CHAPTER TWO

HOW IT STARTED: FROM PHERECYDES TO PLATO

If one goes back in the history of Western culture to look for views on the origin of time, one of the oldest on record is a fragment of Pherecydes of Syros from the sixth century BC. Like his younger contemporary Pythagoras, with whom he may have been in contact, he was believed to possess miraculous powers. Pherecydes was the author of a work on the origin of the world which was known for a long time in antiquity, but is only preserved today in a few frag- ments and paraphrases. One of those fragments is about time. The original work must have started with it, for Diogenes Laertius and others call it the opening phrase: ‘Zas and Chronos always existed and Chthoniè’. Chronos, Time, appears here as one of three naturally present and eternal beings. ‘Zas’ is probably a variant of ‘Zeus’, while ‘Chthoniè’ refers to the earth. ‘Chronos’ is here generally taken to be a vari- ant of ‘Kronos’. Perhaps Pherecydes liked etymologies and that is how the god Chronos originated.1 At any rate, at this early stage the question of the affinity or even identity of Kronos and Chronos is already raised. The idea was to be developed later, as we saw in Chapter I. It is striking that there is no reference to an original chaos, as in the cosmogony of Hesiod. Right from the start, there is apparently a certain ordering in which, besides the opposition of Zas and Chthoniè, who can be regarded as representing heaven and earth respectively, Time also plays a (possibly mediatory) role. Later pas- sages in Pherecydes’ work must have described how fire, wind (or breath) and water originated from the seed of Chronos, as well as

1 A few specialists, including H. Fränkel, have claimed that the fragment in ques- tion has been incorrectly transmitted and that the original text must have read ‘Kronos’ and not ‘Chronos’. from pherecydes to plato 13 the marriage of Zas and Chtoniè. Further on still in his account, Chronos probably became Kronos, since the latter engages in a fight with Ophioneus. Time apparently has no beginning in Pherecydes’ cosmogony. It has always been there, and in spite of the later change of name, it will always continue to exist. We can recognise something of Newton’s view in mythological form: time is eternal, without beginning or end. However, this has nothing to do with a concept of time as evenly flowing onwards. Moreover, time is here not an isolated phenome- non but it is connected with Zas and Chtoniè, although the nature of that connection is unclear. The existence of Chtoniè does at least imply a certain spatiality, so space is also at issue here, albeit prob- ably in a limited form; there is no reason to think of an unlimited space here. All in all, it seems that this time and this space are never alone and never empty; probably they could not exist if they were. The Ionian philosophy of nature was already under way during the life of Pherecydes. Thales of Miletus may have been a contem- porary, though he was probably somewhat older. Of his immediate successors, Anaximander at any rate voiced an opinion on time; at least, there is a quotation pointing in that direction in the work of the philosopher Simplicius, who lived in the sixth century AD, that is, about 1,100 years later. According to that quotation, creation and destruction are inextricably linked, since things pay compensation to one another in a manner that is laid down by time. That manner may refer to a period, such as the seasons (summer is ‘paid for’ by winter). That seems to imply that time is connected with the cos- mos, even has some say in what happens there, and is at least as old as its oldest components, but what else? The text has been end- lessly discussed, but it is too brief for us to draw more specific con- clusions on this point. Generally speaking, it is known that cyclical conceptions of the cosmos were relatively prevalent among the Presocratic philosophers, which points to a prominent, perhaps eternal role for time in the cosmos. The ideas of Heraclitus are particularly relevant here. However mysterious they may be, the dictum ‘panta rhei’ and several related pronouncements that are attributed to him are evidence of an unmis- takable appreciation of the effect of time in the phenomenal world. It seems that the continual changes based, according to Heraclitus, on fire eventually arrive at a state of equilibrium for which the Logos is responsible. It is difficult to know exactly how he conceived those