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11 - Early interest in knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

By
J. H. Lesher
Edited by
A. A. Long
A. A. Long
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Summary

POETIC PESSIMISM AND PHILOSOPHICAL OPTIMISM

The Greek philosophers were not the first to reflect on the nature and limits of human knowledge; that distinction belongs to the poets of archaic Greece. In Book XVIII of the Odyssey, for example, the failure of Penelope's suitors to sense the disaster awaiting them prompts some famous remarks on the mental capacities of the species from the disguised Odysseus:

Nothing feebler does earth nurture than a human being,

Of all the things that breathe and move upon the earth.

For he thinks that he will never suffer evil in the time to come.

So long as the gods grant him excellence and his knees are quick;

But when again the blessed gods decree him sorrow,

This too he bears with an enduring heart,

For such is the mind (noos) of human beings upon the earth,

Like the day the father of gods and men brings to them. (130-37)

Here, as on other occasions in the Homeric poems, the thoughts of mortals reflect only their present experiences,- the events that lie ahead lie also beyond their powers of comprehension. Conversely, when the gods choose to endow an individual with superhuman powers of insight, his knowledge is distinguished by its vast range:

Calchas, the son of Thestor, far the best of diviners Who knew the things that were, that were to be, and that had been before.

(II I.60-70)
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Chapter
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The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy , pp. 225 - 249
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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