Sporty asked:

Why is Greece the place of a few philosophers?

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You may be surprised to learn just how many reasons there are. The first and most obvious is that
Greece has always been a very hot and dry place; and as you probably know, the best way to assist
the body with air conditioning is to open your mouth and breathe heavily. Now once a person has
their mouth open, it seems quite a waste not to use it for its dual purpose, speaking, and so it came
about that the Greeks, presumably from their naturally argumentative temper and inclination, became
exceedingly garrulous. Nietzsche commented on this when he wondered why the Greeks invented
tragedy: it was (he said) because they loved grand speeches; and the grander, the better.

Now clearly, garrulity helps with philosophising, if you've got a philosophy to argue about. The Greeks
didn't at first; and so some of the older generation went about fossicking in the near East (Babylon,
Egypt etc) for morsels of ancient wisdom, and since the patron saint of travellers and thieves was
Hermes, it seemed a foregone conclusion that those travellers would pilfer on the grand scale, as
indeed they did. Now one of the great scholars of the past, John Burnet, disputes this point by asking,
where is the evidence that any of these people had a philosophy that could be 'borrowed' from them?
There is, however, plenty of evidence from the Greeks themselves, in the commentaries to many of
their philosophers, that Solon and Pythagoras, Plato and Democritus and others as well either went
there in person or asked their friends to report what they had seen and heard.

Another factor that facilitated the rise of philosophy in Greece was the smallness of their
communities. Athens, which was by far the largest state in Greece, had a population of less than half
a million at its height, and that's obviously why Athens had to wait so long before philosophy took hold
there. You probably know that it arose initially in quite insignificant colonial places like Elea, Miletus,
Ephesus etc, before the greed for knowledge infected the Athenians and they decided to have their
own philosophy. This occurred not long after Anaxagoras visited and taught many of the young lions
of the city, including one Pericles, and he thereby set the tone for a veritable flood of foreign visitors,
who brought a veritable smorgasbord of philosophies with them, so that eventually it was the
Athenians who became the principal intellectual gourmands of Greece.

A fourth reason is that the Greeks, but especially the Athenians, were very adept at filling their
pockets, and this means that their tummies were always full and they got bored waiting for TV and the
Internet to be invented. But as Brecht said, you can't philosophise on an empty stomach, so from this
piece of wisdom you can deduce quite readily that a full stomach is on the contrary very conducive to
it. Philosophy then became a fashion; at first the philosophers taught in schools and academies, then
in cafes and the market place; and later on they invented other means of making themselves noticed,
for instance Diogenes lived in a tub in the middle of the street and told passers-bye not to disturb his
meditations, whereas in reality he made this aggressive move for no other purpose than to be talked
about. You might have heard of Cynicism, which was originally a philosophical trend; but you may not
know that the term derives from a Greek word meaning 'dog': well, Diogenes was such a Cynic, and
that's why he lived like a dog. — Incidentally, there is an anecdote that Alexander the Great once
passed by the tub and exchanged a few "civilities" with Dio-what's-his-name, and was thereafter
supposed to have said that if he wasn't Alexander, he would wish nothing more than to be Diogenes.
I'm somehow a bit sceptical about the likelihood of this story being true, mainly because Alexander
wasn't a Greek and much preferred sword play to tongue play.

Yet another reason (and let this be the last) that might be quoted is that the Greeks were inveterate
drunkards. Again, you need not take this from me. Check their poems — with the sole exception of
Pindar, who was a very sober person, all the poets of Greece wrote verses about wine swilling
non-stop, and there's even a philosopher, Xenophanes, who did the same thing. I don't know of any
other nation whose poets were so obsessed with grog, unless it was the Persians. And as you know
drink loosens the tongue: 'in vino veritas' (so the Romans said). Here then you have a good reason
why, in spite of their thievery and garrulity, the Greeks seemed to uncover a lot of truths about
themselves and humans generally.

Anyway, this concludes my roster; maybe others can think of more reasons. For example, I haven't
mentioned sex at all, but if the Lysistratagives any indication, the Greeks were just as obsessed with
it as with drink (of which Plato, by the way, gives an outrageously distorted account). And who could
fail to observe that they were all colour blind (the men, at any rate)? But these items may have to wait
for another day. Meanwhile I hope you've got enough ammunition to put an argument together;
though in addition you might just reflect on how come that so many different tribes (albeit speaking
the same language) all had these qualities in abundance and that all around them, in the same era,
equally bright people didn't. There might be some truth in the old saw that 'it's in the drinking water',
after all.

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney