SOURCE: “The Political Theory of Democritus,” in The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, 1957. Yale University Press, 1964, pp. 125-54.

[In the following excerpt, Havelock examines Democritus's political statements and concludes that he was satisfied to leave some problems unsolved.]

The political theory of Democritus has been preserved by antiquity in the form of some twenty-three aphorisms, or programmatic statements, attributed to his name. These are contained in a large ‘chrestomathy’ or anthology of useful statements compiled perhaps in the early fifth century of our era by John of Stobi [4.1 On Polity; 4.2 On Laws; 4.5 On Government]. The reader whose conception of Greek philosophy follows traditional lines will, when he looks at this allegedly Democritean material, be tempted to say to himself: ‘Democritus was famous in antiquity for a materialist metaphysic. He taught the doctrine of a mechanical universe in which infinite atoms moving through infinite space perpetually collided to form combinations essentially fortuitous. Whatever be the precise meaning of these statements about man in society, their doctrine must derive from the general theory of his system. Let us, therefore, in attempting to interpret the political theory of Democritus, first assume that it depends on his atomic principles and reflects the same mechanism and determinism.’

But when we consider the problem of how to connect his atomism with his politics, the testimonies fail us. Democritus clearly had precise views about many matters affecting society and the city state and law and justice. But no writer of antiquity reports where Democritus the atomist stood in relation to Democritus the political scientist. There were writers after him who claimed the Democritean tradition, and who did make the connection for themselves. One thinks, for example, of Lucretius, but this is not the same thing as reporting for Democritus, the man of Abdera. This adopted son of Athens was an intellectual of the Periclean Age. That a connection existed between his politics and his cosmology is virtually certain. Quotation from Democritus conveys the impression of a keen and a coherent mind, thinking structurally. The impression is reinforced by what tradition says of his metaphysics. If we say he was coherent and cogent rather than systematic, it is because the term systematic is better reserved to describe that mastery of the technique of exposition which was achieved in the ideologies of Plato and Aristotle. The style of Democritus is essentially pre-Platonic. It reflects those methods of organizing ideas which were characteristic of the age. We perceive in him an intuitive coherence which we can, if we choose, reformulate and reproduce as a system. But in the absence of any explicit report which defines the connection between his politics and his metaphysics, let us postpone this question. Let us first estimate his statements about man and society in their own right and determine whether they exhibit an inner direction. If they do, then a just estimate of their logic may put us on a road of connection between metaphysics and politics more reliable than any that might suggest itself if we used traditional assumptions about materialism and mechanism.

It is difficult to describe the sayings of Democritus as either aphorisms or proverbs or axioms or maxims. They overlap these categories. To understand them, one has to understand the role of the gnomic method in antiquity. Here it is pertinent to note a historical distinction. The rounded sentence began its career in the preliterate days of oral communication, when indoctrination depended on word of mouth and retention of doctrine depended on the memory. Democritus himself was a writer, but he wrote in a period when readers were still outnumbered by listeners. It is therefore not surprising that he compressed his ideas into gnomic formulations, for he can be pictured, like the poets who were his contemporaries, as composing under what we may call a form of audience-control. Collections of gnomae, therefore, stamped with the hallmark of individual thinkers were characteristic of the first stage of Greek prose writing. But the anthologies of such which were accumulated systematically in the Hellenistic Age and later, and which dominated so much thinking and writing in later antiquity and the Middle Ages, were devoted to the special task of preserving in an epoch of books and readers that kind of material which was still suitable for oral memorization. Fresh thinking was now done on paper in continuous exposition. Thus the province of the gnome (Latin sententia) ceased to be the creative and became the commonplace.

This tended subtly to alter the vocabulary, temper and tone of the ancient gnomic statements as they were preserved. It was as though the chemical thinking of pre-Platonic antiquity, a dynamic creative process, had now been precipitated in crystallized form at the bottom of the glass; and one collected, arranged and packaged the crystals in commonplace books. The historian, therefore, who examines the preserved statements of any pre-Platonic thinker has to fortify himself against two quite different sources of error, the one in the text, the other in himself. On the one hand, there are the ancient compiler and the compiler from whom he may have compiled; they may have edited the material subtly but inescapably out of its archaic and awkward originality, by changes in vocabulary or syntax, by omissions or eclectic additions of commonplaces of other thinkers. The historian, therefore, is all the more thankful when he deals with a philosopher who adhered to metre. But on the other hand, even when an original survives in its archaic stiffness and angularity, the modern mind approaches it half expecting that it will be, indeed, a commonplace, a proverb or maxim with recognizable relation to the accumulated truisms of Western culture. What is specific and original in terminology, what is surprising and significant in syntax, will tend to be glossed over and ignored. The sayings of Heraclitus are notorious for their concentration and obscurity, but are only an extreme example of a method of exposition which is still discernible in Anaxagoras. The sayings of Democritus are stylistically intermediate between these two thinkers. They are little universes in themselves, and yet also they can be said to be flung like the feathered phrases of the epic minstrel from a mind comprehensive in vision, yet intensely particular in formulation. In short, the political sayings of Democritus present themselves both as self-contained units and yet as items in a ‘system’. They can be marshalled and deployed one by one in a sequence which gradually exposes the coherence of their inner logic. They are, so to speak, electrically charged, but the messages they deliver can be monitored because they are transmitting over a consistent wavelength.

1 [FVS⁶ 68 B257]

As to animals in given cases
of killing and not killing the rule is as follows:
if an animal does wrong
or desires to do wrong
and if a man kill it
he shall be counted exempt from penalties.
To perform this promotes well-being
rather than the reverse.

2 [B259A]

According as has been written concerning wild things and
creeping things,
if they are ‘enemy’,
so also [such is my doctrine] is it needful to do in the case of
human beings.

3 [B258]

If a thing does injury contrary to right
it is needful to kill it.
This covers all cases.
If a man do so
he shall increase the portion in which he partakes of right
and security
in any [social] order.

4 [B259B]

According to the custom laws of the fathers
you kill the ‘enemy’ in every [social] order
where custom-law in that order does not prohibit;
for the several groups there are prohibitions
of local religious sanctions
of solemnized contracts
of oaths

5 [B256]

Right is to perform what is needful
and wrong is to fail to perform what is needful
and to decline to do so.

6 [B261]

If men have wrong done to them
there is need to avenge them so far as is feasible.
This should not be passed over.
This kind of thing is right and also good
and the other kind of thing is wrong and also bad.

This group of formulations has a long ancestry. In its curiously stiff archaic simplicity and its participial constructions, it recalls both the syntax and the subject-matter of the Code of Hammurabi, that cuneiform original of the legal systems of the Near East and the West. But the Greek thinker has cast his legalisms in a typically Hellenic and rational context. He is looking at the behaviour of man in a cosmic and historical setting. Why concentrate on such a trivial matter as the ethics of disposing of dangerous animals, the goring ox, the vicious dog? In primitive communities, such issues provoked disputes between neighbours over valuable property, and it is easy to see how their disposition required the aid of regularity in a code. But Democritus is not interested in the custom-laws of a rural economy, not, that is, for their own sake. He is looking at the usage of men toward animals in order to extract a criterion for the usage of men toward other men. He says so explicitly (No. 2). We might expect the reverse line of reasoning. Surely the disposition of hostile animals is an application of the laws of property among men. But this is not the historical genetic approach of Democritus. He is searching less for the principles than for the methods by which human communities have been able to found themselves. He finds the method in law enforcement. This in turn depends for its effectiveness on the application of sanctions, and the essential sanction is the right to kill, legally that is. The power to execute is primary, if societies are to exist at all. He finds the prototype of this power in the right to kill animals. Why? The only answer can be that his conception of human society is based upon an anthropology in which man, himself an animal species, proceeded to organize himself in social orders (cosmoi) in order to protect himself against other species. When Democritus first states the rule of killing and not killing, he speaks of animals as ‘living things’ (zoa). This word could include men; in the ‘zoogonies’, the origin of the animal and human species was described without distinction of kind. In the anthropologies constructed on this foundation, organized war against the animals had been recognized as a necessary stage in man's social advance. Such had been the mythos, the drama in which his early departure from primitivism had been imaginatively conceived. Democritus takes this drama and uses it genetically to establish basic criteria for right and wrong. In the same genetic spirit he cites ancestral usage, not to support some specific party programme in the present, as was often done by practical politicians, but in its most general sense as that pattern of behaviour historically devised and normatively sanctioned in the remote past.

What then do we mean by ‘Right’ and ‘Unright’ (dike and adikia)? This is the question he asks. And his mind (we can see the naturalist, the materialist at work here) argues that to understand them we have to understand the minimum parts, so to speak, out of which they are constructed. In a civilized society they may be symbols for complicated value-judgments or applications of value-judgments; but they had an historical origin. This was essentially simple; nor will they ever lose the quality of their origin. The origin lay in the sanction of protection to achieve security. The sanction itself in its simplest form was negative—the right to kill the ‘enemy’. To forget this is to betray society (as he later argues). It is not verbal looseness on his part when he speaks of animals ‘doing wrong’. He deliberately reduces wrong, and therefore right, to bare essentials by viewing animal as man and man as animal. To make this quite clear, he reformulates the rule in the most general terms possible:

‘If a thing does injury contrary to right it is needful to kill it.’

(3)

By ‘contrary to right’ he indicates the violation of another's security, and to make clear that this minimum condition of right and wrong is meant seriously as a definition of their essence, he makes the definition explicit—

‘To do right is to do what you have to do,
to do what there is need of …’

(item 5)

—in the most simple and concrete sense.

If we have defined the repulse of injury as self-protection, however, we can begin to mistranslate the direction of his thought, which would seem an apology for modified anarchy, with atomized individuals repelling wrong but otherwise minding their own business. Strictly speaking, Democritus has no word for individual, that is, for individual self-subsistent personality, and he is incapable of thinking of the concept. His terminology baffles us because while viewing groups or aggregates as made up of simple parts he never seems to visualize the laws of behaviour of the parts without automatically visualizing that behaviour as social. He certainly considered the savage condition of man as pre-civic; but he almost certainly never imagined it as wholly atomized into individuals. Just as in the early anthropologies, the killing of ‘enemies’ was rationalized as that condition necessary for protecting organized society, so in Democritus as he warms to his theme and further defines the action taken against ‘the enemy’ the action is discovered to be social (item 4), sanctioned by the social order (cosmos) in which you are living. If you kill, you kill in the name of social security, and your act is sanctioned by this ‘need’. Nay more, in those human groups which constitute social orders, the definition of ‘right’ (dike) now advances to a more complex level: the sanction of killing is regulated. It is qualified by religious provisions and exceptions. These, he observes keenly, are local (item 4). His empiricism here reinforces his historical method. The right of asylum, for example, the protection afforded by temples to wrong-doers, depends upon the validity of local cults. There is no standard pattern for these. But solemnized agreements accompanied by libations (his next example) reflect practices widespread and accepted, and so do the oaths by which host swears to protect guest, or friend defends friend, or tribes and cities ratify their agreements. These also cut down the freedom to kill the ‘enemy’. Democritus in effect argues that no social group ever applies the simple law of self-protection in its total sense. There is a possibility of mitigation, of truce, of agreement in the unending effort to establish security. Is he in effect pointing to the regulation of intergroup relations as requiring a set of rules more complicated than mere outlawry? Is he hinting that societies, as they progress, learn other usages beside that of right and unright? He has not yet reached the polis but he is getting nearer to it.

Thus far, unright and right, respectively, could be described as symbols of aggression on the one hand and repulse or correction of aggression on the other. The first premisses of moral man, if such these be, are disappointingly negative. But when Democritus sums up the rule of the right to kill and states it as a general principle ‘covering all cases’, he significantly describes the wrong-doer not merely as the ‘enemy’ but as the ‘injurer’ (No. 3). He uses the participle of an epic verb. His style still falls short of the prosaic in the technical sense of that term. But, stylistic considerations apart, he adopts a word which in Homer indicated injury, damage, disaster, done in hostile relations between enemies (for example, by Greeks or Trojans). Injured feelings are not in question. He is advancing by implication a definition of unright as the infliction of material damage. This supplies a hint of the direction of his thought, a hint confirmed by his defence (No. 1) of killing the animal who is ‘enemy’.

‘To perform this promotes well-being
rather than the reverse.’

Injury or damage on the one hand, well-being or prosperity on the other, are placed in antithesis. You have to prevent or decrease the former, and to assist or increase the latter. He is thinking perhaps in terms of some calculus, for he says:

‘contribute to well-being rather than the reverse’

and it is also symptomatic that when he formulates the right to kill as a necessary law (items 2, 3), his verb of compulsion (chre) symbolizes the need arising out of the inherent situation, rather than that impersonal compulsion (ananke) imposed from some source external to the situation.

This calculus suggests that he is looking for an operational definition of right and unright. Across the intervening centuries we hear an echo of this, of course unpremeditated, in the accents of Jeremy Bentham. But the comparison with English Utilitarianism is no sooner made than it should be withdrawn. The greatest good of the greatest number is a formula built on the conception of units of personality which can be added up to form arithmetic aggregates. No fresh values enter in at the group level which are not present in its atomized parts. Democritus, to repeat what has already been said, shares with his age an inability to reach such a concept of the human ethos. He would have rejected it as an illusion, we suspect, had it been stated to him. His utilitarianism, then, if it be fair to use the term—and it probably is, for the symbols of utility, profit and interest had already been advanced by thinkers of the naturalist school before Plato united them strategically with the form of the good—his utilitarianism conceives of well-being versus ill-being, of profit versus damage, as indicating alternative conditions which affect the person and his community simultaneously, for a person's ‘way of life’ is life in a community. The group and its component parts have a double-acting relationship. The group is a dynamic context. This is not spelled out for us in Democritus' statements. It is reflected, however, in the ambiguity of his terminology. For example, when he surrounds the right to kill with qualifications (No. 4), he says:

‘For the several groups there are prohibitions.’

Here the phrase ‘several groups’ seeks to translate an untranslatable ambivalence. More strikingly, he says of the man who carries out the need for killing the injurer (No. 3):

‘He shall increase the portion in which he partakes of right and
security
in any society.’

Democritus means that such a man in the first instance increases the security of the community. But to this security he has himself contributed by his act. He therefore feels good because of his service and also deserves well of the community which he has served. His ‘portion’ is not a fraction of the whole, but amounts to a degree of participation.

So far the Democritean theory of right has presented itself in these legalisms as resting on narrow and negative premisses. To argue that human society could only start its ascent toward civilization by strict enforcement of the most primitive laws of security is no doubt true and valuable; but it does not express the hallmark of civilization itself. Seized as he was of the value of security as a positive thing, Democritus was bound to enlarge and advance his conception until it could comprehend action not only narrowly defensive but also helpful and co-operative. This he begins to do by propounding axiom No. 6; that if you repulse injury and punish it, you do not do this for yourself alone. In a community, you do this in the interests of others who are wronged.

‘If men have wrong done to them there is need to avenge
them so far as is feasible.
This kind of thing is right and also good.’

This carries us beyond narrowly selfish considerations. Such action is therefore always in danger of being ignored or ‘passed over.’ But (if we may fill in his thought for him) a community comes into existence not as a mere sum of private interests, each protecting their own security, but as a complex in which the need of avenging all who are wronged becomes a matter of ‘principle’, we would say. It has to be recognized, regardless of whether or not the particular victims are strong enough to protect themselves without help. He uses the verb ‘avenge’ perhaps to locate the rule far back in primitive society as he has already located the right of self-preservation. It is the prototype of those methods of legal redress which an advanced society makes available as a substitute for direct succour. But the point is that at least some vengeance must always be taken, whoever is wronged, in order to guarantee that a collective system of mutual security will work for all members. If he asks for it ‘so far as is feasible’, he may mean to hint that group protection by members for other members has always had limited efficacy as contrasted with direct action. But when he vigorously defends this vicarious rule as ‘right and also good’, and the opposite as ‘wrong and also bad’, the second adjective in each pair points up the utility and strength which accrue to the community as a whole.

Two-thirds of Democritus' social and political axioms still remain to be considered. They deal with matters of increasing complexity—law and custom, faction and consensus, the polis, its ethos and administration. His thinking in politics seems to have proceeded along organic lines, viewing the human group as founded on a very few simple principles but discovering and then solving more complicated issues in later stages of development. This kind of progress means that the problems formulated for solution cease to be negative and become positive. They advance from mere security to the creative values and enjoyments of a polis type of community.

7 [B249]

Faction within the clan is a bad thing for both sides.
Those who win and those who lose share impartially in
common disaster.

8 [B245B]

Envious malice between men constitutes the genesis of faction.

9 [B245A]

The custom laws would not prevent each of us from living
his life in accordance with those powers and opportunities
which are his own
if it were not true that A inflicted injury on B.

10 [B248]

It is the desire of custom law to do good to the way of life
of men
but it is able to do this only when men also desire to have
good done to them.
If men hearken to it
the custom law demonstrates to them that excellence which
is its own.

To establish the basis of sociality, human beings must initially recognize sanctions which protect the group from without. This is a simpler matter than maintaining its cohesion within. If right is a value-symbol to be placed on action taken against the anti-social ‘enemy’, then the objective of reconciling tensions within will call into play other terms and different formulae.

These four political axioms focus their attention on the provenance of custom-law. In Greek tradition, Greek law (nomos) came to be viewed as the specific creation of the city-state. The virtual identification of nomos and polis was already implicit in the theory (or the myth) of law-givers who had established ‘polities’, that is, civic institutions. The idealism of Plato and the teleology of Aristotle only confirmed the identification and made it an article of faith. But Democritus true to his genetic method sees law generated as a solution to problems which were already crystallizing in pre-civic conditions. The factional quarrel which threatens to split the civic group and end its existence can be seen already at work in the clan of blood-kindred. Long before Democritus, Solon had phrased it in this way, and his successor in the democratic experiment, Cleisthenes, had set out to solve the problem practically, by breaking up the ancient clans and distributing their members among demes. Perhaps both men confronted an ancient inheritance, handed down from more primitive days, in the form of blood-feud, which dividing a clan of kindred families can decimate its members. Herodotus saw the same danger in a Pan-Hellenic setting: the quarrel over the command of the united forces against Persia at Salamis; and he applied the same phrase to describe it. These examples show that the clan (phyle) did not describe a kin-group of any defined size. Depending on context, it might refer to the consanguinity of a kin-group within a polis, or to all members of a polis as for example Athenians, or to all Greeks as a ‘race’. Democritus, then, in presenting the factions of the clan as a problem in politics, takes advantage of the ambiguity. He wants a term as general as possible in order to view faction historically as a process endemic in the social order at all stages of its evolution. Upon this perennial and now proverbial danger he places a reflective interpretation. Historically, the way of settling a feud had been a conflict which ended in victory and subjugation. This solution is illusory, says Democritus. The victors and vanquished have suffered a common destruction. Of what, we may ask? In any immediate sense, the vanquished lose definite things like life or status or property; and the victors gain corresponding and equally definite benefits. Democritus cannot be defining loss in these terms. Something has been destroyed which was the common property of the two factions before the fighting began.

That common property could be defined as the group's over-all security, or its law. But Democritus does not at once jump, as a more traditional and superficial thinker might, to the necessity of supporting law at all costs—eunomia, the Greeks called it—as a preventive of faction. The enemy from without the group had been simply ‘the enemy’, externally viewed. You do not have to deal with his ethos or motives. You establish the rule of right (dike) on purely positivist lines. Punishment by expulsion or elimination or execution is the first law of group survival. But it is only the first law. For an in-group problem, you are forced to consider the inner ethos and motives of human beings. Thus, still looking at the cause of feud genetically, you discover it in the propensity of the human animal to compete and to conceive and nurse a grudge against his competitor, to make envious comparisons. These connotations are all packed into the Greek noun phthonos and its more ancient verb phthoneo. Competition, primarily envious, secondarily emulative, between fellow-craftsmen had become a proverb before Hesiod. Envious malice describes an emotion not self-generated in isolation but one which ab initio exists between two or more people. The curse of Adam is the way Adam handles his primary relationships with other Adams. Adam the single man never existed. The ‘grudge’ is almost the condition of being a human being so far as our manhood depends on some relationship to other men. Hence Democritus, viewing the growth of morals and politics from an anthropological standpoint, at least implies that within this growth are comprehended two warring principles: an inherent grudge of man against man; and a compulsion nevertheless to live in groups which can co-operate because the grudge is somehow controlled or sublimated. Hebraic analogies even when helpful can often mislead. Did ‘malice’ express the Greek equivalent for original sin? Or was it not more characteristic of Greek realism combined with Greek rationalism to assume that if two men or groups could advance in prosperity at mathematically equal rates, grudge and envy would not arise; but that chance and fortune see to it that they almost never do; and so the envy on one side and the fear on the other that result are reactions of the human material to an emotional strain imposed upon it by the non-mathematical operation of circumstances. This might have been Democritus' complete doctrine. We cannot be sure. In what we have of him, we start with the fact of the competitive grudge as an originating force (arche) which sets in motion divisive and destructive faction.

For this endemic danger the remedy is law, and the initial operation of law has to be viewed negatively as a restraint on the use of one's own elbow-room (no. 9). Up to this point, the mind and method of Democritus have sought to understand and to solve political problems simply by describing them. Is he here, at the introduction of law, at last forced to take refuge in a solution conceived a priori: a deus ex machina, some force, moral or theological, exercising a power over the historical process which is independent of that process? In making law the personal subject of verbs like ‘prevent’ and ‘do good,’ it might almost seem that he does, indeed, resort to that kind of syntax in which the structures of idealists are built. But the Greek nomos, when he used the word, had not yet acquired the a priori or ‘geometric’ significance with which Plato's later thinking endowed it and which passed over into the natural law of the Stoics, of St. Thomas, and of the rationalists of the seventeenth century. Nomos is not translatable by a single word. It had an ambivalence in the Greek mind, and yet the shape of this ambivalence was incisive and powerful. When Pindar sang that ‘custom-law was lord of all men’, Herodotus in effect added, ‘Yes indeed: the lawful customs of the races of men are various; but each evokes its own fierce loyalty from its own devotees’. These two citations give the polarity of the Greek term better than anything else that could be said about it. It is untranslatable because it comprehends two concepts later split apart in the Western tradition: custom, usage or habit on the one hand, created by man locally and fortuitously, but also controlling man in attitude and act; law on the other hand, passionless, wise, universal, above and beyond men, but requiring their obedience and reverence as to a god. Nomos in fact in the fifth century was ‘usage-which-is-solemn’.

Thus Democritus in effect is arguing that one positive and inherent force in men, that of competitive suspicion, can be balanced or controlled by another and often is: the preference for conformity to collective habits which we might call a sort of force of inertia. Nomos gathers momentum in society and controls its acts and relations by virtue, perhaps, of an inherent laziness, a conservatism in the human raw material which while aggressive and envious is also prone to prefer the familiar and the consistent. The ‘right way’ of behaving in a thousand matters of daily decision is just the accepted way. All this Democritus does not say: but his term nomos speaks for itself if we keep it in the context of the vocabulary of the fifth century and do not transfer it to the late fourth. There is a theoretic capacity plus opportunity (exousia) at the disposal of every man personally (item 9), but it is only theoretical. Man is normally too given to familiar standardized usages to exercise it outside of or against the group, except he have the support of a group within the group. Hence it is factionalism (stasis) of group within group that is really dangerous (item 7) much more so than the anarchism of the lawless man. With him society can and does deal. He does not have any nomos-support whatever. But in a sense every member of a faction or a class does have support: he has that minimum portion of law which can be used as group loyalty, though it is not the fully formed law of a society.

‘Envy’ and ‘custom’, then, have always been competing forces, genetically speaking. But Democritus makes a value-judgment here: he expresses a preference, the Hellenic preference. Custom law is good and useful. It can indeed be viewed as having a desire or purpose to ‘do good to man's way of life’ (No 10). Democritus is still speaking historically. The way of life is not mine or yours personally. It is the life lived in a society, as the anthropologists had spoken of it. The restraint of common custom is not merely negative, then: it paves the way for a more positive possibility. Wherever Democritus speaks of ‘good’, he is looking to the future, to the further utility of man in society. What benefits of custom law he has in mind will appear in due course. But in the present stated axiom, what preoccupies him is the paradox that while custom-law has a power to benefit this power is not automatic. It depends for its validity upon the equally valid acquiescence given by the members of society. The reasoning is in a closed circle. It has to be, to accord with the complete facts of life. Perhaps he means too that custom-law is a total thing. It either works, is accepted and loved and finds its own justification in the smooth functioning of harmony between men, men's obedience and their sense of benefit: or it disintegrates wholly, collapses into lawlessness (anomia); the group ceases to function as a group. And automatically the members thereof are deprived of their power to understand or imagine the virtue of that condition which is now not theirs. For their very anarchy controls their judgment. Nomos is not like a piece of property which you could abandon or pick up again at will. It is painfully acquired; it makes total sense when you have it; but when you lose it, it becomes indeed a lost cause.

What else Democritus has to say about politics—and there is a good deal—moves us into more familiar ground, familiar, that is, from the point of view of Plato and Aristotle. The city-state, its character and peculiar problems, come into plain view. Hitherto they have not been in the foreground. Whether Democritus was prepared to construct a series of ascending social integrations from savagery to the city and, if so, what these were, is uncertain. It would seem that Aristotle's simple and elegant sequence of household, village and city is in that form the creation of his own teleological needs, rather than a faithful reproduction of the Greek anthropological view. Democritus certainly conceived of society before the city-state. But the evidence for this lies mainly in the kind of terminology he uses, rather than in explicit historical statements. He must have refused to posit the polis as the one definitive social order. For example, he uses the two words ‘order’ and ‘shape’ (cosmos and rhuthmos) to describe a given stage or type of social organization. But his method is not typological, nor is his approach constitutional, in the manner of the idealists who followed him. His mind moves in genetic relations, not in a priori forms. Thus he speaks (in a statement still to be presented) of the Athenian democracy as the ‘presently constituted shape of things’. This is not quite the same thing as saying ‘under this political constitution’; and the temporal qualification suggests that there have been and will be other shapes. Indeed, both cosmos and rhuthmos are dynamic terms describing an animated order and a moving shape. They were so used also in his atomic metaphysics.

A citation of Plutarch's reports a reference in Democritus to

‘governments or polities and friendships of kings’

as the source of

‘great and glorious benefits for our way of life’.

This sounds like a recollection of some genetic account of the rise of government with authority to organize society, a stage which Democritus may have superimposed upon his validation of right and custom-law. That is, he may first have looked at those fundamental sanctions which support the existence of any society, primitive or advanced, and then proceeded to consider the problems of constitutional authority and to indicate some of the solutions achieved historically in tribal oligarchy or in monarchy or in democracy alike. But this reconstruction of his thought is speculative. That his premisses were historical is revealed in the preserved vocabulary of his axiomatic statements about the city-state. A group of three of these can now be presented.

11 [B260]

If a man kill any highwayman or pirate
he shall be counted exempt from penalty
whether [he kill] by direct action
or by orders
or by vote.

12 [B262A]

In the case of those who commit acts that deserve expulsion
or imprisonment
and in the case of [all] who deserve penalty
the vote must condemn them
and not absolve them.

13 [B262B]

If a man in violation of custom law
absolve [another]
using [motives of] gain or pleasure to formulate [the issue]
he does wrong
and inevitably this will be on his heart.

On the face of it, these three axioms repeat the primary proposition already fully covered that the very existence of any society depends in the first instance upon the enforcement of sanctions against the social ‘enemy’. Justice, genetically validated by the measures taken by the human species against other species, originates at this elementary and negative level. But in axiom No. 11, which heads this group of three, Democritus classifies three kinds of sanctions, and the distinctions are significant. In the first, penalty is imposed by direct action; this identifies the condition of primitive society. In the second, it is done by orders given; this, we suggest, identifies a more organized community in which responsibility for social security is wielded by a king; in this authority the original right of direct action, always close to anarchy, is now vested. Any seventeenth-century believer in the divine right of kings would have understood at once what Democritus meant here. But there is a third possibility: action can be taken through vote. Democritus would not limit this procedure to what would be styled in a technical sense democracy. He could have in mind any society in which legal sanctions can be taken by collective decision. Under certain circumstances this could be true even of Homeric society and certainly of any city-state unless governed by a despot. But the order of precedence in these alternatives is not accidental; it suggests the thought that organs of collective responsibility tend to displace earlier and simpler devices of government. The anthropological method of Democritus, proceeding from savage to civilized condition, has reached the voting society, as we might call it. The language of No. 12, the next axiom, is the language of Athenian democracy. The area of application for sanctions which protect society is no longer confined within the simplicities of robbery or piracy, and the penalty of liquidation through killing is also far too simple for use in such a complex organism as a city-state. But the principle remains that sanctions must be implemented: that is our first duty to the society in which we live, for only this can guarantee the initial stability and authority of what is becoming (Democritus does not say so) a legal system responsible to popular control. Statement No. 13 makes it even clearer that Democritus is now addressing himself to the Athenian judge and jury (no distinction was drawn between them) whose primary function is not mercy or leniency but the decision to convict where conviction is deserved. In this way is the stern logic maintained by which a society stands or falls. The citizen in a voting society will be tempted to deviate from this, because in a voting society the voter's immediate interest and the long-range social interest can come into conflict. So political theory has at this point to take note of gain and pleasure (item 13) as twin motivations which complicate the process of judicial decision. Democritus did not oppose either provided they coincided with public utility, or at least did not conflict with it. But the latter must predominate, and this requires a correct ‘formulation’ of the issue in the voter's mind. Democritus has here involved his political with his psychological theory, which no complete account of his philosophy can afford to ignore. However, the political thread of his thinking is separable and the final unwinding of it is near at hand.

14 [B255]

At that time when the powerful [classes] confronting the have-
nots take it on themselves to pay toll to them and to do
things for them and to please them:
This is the [situation] in which you get [the phenomenon of]
compassion and the end of isolation and the creation of
comradeship and mutual defence
and then civic consensus
and then other goods beyond the capacity of anyone to
catalogue in full.

15 [B250]

It is consensus that makes possible for cities the [execution of]
mighty works
enabling them to execute and carry through wars.

16 [B252B]

A city managed prosperously means complete stability-and-
success for everybody.
In this [condition] is comprehended all.
If this [condition] is secured, this means general security; if
this [condition] is dissolved, this means general demoralization.

17 [B252A]

It is needful that greater importance be placed upon the
[area of] the civic than on any other,
and upon its good management:
avoiding any competition
that goes beyond reason
and any access of private power
that may cut across the utility of the common [wealth].

18 [B251]

Poverty under a democracy is as much to be preferred above
what men of power call prosperity
as is liberty above bondage.

The first of this group of statements constitutes the most remarkable single utterance of a political theorist of Hellas. Considering its epoch, it is as remarkable as anything in the whole history of political theory. Neither in content nor in temper has it a parallel in the better-known classic thinkers. Ethically speaking, it seems to carry the colour of certain values which are defined in the New Testament; politically, with its stress on what looks like a social conscience, it reads like a formula suitable to the liberalism of the age of Mill or T. H. Green. It is true that the objective towards which the statement is directed was becoming a commonplace: unanimity of the citizen body had been viewed as a political ideal long before Plato cemented the conception into an almost mathematical unity of the state. It is equally true that this condition of consensus adds little to Democritus' previous principle that the cohesion and the stability of the group are the first objective of politics. It does however describe this as a mood, so to speak, of a citizen body which is facing up to this condition consciously and deliberately.

But what is the originating cause of such a mood? A less subtle thinker would reply: obedience to the laws; an idealist would substantiate this answer by the proposition that the laws represent eternal forms of Good and Right which give them independent validity and influence over the minds of men. For Democritus causes are always genetic not teleological. He looks to processes rather than to patterns for the explanation of politics. Law, as we have seen, is for him the sum of a system of habits, which places a brake on human wilfulness. But this can never of itself evoke the co-operation of a harmonious community. So Democritus is forced once more to get behind custom to ethos, that complex of behaviour patterns out of which standardized practice grows. Is there some element here which historically becomes the means of calling social consensus into being? He finds it in a human propensity, under given conditions, to altruism and compassion.

It is often said that Greek rationalism could not find room for pity as such, and might even deplore it as a sentimental violation of a good man's integrity. This does not misrepresent the main tradition as defined by the classic writers and thinkers, to the end of the fourth century. There were however exceptions. Even in the fifth century, Aeschylus in his portrayal of Prometheus chose to dramatize not only the hero's gifts of technology to man but his compassion for man, and in the same spirit the Chorus are invited to have compassion on him. The tragedy conveys to its audience the strong impression that somehow, in the unfolding history of civilization, the cause of technology and the cause of compassion are bound up together. The remarkable thing about compassion in Democritus is that it is presented in conjunction with altruism as a political principle of the first importance, a kind of human energy comparable to other energies of the human ethos, and one which can have structural effect upon the condition of the body politic. In this respect, the thought of Democritus is tougher and more systematic than that of Rousseau. Compassion is not to be viewed as an intuitive recoil from suffering in others, a vague but powerful sentiment rooted in the untutored primitive. It is a phenomenon which presents itself at an advanced stage of human culture, and it is the specific property of the stronger and more successful elements in that culture.

But why should it arise at all? Democritus, without breaking the sequence of his genetic method, could have argued that the necessary concessions which may be made by the strong toward the weak, by the rich towards the poor, are simply exacted from them by the demand for over-all group security. Instead of that, he proposes an addition to the ethos of human beings, a fresh ingredient in their make-up. Does he here then take leave of his method, abandoning history in favour of an unsupported aspiration? Does his picture of altruism mean that he is tempted into the fantasy of wish-fulfilment?

A Marxist, schooled in the doctrine of class-struggle as fundamental, would say he did. Democritus, be it noted, goes half-way towards such realism. He does not pretend like Plato that class divisions in the city-state can be treated by the theorist as abnormalities. They, as much as right and law, are part of the historical process of politics. But where does his discovery of altruism—which at this point mitigates the class division so decisively—come from?

The riddle can be read and the method of Democritus placed in consistent perspective once it is assumed that he is looking at a famous crisis in the history of the city-state. His working model is the Athens of Solon, when a programme of political reform was adopted by consent. The crisis was in its overt aspects economic, and was alleviated by a famous financial arrangement later known as the Great Disburdening. But the underlying problems were those of political conciliation and they were solved in some body of legislation in which the competing interests of rich and poor, hill, plain and coast, landowner, merchant and craftsman were reconciled. The most conspicuous of these reforms made office-holders responsible to audit, political and pecuniary, after their terms of office; and the right of audit was vested in the commons. This feature had impressed itself upon the mind of Democritus, as we shall see.

Tradition in retrospect always likes to dramatize political policies as personal at the expense of the social forces which made policy possible. But Democritus goes behind the sanctification of Solon and asks what made possible his choice as umpire and what made his solutions acceptable. He finds the only possible answer to lie in some ethos of consent on the part of the privileged classes of that period. For change was effected by voluntary reform, not enforced by revolution. Nor, presumably, in the philosopher's view, could any revolution have been successful; or rather, if it were, the community as Democritus viewed it would have been destroyed. Had he not said that in a collision of factions victors and vanquished suffer a common destruction (axiom 7)? At any rate, discord in Solonian Athens did not come to the breaking point: it proved negotiable. He might have pointed to simple fear as the ethos causative of prudence; however, knowing some of the recorded facts perhaps better than we do, he discerned as the causative factor some mood of altruism and compassion latent in the governing classes, a mood which he describes as self-generated. For ‘they took it on themselves’.

This historical frame of reference suggests a vivid context for the succeeding statements. Solon led to Cleisthenes, and to the formal establishment through further constitutional reform of ‘The Democracy’. Cleisthenes was followed by Marathon and Salamis. Victory over the Persians was followed by the Delian League and the rise of the Athenian empire, culminating in the Age of Pericles with its supreme confidence and its brilliant achievements. Democritus views the entire story and frames an explanation for it. It is a single political process set in motion when liberal political principles were originally applied. Once those precious ingredients were released, the vital dynamic consensus of a city came into being, not as a single mood but as a continuing and evolving energy. So were made possible the ‘mighty works’, ‘the execution and carrying through of great wars’ (item 15). The mechanism of civic strength and achievement lay not in individual leadership but in a happy race of men: when the city-state is managed prosperously, this means stability and success for all its members (item 16). He is looking now at the Periclean age in which he lived.

However, Democritus does not allow these historical glories to carry him over into some Hegelian vision of the corporate community. His analysis remains complex: consensus had been achieved in a competitive situation by the addition of non-competitive forces. Once achieved, it therefore cannot be viewed as becoming a static condition or even an ideal formula into which individual energies become absorbed. Itself produced by process, it releases further process; thus competition between individuals and groups continues, but now it does not go ‘beyond reason’ (item 17): men continue to seek power for themselves but within a formula set, not by custom law so much as the ‘utility of the commonwealth’. This is a rational criterion of civic good. Presumably therefore men had a capacity to envisage it and calculate it and in his psychology Democritus elsewhere explains that they have.

What is the total character of such a society? Has it a name? He names it himself in his summing up. ‘Poverty under democracy is better than any prosperity among the powerful (item 18). This reads like the sentiment of some man of Athens, say between 440 and 420. He was not a native son but he had come to Athens to live there. And like Herodotus in the same period he fell under Athens' spell. May this not help to illuminate the obscure chronology of his life? He was surely a spiritual son of the age of Pericles. It is also hard to avoid the conclusion that when Thucydides penned the Funeral Speech of Pericles he was expressing an intellectual debt to Democritus.

If the philosopher turns to the age of Solon and after to explain the origin and behaviour of a liberal society, can his methodology as a theorist be defended as genetic and as consistent? To a modern mind, equipped with distinctions between sciences to which he was a stranger, it might seem that while he laid his foundations in anthropology and argued then deductively from a few principles, his superstructure is empirically derived from a quite recent and limited historical experience. This would recall a similar split in the thinking of Hobbes, where a deductive psychology is allied with Hobbes's present sense of the need to support absolute monarchy under given historical conditions. But for a thinker of the mid-fifth century b.c., the distinction between anthropology and history scarcely existed. The ancient times were in perspective foreshortened and their vast story of previous social development was telescoped into traditions of recent memory. Had not human history for Hesiod begun with the heroes of the Trojan war? Thus it is reasonable to assume that when Democritus says of compassion and the end of isolation that these arose ‘at that time when the powerful took upon themselves to pay toll’, etc., he is fitting the phenomena of the Solonic epoch into their genetic place in the anthropological story: here was a crucial stage in the advance from primitivism towards civilization. A science of man better equipped than his can afford to smile at the naïvety of such a foreshortening, but can it afford to dismiss his premiss that altruism has a historical basis?

19 [B254]

If inferior [citizens] proceed to the prerogatives of office
the more unfit they are when they proceed
the more negligible they become
and are filled with witlessness and overconfidence.

20 [B267]

The exercise of authority is by nature proper to the superior.

21 [B265A]

Men have better memories for errors than for successful
performance.

22 [B265B]

If [a trustee] restores a deposit
he need not expect to be [morally] approved.
If he default,
he can expect to have bad things said about him and done
to him.
It is just [to treat] anyone in authority in the same manner.

23 [B265C]

A man in authority is expected to perform well and not badly.
This is the [formal] assumption on which he was elected.

The political vision of Democritus is complex—more complex, as far as we know, than that of any of his successors. Perhaps it was because he kept his eye closer than any other did to all the factors of the historical process which had generated politics, and not just to some of them. Having recognized the quality of the Athenian democracy and the Athenian democratic process from Solon to Pericles as a supreme achievement, he raises at once the problem of effective authority in such a society, and gives an explicit answer: it can be solved only by recognizing the aristocratic principle: society divides itself into the superior and inferior; to entrust government to the latter is folly (items 19, 20).

The first thing to realize is what he means by superior. In this word, kreitton, the meanings of stronger and better crossed each other. The ambivalence produced a great deal of semantic confusion in Democritus' successors, a confusion compounded by Plato's polemics against them. What Democritus means by superior is sufficiently indicated by the terms in which he describes the behaviour of its opposite number, the inferior: negligence, stupidity, overconfidence. If the last is a partly moral defect, the first two are certainly intellectual. The first criterion of distinction is brains. So far, then, Democritus seems to anticipate the principle of Plato, that men are disparate in terms of intellectual ability. Therefore his argument for natural superiority comes to no more than the proposition that democracy must somehow get men of quality and ability to assume authority, and that, if it does not, the common estate suffers. He calls such types the ‘effective citizens’ (in No. 24 below). Yet he assumes that they are ‘elected’ and not self-appointed (No. 23). It is perhaps symptomatic of his position as a social theorist that he seems to suggest that the defects of the inferior are compounded by inappropriate responsibilities (item 19). That is, the social context available to a man's ethos can determine what becomes of the potentialities of that ethos. Plato after him made a similar point when, in insisting on specialization of function appropriate to each type, he argued that round pegs in square holes exhibit dangerous effects which would otherwise not arise.

Government, then, as distinct from society, is by nature proper to the superior. Does Democritus see the problem of reconciling this with the presuppositions of democracy? It is to his lasting credit that he does. The dilemma is very real: if political responsibility is to be distributed widely over society, this implies a degree of popular control over the state apparatus. Yet if office should be restricted to the superior, how can you have popular control of the superior, and how justify it? The answer given, with striking originality, anticipates the theory of government propounded by Hobbes, yet in a version subtler than Hobbes's political circumstances allowed him to envisage. Authority is a deposit which the community is capable of vesting in the holder of authority as in a trustee (item 22): that is, a virtual contract is entered into whereby we surrender the right to rule to those best able to exercise it. But when Democritus says a deposit, which the trustee is expected to return and get no thanks for it, he envisages a contract with a time-limit. He is obviously inspired here by the audit system instituted by Solon and further developed in the Cleisthenic constitution. Office-holders are elected for a term. Then they surrender their deposit and are examined on the use they have made of it. Conceivably the metaphor, borrowed from elementary commercial practice, was used in Solon's day to justify the arrangement; or perhaps Democritus invented it. At any rate, it reconciles Hobbes's perception that for effective government you have to assume the existence of some kind of contract with the requirement of an Athenian democrat that sovereignty be never absolute—a requirement which for historical reasons did not trouble Hobbes. The theory, or more correctly the analogy in which the theory is implicit, also has the effect of viewing political power (arche) as executive authority rather than as legislative sovereignty. It would have been better for Plato's political theory had he more plainly seen the distinction himself. Democritus, still keeping the audit system in view, argues that no form of political authority can ever be explained as privilege or prerogative. It comes into existence by definition only as a vehicle of good government (item 23). Plato would agree in the abstract, but Democritus applies this to the actual man who governs, not an ideal philosopher, but a fallible official subject to recall.

The contract theory thus stated had in various versions a long history after Democritus' day. It may be doubted whether it was ever stated so succinctly or with such satisfaction to the competing claims of authority and liberty. Positing as it does an arrangement between citizens and their rulers, it is to be distinguished from a parallel but different concept of compact (syntheke), an agreement between the citizens themselves. This was advanced in the generation after Democritus to justify the existence of custom-law within the body politic, as against the executive authority that rules over it. In Democritus' own day, the urgent need was to devise a theory supporting the practice of annual elections which could command intellectual respect. He earned the eternal credit of supplying it.

24 [B253A]

For the effective [citizens] expediency does not lie in omitting
their own business
in order to handle affairs.
Their own business gets into a bad way.

25 [B253B]

However if there is some error or omission in public business
the cry of disapproval goes up
even though no dishonest or wrongful act is involved.

26 [B253C]

Omission and wrong-doing alike incur the peril of criticism
and indeed punishment as well.

27 [B253D]

Error is inevitable,
but for men to sympathize with it does not come easy.

28 [B266A]

The shape [of society] presently prevailing has no device
against wrong being done to men in authority
even though they be perfect …

29 [B266C]

Somehow, the [shape of] things should be so ordered
as to cover the following problem also:
if a man does no wrong himself,
no matter how thoroughly he censure wrong-doers,
he should never find himself in their power.
If his acts are right,
some defence, of ordinance or otherwise,
should be there to protect him.

For Democritus, there were some problems that remained unresolved. As his rationale of man in society nears its conclusion, he casts his eye upon a stubborn fact: a democratic society cannot yet be a just society in any Platonic sense of that word. Better the Solonian democracy than any other polity, far better. But a question remains. He is still looking at the audit of office-holders and the way it is carried out. It is an operation of the multitude, relying not on judicial precision, not even on their collective will to achieve a common good. It may be doubted whether Democritus could ever have accepted the conception of such a will had it been proposed to him. No, the audit relies on certain factors in the human ethos: here again he turns to his psychology of that motivation in men which, as we have seen, is for him so complicated:

Men have better memories for errors than for successful performance

(No. 21).

This is what creates the possibility of the audit system and makes it effective. Men can always summon zeal for it. But, equally, the audit can therefore be undiscriminating. There are forms of error which are pardonable, as distinguished from crimes which are punishable. But the human ethos, with its proclivity to remember vice and forget virtue, can alter the focus of the facts; forgetting the virtues that mitigate errors, it can convert errors into crimes. How then do you combine the audit with complete justice to the executive? He notes that in Athenian democracy at its best, the effective citizen who had his own business to manage makes sacrifices if he takes on governmental responsibility (item 24). He does not actually say he should be paid, compensated by a salary for it: yet his intent may be to justify this Periclean policy. It also follows, because of the motivations upon which the machinery of the audit relies, that in addition to the sacrifice the citizen exposes himself to a genuine risk: honest administration need not be perfect; a man can err and yet be guiltless of crime or peculation (item 25). The end result for him is, however, the same as if he had committed crimes (item 26). He

‘has wrong done to him’

(item 28).

This violates the rule of moral logic. The just should not be exposed to injustice. There should be some mechanism or device, legal or otherwise, both to prevent an irrationality and to defend the security of the just (item 28). Thus at the end Democritus returns to the problem of security against wrong with which his story of civilization had begun. But it is now viewed at an advanced level of culture in a context of great complexity.

It would be interesting to reflect upon later solutions to this question thus posed by Democritus for western society. In effect, no absolute solution has been found. After Aristotle, political theory was for a long time formulated in mainly teleological or authoritarian terms. Since the problem is specific to the democratic process, it could not agitate the attention of thinkers very closely until after Cromwell. Since the eighteenth century, western democracy in effect has formulated a double solution. On the one hand, it has distinguished judicial and executive functions from legislative, and on the whole (with exceptions, to be sure) has made the former a matter of ‘civil service’ not subject to audit and reprisal. The acts of the legislative power, on the other hand, are in fact subject to audit through the party system, by which a government is ‘voted down’ and ‘thrown out of office’ for what are judged to be errors or crimes according to the voter's prejudices, and very often for errors which it did not commit. The solution, in fact, has been to separate the concepts of criminal guilt and political error, and to assume that guilt, under normal circumstances, does not arise in the processes of government. As to error, it is penalized unfairly, but the penalty consists merely in the deprivation of opportunity for the further exercise of power. A thinker of ancient Athens would be no more capable of drawing these distinctions achieved by modern democracy than he would be of rationalizing and accepting the party system as a genuine method of government.

This takes us far afield from Democritus. But that the problem he posed had to await the long passage of time for even partial solution is a tribute to the greatness of the man who could face and state the problem; who could realize that the triumphant democratic polity of Athens was not the last word in politics, without making that an excuse for rejecting it in the lofty manner of Plato. It may be said: did not Plato face the question? He did, but he solved it only by erasing it, for the problem turned on the complexities of the relationship between democracy and authority; and he would not admit that the relationship had any right to exist. Having educated the superior to be superior, he proposed to put them in power and give them machinery for self-perpetuation. So far as the issue of sovereignty was concerned, this was a simple regression to the mythical centuries before Solon. Part of Plato's weakness, as of Aristotle's, was the conviction that in politics all problems, as they may be soluble theoretically, must therefore be solved now.

Democritus was content to leave something unsolved, and his readiness in this respect reveals the measure of his stature as a political thinker, for it grows from his conception of politics as a continuing process which, as it began far back in the past, in the savage, will still continue beyond the present. That is why the words cosmos and rhuthmos recur in these axiomatic statements. The anthropological story is one of the invention of successive tools and devices which in politics are addressed to solving political problems. We are waiting just now, he says, for a fresh addition to these devices. For the presently constituted society, no such device yet exists.

The same anthropological story describes how human beings have become successively shaped into societies none of which have teleological finality. The present shaping now asks for a piece of ordering, a new addition to the accumulating patterns of human relations.

This conclusion to his politics makes it feasible to suggest the basic relationship of his political theory to his physics or meta-physics. It would have been dangerous to suggest it at the beginning of our study. Do not all historians repeat the tale of his neat mechanical universe of oscillating or rotating atoms blindly throwing themselves through a limitless void and blindly engaging, among other things, in the accidental creation of the human species, which with equal accident is then moved by mechanical impulsion of pleasure and pain upon its amoral course?

This nightmare is a figment of text-books, even if the text-books go back as far as antiquity. What we do perceive is a naturalism, rather than a materialism, which insists (1) that the world is a physical ‘order’, as its Greek label cosmos implies, successively integrated out of chaos and successively replacing simple patterns by more complex ones, though without benefit of an ordering mind, since the tendency to organization is inherent in atomic behaviour; (2) that human society equally forms itself from the dust into increasingly complex patterns describable in terms not of mechanical but of political behaviour, patterns not produced in response to eternal verities nor directed by an all-powerful providence, but rather themselves producing for solution a series of problems with which atomic man has to wrestle, for they are problems of pleasure and pain, profit and loss, right and wrong, good and bad; and these have always been of major importance to the human species since it was first formed.

Appendix

While the floruit of Democritus as established by Apollodorus (420 b.c.) seems to be based on an unreliable computation (forty years after Anaxagoras) critics have continued to assume that Democ. was younger than Protagoras. Whether or not this be true—and the style of Democritus at least bespeaks his reliance on oral methods of publication—the difference cannot have been great, and I feel personally convinced that the structural and systematic analysis of the human condition carried out by the atomist must have supplied the intellectual foundation for the sophistic communications-theory. Hence the order of treatment in chapters VI, VII and VIII.

That group of statements treated in this chapter seem to have been largely by-passed by historians; a clue to indifference may lie in the myopic statement of Burnet, Thales to Plato, p. 201: ‘What we have of him has been preserved mainly because he was a great coiner of telling phrases, and these have found their way into anthologies. That is not the sort of material we require for the interpretation of a philosophical system, and it is very doubtful whether we have some of his deepest thoughts at all.’

Reluctance to accept Democritean material in Stobaeus (FVS 169-297) as authentic (cf. Sinclair, op. cit., p. 65, n. i, where however the cross-reference to the admittedly spurious Pythagorean material appears scarcely relevant) seems to derive mainly from failure to understand it. I hope my explication may help to settle the matter, on grounds of (a) vocabulary: e.g. could any post-Platonic writer have described a given social grouping as cosmos or rhuthmos, rather than, say, sustema? (b) continuity with pre-Socratic anthropology; (c) close attachment to political events in Athens from Solon to Pericles. This Stobaeus material (in contrast to the ‘Democrates’ material) is free from that kind of moralizing characteristic of Peripatetic and Stoic editors; cf. the very different fate that befell ‘Antiphon’ (below, appendix to cap. X).

Items nos. 1 and 3 in my series (FVS 68B257, 258), which seem crucial for establishing the continuity, in Dem.'s thought, between the defence of the human species against its rivals and the development of the primary social sanctions, are unluckily omitted in the useful collection of W. Kranz, Vorsok. Denker (1949), pp. 204-208.

Items 4, 9, 10, and 13: nomos in these contexts, as generally elsewhere when used in pre-Platonic authors (Sophocles, Archelaus, Antiphon), I have sought to render by linking the ideas of ‘custom’ and ‘usage’ with that of ‘law’; nomos is admittedly usage which is ‘solemn’, but on the other hand is never wholly hypostatized as ‘law’ in the absolute, until enclosed in the context of the Socratic search for universals. Lines 450-457 of the Antigone are often translated as if they did describe Kantian universal imperatives (cf., e.g., Sinclair, op. cit., pp. 49-50 and 89), but they refer, as both the Greek text and the dramatic context reveal, specifically to the solemn usages surrounding the treatment of the dead, especially when they are blood-kin. Similarly, Oed. T. lines 863-872 refer to the equally solemn usages (also familial) which forbid patricide and incest, crimes which the chorus forebode may be in the offing, though not yet revealed. Both passages could in fact provide text for Democritus' own approach to nomos as social usage, which, because it represents stages of historical growth responsive to social need, is not thereby any less essential or sacred. Aristotle's interpretation (Rhet. 1.13.2.) is unhistorical.

Items 2, 4, 8, 9, 12, 13, 16, 17, 21-29) correspond to only 7 distinct entries in Stobaeus, which I have sub-divided into the separate aphorisms of which they seem to be composed. Such combinations, often formed with scant attention to the logic of the original, are characteristic of editors of florilegia; sometimes a connective … is inserted, sometimes not. …