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How a Few Days Sailing in the Aegean Changed My Mind About the Fundamental Nature of Things How a Few Days Sailing in the Aegean Changed My Mind About the Fundamental Nature of Things
(5 days later)
A few years ago, my wife, Sarah, and I went on a sailing trip on the eastern Aegean. It was heaven: the two of us out at sea, charting a course between Greek islands and the coast of Turkey, taking turns helming the boat and dozing below, surrounded by all the glittering blue of the sea.A few years ago, my wife, Sarah, and I went on a sailing trip on the eastern Aegean. It was heaven: the two of us out at sea, charting a course between Greek islands and the coast of Turkey, taking turns helming the boat and dozing below, surrounded by all the glittering blue of the sea.
As we hopped from port to port, I couldn’t help but notice that the names of many of the places we passed were familiar to me, as I had come across them in my work as a historian. Thirty or forty miles to the south of our boat was Miletus, the birthplace of some of the first recorded theorists of the physical world. Twenty miles to the east in Ephesus was the home of Heraclitus, the earliest person whose reflections on the interrelatedness of things have come down to us. Across a nearby peninsula, just 70 miles away, was Lesbos, the island of Sappho and Alcaeus, the greatest early lyric poets. To the south in Samos was the birthplace of Pythagoras, an early theorist of an everlasting soul.As we hopped from port to port, I couldn’t help but notice that the names of many of the places we passed were familiar to me, as I had come across them in my work as a historian. Thirty or forty miles to the south of our boat was Miletus, the birthplace of some of the first recorded theorists of the physical world. Twenty miles to the east in Ephesus was the home of Heraclitus, the earliest person whose reflections on the interrelatedness of things have come down to us. Across a nearby peninsula, just 70 miles away, was Lesbos, the island of Sappho and Alcaeus, the greatest early lyric poets. To the south in Samos was the birthplace of Pythagoras, an early theorist of an everlasting soul.
It struck me that not so far out of view from the cockpit of our small boat was the whole province in which Greek philosophy had begun. Those gray-blue masses of island and mainland hid within them the thinkers’ cities.It struck me that not so far out of view from the cockpit of our small boat was the whole province in which Greek philosophy had begun. Those gray-blue masses of island and mainland hid within them the thinkers’ cities.
There, afloat on the water, I began wondering about the relationship of places and ideas — how places can open up the way we think and feel and give access to minds, however distant and strange. I realized then that philosophy has a geography. To be in the places these thinkers knew, visit their cities, sail their seas and find their landscapes is to know something about them that cannot be found otherwise, and despite that locatedness and despite their age, the frame of mind of these first thinkers remains astonishingly and surprisingly illuminating today.There, afloat on the water, I began wondering about the relationship of places and ideas — how places can open up the way we think and feel and give access to minds, however distant and strange. I realized then that philosophy has a geography. To be in the places these thinkers knew, visit their cities, sail their seas and find their landscapes is to know something about them that cannot be found otherwise, and despite that locatedness and despite their age, the frame of mind of these first thinkers remains astonishingly and surprisingly illuminating today.
But why here and why then? Several centuries earlier, the great near-eastern civilizations of the Bronze Age, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, eastern Turkey and Crete, had all collapsed or nearly so. A wild and anarchic period of petty kings and sea pirates — the world, essentially, portrayed by Homer in “The Iliad” — had followed. But then, from about 650 B.C. onward, there was an emergence and a renaissance, as a constellation of independent harbor cities started to emerge in the eastern Aegean. They were mainly merchant oligarchies, often deeply skeptical of the virtues of monarchy, dependent more on trade than agriculture, absorbing the ancient wisdom from the earlier civilizations to the east but crucially not dominated by them. The trading Greeks could take what they wanted (math, astronomy, sculpture, temples, alphabetic writing, the making of gold and silver jewelry) but remain independent.
Above all, the Greeks were not subject to vast instituted kingly and priestly bureaucracies. A mental freedom coursed through their cities. They were adventurous, expert sailors and shipbuilders, sending expeditions out to the far north of the Black Sea and to the western end of the Mediterranean, taking olives and vines to southern France, bringing back shiploads of silver from the great mines of southern Spain, lacing the Mediterranean with the bright wakes their poetry celebrated.