anaximander's book. 269 



But all this store of information was in the true Greek manner to be 

 somehow set in order and brought into relation to the time and place 

 in which they found themselves. How consciously these early 

 Milesians worked we do not know; but the result of their labors is 

 writ large in the physiognomy of Greek science. 



Hesiod occupies a strangely anomalous position in Greek literature. 

 The Homeric epic, at least in its finished form, is acknowledged to be 

 the product of Ionia. After their childhood days, in which the lonians 

 gave themselves to telling tales of the long ago merely for the delight 

 they took in heroic adventure, ensues an age of almost total eclipse 

 of this extraordinary people, from which it emerges in the sixth cen- 

 tury, past its prime and in a measure decadent. When it thus again 

 comes to view it is engaged in writing treatises in prose on scientific 

 themes. Meanwhile, for us, the connecting link lietween the heroic 

 epic and the sober prose of science appears in Hesiod, not in Ionia, 

 but in the Mother Land, which was, intellectually considered, cen- 

 turies behind the Greeks of Asia Minor. ^^ It is perhaps idle to specu- 

 late, but one cannot refrain from asking how this fact is to be explained. 

 Can we believe that there was really a lapse of consciousness in Ionia 

 and that when the people suddenly awoke, they took the cues of their 

 intellectual life from Greece Proper? Would it not be more reasonable 

 to suppose that the beginnings of Ionian prose lie in that dark age, 

 the general substance of the attempts of the lonians at reconstructing 

 their past l^eing worked up by Hesiodic poets who borrowed their ideas 

 from contemporary Ionia and the form from the Homeric epic?^^ 

 If we could assume that the first ' theogonies' and ' catalogues ' were 

 in prose, we should be able to account both for their disappearance 

 and for certain characteristics of the Hesiodic poetry itself. 



Be that as it may, Miletus in the sixth century has definitively 

 broken with the Hesiodic and Homeric past. It is not in a mood for 

 poetry: the gods have melted away in the cosmos, and genealogies 

 are useful solely as materials from which one may by criticism and 

 combination extract history.^* Miletus is at a certain point on a 

 map of the earth, which has its assignable place in the cosmos. The 



72 The importance of Boeotia, for example, in the early development of 

 Greek reUgion cannot be denied; but thi.s very fact, especially in view of the 

 character of this religious movement, is really the best evidence of the essen- 

 tially different attitude of the motherland. Ionia tended to secularize and 

 rationalize everything. 



73 Tradition said that Hesiod's father came from C>Tne in Aeolis, on the 

 border of Ionia; if this is legend, it is at least ben trovato. 



74 One must be dull indeed to miss the fine irony of Hecataeus' reference to 

 his descent from a god in the sixteenth generation (Hdt. 2.143). 



