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.
Entrepreneurial qualities governed them: inventiveness, a sprightliness of mind, a new athleticism, a certain fluidity of thought, a desire to rule themselves, to generate their own systems of law and regulate their turbulent lives and to find justice by accommodating difference.
These harbor cities were the homes of the people generally considered to be the first philosophers, with lives dependent on the sea and on the connections the sea could provide. This version of Greece in the centuries between 700 and 500 was not land-based. It essentially existed at sea and, where it touched the land, it appeared and manifested itself as the cities from which these philosophers came.
What we think of now as the mainland of Greece, then filled with communities of farmer-warriors, played essentially no part. Recorded philosophy was almost entirely a harbor phenomenon, a byproduct of trading hubs on the margins of Asia, on the islands and eventually in the rich lands of Sicily and southern Italy. Its creators were from the mobile edges, merchants in ideas, people from communities in which exchange was the medium of significance and for whom inherited belief was not enough.
