Review of Science and Politics in the Ancient World by Benjamin Farrington
Source: The Labour
Monthly, Volume 22, Number 1, December 1940, pp.59-61 (1,615 words)
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Mark Harris
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2010). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Science and Politics in the Ancient World by Benjamin Farrington. (Allen and Unwin. 10s. 6d.)
“This is a book about the obstacles to the spread of a scientific outlook in the ancient world,” Professor Farrington writes in an introductory chapter. It is indeed this, but much more also; for his analysis of those aspects of classical society which are involved in his argument is based upon a firm understanding of the importance of the class struggle. The result is a book which must, one may suppose, exert a revolutionary influence upon classical scholarship; and, equally important, which enables the ordinary reader to relate the problems of Greek civilisation in decline to the immediate problems of contemporary life.
How was it, he begins by asking, that the brilliant scientific achievements of the Ionian philosophers in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. were eclipsed in the 4th, and, in spite of the efforts of such men as Epicurus and Lucretius, were by the 6th century of our era to all intents and purposes extinguished? The question has often been asked and the blame has usually been attributed to popular superstition, let loose by the spread of democratic notions. But Farrington clearly refutes this answer by showing that superstition, far from being a spontaneous product of the people, was consciously encouraged and enforced by the upper classes in Athens, and later in Rome, as a weapon in their struggle with the rising democratic forces.
Already by the middle of the 5th century the problem of “adjusting contemporary institutions to meet the great upheaval of the old ways of life represented by the Ionian enlightenment” had become a central one. It was, as Farrington maintains in a most persuasive chapter, the theme of Aeschylus’s great trilogy, the Prometheia. But if Aeschylus’s solution was a plea for caution and restraint on the part both of those who would forward and of those who would restrain reform, his counsels did not prevail with the Athenian nobility. They were all too well aware that the spread of Ionian materialism amongst those classes newly enfranchised by democracy was a threat to the very bases of their political power, and the idealistic revolt of Socrates was a reflection of this realisation.
But it remained for his disciple, Plato, to elaborate a philosophical system, which would “banish for ever the possibility of popular revolts and establish a class-divided society on a secure basis.” This he did by the invention of the political, or, as he called it, the “golden,” lie; the conscious imposition on the mass of the people of religious superstitions known by the law-givers to be untrue. This aspect of Plato’s teaching has usually been shuffled off by his commentators, and it is one of Farrington’s most important contributions that he should have shown so conclusively how important an influence it had on the fate of Greek society. For in order to sustain his belief in the lie as a political instrument he had inevitably to range himself against the protagonists of the scientific view; against, that is to say, all that was most progressive in Greek thought. As Farrington exclaims, “who with any sense of the tragedy of the twenty-three centuries that separate us from Plato can read his proposals without a sense of horror?”
It is clear then that Farringdon’s opinion of Plato differs radically from that usually accepted, which sees in him and Aristotle the full maturity of Greek thought, while regarding those who went before as merely adolescent and those who came after as already in decline. But Farrington’s view does not rest only on his criticism of Plato. Having in an earlier chapter established the durable value of the two great achievements of pre-Socratic science, the atomic theory of the constitution of matter and Hippocratic medicine, he next proceeds to a study of Epicurus, the great materialist philosopher, who was born seven or eight years after the death of Plato and reached his majority about the time of Aristotle’s death. Here again his opinion is of vital importance and based on impressively convincing evidence. Epicurus, he contends, far from representing the effete twilight of Greek thought, strove to invigorate the society of his time precisely by resuming the Ionian tradition. It was (his) master-conception that a true knowledge of the Nature of Things was the sovereign remedy for the ills of mankind, both individually and socially”; and, arising from this, it was his specific originality that he was “the first man known to history to have organised a movement for the liberation of mankind at large from superstition.”
One cannot do more in a review than draw attention to the vitality and ranging scholarship of the chapter devoted to the exposition and rehabilitation of Epicurus’s philosophy, but it is important to note his conclusion that Epicureanism was a popular movement. As such it was recognised and feared by the Athenian oligarchies, who sought to suppress it - much as the ruling class in our own day opposes the spread of Marxism - by recourse to the unscientific sophistries of Platonism. And it was as such that it spread to Rome, where as early as 173 B.C. we find the Senate expelling two of its propagandists for “introducing pleasures.” That the “pleasure” which the Roman Fathers feared above all was “the freedom of mind that comes from discarding false notions about the gods,” Farrington, I think, makes amply clear; and his view is supported by an impressive quotation (p.167) from the statesman, Polybius. Reaction, in its struggle against the spread of Ionian enlightenment, against the spirit of scientific enquiry, had now enlisted the support of Roman power, but though the victory was to be overwhelming and to endure for many centuries, there was yet to be one more noble and passionate protest. And it is to this protest that Farrington devotes his most moving chapter.
The greatness of the De Rerum Natura as a poem has never been disputed, but I doubt if its importance in the history of ideas has ever been so conclusively argued, or its noble beauty more genuinely appreciated. The majority of critics hitherto, unwilling to accept Lucretius’s moral indignation with the society of his age at its face value, have attributed his passionate intensity to morbid exaggeration, very much in the way that academic literary historians still attempt to castrate the disgust and hatred of a Byron or a Shelley. Farrington, on the contrary, insists that Lucretius’s “exaltation of the Ionian tradition of natural philosophy over the authority of the Oracle of Delphi . ... was an essential element in that revolution of the mind of society at which the poet, following in the footsteps of Epicurus, aimed...” Moreover, he shows that this social significance of the poem was not lost upon his contemporaries. This is made clear by the attitude of Cicero, the very type of “ruling class mentality,” who, though admiring in private, publicly refused to recognise the poem. Incidentally, one may compare the behaviour of Pope towards the Deists and Freethinkers, borrowing their ideas while virulently attacking them; and indeed this parallel could be interestingly pursued, for it certainly seems that the attitude of the 18th century ruling class towards the materialist philosophers was very similar to that of Cicero and his circle towards Lucretius and the Epicureans. In both cases it was dictated by the same fear: that popular enlightenment should successfully challenge their political supremacy. Farrington stresses this point by revealing the effort that was being made to revive the Roman state religion “as an instrument of oligarchic repression” at the very time when Lucretius was composing his masterpiece. In the struggle between reaction and progress the revivifying ideas of the past were overcome, but the significance of his challenge still remains as an encouragement for us to-day.
Such, in brief, is the main purport of Fairington’s book. Its importance for a Marxist understanding of social history is indisputable and it is a model of exposition - learned, without being heavy; informed with a glowing appreciation of the literature and philosophy of the past, and a keen understanding of the problems of the present; and written with an ease and brilliance that is all too rare in progressive writing. It is, however, admittedly no more than a essay. Its great value is that it approaches the problems of ancient society from the point of view of the class struggle, but the exact nature of that struggle remains to be elucidated. That the development of a scientific attitude to life was bound up with the spread of democracy and that religious obscurantism was converted into a political weapon by the ruling class is made clear. But the relation of democratic and oligarchic state forms to the masses of the people and to the economic bases of society are only casually referred to, and it would clearly be mistaken to assume any close resemblance between modern democracy and a democracy based on slavery. Moreover, we could wish for a further elaboration of the nature of Ionian. science. Farrington tells us enough for us to conclude with confidence that Thales, and Anaximander, Heraclitus and Democritus laid the bases of scientific method, and he is particularly interesting in his account of Hippocrates’s insistence upon the necessity of combining theory with practice. But one would welcome a fuller account both of the methods and achievements of ancient science. There is, however, reason to hope that Science and Politics in the Ancient World will inspire other scholars to approach these problems with an equally lively understanding of the historical materialist approach, since Farrington’s essay has already produced such rich results.