Astonishing centuries
Simon Hornblower
The Presocratics Edward Hussey (Duckworth £2.75) This is a magisterial book, and a wholly admirable achievement. Mr. Hussey provides, in 168 pages, a lucid and authoritative account of the views and arguments of that disparate succession of thinkers, who flourished between 600 and 400 B.C., before, or not later than, the time of Socrates. These so-called ' Presocratics,' though sometimes hailing from towns whose names are undistinguished except as the homes of philosophers, nevertheless deserve a central place in the history of those two astonishing centuries. They match the more concrete and familiar products of Greek culture by their essays into proto-scientific and metaphysical speculation, by their bold venturings in what we should call philosophical analysis, and by the profundity of the questions they asked themselves and often of the answers they gave.
Hussey's book is inevitably a distilled analysis of the fragmentary philosophical material, and in a short review of such an analysis one can only indicate what approach and form of presentation he adopts, without summarising the content. First, and most important, Hussey puts the Presocratics into a framework ; his masterly first chapter does this expressly, but throughout the book, we are aware of the general direction of the intellectual curreei on which or against which the thinker under examination is an eddy or cross-current — to borrow a favourite Presocratic metaphor. Moreover the comparisons Hussey occasionally — and diffidently — draws, with later philosophers, are always helpful and never either pretentious or implausible. Second, Hussey's treatment of the thinkers themselves is invariably Clear, and in this field that is the highest praise one can bestow. His illumination of the proverbial ' darkness ' of Heraclitus's utterances, and the unravelling of Parmenides's problems of non-existence, are conspicuous examples of this clarity. Hussey is, however, duly tentative in his exploration of those areas — and they are many — where we shall never be certain of the meaning of a particular sentence, torn perhaps from a context no longer extant. The book is not purely exegetic, though, and contains many new and fascinating ideas, like the suggestion, casually made, that Anaxiinenes arrived in Athens in 480 as a conscript in the army of Xerxes.
Hussey's choice of words is meticulous, his style trenchant and unmistakably Oxonian. We are told that Aristotle put Melissus down as a "crude thinker," "And," Hussey continues, "the fragments that survive do not make it easy to dissent from this judgment." This characteristic of Hussey's writing is most conspicuous in the excellent notes, which take the form of a critical bibliography, where the occasional Housmanism sticks in the mind, like " full of interest, but blinkered by conceptual rigidity." In his treatment of the men behind the philosophers, Hussey is spare, almost Thucydidean in his contempt for tittle-tattle. He tells us that Thales became legendary as a man of practical ingenuity, but scorns to repeat the story that Thales made a fortune by cornering the market in olive-presses.
If one had to guess, one would say that this book, short though it is, represented the condensed study of a lifetime: every word counts, and every sentence is pregnant with interest and significance. All students of early Greek philosophy will admire and be grateful for its insights; others who read it will be enthralled by it.
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