Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [6]
The Greeks, possessing neither clocks nor watches, had but a rudimentary sense of time. Sundials offered only approximations, were not transportable, and were of no help in cloudy weather; the water clocks used to limit oratory in court were merely bowls filled with water that emptied through a hole in about six minutes.
Lighting, such as it was, was provided by flickering oil lamps. A few of the well-to-do had bathrooms with running water, but most people, lacking water to wash with, cleansed themselves by rubbing their bodies with oil and then scraping it off with a crescent-shaped stick. (Fortunately, some three hundred days a year were sunny, and Athenians lived out of doors most of the time.) Few city streets were paved; most were dirt roads, dusty in dry weather and muddy in wet. Transport consisted of pack mules or springless, bone-bruising horse-drawn wagons. News was sometimes conveyed by fire beacons or carrier pigeons, but most often by human runners.
Illustrious Athens, the center of Greek culture, could not feed itself; the surrounding plains had poor soil, the hills and mountains were stony and infertile. The Athenians obtained much of their food through maritime commerce and conquest. (Athens established a number of colonies, and at times dominated the Aegean, receiving tribute from other city-states.) But while their ships had sails, the Athenians knew only how to rig them to be driven by a following wind; to proceed cross-wind or into the wind or in a calm, they forced slaves to strain hour after hour at banks of oars, driving the ships at most eight miles per hour. The armies thus borne to far shores to advance Athenian interests fought much like their primitive ancestors, with spears, swords, and bows and arrows.
Slaves also provided most of the power in Greek workshops and silver mines; human muscles, feeble as they are compared to modern machinery, were, aside from beasts of burden, the only source of kinetic energy. Slavery was, in fact, the economic foundation of the Greek city-states; men, women, and children captured abroad by Greek armies made up much of the population of many cities. Even in democratic Athens and the neighboring associated towns of Attica, at least 115,000 of the 315,000 inhabitants were slaves. Of the 200,000 free Athenians only the forty-three thousand men who had been born to two Athenian parents possessed all civil rights, including the right to vote.
All in all, it was not a way of life in which one would expect reflective and searching philosophy, or its subdiscipline, psychology, to flourish.
What, then, accounts for the Greeks’ astonishing intellectual accomplishments, and for those of the Athenians in particular? Some have half-seriously suggested the climate; Cicero said that Athens’ clear air contributed to the keenness of the Attic mind. Certain present-day analysts have hypothesized that the Athenians’ living outdoors much of the time, in constant conversation with one another, induced questioning and thinking. Others have argued that commerce and conquest, bringing Athenians and other Greeks into contact with many other cultures, made them curious about the origin of human differences. Still others have said that the mix of cultural influences in the Greek city-states gave Greek culture a kind of hybrid vigor. Finally, some have pragmatically suggested that when civilization had developed to the point where day-to-day survival did not take up every hour of the day, human beings for the first time had leisure in which to theorize about their motives and thoughts, and those of other people.
None of these explanations is really satisfactory, although perhaps all of them taken together, along with still others, are. Athens reached the zenith of its greatness, its Golden Age (480 to 399), after it and its allies defeated the Persians. Victory, wealth, and the need to rebuild the temples on the Acropolis that the Persian leader