ABSTRACT
The natural tendency of early Greek thought was one which accepted the order of the State and the rules which it enforced without murmur and without question. Men were born, and lived, and died, under ancient customs, whose origin no man knew. It was dimly felt that they were divine: it was certainly recognized that they were rigid and fundamental. No enacted law (νóμοϛ) had yet come: an unchanging custom (δίĸη or Right) guided the lives of men. The sense of an inevitable order of human life was so powerful, that by comparison the life of the earth, with all its flux and change, with its lightning and tempest, might well seem incalculable and indeterminate. In human life all was appointed. You did this, and that followed. It was not so in Nature. ‘Man lived in a charmed circle of law and custom, and all around the world was lawless.’ 1 It was possible, as we have seen, for a thinker like Anaximander to attempt to import order into the physical world, by showing that there was a principle of ‘justice’ in all its changes, and by arguing from the undoubted fact of man’s law to the probability of a law in the world. On the other hand, when thinkers had detected a law in the world, it was natural that they should use this law to illustrate and to defend the similar and equally valid law of man. But the process of history was none the less slowly undermining the stability of human order. Colonization, which led to the formation, by human hands, of new States with new laws, was tearing men loose from the old vesture of custom, and unsettling traditional stability. A new religious movement came: a fresh ritual, a system of ‘mysteries’, appeared, resulting sometimes in the growth of new religious societies independent of the State, sometimes, as at Athens, in an alteration of the State religion which admitted the new ritual into its pale. Legislators became active in many States: a Solon or a Charondas gave laws to Athens or to Catana. Here was an obvious making of law by man: was all law of a similar institution? Had legislators everywhere laid down laws (νóμουϛ τιθέναι): had peoples everywhere adopted laws (νóμουϛ τιθ∊σθαι)? If so, the conclusion was natural that the State and its law was either the creation (θέσιϛ) of an enacting legislator, or the convention (συνθήĸη) of an adopting people. In any case it was obvious that enacted law varied from city to city; and men were naturally driven to ask whether there was any single substratum or ϕύσιϛ beneath all its changes. The problem of matter which had occupied the Ionians had now become a problem of man. We stand face to face with an antithesis between ϕύσιϛ, or permanent identity, and νóμοϛ, or conventional variety, in the world of human things, which corresponds to the distinction drawn by the Ionian philosophers between the single and permanent physical basis, and the many and variable physical ‘appearances’, of the visible universe.
