(Continuity)
The transition from Myth to Reason
It marks the birth of scientific and philosophical thought in Western Europe. Criticism of Homer served as the main catalyst for this world-historical change, which took place in three specific stages:
From Divine Dispositions to Natural Laws
In Myth (Homer): If a storm or an epidemic broke out, the cause was the anger of Poseidon or the arrows of Apollo. Nature had no rules of its own, but depended on the whims of the gods.
In Reason (Prosocratics): The first philosophers (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) excluded the gods from the interpretation of nature. They sought a raw material (water, infinity, air) and stable physical laws to explain the world. Rain was no longer the will of Zeus, but the result of the evaporation of water.
The Demystification of Human Behavior
In the Myth: A person's bravery, wisdom, or madness was the result of divine inspiration (e.g. Athena gives courage to Diomedes).
In the Word: With the emergence of the Sophists and Socrates, human behavior became the subject of Ethics and PsychologyVirtue and knowledge are no longer gifts from the gods, but the result of education, logical thinking, and personal effort.
The New Meaning of Truth
In the Myth: The truth was based on the authority of the Muse who guided the poet. The listener was required to believe the story without proof.
In the Word: The truth now demands logical reasoning (arguments) and observationAnything that cannot be proven or explained by logic is dismissed as a fairy tale.
This conversion did not eliminate religion, but it changed its function: the gods ceased to be protagonists of everyday life and became abstract concepts (like Aristotle's "First Mover Unmoved"), leaving man free to explore the world with his own mind.
Did Herodotus and Thucydides stop using the gods to explain wars?
The transition from Myth to Logos radically transformed the way people recorded their past. Before this development, "history" was the epic (like the Iliad), where the causes of a war were located on Olympus.
With Herodotus and Thucydides, the recording of events is freed from the divine and the science of History is born.
Herodotus: The transitional stage (5th century BC)
Herodotus is considered the "Father of History" because for the first time research (history) is based on personal observation, critical examination of sources, and the collection of testimonies. However, it is still in a transitional stage between myth and rationality:
Human causes: He seeks the real, earthly causes of the Persian Wars (political confrontations, cultural differences, expansionism)
The divine as "Cosmic Balance"»: Herodotus' gods do not descend onto the battlefield as in Homer. They intervene indirectly through (envy of the gods). If a man becomes excessively powerful and arrogant (Hybrid), the divine intervenes to restore balance (e.g. the fall of Croesus or Xerxes)
Signs and symbols: He still places great importance on dreams, oracles, and divine signs, although he often treats them with a dose of skepticism. .
Thucydides: Absolute Rationality and the Birth of Science (5th century BC)
Thucydides, writing about the Peloponnesian War, takes the big, revolutionary step. He completely excludes divine intervention from his historical narrative. .
Human Nature (the human): For Thucydides, the driving forces of history are human motivations: fear, self-interest, ambition, and the thirst for power. Wars are not fought because a god is angry, but because of political and economic rivalries.
Distinction between Cause and Cause: It introduces scientific methodology by separating the formal occasion (cause) from the real, deeper cause (most truthful pretext) of a war (e.g. the Spartans' fear of the rise of Athenian power)
"Luck" as the unpredictable: When Thucydides uses the word luck, does not mean a deity, but the unpredictable factor, the unpredictability of human life (e.g. the sudden plague that struck Athens)
Contempt of oracles: Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides treats oracles and superstitions with irony. In fact, he criticizes the Athenian general Nicias, who lost a crucial battle in Sicily because he refused to retreat due to a lunar eclipse.
The birth of History completed the path begun by the philosophers. The responsibility for the destruction or greatness of cities was transferred entirely to the shoulders of men. Politicians and generals were no longer pawns of the gods, but responsible for their decisions.
Epilogue
The Homeric era had given man an important, but not autonomous, position. The hero of the Iliad is great, but a god always stands beside him, whispering to him, pushing him, or holding him back. Fate defines life, the gods carry out or delay the inevitable, and man is responsible for his actions, but never alone.
The transition from myth to speech was not an abrupt rupture, but a slow, painful and creative maturation. Herodotus still hesitates between punishment for arrogance by the gods and political analysis. Thucydides, however, takes the big leap: he excludes the gods from history and places human nature—fear, self-interest, ambition—in— at the center of events. A little earlier, the Pre-Socratic philosophers had already explained lightning without Zeus and movement without Mercury.
Plato's philosophical criticism of Homer was not censorship out of intolerance, but the matrix of Western rational thought: if god is truly good, then he cannot lie, mourn, or sow destruction out of selfishness. The gods are either moralized, or become allegories, or they retreat before law, nature, and human responsibility.
The beginning of science did not mean the end of religion, but the end of the need for gods to inhabit every rain, every battle, and every decision.. Man was left alone before the universe — not abandoned, but free. Free to investigate, to err, to correct himself, to write history without the permission of the Muse, to set laws not as a divine command but as a human convention.
The path from Homer to Thucydides and Thales is, ultimately, the path of the West itself: a slow, difficult, but unstoppable move away from the heteronomy of myth to the autonomy of Reason. Not because the gods died, but because man decided—for the first time—to look at the world without intermediaries, with only his eyes and mind.
And this decision was the greatest revolution of antiquity.
Bibliography
Homer: Iliad- Odyssey
Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days.
Herodotus, Histories.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.
Plato: Republic
Presocratics – The Presocratic Philosophers (trans. N. M. Skouteropoulos, Kritiki Publications).
Veikos, Th. (1993). Xenophanes of Colophon: His Criticism of Homeric Theology. Athens: Stigmi Publications.
Karagiorgas, M. (2012). Historical Thought in Ancient Greece: From Homer to Thucydides. Athens: Papazisis Publications.
Romanos, V. (1997). Gods and Heroes in Ancient Tragedy. Athens: Kardamitsa Publications.
Kessidis, T. C. (2009). From Myth to Reason: The Formation of Greek Philosophical ThoughtThessaloniki: University Studio Press.
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