Cosmology in Antiquity

Rosemary Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134524181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The popularity of Stephen Hawking's work has put cosmology back in the public eye. The question of how the universe began, and why it hangs together, still puzzles scientists. Their puzzlement began two and a half thousand years ago when Greek philosophers first 'looked up at the sky and formed a theory of everything.' Though their solutions are little credited today, the questions remain fresh.
The early Greek thinkers struggled to come to terms with and explain the totality of their surroundings; to identitify an original substance from which the universe was compounded; and to reconcile the presence of balance and proportion with the apparent disorder of the universe.
Rosemary Wright examines the cosmological theories of the `natural philosophers' from Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes to Plato, the Stoics and the NeoPlatonists. The importance of Babylonian and Egyptian forerunners is emphasised.
Cosmology in Antiquity is a comprehensive introduction to the cosmological thought of antiquity, the first such survey since Neugebauer's work of 1962.

1

INTRODUCTION

I have written in the belief that the universe is governed by an order that we can perceive partially now, and that we may understand fully in the not-too-distant future.

(Stephen Hawking 1993: ix)

The last thirty years have been called ‘the golden age of cosmology’. With the discovery of the microwave background, the launching of the ‘Cosmic Background Explorer’ (COBE), the general advances in astrophysics and the increased sophistication of radio-telescopes, particle accelerators and computer modelling, it would seem that we are on the brink of solving the enigma of the origins of the universe, yet the paradoxes inherent in the subject, the continuing controversies and the difficulties of verification make that solution still elusive. Many of today’s problems awaiting solution are more sophisticated versions of issues which engaged the interest of ancient cosmologists. The Aristotelian ‘perfect cosmological principle’, for example, of a universe maintained indefinitely by natural laws foreshadows the ‘steady state’ concept, whereas the opposed view of a ‘big bang’ theory of the universe starting from a single point and erupting out from there had its adherents then as now.

Ongoing arguments even among the theorists who are in general agreement on the ‘big bang’ and the events immediately following the crucial first moment come up against a need to assume either ‘god-given’ initial conditions or some kind of cosmic organising basis in addition to the recognised laws of physics; to affirm that an initial condition or an increase in complexity is a fundamental property of nature is an answer that received short shrift from Plato and his followers. Once the events are in train ‘inflationists’ who expect expansion to continue indefinitely are in the tradition of Anaxagoras, whereas others are closer to Epicurus in assuming a self-regulating world in which the expansion is halted once an appropriate density is reached. The question of whether the advance in development is to be taken as linear or repeating in cycles is another old question, as is the related one of whether the universe, or at least our immediate galaxy, will continue or disintegrate in some way, following the pattern of birth, maturity, decrease and death of the forms of life it contains. Will there be continual regeneration as Empedocles supposed or, in line with the ancient atomists, a ‘big crunch’ for our world, complementing at its end the vortex-generation of its beginning? The Stoic theory of the ascendancy of fire and a repeating ekpyrōsis also appears to be enjoying a revival in the assumption of the incredible initial heat of the ‘big bang’, in the observed present increase in the earth’s temperature and in the view that the universe may in the future fall back on itself ‘with stars and galaxies being consumed in a mighty fireball, possibly to re-explode in a second big bang’ (as reported by N. Booth in the Observer of 5 August 1994).

The model of the anthropocentric enclosed spherical cosmos that was developed in detail from Plato to Ptolemy and continued through the Middle Ages has long been discarded, yet the discovery of the curvature of space restores some interest to old arguments concerned with the outermost ‘edge’ of the universe. And what of the anthropocentric perspective? Is the human race fundamental or incidental to the whole? A question that was once shunted to theology becomes increasingly relevant as we are made more aware that cosmology itself, like all arts and sciences, is a construct of human intelligence, subject to social and linguistic conditioning and dubious means of communication.

A further relevance of the old to the new comes with the kind of language with which the most up-to-date cosmogonies are presented by experts to a non-professional readership; there is the constant surprise of the reappearance of Presocratic terminology in such works, an excellent example of which is Paul Davies’ The Cosmic Blueprint (1987). Talk of cold dark matter and hot dark matter, and of processes of heating and cooling, recalls the primary opposites of the Milesians, as does that of dense regions being brought together while the ‘rarefied’ is thrust outwards. An account of an initial ‘soup’ of cosmological material in a uniform mixture reads like Anaxagoras’ first fragment that ‘all things were together’, and a ‘thermodynamic equilibrium’ could pass as a description of Empedocles’ pre-cosmic sphere, itself influencing the later physics of the Stoics. There are common grounds in the assumption of orderly arrangements emerging from the outward rippling of featureless swirling ‘stuff’, and especially in the crucial realisation that cosmological theorising rests on some understanding of the essential linkage of the minutely small with the immensely large.

The name of the science of cosmology is derived from ancient Greek, and has an interesting history. In the earliest Greek texts, the Homeric epic poems of the Iliad and Odyssey, the word kosmos had primarily the sense of ‘order’, used, for example, of rowers at their place by the oars (Odyssey 13.77) or of soldiers sleeping with their equipment properly set out around them (Iliad 10.472), whereas the absence of kosmos would characterise the ragged rout of an army (Iliad 2.214). The Greek aesthetic sense of style saw beauty in arrangement and proportion, so that kosmos could be used for geometric decoration on a vase, as well as for the array of dress, perfume, jewellery and sandals put on by the goddess Hera in her glamorous preparations for seduction (Iliad 14.187); this meaning of ‘adornment’ still lingers in the derivation ‘cosmetics’. A song or story with the parts well arranged was also a kosmos, and to show the courtesy of good manners, adapting to the needs of others was to be kosmic. The historians extended this use to cover well-regulated states such as Sparta (so Herodotus at 1.65), officials who maintained political order, and harmonious relationships generally.

By the end of the sixth century BC the combination of these senses of a continuing orderly arrangement of parts showing beauty and adornment was appropriated for the grand structure of earth, sea and the sky above, encompassing by day the sun, clouds and rainbow, and by night the bright patterns of moon, stars and planets. Xenophanes, a refugee from the expansion of the Middle Eastern empire of the Medes in the sixth century BC, is said to have been the first ‘who looked up at the sky and had a theory of everything’ (reported by Aristotle Metaphysics 986b). The move towards calling this whole world-system ‘the kosmos,’ on the other hand, was attributed to his near contemporary Pythagoras in the notice that:

He was the first to call the sum of the whole by the name of kosmos, because of the order which it displayed.

(Aetius 2.1.1)

To this word, still ambiguous between the beautiful arrangement of parts in the whole and the whole itself, was added logos, meaning ‘a reasoned and rational account’, to give the compound noun cosmology, the term that was used from then onwards to cover analyses, theories and and explanations of the phenomena of the universe.

The first recorded use of kosmos in the sense of ‘world order’ is from the one quotation extant from the work of Anaximenes:

As our soul, which is air, maintains us, so breath (pneuma) and air surround the whole kosmos.

The ‘whole kosmos’, the encircling sky and all that it contains, is presented here as alive and breathing, held and controlled as humans are by the life-support system called air (aēr).

Other early uses of kosmos show the word in the process of becoming established as an appropriate general term for the universe, ‘the whole’, ‘the all’ or ‘the sum of things’ (the Latin summa rerum). Heraclitus, writing soon after Anaximenes, found the vital principle in fire rather than air:

This kosmos no one of men or gods has made, but it ever was and will be – ever-living fire, kindling in measures and quenching in measures.

(fr. 30)

Melissus, a generation later than Heraclitus, made the same point, but more prosaically:

It is impossible for there to be change of kosmos, for the kosmos that previously exists is not destroyed, and the one that does not exist has not come into being.

(fr. 7)

Empedocles, a near contemporary of Melissus, said that the four elements of earth, air, fire and water were brought together ‘into one kosmos’ by the force of attraction (fr. 26.5), and he described the universal intelligence pervading the whole as:

Mind alone, holy and inexpressible, sweeping across the whole kosmos with swift thoughts.

(fr. 134)

And this sense of the united arrangement of the universe was the standard use soon after in Anaxagoras, as in the quotation

All things in the one kosmos have not been separated one from another or sliced off by an axe, not hot from cold or cold from hot.

(fr. 8)

Two fragments of the Pythagorean Philolaus probably come from about the same period and continue the theme on similar lines to the previous quotations, as they emphasise the sense of orderly connection and arrangement of like and unlike in one whole:

Things unlike each other and of different kinds and unequally matched must all have connecting links to be part of one kosmos.

(fr. 6)

What limits and what is unlimited together make a harmony of the kosmos and the things in it.

(fr. 2)

Among the later Presocratics, Diogenes of Apollonia spoke with familiarity of ‘this kosmos’ and all that exists in it (fr. 2). The sense came full circle when the the word kosmos, which in Homer had described personal adornment and was then transferred to the fair arrangement of the universe, returned with Democritus to the individual, portrayed now as the whole in miniature, the ‘microcosm’ (mikros kosmos, fr. 34).

The medical writers at about the same time were also conscious of the relationship between the order of parts in the individual and in the external world. It was thought that the doctor had to be familiar with the constellations, and to watch out for

changes and excesses in food and drink, in winds and weather and the kosmos as a whole, since from these arise the illnesses that occur in people.

(Regimen 1.2)

And the author of the early Hippocratic work, On Human Nature, claimed that a person would die if any of the mutually dependent components that made up his or her constitution failed, just as the kosmos would disappear if any one of its connected opposites, the same ingredients on a large scale, were to break loose, for, in both, ‘from a single necessity, they maintain and nourish each other’ (On Human Nature 7.58–60).

These early thinkers set out to discard mythical and theological traditions and to forge a new language of nature and necessity to account for the structure and functioning of phenomena. Their great advance came in the recognition of balance and proportion in apparent disorder, and of continuity through the variations; they were sustained by the confidence that the explanation of these was ultimately accessible to human reasoning, however great the intellectual effort involved. Kosmos was the name given to the well-arranged, all-containing whole, and logos the rational analysis and account of it. From the struggles of these pioneering Greeks to come to terms with and explain the totality of their surroundings was born the science of cosmology.

The new science soon began to develop its own subject-matter and to find its own experts, who transferred the language of human relationships to that of the physical world. So Socrates, with his usual ironic touch, told his respondent that

clever men, Callicles, say that sky and earth, and men and gods, are bound in friendly community, orderliness (kosmiotēs), restraint and law, and so that’s why they call this whole thing kosmos.

(Gorgias 508a)

Socrates himself however declined to join these experts, finding the study irrelevant to questions of human values, aims and happiness, where his own interests lay. Xenophon, who knew Socrates in his lifetime, and wrote biographical notes of him in his Memorabilia, reported that:

Socrates didn’t spend his time discussing the nature of everything as most others did, wondering about what the experts call the kosmos and the reasons for all the things in the sky necessarily coming about as they do; on the contrary he pointed out the foolishness of those who were concerned with such matters.

(Memorabilia 1.1.11; cf. Plato Phaedo 98a)

Although kosmos still kept connotations of orderly arrangement – for states, groups of people, speeches, personal adornments – as well as for the sky (the ouranos) in its night beauty, by Socrates’ time in the fifth century BC it had become in particular a technical term for the universe, for what had been called more informally ‘the whole’ or ‘all things’, and those who investigated it were recognised as professionals, grouped together as philosophers and in particular as ‘physicists’, i.e., students of physis – ‘nature’ or ‘the natural world’.

The list of ‘physicists’ starts with the three Ionians, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, from the coastal town of Miletus. They are followed soon after by Heraclitus of Ephesus and Pythagoras, who migrated from the island of Samos to south Italy; his immediate successors were Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, also in south Italy. Empedocles in Sicily from the west of the Greek world and Melissus of Samos from the east side belonged in the next generation, as well as Anaxagoras from the Ionian town of Clazomenae and Democritus of Abdera, the main founder of the atomic theory, who both migrated to Athens. Only then, in the fifth century, did Athens become the centre for philosophy, dominated by the native Athenians Socrates and Plato. Aristotle first studied with Plato in his Academy, and then set up his own school, the Lyceum, nearby. In the post-Aristotelian Hellenistic era the rival schools of Epicurus and the Stoic Zeno of Citium were founded, and over the next centuries both Epicureanism and a modified form of Stoicism became influential in the intellectual life of the increasingly powerful city of Rome. During the same period from the third century BC a great centre of scholarship had been founded in the Museum and Library of Alexandria where some of the brightest and most influential astro-cosmologists worked over a number of centuries, culminating in the great Ptolemy.

While it is necessary to recognise the early background to cosmological thought in the achievements of the ancient Near East in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Semitic cultures, the innovations and theoretica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• List of figures
• General series introduction
• Acknowledgements
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 A SURVEY OF COSMOLOGICAL TEXTS
• 3 MODELS, MYTHS AND METAPHORS
• 4 MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM
• 5 CHAOS AND COSMOGONY
• 6 ELEMENTS AND MATTER
• 7 AIR, AITHER AND ASTRA
• 8 TIME AND ETERNITY
• 9 THE MATHEMATICAL BASES OF GREEK COSMOLOGY
• 10 THE COSMOS AND GOD
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index of classical sources
• General index