“This theory – an Epicurean one – stated that everything in the world was made not by any divine being but by the collision and combination of atoms. According to this school of thought, these particles were invisible to the naked eye but they had their own structure and could not be cut (temno) into any smaller particles: they were atemnos – ‘the uncuttable thing’: the atom. Everything that you see or feel, these materialists argued, was made up of two things: atoms and space...”
Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age
An odd thing I notice is the way we infantilize earlier cultures or make them seem like children when compared to first-world adults. Sub-consciously, we seem to accept a kind of social Darwinism that implies that since we are evolving psychologically, we must be getting wiser - that technological cultures are more evolved, simply because we have technology.
The belief that the world is getting better is called meliorism. But there’s no evidence that the world is actually improving. It seems to me it goes up and down or from light to darkness and back again in a cycle. People say the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice, but the people who lose their whole culture and way of life in war never really find justice. It’s tempting to think of what Conrad, in Heart of Darkness, called “the march of history,” and use that idea to excuse all manner of evil for the sake of progress. But colonialism wasn’t progress for the people colonized, and Christianization wasn’t progress for the Hellenistic philosophers who were put to death.
I’ve read historians who say we think very differently than ancient people did. But homo sapiens have changed very little in the last 30,000 years. We are basically the same creature. They thought and carried on very much as we do. Their culture was different. So, what we think about is different, but how we think is not. They were just as rational and irrational as we are, just as pragmatic and just as irresponsible. They had great systems of inquiry and knowing. Way before Copernicus, the ancients knew the earth was not the center of the solar system. They also thought metaphorically and symbolically. They loved philosophy until the Christians in Rome made it illegal.
I don’t think ancient people were child-like or primitive. Essentially, we are the same complex creature that they were: homo sapiens. That term itself is a bit… arrogant. Are we really so sapient, so wise? Stephen Jay Gould, the American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science, suggested that homo narrator was more accurate. I once heard Neal Degrasse Tyson say that he thought homo narativa, the storytelling animal, was better because we are run by story much more than wisdom. Clearly, a story doesn’t have to be true to move us, or even teach us about the complex nature of our psychology.
The Greek myths were stories populated by complex characters that some took literally, but not all. There were literalists, atheists, pragmatists, fundamentalists and those who could read deep layers of symbol among the population then, just as today. The wisdom was available then and today, no matter what you believe about the divine. Joseph Campbell, the famous mythologist, said that “myth is what we call other people’s religion.” It should be what we call our own religion as well.