduct, and by rendering good service to their fellow-citizens: having first earned public gratitude, they abused it for purposes of their own ambition. There was far greater danger, in a Grecian community, of dangerous excess of gratitude towards a victorious soldier, than of deficiency in that sentiment: hence the person thus exalted acquired a position such that the community found it difficult afterwards to shake him off. Now there is a disposition almost universal among writers and readers to side with an individual, especially an eminent individual, against the multitude; and accordingly those who under such circumstances suspect the probable abuse of an exalted position, are denounced as if they harbored an unworthy jealousy of superior abilities. But the truth is, that the largest analogies of the Grecian character justified that suspicion, and required the community to take precautions against the corrupting effects of their own enthusiasm. There is no feature which more largely pervades the impressible Grecian character, than a liability to be intoxicated and demoralized by success: there was no fault from which so few eminent Greeks were free: there was hardly any danger, against which it was at once so necessary and so difficult for the Grecian governments to take security,—especially the democracies, where the manifestations of enthusiasm were always the loudest. Such is the real explanation of those charges which have been urged against the Grecian democracies, that they came to hate and ill-treat previous
- 61. benefactors; and thehistory of Miltiadês illustrates it in a manner no less pointed than painful. I have already remarked that the fickleness, which has been so largely imputed to the Athenian democracy in their dealings with him, is nothing more than a reasonable change of opinion on the best grounds. Nor can it be said that fickleness was in any case an attribute of the Athenian democracy. It is a well-known fact, that feelings, or opinions, or modes of judging, which have once obtained footing among a large number of people, are more lasting and unchangeable than those which belong only to one or a few; insomuch that the judgments and actions of the many admit of being more clearly understood as to the past, and more certainly predicted as to the future. If we are to predicate any attribute of the multitude, it will rather be that of undue tenacity than undue fickleness; and there will occur nothing in the course of this history to prove that the Athenian people changed their opinions on insufficient grounds more frequently than an unresponsible one or few would have changed. But there were two circumstances in the working of the Athenian democracy which imparted to it an appearance of greater fickleness, without the reality: First, that the manifestations and changes of opinion were all open, undisguised, and noisy: the people gave utterance to their present impression, whatever it was, with perfect frankness; if their opinions were really changed, they had no shame or scruple in avowing it. Secondly,—and this is a point of capital importance in the working of democracy generally,—the present impression, whatever it might be, was not merely undisguised in its manifestations, but also had a tendency to be exaggerated in its intensity. This arose from their habit of treating public affairs in multitudinous assemblages, the well-known effect of which is, to inflame sentiment in every man’s bosom by mere contact with a sympathizing circle of neighbors. Whatever the sentiment might be, —fear, ambition, cupidity, wrath, compassion, piety, patriotic devotion, etc,[685]—and whether well-founded or ill-founded, it was
- 62. constantly influenced moreor less by such intensifying cause. This is a defect which of course belongs in a certain degree to all exercise of power by numerous bodies, even though they be representative bodies,—especially when the character of the people, instead of being comparatively sedate and slow to move, like the English, is quick, impressible, and fiery, like Greeks or Italians; but it operated far more powerfully on the self-acting Dêmos assembled in the Pnyx. It was in fact the constitutional malady of the democracy, of which the people were themselves perfectly sensible,—as I shall show hereafter from the securities which they tried to provide against it,— but which no securities could ever wholly eradicate. Frequency of public assemblies, far from aggravating the evil, had a tendency to lighten it. The people thus became accustomed to hear and balance many different views as a preliminary to ultimate judgment; they contracted personal interest and esteem for a numerous class of dissentient speakers; and they even acquired a certain practical consciousness of their own liability to error. Moreover, the diffusion of habits of public speaking, by means of the sophists and the rhetors, whom it has been so much the custom to disparage, tended in the same direction,—to break the unity of sentiment among the listening crowd, to multiply separate judgments, and to neutralize the contagion of mere sympathizing impulse. These were important deductions, still farther assisted by the superior taste and intelligence of the Athenian people: but still, the inherent malady remained,—excessive and misleading intensity of present sentiment. It was this which gave such inestimable value to the ascendency of Periklês, as depicted by Thucydidês: his hold on the people was so firm, that he could always speak with effect against excess of the reigning tone of feeling. “When Periklês (says the historian) saw the people in a state of unseasonable and insolent confidence, he spoke so as to cow them into alarm; when again they were in groundless terror, he combated it, and brought them back to confidence.”[686] We shall find Dêmosthenês, with far inferior ascendency, employed in the same honorable task: the Athenian people often stood in need of such correction, but unfortunately did not always find statesmen, at once friendly and commanding, to administer it.
- 63. These two attributes,then, belonged to the Athenian democracy; first, their sentiments of every kind were manifested loudly and openly; next, their sentiments tended to a pitch of great present intensity. Of course, therefore, when they changed, the change of sentiment stood prominent, and forced itself upon every one’s notice,—being a transition from one strong sentiment past to another strong sentiment present.[687] And it was because such alterations, when they did take place, stood out so palpably to remark, that the Athenian people have drawn upon themselves the imputation of fickleness: for it is not at all true, I repeat, that changes of sentiment were more frequently produced in them by frivolous or insufficient causes, than changes of sentiment in other governments.
- 64. CHAPTER XXXVII. IONIC PHILOSOPHERS.— PYTHAGORAS. — KROTON AND SYBARIS. The history of the powerful Grecian cities in Italy and Sicily, between the accession of Peisistratus and the battle of Marathon, is for the most part unknown to us. Phalaris, despot of Agrigentum in Sicily, made for himself an unenviable name during this obscure interval. His reign seems to coincide in time with the earlier part of the rule of Peisistratus (about 560-540 B. C.), and the few and vague statements which we find respecting it,[688] merely show us that it was a period of extortion and cruelty, even beyond the ordinary licence of Grecian despots. The reality of the hollow bull of brass, which Phalaris was accustomed to heat in order to shut up his victims in it and burn them, appears to be better authenticated than the nature of the story would lead us to presume: for it is not only noticed by Pindar, but even the actual instrument of this torture, the brazen bull itself,[689]—which had been taken away from Agrigentum as a trophy by the Carthaginians when they captured the town, was restored by the Romans, on the subjugation of Carthage, to its original domicile. Phalaris is said to have acquired the supreme command, by undertaking the task of building a great temple[690] to Zeus Polieus on the citadel rock; a pretence whereby he was enabled to assemble and arm a number of workmen and devoted partisans, whom he employed, at the festival of the Thesmophoria, to put down the authorities. He afterwards disarmed the citizens by a stratagem, and committed cruelties which rendered him so abhorred, that a sudden rising of the people, headed by Têlemachus
- 65. (ancestor of thesubsequent despot, Thêro), overthrew and slew him. A severe revenge was taken on his partisans after his fall.[691] During the interval between 540-500 B. C., events of much importance occurred among the Italian Greeks,—especially at Kroton and Sybaris,—events, unhappily, very imperfectly handed down. Between these two periods fall both the war between Sybaris and Kroton, and the career and ascendency of Pythagoras. In connection with this latter name, it will be requisite to say a few words respecting the other Grecian philosophers of the sixth century B. C. I have, in a former chapter, noticed and characterized those distinguished persons called the Seven Wise Men of Greece, whose celebrity falls in the first half of this century,—men not so much marked by scientific genius as by practical sagacity and foresight in the appreciation of worldly affairs, and enjoying a high degree of political respect from their fellow-citizens. One of them, however, the Milesian Thalês, claims our notice, not only on this ground, but also as the earliest known name in the long line of Greek scientific investigators. His life, nearly contemporary with that of Solon, belongs seemingly to the interval about 640-550 B. C.: the stories mentioned in Herodotus—perhaps borrowed in part from the Milesian Hekatæus—are sufficient to show that his reputation for wisdom, as well as for science, continued to be very great, even a century after his death, among his fellow-citizens. And he marks an important epoch in the progress of the Greek mind, as having been the first man to depart both in letter and spirit from the Hesiodic Theogony, introducing the conception of substances with their transformations and sequences, in place of that string of persons and quasi-human attributes which had animated the old legendary world. He is the father of what is called the Ionic philosophy, which is considered as lasting from his time down to that of Sokratês; and writers, ancient as well as modern, have professed to trace a succession of philosophers, each one the pupil of the preceding, between these two extreme epochs. But the appellation is, in truth, undefined, and even incorrect, since nothing entitled to the name of
- 66. a school, orsect, or succession,—like that of the Pythagoreans, to be noticed presently,—can be made out. There is, indeed, a certain general analogy in the philosophical vein of Thalês, Hippo, Anaximenês, and Diogenês of Apollonia, whereby they all stand distinguished from Xenophanês of Elea, and his successors, the Eleatic dialecticians, Parmenidês and Zeno; but there are also material differences between their respective doctrines,—no two of them holding the same. And if we look to Anaximander, the person next in order of time to Thalês, as well as to Herakleitus, we find them departing, in a great degree, even from that character which all the rest have in common, though both the one and the other are usually enrolled in the list of Ionic philosophers. Of the old legendary and polytheistic conception of nature, which Thalês partially discarded, we may remark that it is a state of the human mind in which the problems suggesting themselves to be solved, and the machinery for solving them, bear a fair proportion one to the other. If the problems be vast, indeterminate, confused, and derived rather from the hopes, fears, love, hatred, astonishment, etc., of men, than from any genuine desire of knowledge,—so also does the received belief supply invisible agents in unlimited number, and with every variety of power and inclination. The means of explanation are thus multiplied and diversified as readily as the phenomena to be explained. And though no future events or states can be predicted on trustworthy grounds, in such manner as to stand the scrutiny of subsequent verification,—yet there is little difficulty in rendering a specious and plausible account of matters past, of any and all things alike; especially as, at such a period, matters of fact requiring explanation are neither collated nor preserved with care. And though no event or state, which has not yet occurred, can be predicted, there is little difficulty in rendering a plausible account of everything which has occurred in the past. Cosmogony, and the prior ages of the world, were conceived as a sort of personal history, with intermarriages, filiation, quarrels, and other adventures, of these invisible agents; among whom some one or more were assumed as unbegotten and self-existent,—the latter
- 67. assumption being adifficulty common to all systems of cosmogony, and from which even this flexible and expansive hypothesis is not exempt. Now when Thalês disengaged Grecian philosophy from the old mode of explanation, he did not at the same time disengage it from the old problems and matters propounded for inquiry. These he retained, and transmitted to his successors, as vague and vast as they were at first conceived; and so they remained, though with some transformations and modifications, together with many new questions equally insoluble, substantially present to the Greeks throughout their whole history, as the legitimate problems for philosophical investigation. But these problems, adapted only to the old elastic system of polytheistic explanation and omnipresent personal agency, became utterly disproportioned to any impersonal hypotheses such as those of Thalês and the philosophers after him, —whether assumed physical laws, or plausible moral and metaphysical dogmas, open to argumentative attack, and of course requiring the like defence. To treat the visible world as a whole, and inquire when and how it began, as well as into all its past changes, —to discuss the first origin of men, animals, plants, the sun, the stars, etc.,—to assign some comprehensive reason why motion or change in general took place in the universe,—to investigate the destinies of the human race, and to lay down some systematic relation between them and the gods,—all these were topics admitting of being conceived in many different ways, and set forth with eloquent plausibility, but not reducible to any solution either resting on scientific evidence, or commanding steady adherence under a free scrutiny.[692] At the time when the power of scientific investigation was scanty and helpless, the problems proposed were thus such as to lie out of the reach of science in its largest compass. Gradually, indeed, subjects more special and limited, and upon which experience, or deductions from experience, could be brought to bear, were added to the list of quæsita, and examined with great profit and
- 68. instruction: but theold problems, with new ones, alike unfathomable, were never eliminated, and always occupied a prominent place in the philosophical world. Now it was this disproportion, between questions to be solved and means of solution, which gave rise to that conspicuous characteristic of Grecian philosophy,—the antagonist force of suspensive skepticism, passing in some minds into a broad negation of the attainability of general truth,—which it nourished from its beginning to its end; commencing as early as Xenophanês, continuing to manifest itself seven centuries afterwards in Ænesidêmus and Sextus Empiricus, and including in the interval between these two extremes some of the most powerful intellects in Greece. The present is not the time for considering these Skeptics, who bear an unpopular name, and have not often been fairly appreciated; the more so, as it often suited the purpose of men, themselves essentially skeptical, like Sokratês and Plato, to denounce professed skepticism with indignation. But it is essential to bring them into notice at the first spring of Grecian philosophy under Thalês, because the circumstances were then laid which so soon afterwards developed them. Though the celebrity of Thalês in antiquity was great and universal, scarcely any distinct facts were known respecting him: it is certain that he left nothing in writing. Extensive travels in Egypt and Asia are ascribed to him, and as a general fact these travels are doubtless true, since no other means of acquiring knowledge were then open. At a time when the brother of the Lesbian Alkæus was serving in the Babylonian army, we may easily conceive that an inquisitive Milesian would make his way to that wonderful city wherein stood the temple-observatory of the Chaldæan priesthood; nor is it impossible that he may have seen the still greater city of Ninus, or Nineveh, before its capture and destruction by the Medes. How great his reputation was in his lifetime, the admiration expressed by his younger contemporary, Xenophanês, assures us; and Herakleitus, in the next generation, a severe judge of all other philosophers, spoke of him with similar esteem. To him were traced,
- 69. by the Grecianinquirers of the fourth century B. C., the first beginnings of geometry, astronomy, and physiology in its large and really appropriate sense, the scientific study of nature: for the Greek word denoting nature (φύσις), first comes into comprehensive use about this time (as I have remarked in an earlier chapter),[693] with its derivatives physics and physiology, as distinguished from the theology of the old poets. Little stress can be laid on those elementary propositions in geometry which are specified as discovered, or as first demonstrated, by Thalês,—still less upon the solar eclipse respecting which, according to Herodotus, he determined beforehand the year of occurrence.[694] But the main doctrine of his physiology,—using that word in its larger Greek sense,—is distinctly attested. He stripped Oceanus and Tethys, primeval parents of the gods in the Homeric theogony, of their personality,—and laid down water, or fluid substance, as the single original element from which everything came, and into which everything returned.[695] The doctrine of one eternal element, remaining always the same in its essence, but indefinitely variable in its manifestations to sense, was thus first introduced to the discussion of the Grecian public. We have no means of knowing the reasons by which Thalês supported this opinion, nor could even Aristotle do more than conjecture what they might have been; but one of the statements urged on behalf of it,—that the earth itself rested on water,[696]—we may safely refer to the Milesian himself, for it would hardly have been advanced at a later age. Moreover, Thalês is reported to have held, that everything was living and full of gods; and that the magnet, especially, was a living thing. Thus the gods, as far as we can pretend to follow opinions so very faintly transmitted, are conceived as active powers, and causes of changeful manifestation, attached to the primeval substance:[697] the universe being assimilated to an organized body or system. Respecting Hippo,—who reproduced the theory of Thalês under a more generalized form of expression, substituting, in place of water, moisture, or something common to air and water,[698]—we do not know whether he belonged to the sixth or the fifth century B. C. But
- 70. Anaximander, Xenophanês, andPherekydês belong to the latter half of the sixth century. Anaximander, the son of Praxiadês, was a native of Milêtus,—Xenophanês, a native of Kolophon; the former, among the earliest expositors of doctrine in prose,[699] while the latter committed his opinions to the old medium of verse. Anaximander seems to have taken up the philosophical problem, while he materially altered the hypothesis of his predecessor Thalês. Instead of the primeval fluid of the latter, he supposed a primeval principle, without any actual determining qualities whatever, but including all qualities potentially, and manifesting them in an infinite variety from its continually self-changing nature,—a principle, which was nothing in itself, yet had the capacity of producing any and all manifestations, however contrary to each other,[700]—a primeval something, whose essence it was to be eternally productive of different phenomena,—a sort of mathematical point, which counts for nothing in itself, but is vigorous in generating lines to any extent that may be desired. In this manner, Anaximander professed to give a comprehensive explanation of change in general, or generation, or destruction,—how it happened that one sensible thing began and another ceased to exist,—according to the vague problems which these early inquirers were in the habit of setting to themselves.[701] He avoided that which the first philosophers especially dreaded, the affirmation that generation could take place out of Nothing; yet the primeval Something, which he supposed was only distinguished from nothing by possessing this very power of generation. In his theory, he passed from the province of physics into that of metaphysics. He first introduced into Grecian philosophy that important word which signifies a beginning or a principle,[702] and first opened that metaphysical discussion, which was carried on in various ways throughout the whole period of Grecian philosophy, as to the one and the many—the continuous and the variable—that which exists eternally, as distinguished from that which comes and passes away in ever-changing manifestations. His physiology, or explanation of nature, thus conducted the mind into a different route from that suggested by the hypothesis of Thalês, which was built
- 71. upon physical considerations,and was therefore calculated to suggest and stimulate observations of physical phenomena for the purpose of verifying or confuting it,—while the hypothesis of Anaximander admitted only of being discussed dialectically, or by reasonings expressed in general language; reasonings sometimes, indeed, referring to experience for the purpose of illustration, but seldom resting on it, and never looking out for it as a necessary support. The physical explanation of nature, however, once introduced by Thalês, although deserted by Anaximander, was taken up by Anaximenês and others afterwards, and reproduced with many divergences of doctrine,—yet always more or less entangled and perplexed with metaphysical additions, since the two departments were never clearly parted throughout all Grecian philosophy. Of these subsequent physical philosophers I shall speak hereafter: at present, I confine myself to the thinkers of the sixth century B. C., among whom Anaximander stands prominent, not as the follower of Thalês, but as the author of an hypothesis both new and tending in a different direction. It was not merely as the author of this hypothesis, however, that Anaximander enlarged the Greek mind and roused the powers of thought: we find him also mentioned as distinguished in astronomy and geometry. He is said to have been the first to establish a sun- dial in Greece, to construct a sphere, and to explain the obliquity of the ecliptic;[703] how far such alleged authorship really belongs to him, we cannot be certain,—but there is one step of immense importance which he is clearly affirmed to have made. He was the first to compose a treatise on the geography of the land and sea within his cognizance, and to construct a chart or map founded thereupon,—seemingly a tablet of brass. Such a novelty, wondrous even to the rude and ignorant, was calculated to stimulate powerfully inquisitive minds, and from it may be dated the commencement of Grecian rational geography,—not the least valuable among the contributions of this people to the stock of human knowledge.
- 72. Xenophanês of Kolophon,somewhat younger than Anaximander, and nearly contemporary with Pythagoras (seemingly from about 570-480 B. C.), migrated from Kolophon[704] to Zanklê and Katana in Sicily and Elea in Italy, soon after the time when Ionia became subject to the Persians, (540-530 B. C.) He was the founder of what is called the Eleatic school of philosophers,—a real school, since it appears that Parmenidês, Zeno, and Melissus, pursued and developed, in a great degree, the train of speculation which had been begun by Xenophanês,—doubtless with additions and variations of their own, but especially with a dialectic power which belongs to the age of Periklês, and is unknown in the sixth century B. C. He was the author of more than one poem of considerable length, one on the foundation of Kolophon and another on that of Elea; besides his poem on Nature, wherein his philosophical doctrines were set forth.[705] His manner appears to have been controversial and full of asperity towards antagonists; but what is most remarkable is the plain-spoken manner in which he declared himself against the popular religion, and in which he denounced as abominable the descriptions of the gods given by Homer and Hesiod. [706] He is said to have controverted the doctrines both of Thalês and Pythagoras: this is probable enough; but he seems to have taken his start from the philosophy of Anaximander,—not, however, to adopt it, but to reverse it,—and to set forth an opinion which we may call its contrary. Nature, in the conception of Anaximander, consisted of a Something having no other attribute except the unlimited power of generating and cancelling phenomenal changes: in this doctrine, the something or substratum existed only in and for those changes, and could not be said to exist at all in any other sense: the permanent was thus merged and lost in the variable,—the one in the many. Xenophanês laid down the exact opposite: he conceived Nature as one unchangeable and indivisible whole, spherical, animated, endued with reason, and penetrated by or indeed identical with God: he denied the objective reality of all change, or generation, or destruction, which he seems to have considered as only changes or
- 73. modifications in thepercipient, and perhaps different in one percipient and another. That which exists, he maintained, could not have been generated, nor could it ever be destroyed: there was neither real generation nor real destruction of anything; but that which men took for such, was the change in their own feelings and ideas. He thus recognized the permanent without the variable,[707]— the one without the many. And his treatment of the received religious creed was in harmony with such physical or metaphysical hypothesis; for while he held the whole of Nature to be God, without parts or change, he at the same time pronounced the popular gods to be entities of subjective fancy, imagined by men after their own model: if oxen or lions were to become religious, he added, they would in like manner provide for themselves gods after their respective shapes and characters.[708] This hypothesis, which seemed to set aside altogether the study of the sensible world as a source of knowledge, was expounded briefly, and as it should seem, obscurely and rudely, by Xenophanês; at least we may infer thus much from the slighting epithet applied to him by Aristotle.[709] But his successors, Parmenidês and Zeno, in the succeeding century, expanded it considerably, supported it with extraordinary acuteness of dialectics, and even superadded a second part, in which the phenomena of sense—though considered only as appearances, not partaking in the reality of the one Ens—were yet explained by a new physical hypothesis; so that they will be found to exercise great influence over the speculations both of Plato and Aristotle. We discover in Xenophanês, moreover, a vein of skepticism, and a mournful despair as to the attainability of certain knowledge,[710] which the nature of his philosophy was well calculated to suggest, and in which the sillograph Timon of the third century B. C., who seems to have spoken of Xenophanês better than of most of the other philosophers, powerfully sympathized. The cosmogony of Pherekydês of Syrus, contemporary of Anaximander and among the teachers of Pythagoras, seems, according to the fragments preserved, a combination of the old legendary fancies with Orphic mysticism,[711] and probably exercised
- 74. little influence overthe subsequent course of Grecian philosophy. By what has been said of Thalês, Anaximander, and Xenophanês, it will be seen that the sixth century B. C. witnessed the opening of several of those roads of intellectual speculation which the later philosophers pursued farther, or at least from which they branched off. Before the year 500 B. C. many interesting questions were thus brought into discussion, which Solon, who died about 558 B. C., had never heard of,—just as he may probably never have seen the map of Anaximander. But neither of these two distinguished men— Anaximander or Xenophanês—was anything more than a speculative inquirer. The third eminent name of this century, of whom I am now about to speak,—Pythagoras, combined in his character disparate elements which require rather a longer development. Pythagoras was founder of a brotherhood, originally brought together by a religious influence, and with observances approaching to monastic peculiarity,—working in a direction at once religious, political, and scientific, and exercising for some time a real political ascendency,—but afterwards banished from government and state affairs into a sectarian privacy with scientific pursuits, not without, however, still producing some statesmen individually distinguished. Amidst the multitude of false and apocryphal statements which circulated in antiquity respecting this celebrated man, we find a few important facts reasonably attested and deserving credence. He was a native of Samos,[712] son of an opulent merchant named Mnêsarchus,—or, according to some of his later and more fervent admirers, of Apollo; born, as far as we can make out, about the 50th Olympiad, or 580 B. C. On the many marvels recounted respecting his youth, it is unnecessary to dwell. Among them may be numbered his wide-reaching travels, said to have been prolonged for nearly thirty years, to visit the Arabians, the Syrians, the Phenicians, the Chaldæans, the Indians, and the Gallic Druids. But there is reason to believe that he really visited Egypt[713]—perhaps also Phenicia—and Babylon, then Chaldæan and independent. At the time when he saw Egypt, between 560-540 B. C., about one century earlier than Herodotus, it was under Amasis, the last of its own kings, with its
- 75. peculiar native characteryet unimpaired by foreign conquest, and only slightly modified by the admission during the preceding century of Grecian mercenary troops and traders. The spectacle of Egyptian habits, the conversation of the priests, and the initiation into various mysteries or secret rites and stories not accessible to the general public, may very naturally have impressed the mind of Pythagoras, and given him that turn for mystic observance, asceticism, and peculiarity of diet and clothing,—which manifested itself from the same cause among several of his contemporaries, but which was not a common phenomenon in the primitive Greek religion. Besides visiting Egypt, Pythagoras is also said to have profited by the teaching of Thalês, of Anaximander, and of Pherekydês of Syros.[714] Amidst the towns of Ionia, he would, moreover, have an opportunity of conversing with many Greek navigators who had visited foreign countries, especially Italy and Sicily. His mind seems to have been acted upon and impelled by this combined stimulus,—partly towards an imaginative and religious vein of speculation, with a life of mystic observance,—partly towards that active exercise, both of mind and body, which the genius of an Hellenic community so naturally tended to suggest. Of the personal doctrines or opinions of Pythagoras, whom we must distinguish from Philolaus and the subsequent Pythagoreans, we have little certain knowledge, though doubtless the first germ of their geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, etc. must have proceeded from him. But that he believed in the metempsychosis or transmigration of the souls of deceased men into other men, as well as into animals, we know, not only by other evidence, but also by the testimony of his contemporary, the philosopher Xenophanês of Elea. Pythagoras, seeing a dog beaten, and hearing him howl, desired the striker to desist, saying: “It is the soul of a friend of mine, whom I recognized by his voice.” This—together with the general testimony of Hêrakleitus, that Pythagoras was a man of extensive research and acquired instruction, but artful for mischief and destitute of sound judgment—is all that we know about him from contemporaries. Herodotus, two generations afterwards, while
- 76. he conceives thePythagoreans as a peculiar religious order, intimates that both Orpheus and Pythagoras had derived the doctrine of the metempsychosis from Egypt, but had pretended to it as their own without acknowledgment.[715] Pythagoras combines the character of a sophist (a man of large observation, and clever, ascendent, inventive mind,—the original sense of the word Sophist, prior to the polemics of the Platonic school, and the only sense known to Herodotus[716]) with that of an inspired teacher, prophet, and worker of miracles,—approaching to and sometimes even confounded with the gods,—and employing all these gifts to found a new special order of brethren, bound together by religious rites and observances peculiar to themselves. In his prominent vocation, analogous to that of Epimenidês, Orpheus, or Melampus, he appears as the revealer of a mode of life calculated to raise his disciples above the level of mankind, and to recommend them to the favor of the gods; the Pythagorean life, like the Orphic life,[717] being intended as the exclusive prerogative of the brotherhood,—approached only by probation and initiatory ceremonies which were adapted to select enthusiasts rather than to an indiscriminate crowd,—and exacting entire mental devotion to the master.[718] In these lofty pretensions the Agrigentine Empedoklês seems to have greatly copied him, though with some varieties, about half a century afterwards.[719] While Aristotle tells us that the Krotoniates identified Pythagoras with the Hyperborean Apollo, the satirical Timon pronounced him to have been “a juggler of solemn speech, engaged in fishing for men.”[720] This is the same character, looked at from the different points of view of the believer and the unbeliever. There is, however, no reason for regarding Pythagoras as an impostor, because experience seems to show, that while in certain ages it is not difficult for a man to persuade others that he is inspired, it is still less difficult for him to contract the same belief himself. Looking at the general type of Pythagoras, as conceived by witnesses in and nearest to his own age,—Xenophanês, Hêrakleitus,
- 77. Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle,Isokratês,[721]—we find in him chiefly the religious missionary and schoolmaster, with little of the politician. His efficiency in the latter character, originally subordinate, first becomes prominent in those glowing fancies which the later Pythagoreans communicated to Aristoxenus and Dikæarchus. The primitive Pythagoras inspired by the gods to reveal a new mode of life,[722]— the Pythagorean life,—and to promise divine favor to a select and docile few, as the recompense of strict ritual obedience, of austere self-control, and of laborious training, bodily as well as mental. To speak with confidence of the details of his training, ethical or scientific, and of the doctrines which he promulgated, is impossible; for neither he himself nor any of his disciples anterior to Philolaus— who was separated from him by about one intervening generation— left any memorials in writing.[723] Numbers and lines, studied partly in their own mutual relations, partly under various symbolizing fancies, presented themselves to him as the primary constituent elements of the universe, and as a sort of magical key to phenomena, physical as well as moral. And these mathematical tendencies in his teaching, expanded by Pythagoreans, his successors, and coinciding partly also, as has been before stated, with the studies of Anaximander and Thalês, acquired more and more development, so as to become one of the most glorious and profitable manifestations of Grecian intellect. Living as Pythagoras did at a time when the stock of experience was scanty, the license of hypothesis unbounded, and the process of deduction without rule or verifying test,—he was thus fortunate enough to strike into that track of geometry and arithmetic, in which, from data of experience few, simple, and obvious, an immense field of deductive and verifiable investigation may be travelled over. We must at the same time remark, however, that in his mind this track, which now seems so straightforward and well defined, was clouded by strange fancies which it is not easy to understand, and from which it was but partially cleared by his successors. Of his spiritual training much is said, though not upon very good authority. We hear of his memorial discipline, his monastic self-scrutiny, his employment of music to soothe disorderly passions,[724] his long novitiate of silence, his
- 78. knowledge of physiognomy,which enabled him to detect even without trial unworthy subjects, his peculiar diet, and his rigid care for sobriety as well as for bodily vigor. He is also said to have inculcated abstinence from animal food, and this feeling is so naturally connected with the doctrine of the metempsychosis, that we may well believe him to have entertained it, as Empedoklês also did after him.[725] It is certain that there were peculiar observances, and probably a certain measure of self-denial embodied in the Pythagorean life; but on the other hand, it seems equally certain that the members of the order cannot have been all subjected to the same diet, or training, or studies. For Milo the Krotoniate was among them,[726] the strongest man and the unparalleled wrestler of his age,—who cannot possibly have dispensed with animal food and ample diet (even setting aside the tales about his voracious appetite), and is not likely to have bent his attention on speculative study. Probably Pythagoras did not enforce the same bodily or mental discipline on all, or at least knew when to grant dispensations. The order, as it first stood under him, consisted of men different both in temperament and aptitude, but bound together by common religious observances and hopes, common reverence for the master, and mutual attachment as well as pride in each other’s success; and it must thus be distinguished from the Pythagoreans of the fourth century B. C., who had no communion with wrestlers, and comprised only ascetic, studious men, generally recluse, though in some cases rising to political distinction. The succession of these Pythagoreans, never very numerous, seems to have continued until about 300 B. C., and then nearly died out; being superseded by other schemes of philosophy more suited to cultivated Greeks of the age after Sokratês. But during the time of Cicero, two centuries afterwards, the orientalizing tendency—then beginning to spread over the Grecian and Roman world, and becoming gradually stronger and stronger—caused the Pythagorean philosophy to be again revived. It was revived too, with little or none of its scientific tendencies, but with more than its primitive religious and imaginative fanaticism,—Apollonius of Tyana constituting himself
- 79. a living copyof Pythagoras. And thus, while the scientific elements developed by the disciples of Pythagoras had become disjoined from all peculiarity of sect, and passed into the general studious world,— the original vein of mystic and ascetic fancy belonging to the master, without any of that practical efficiency of body and mind which had marked his first followers, was taken up anew into the pagan world, along with the disfigured doctrines of Plato. Neo-Pythagorism, passing gradually into Neo-Platonism, outlasted the other more positive and masculine systems of pagan philosophy, as the contemporary and rival of Christianity. A large proportion of the false statements concerning Pythagoras come from these Neo- Pythagoreans, who were not deterred by the want of memorials from illustrating, with ample latitude of fancy, the ideal character of the master. That an inquisitive man like Pythagoras, at a time when there were hardly any books to study, would visit foreign countries, and converse with all the Grecian philosophical inquirers within his reach, is a matter which we should presume, even if no one attested it; and our witnesses carry us very little beyond this general presumption. What doctrines he borrowed, or from whom, we are unable to discover. But, in fact, his whole life and proceedings bear the stamp of an original mind, and not of a borrower,—a mind impressed both with Hellenic and with non-Hellenic habits and religion, yet capable of combining the two in a manner peculiar to himself; and above all, endued with those talents for religion and personal ascendency over others, which told for much more than the intrinsic merit of his ideas. We are informed that after extensive travels and inquiries he returned to Samos, at the age of about forty: he then found his native island under the despotism of Polykratês, which rendered it an unsuitable place either for free sentiments or for marked individuals. Unable to attract hearers, or found any school or brotherhood, in his native island, he determined to expatriate. And we may presume that at this period (about 535-530 B. C.) the recent subjugation of Ionia by the Persians was not without influence on his determination. The trade between the Asiatic and the Italian Greeks,
- 80. —and even theintimacy between Milêtus and Knidus on the one side, and Sybaris and Tarentum on the other,—had been great and of long standing, so that there was more than one motive to determine him to the coast of Italy; in which direction also his contemporary Xenophanês, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, emigrated, seemingly, about the same time,—from Kolophon to Zanklê, Katana, and Elea.[727] Kroton and Sybaris were at this time in their fullest prosperity,— among the first and most prosperous cities of the Hellenic name. To the former of the two Pythagoras directed his course. A council of one thousand persons, taken from among the heirs and representatives of the principal proprietors at its first foundation, was here invested with the supreme authority: in what manner the executive offices were filled, we have no information. Besides a great extent of power, and a numerous population, the large mass of whom had no share in the political franchise, Kroton stood at this time distinguished for two things,—the general excellence of the bodily habit of the citizens, attested, in part, by the number of conquerors furnished to the Olympic games,—and the superiority of its physicians, or surgeons.[728] These two points were, in fact, greatly connected with each other. For the therapeutics of the day consisted not so much of active remedies as of careful diet and regimen; while the trainer, who dictated the life of an athlete during his long and fatiguing preparation for an Olympic contest, and the professional superintendent of the youths who frequented the public gymnasia, followed out the same general views, and acted upon the same basis of knowledge, as the physician who prescribed for a state of positive bad health.[729] Of medical education properly so called, especially of anatomy, there was then little or nothing. The physician acquired his knowledge from observation of men sick as well as healthy, and from a careful notice of the way in which the human body was acted upon by surrounding agents and circumstances: and this same knowledge was not less necessary for the trainer; so that the same place which contained the best men in the latter class was also likely to be distinguished in the former. It is
- 81. not improbable thatthis celebrity of Kroton may have been one of the reasons which determined Pythagoras to go thither; for among the precepts ascribed to him, precise rules as to diet and bodily regulation occupy a prominent place. The medical or surgical celebrity of Dêmokêdês (son-in-law of the Pythagorean Milo), to whom allusion has been made in a former chapter, is contemporaneous with the presence of Pythagoras at Kroton; and the medical men of Magna Græcia maintained themselves in credit, as rivals of the schools of the Asklepiads at Kôs and Knidus, throughout all the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. The biographers of Pythagoras tell us that his arrival there, his preaching, and his conduct, produced an effect almost electric upon the minds of the people, with an extensive reform, public as well as private. Political discontent was repressed, incontinence disappeared, luxury became discredited, and the women, hastened to exchange their golden ornaments for the simplest attire. No less than two thousand persons were converted at his first preaching; and so effective were his discourses to the youth, that the Supreme Council of One Thousand invited him into their assembly, solicited his advice, and even offered to constitute him their prytanis, or president, while his wife and daughter were placed at the head of the religious processions of females.[730] Nor was his influence confined to Kroton. Other towns in Italy and Sicily,—Sybaris, Metapontum, Rhêgium, Katana, Himera, etc., all felt the benefit of his exhortations, which extricated some of them even from slavery. Such are the tales of which the biographers of Pythagoras are full.[731] And we see that even the disciples of Aristotle, about the year 300 B. C.,—Aristoxenus, Dikæarchus, Herakleidês of Pontus, etc., are hardly less charged with them than the Neo-Pythagoreans of three or four centuries later: they doubtless heard them from their contemporary Pythagoreans,[732] the last members of a declining sect, among whom the attributes of the primitive founder passed for godlike, but who had no memorials, no historical judgment, and no means of forming a true conception of Kroton as it stood in 530 B. C. [733]
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