which provided employment for countless craftsmen and helped to kick-start Athens' golden age. Under him, the Assembly now comprised every adult male who had not been disenfranchised by some serious offence. It was the sole legislative body and had complete control of both the administration and the judiciary. It met once a month, any citizen could speak and anyone could propose anything. But, with Assemblies of 5,000 and more, there was need of a committee to prepare business. This council was called the boule and it was scarcely less cumbersome, consisting of 500 citizens, not elected but chosen by ballot, the point being that in this way it never developed a corporate identity which might have corrupted and distorted the business of the Assembly. There were no professional lawyers. 'The principle was preserved that the aggrieved man appealed directly to his fellow citizens for justice.'14 The jury was a selection of the Assembly and could vary from 101 to 1,001, according to the importance of the case. There was no appeal. If the offence did not carry a specific penalty then the prosecutor, if he won the case, would propose one penalty, while the accused proposed another. The jury then chose between the two. 'To the Athenian, the responsibility of taking his own decisions, carrying them out, and accepting the consequences, was a necessary part of the life of a free man.'15 Given the size of Athens, democracy there was a remarkable-a unique-achievement. Not everyone liked it-Plato for one condemned it-and the arrangement was nothing like, say, parliamentary democracy in our own day. (To repeat Peter Jones' point: modern democracies are elective oligarchies.) And this is one reason why another Greek idea, rhetoric, has not survived. Rhetoric was a way of speaking, arguing, persuading, that was necessary in a democracy where the assemblies were large, where there were no microphones, and where it was necessary to sway others in debate. Rhetoric developed its own rules and it encouraged great feats of eloquence and memory, which had a profound influence on the evolution of classical literature. In elective oligarchies, however, where the political etiquette is more intimate, and more cynical, rhetoric has no real place: to the modern ear it sounds forced and artificial. If politics-democracy-is the most famous Greek idea that has come down to us, it is closely followed by science ( scientia = knowledge, originally). This most profitable area of human activity is generally reckoned to have begun at Ionia, the western fringe of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the islands off the coast. According to Erwin Schrodinger, there are three main reasons why science began there. First, the region did not belong to a powerful state, which are usually hostile to free thinking. Second, the Ionians were a seafaring people, interposed between East and West, with strong trading links. Mercantile exchange is always the principal force in the exchange of ideas, which often stem from the solving of practical problems-navigation, means of transport, water supply, handicraft techniques. Third, the area was not 'priest-ridden'; there was not, as in Babylon or Egypt, a hereditary, privileged, priestly caste with a vested interest in the status quo.16 In their comparison of early science in ancient Greece and China, Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin argue that the Greek philosopher/scientists enjoyed much less patronage than their contemporaries in China, who were employed by the emperor, and often charged with looking after the calendar, which was a state concern. This had the effect of making Chinese scientists much more circumspect in their views, and in embracing new concepts: they had much more to lose than in Greece, and they seldom argued as the Greeks argued. Instead, new ideas in China were invariably incorporated into existing theories, producing a 'cascade' of meanings; new notions never had to battle it out with old ones.17 In Greece on the other hand there was a 'competition in wisdom', just as in sports contests (sport was itself seen as a form of wisdom).18 Lloyd argues that there are far more first-person-singular statements in Greek science than in Chinese, much more egotism, individuals describe their mistakes more often, their uncertainties, and criticise themselves more.19 Greek plays poked fun at scientists and even this served a useful purpose.20 What these Ionians grasped was that the world was something that could be understood, if one took the trouble to observe it properly. It was not a playground of the gods who acted arbitrarily on the spur of the moment, moved by grand passions of love, wrath or revenge. The Ionians were astonished by this and, as Schrodinger also remarked, 'this was a complete novelty'.21 The Babylonians and the Egyptians knew a lot about the orbits of the heavenly bodies but regarded them as religious secrets.
The very first scientist, in the sixth century BC, was Thales of Miletus, a city on the Ionian coast. However, science is a modern word first used as we use it in the early nineteenth century, and the ancient Greeks would not have recognised it; they knew no boundaries between science and other fields of knowledge, and in fact they asked the questions out of which both science and philosophy emerged.22 Thales was not the first ancient figure to speculate about the origin and nature of the universe but he was the first 'who expressed his ideas in logical and not mythological terms'.23 As a merchant who had travelled to Egypt, he had picked up enough mathematics and Babylonian astronomy to be able to predict a total eclipse of the sun in the year 585 BC, which duly occurred, on the day we call 29 May. (For Aristotle, writing two centuries later, this was the moment when Greek philosophy began.)24 But Thales is more often remembered for the basic scientific-philosophical question that he asked: what is the world made of ? The answer he gave-water-was wrong, but the very act of asking so fundamental a question was itself an innovation. His answer was also new because it implied that the world consists not of many things (as it so obviously does) but, underneath it all, of one thing. In other words, the universe is not only rational, and therefore knowable, but also simple.25 Before Thales, the world was made by the gods, whose purpose could only be known indirectly, through myths, or-if the Jews were to be believed-not at all. This was an epochal change in thought (though to begin with it affected only a tiny number of people). Thales' immediate successor was another Ionian, Anaximander. He argued that the ultimate physical reality of the universe cannot be a recognisable physical substance (a concept not so far from the truth, as it turned out much later). Instead of water, he substituted an 'undefined something' with no chemical properties as we would recognise them, though he did identify what he called 'oppositions'-hotness and coldness, wetness and dryness, for example. This could be seen as a step towards the general concept of 'matter'. Anaximander also had a theory of evolution. He rejected the idea that human beings had derived indirectly from the gods and the Titans (the children of Uranus, a family of giants) but thought that all living creatures arose first in the water, 'covered with spiny shells'. Then, as part of the sea dried up, some of these creatures emerged on land, their shells cracked and released new kinds of animal. In this way, Anaximander thought 'that man was originally a fish.'26 Here too it is difficult to overstate the epochal change in thinking that was taking place-the rejection of gods and myths as ways to explain everything (or anything) and the beginnings of observation as a basis for reason. That man should be descended from other animals, not gods, was as great a break with past thinking as could be imagined. For Anaximenes, the third of the Ionians, aer was the primary substance, which varied in interesting ways. It was a form of mist whose density varied. 'When most uniform,' he said, 'it is invisible to the eye...Winds arise when the aer is dense, and moves under pressure. When it becomes denser still, clouds are formed, and so it changes into water. Hail occurs when the water descending from the clouds solidifies, and snow when it solidifies in a wetter condition.'27 There is not much wrong with this reasoning, which was to lead, a hundred years later, to the atomic theory of Democritus. Before Democritus, however, came Pythagoras, another Ionian. He grew up on Samos, an island to the north of Miletus, off the Turkish coast, but emigrated to Croton, in Greek Italy, because, it is said, the pirate king, Polycrates, despite luring poets and artists to Samos, and building impressive walls, headed a dissolute court that Pythagoras, a deeply religious-not to say mystical-man, hated. All his life, Pythagoras was a paradoxical soul. He taught a wide number of superstitions-for example, that you do not poke a fire with a knife (you might hurt the fire, which would seek revenge). But Pythagoras' fame rests on the theorem named after him. This particular theorem (about how to obtain a right angle), we should never forget, was not merely an abstraction: obtaining an absolute upright was essential in building. This interest in mathematics led on to a fascination with music and with number. It was Pythagoras who discovered that, by stopping a lyre-string at three-quarters, two-thirds or half its length, the fourth, fifth and octave of a note may be obtained, and that these notes, suitably arranged, 'may move us to tears'.28 This phenomenon convinced Pythagoras that numbers held the secret of the universe, that number-rather than water or any other substance-was the basic 'element'. This mystical concern with harmony persuaded Pythagoras and his followers that there was a beauty in numbers, and this led, among other things, to the idea we call 'square numbers'-those that can be represented as squares: