Pythagoras
As
mentioned last time, Anaximander had a student named Pythagoras (570 -
495 BCE) who is said to have met Thales, who told Pythagoras to go to
Egypt to learn about mathematics, science and the cosmos. Pythagoras is
best known today for the Pythagorean theorem of mathematics, triangular
like much of the work of Thales as well as the pyramids of Egypt.
Pythagoras
is the most famous of the ‘presocratic’ philosophers (those who taught
before Socrates). While the Milesians had a school by association,
Pythagoras is the first Greek thinker to found a system which for
hundreds of years was known as the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras is also the
first to call himself a ‘philosopher’, a lover of wisdom, and he had a
great influence on Plato, the most famous and influential of Greek
philosophers. Plato, like Pythagoras, founded a major movement of
Platonism (known today as Neoplatonism), and it was from several
prominent Neoplatonists (particularly Porphyry and Iamblichus) that we
know of Pythagoras and his teachings. These Neoplatonists believed that
both Pythagoras and Plato were sent by the gods to humanity. While the
Pythagoreans only lasted a few hundred years, the Neoplatonists brought
much Pythagoreanism along with Platonism into the Islamic golden age
and the Italian Renaissance.
Pythagoras
was born on the island of Samos, off the Turkish coast of ancient Ionia
and not far from Miletus. He traveled before settling in Croton, a
Greek colony in what is today southern Italy. Pythagoras gathered many
students and these Pythagoreans became involved in politics, playing a
significant part in the aristocratic rule of Croton. Like Plato,
Aristotle and other Greek thinkers, Pythagoras believed in aristocracy
through meritocracy, that those who rose in achievement and education
should rule society. Later, the Pythagoreans were persecuted and chased
off the island. Their meeting place was set on fire and many of their
members died in the flames.
Pythagoras,
like Plato, was revered by later followers as a divine being, and much
mythology was added to his biography. He was said to have been the son
of Apollo (a name which the Pythagoreans interpreted to mean ‘Not’ (A)
‘Many’ (poly), a supreme oneness like that of Anaximander’s apeiron and
Xenophanes’ god we will examine next). Like Apollo and the sun,
Pythagoras was said to glow with a sagely aura. The Oracle of Apollo at
Delphi, the place Anaximander places as the center and navel of the
earth and cosmos and the place Socrates went to inquire about his own
worth, was the home of the Pythia, the priestesses who huffed incense
and/or geological gasses to predict the future in enigmatic riddles.
The name ‘Pythagoras’ means ‘Apollo-Priestess Professor’, one who
professes the greatness of Apollo’s Oracle to others (as in the Agora,
the public square), one who speaks for Apollo like the priestesses, or
one who speaks/professes on an equal level with the priestesses. One
delphic priestess named Themistoclea is said to have taught Pythagoras
about ethics.
Pythagoras
had many legends told about him. Other than glowing like the sun
itself, he was said to have a golden thigh that he showed off once at
the Olympic games (it is not written which thigh was golden or why he
did not have two), that he could predict the future several generations,
that he could translocate (be in two or more places at once, similarly
said of some Indian gurus), that a river once welcomed him by calling
his name, and, best of all, that he killed a poisoned snake by biting it
(an ancient version of the “Bigfoot keeps a picture he took of Chuck
Norris” bit).
Pythagoras
is said to have traveled extensively and according to Diogenes Laertius
studied with the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the
Persians, the Judeans, the Indians, and others (note that he mentions
the Indians). While this is the most extensive list of instructive
cultures for a thinker so far, as mentioned previously it is difficult
to know whether Pythagoras reached all of these places or if he is made
to look worldly afterwards.
Xenophanes
said Pythagoras believed in the transmigration of souls, and that
Pythagoras once stopped a man from beating a dog saying he heard the
voice of his dead friend in the dog’s cries. Heraclitus affirms this
too, ridiculing Pythagoras for being the wisest of men, yet believing
that in one previous life he had been a sardine, and in another a
cucumber. Heraclitus seems to be using Pythagoras to show us that the
wisest are still foolish, only relatively wise themselves. Like Thales,
Pythagoras thought all things were full of souls and/or gods, which
required the ethical treatment of all life.
It
is difficult to know about teachings of Pythagoras and the practices of
the Pythagoreans as they believed in keeping secrets. In the ancient
world knowledge was often kept secret for its own protection, as we will
see Plato advocate in his Republic. The most important teachings are
spoken to those one trusts and lived in practice, not written down for
unknown people to misinterpret. Pythagoras was not known to have
committed any of his teachings to writing. Not only was divulging
teachings outside community forbidden, new members were tested as to how
long they could keep silent, refraining from saying anything to
anybody. The community was divided into the new ‘listeners’ who were
instructed in general teachings and the inner circle of ‘learners’ who
actively pursued truth and shared their findings only with this group.
Some sources say these were two separate schools, one dogmatic and the
other progressive, while others say these were two levels in one and the
same school/society.
There
were many female Pythagoreans in the community, though all the major
Pythagorean texts left to us are written by men and it is unclear what
status women would have had. Some say the Pythagoreans shared all
things in common, which is Plato’s ideal of the Republic. This could
include property or relationships and child rearing. The Pythagoreans
were believed to be vegetarian, though it could be that only some types
of meat were prohibited. The Pythagoreans didn’t eat beans, as they
were believed to be embryonic souls at an early stage of transmigration
(possibly because beans resemble testicles). Diogenes Laertius says
that when the Crotons burned down Pythagoras’ school, Pythagoras tried
to escape but found he could not without trampling bean plants, and so
he allowed himself to be caught and killed. All other sources say he
escaped, and make no mention of beans being harmed in the burning of the
school.
Pythagorean Cosmology & Mathematics
For
Pythagoras, the cosmos is ruled by order, specifically mathematics and
music. The story goes that as Pythagoras was passing a blacksmith’s
workshop, he heard the various hammer blows harmonizing with each other.
On closer inspection, he discovered that the hammers created different
tones proportionately to their size, so a hammer harmonized naturally
with another half its size. While this story is thought to be false, he
could have discovered the same in numerous ancient cultures by
measuring string lengths of various instruments.
The
Harmony of the Spheres (also Music of the Spheres), the mathematical
rotations of the planets was seen as a silent symphony. It was
mentioned with the epic poets that larger choral productions involved
many singers and instruments along with choreography. Pythagoras
thought this was how the cosmos worked as well as the soul, which was
itself like the stars a harmony of numbers and proportions. Mathematics
is unchanging (2 + 3 = 5), unlike the body but like the mind, which is
ideal and immortal. This prefigures Plato who also believed that the
ideal and numerical are the supreme causal forces of the physical and
material.
Numerology
is the study of sacred numbers, back when mathematics and physics were
not specialized apart from the religious traditions (like alchemy to
modern chemistry). The Tetractys is a ten dot pyramid, ten being the
perfect number. A sacred symbol to the Pythagoreans, they were said to
swear oaths in front of it and that it was revealed to Pythagoras by the
divine (likely Apollo’s Oracle at Delphi). All proceeds out of the
great One, the supreme All that Islamic and Christian Neoplatonists
later equated with monotheism. The tetractys series does not simply
unfold into a two dimensional pyramid, but a three dimensional pyramid
as well (one dimensional point, two dimensional line, two dimensional
triangle, three dimensional pyramid). The pyramid is the shape of fire
and light, fire being pointed on top and light shining down through
clouds appearing as a pyramid.
The
Pythagoreans believed that the world originated out of a singular point
(like modern Big Bang Theory), which gave birth to numbers, from which
came points, from which came lines, from which came planes, from which
came solids, from which came the elements. Unlike the Milesians,
Pythagoras made numbers and proportions the primary element, his arche.
Pythagoras taught that earth is made of cubes, fire from pyramids, air
from the octahedron (eight-sided double pyramid), water from the
icosahedron (twenty-sided) and the sphere of the cosmos from the
dodecahedron (twelve-sided). The numbers, lines, sides, and things of
the cosmos are separated and delineated from each other by void, which
is inscribed by the breath of the cosmos. This void, like the cosmos
itself, is not infinite but finite, limited in proportion.
Aristotle
argued against the Pythagoreans saying that, unlike the Milesians, the
Pythagoreans base their cosmos on things not perceivable in nature. We
do not see math or unchanging numerals when we look into the world. It
should be mentioned, however, that Aristotle did believe that the
heavens are driven by absolute forces and that this comes down and is
mixed up and chaotic here on earth unlike its perfect circling in the
heavens.
For
Pythagoras the cosmos is a series of spheres within spheres. The
earth, which is one of the stars, rotates around a fire at the center
(not the sun and thus not a heliocentric theory, as some Indian thinkers
held, because the sun is another body entirely for Pythagoras). This
is “Zeus’ guardhouse”, the fire-protected center of the universe. Day
and night are caused by earth’s rotation around this fire, not by the
sun or moon. Around the center rotate earth, ‘counter-earth’, the moon,
the sun, the stars, and outside this another sphere of fire. Aristotle
says that because the Pythagoreans thought the number ten to be sacred
and central to the order of the universe, the Pythagoreans added
‘counter-earth’ as a body that causes lunar eclipses.
The
musical intervals of fourth, fifth and octave were thought to be
sacred. Plato followed Pythagoras in this, and these ‘ratios’ are the
basis of our word ‘rational’ (as well as ‘irrational’). The ‘rational’
is that which is correctly proportional. Musicians were well aware in
earlier cultures that plucking half of a string gives one an octave,
three fourths gives one a fourth and two thirds gives one a fifth.
Here
is a place for Nietzsche’s criticism of Plato and idealism: the true is
what is most beautiful to us, and with Pythagoras and Plato the
beautiful musical intervals and symmetric constructions of mathematics
are revered as the truly real that gives rise to the physical and
apparent. Asymmetric organic fractal patterns were seen as abhorrent
and nonsensical even though Mandelbrot showed how they are the beauty of
nature through fractal geometry while working at IBM in the 1960s.
Just like many modern physicists, Aristotle tells us the Pythagoreans
assumed the cosmos is governed by a few universal mathematical
principles. Why must the cosmos correspond to simple mathematics, when
even math is not entirely systematic (Godel's incompleteness theorem)?
When
thinking of a square number, such as those involved in the Pythagorean
theorem, it would have been understood by Pythagoras as a square of dots
(ex: 9 is a square grid of three rows of three dots each).
Pythagoreans would only be able to square whole numbers or numbers that
could be expressed in simple ratios (ex: the square of two thirds is
four ninths).
Oppositions,
central to human thought, were important to the Pythagoreans, and their
set of ten opposites is similar to other systems found accross cultures
(some are identical to Daoism). Limit, odd, one, right, male, rest,
straight, light, good, and square were paired against unlimited, even,
many, left, female, moving, bent, dark, evil, and oblong. Note that
first is limit/unlimited, from which comes odd/even, from which comes
one/many, akin to the generation of the cosmos. Square and oblong refer
to numbers, which are formed in rows of dots as a square or as close to
a square as possible.
Particular
numbers were associated with important things. One was associated with
mind and essence, as mind is the union and essence of the human
individual and of the cosmos. Four was associated with justice, as it
is the first number which is an even number times an even number (2 x
2). Five was associated with marriage and union, as it is even added to
odd (2 + 3), female added to male. Seven was associated with
fulfillment, as children were thought to become adolescents at seven and
then adults at fourteen.
Pythagorean Ethics & Practice
While
specifics of Pythagoras’ teachings are blurry, it seems he taught
moderation and abstaining from excessive pleasures to thrive in mind and
body. Similar to Indian asceticism, the soul must be ordered and thus
purified. Like Buddhists, Pythagoreans believed that the soul/mind/self
is reincarnated until it achieves release into union with the soul of
the cosmos, the universal soul. Unlike Buddhists, Pythagoreans see this
as a release from the limitless into union with order, not a release
into the limitless which the Pythagoreans believed to be largely outside
the cosmos.
Heraclitus
says the Egyptians taught a three-thousand year cycle that takes the
soul through all orders of animal life before it is again reborn as a
human being. It is not clear whether Pythagoras adhered to this, but
Herodotus says several Greeks did without mentioning names. Pythagoras
saw that the human individual was bound by cycles like the cosmos, and
so individuals should strive to adhere to balanced cycles that build one
up rather than destructive cycles that tear one apart.
Similar
also to Egyptian and Indian doctrines, Pythagorean dietary restrictions
aimed at incurring the least amount of punishment and karmic demerit.
Some plants such as beans were thought to incarnate human souls and so
were prohibited, but other plants, honey and nuts were acceptable. It
may be that later Neopythagoreans lifted the ban on certain meats or got
rid of the dietary restrictions entirely. Diogenes Laertius mocks
Pythagoras with several humorous poems, in one saying that like
Pythagoras, he also does not eat living food, but prefers his meat
roasted and salted.
Other
prohibitions for Pythagoras included not touching white roosters (as
they are sacred), not picking up food off the ground (ancient 0 second
rule), not eating on the day of an acquaintance’s death, not stirring
fire with a knife (as it might offend Apollo), not urinating while
facing the sun (again, it’s rude to Apollo), and making your bed every
day.
Some
of these prohibitions are symbolic of ethical teachings. The Maxims of
Pythagoras were sayings that are concealed through metaphor from those
outside the Pythagorean community but easily understood once explained.
“Do not poke the fire with a sword” meant “Do not provoke the angry”.
“Suffer no swallows around your house” meant “Do not associate with the chatty”.
“Do not unload people, but load them up” meant “Encourage work and virtue”.
“Do not sleep at noon” meant “Stay aware and alert”.
“Do not cut wood on the road” meant “Do not use or do privately what should be public”.
“Sit down when you worship” means “Take your time doing what needs to be done”.
“Eat not in the chariot” meant “Focus on the task at hand”
“Stop not at the threshold” meant “Be decisive and take a side”.
“Avoid the weasel” meant “Avoid the deceitful”.
“Sleep not on a grave” meant “Work rather than rely on inheritance”.
“Threaten not the stars” meant “Do not threaten superiors”.
“Do not place a candle against the wall” meant “Do not waste time on the hopelessly ignorant”.
“Do not speak in the dark” meant “Do not talk about what you don’t know”.
Another
symbol used was the Pythagorean Y, in ancient Greek the capitalized
letter ‘epsilon’. One forks into two, the right and left paths. The
right path is tough, but it ends in virtue, peace and immortality. The
left path is easy, but ends in hardship and destruction. This applied
equally to the cosmos and the human individual. Virtuous things and
people prosper and become permanent, like the cosmos itself.
Pythagoreanism
was a big influence on later secret mystical societies of the Middle
East and Europe such as the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons.
Pythagoreans, like Masons, were said to wear symbols by which they
could recognize each other. Like Masons, many New Age groups take
Pythagorean teachings as the sacred wisdom of ancient Egypt, sometimes
adding aliens into the mix as the builders of the pyramids and teachers
of the Egyptians.
Xenophanes
Born
in Colophon, (570 - 475 BCE) near Miletus, Xenophanes was well
acquainted with Milesian thought. The Persians conquered Colophon in
546 BCE, when Xenophanes was in his 20s. He composed poetry like Homer
and Hesiod to express his thought, not prose like Anaximander (and maybe
Thales), and would have recited his poetry at various gatherings. His
poetry, of which we still have forty fragments, are famous for
ridiculing his fellow poets and philosophers for their views. While
much of his surviving poetry does not have to do with philosophy or
skepticism, it is for this that he is remembered and recorded by other
philosophers and historians. Xenophanes is said to have been a student
of Anaximander, like Pythagoras, and that he taught Parmenides. He
refers to Thales, Pythagoras and Epimenides, and is referred to by
Heraclitus (whose thinking is very similar to that of Xenophanes).
Xenophanes
was critical of Greek culture valuing military might and athletic
ability, a fan of inquiry and the endless pursuit of truth. In the only
written text we have from the brief period of Athenian democracy (as
they did not keep records) speech of Pericles the general gives a speech
to the assembly saying, “We have learned study like those from the
East, without compromising our manliness”. Clearly, the Athenians
valued education but saw it as potentially effeminate compared to
fighting with spears. Xenophanes wrote that a city would not be well
governed by a great boxer or sprinter, but could only prosper under a
wise and knowing leader.
The
Milesians, as shown previously, thought that the cosmos was divine and
intelligent, but were concerned with the processes of nature and the
elements rather than anthropomorphic gods. While this is implicit in
the Milesians, it is not explicitly said that the forces ruling the
cosmos are non-anthropomorphic. Similarly in India, logicians such as
Kanada and Gotama, as well as the philosophers of the unorthodox schools
such as Jainism and Buddhism, spoke of forces other than gods at work
in the cosmos without explicitly calling the anthropomorphic gods of the
Vedas and Epics into question.
Xenophanes
openly ridicules the idea of anthropomorphic forces, calling it
conceit. Says it is foolish to see the cosmos ruled by human like
chaotic and selfish beings rather than order itself. Such gods are
incapable of ruling the cosmos and giving it the order we see. Our
cosmos is rational and comprehensible. This is early rational theology,
also employed by Muslims who saw algebra as the reasoning and active
ordering of the cosmos. Mutazilites, a sect of Muslims who argued that
God and the cosmos is order itself and so God is not free to contradict
himself or be unreasonable, debated furiously with other Muslims who
argued this view contradicts God’s omnipotence. A being of pure order
and necessity should not have to make choices.
Xenophanes
said the Homeric Olympian gods are immoral and disorderly, lower in
many acts than human beings, and that the stories of gods fighting
Titans, giants and centaurs are “the forgeries of our fathers”. This is
not mindful of the gods. Note that Xenophanes believes there are gods,
but that Homer and Hesiod, the orthodox sources of the Olympic myths,
are not pious enough, do not revere the gods enough. Homer and Hesiod
say the gods steal, rape, cheat on their spouses and deceive one
another, all the things human beings despise in each other. The gods
are not causes of or responsible for evil. Rather, it is falling away
from the infinite and divine which is the cause of evil, chaos and
suffering.
Do
the gods have human form? Xenophanes notes that the Ethiopians say
gods are dark skinned and flat nosed, while the Thracians (like the
slave girl who laughed at Thales falling into the well) are blue-eyed
and red-haired. Ethiopia was the southernmost nation of people
(inhabited, according to Anaximander, Xenophanes’ supposed teacher, by
fire people) and Thrace was the northernmost nation (inhabited,
according to Anaximander, by snow people). Xenophanes is drawing a
comparison between the extremes, implying that for the Greeks and
Egyptians, people who occupy the center of the world according to
Anaximander’s map, are just as foolish as the extreme peoples on the
outskirts in depicting the gods to look like themselves, or even to look
like human-animal hybrids such as the Egyptian gods. Xenophanes argues
that even animals would fall for this sort of mistake if they were
capable of doing so. Thus comes the most quoted of lines from
Xenophanes’ poetry:
“If
oxen and horses had hands and were able to draw with their hands like
humans, horses would draw the gods as horses, and oxen would draw the
gods as oxen, and each would give them the same shape as themselves.”
Xenophanes
argued that those like Hesiod who claim that gods are born are just as
impious, just as atheist, as those who say the gods are not immortal and
can die, as both necessarily mean that there is a period of time
without the gods, when they do not exist. For Xenophanes, immortality
means equally that one never dies and that one was never born. Note
that those who believe in the Homeric traditional culture and Hesiod’s
Theogony would say that it is Xenophanes who is the atheist, ‘atheist’
here meaning one who does not believe in the gods the way that the
speaker of the term does.
Xenophanes
denied that there is any hierarchy of the gods, directly attacking the
idea of Zeus as prime ruling father god. If the gods are supreme, then
they can have nothing above them, not even each other. The immortal and
infinite can not be constrained by anything. This is similar to
Anaximander, who argued that the primordial infinite apeiron could not
be constrained in having a particular quality or character.
For
Xenophanes, the gods do not meddle in human affairs, and they are not
many at all. Xenophanes is outspoken in his monotheism. There is one
infinite, similar to if not identical with Anaximander’s apeiron, and
this thing does not move, is not more here rather than there at this
time versus that time, and is not affected by anything. Strangely,
Xenophanes speaks of the (many) gods, and yet says there is only one
god. Xenophanes is in complete disagreement with Homer and Hesiod, as
they said that the gods moved about and were the primary agents of human
affairs, such as in Homer’s Iliad where they are on all sides of the
siege of Troy.
Xenophanes argued that there is one divine god which is not at all like mortal humans in either body or mind.
“All of him sees, all of him thinks, all of him hears...But without effort he shakes all things by the thought of his mind.”
This
creates a problem Plato tries to solve with the Demiurge in his
Timaeus, and it remained a problem for Neoplatonism for centuries: how
can the supreme One perceive and think without moving or having
character, without being at one time this and at another that. Can
thought be effortless and unaffected? Can there be thought or
perception without motion? If perception and thought are reactions to
things that are then nourished or rebalanced, it would seem so. The
contradictions of Homer and Hesiod lead to further contradictions of
Xenophanes, which lead to further contradictions of Plato and the
Neoplatonists. This follows Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shift, that a
model has problems but is sufficient until those problems become
apparent, which leads to a new model that solves the older problems but
creates new ones in the process.
Xenophanes
seems to remove the infinite categorically from particular things,
which do move here and there and are affected by each other. However,
if all things are of this infinite in extension, are one and the same as
it, the way that branches are extensions from the trunk of a tree, one
and the same as it, the trunk can be said to not move or be affected by
anything, the branches can be said to move and affect each other, and
yet the trunk is one and the same thing as each individual branch.
Xenophanes
agrees that the cosmos is ruled and ordered by the divine, but
disagrees with the conceptions of the poets as well as the various
traditional peoples of the known world. This is coming about due to
contact with multiple cultures, from which Xenophanes knows that all
peoples believe in the divine but disagree as to its form and character.
Xenophanes says that this is because the infinite, as Anaximander
argues, has no character, and so each people (such as the Greeks, the
Ethiopians and Thracians) see the gods through their own cultural
understanding just as, in the Indian story, each blind man feels a part
of the elephant and thinks his part is characteristic of the whole.
Some
have said Xenophanes is the father of skepticism, picked up and
furthered later by Heraclitus and Pyrrho. Dogmatists tend to put truth
out in the world, while skeptics tend to put truth in the head. This is
also referred to as psychological skepticism: truth is shaped in the
mind, not simply given in the world. Nietzsche, who likes Xenophanes
and Heraclitus, says we should distrust the falsification of the world
by grammar and logic to achieve greater understanding of ourselves, our
world, and our role in the world. Xenophanes writes:
“No
one has seen nor will know the truth about the gods or all the things I
speak of, for even if one should say what is true, they do not know but
rather place beliefs over all things.”
Superstition
means standing something on top of something else. Radical skepticism
would say that all conceptions and knowledge are superstition, with some
being quite useful and others quite useless. In a softer form this is
also known as pragmatism, the position that knowledge and truth are not
absolute correspondences but useful tools.
If
so, then why is Xenophanes telling us about what he knows about, which
are things no one can ever know about? In what may be the conclusion to
Xenophanes’ book, he says, “Let these things be believed as resembling
the truth.” So Xenophanes does believe in correspondence, but only a
relative and not absolute correspondence which he says is impossible.
Nevertheless,
there is progress: “By no means did the gods reveal all things to
mortals from the beginning, but in time, by searching, they discover
better.” This is optimistic skepticism, not pessimistic. It is not
that there is no truth, but because relatively more truth can always be
discovered there is no absolute truth. Xenophanes believes that his
beliefs are relatively true compared to others, but that they are not
absolute in and of themselves.
Displaying
perspectival relativism like Heraclitus (and Daoists like Zhuangzi),
Xenophanes says if there was no yellow honey people would say that figs
are much sweeter than they do. This means that figs are perceived to be
less sweet only because we have something sweeter to compare it to.
For
Xenophanes, the world within the cosmos is also eternal, never having
been born and undying. He argues the rainbow is not a goddess but a
multicolored cloud. All things, including rainbows, are made of earth
and water. Air comes from water, such as wind from the ocean.
The
opposition of wet water and dry earth is the primary dynamic of
elemental interactions, rather than the hot and cold for Anaximander or
dense and rare for Anaximenes. Xenophanes argues that sea shells and
fossils of fish found in mountains showed that those lands were
underwater previously, and that the earth had interacted with the water
such that the water had been used up and the mud congealed into stone.
This is quite correct, other than the production of elements out of
water and earth.
To
explain this, Xenophanes says the world alternates between wet and dry
periods, and humanity dies out in the wet periods and flourishes in the
dry. Heraclitus thinks wet is desire and dry is good for soul, making
it wise. It is also very similar to kalpas of Indian thought, in which
there are cycles of the rise and setting of culture and ‘religion’ or
systems of thought. Xenophanes is attempting to explain the flood
stories of Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia and Noah of the Judaic Old
Testament, as a great flood wiped out civilization that then grew back
when the waters receded. The seasons would be microcycles within the
larger cycle, dryness in the summer before the fall harvest, wetness in
the winter before the rebirth of spring. Anaximander also held that the
world is in a drying period, but many believe that he saw the drying as
a final phase before the world is absorbed back into the infinite.
As
a final note, on drinking Xenophanes says it is not wrong to drink as
much as an elderly person could such that they can get home without the
assistance of servants (clearly a problem of the time) and a great
person speaks of virtue and noble deeds when they drink, unlike others
who speak of bawdy and base subjects. Clearly, it is not drinking but
topic of conversation that can be evil.
