An axiom, previously mentioned: Everything that philosophers can talk about is there replacing something else that did not work out. Philosophers can talk about philosophy. What does it replace? Why didn’t it work?
Answer: Myth, religion. Cornforth and Hatab have written well about them, but the most influential presentation of pre-philosophical Greek wisdom comes to us from a Greek himself, Homer. Homer’s world is as dismal and violent as the one depicted in The Road Warrior. It follows on another, more developed civilization (Mycenean). which has decayed to the point that the only social structures left are small groups living together—what Aristotle will call “villages” (κώμαι). The Iliad tells the story of how, once upon a time, those small groups united to avenge the kidnapping of Menelaus’ wife, Helen.
Two aspects of Homer’s world are particularly ghastly. First, the Homeric view of the afterlife (which is not the same as Homer’s personal view; there is plenty of evidence that Homer hates his world) is wretched. Good and bad people alike lose most of their life-force when they die, and by the time they arrive in Hades are nothing but shades of their former selves. Hence Homer’s formulaic way of referring to death in battle: “The strength left his knees, and his soul went gibbering down to Hades.”
So when Odysseus visits Hades, he recognizes old comrades from the Trojan siege, but they can only dance and jabber. Only Achilles himself retains enough life-force to speak coherently, and he tells Odysseus that he would rather be the slave of the poorest sharecropper in Greece than king of the underworld.
This vision of the afterlife may be better than the tormented Christian hell, but it is far worse than the atheistic (and Socratic) vision of death as an eternal dreamless sleep—and in Homer’s world, everyone will eventually come to it; there is no hope of anything else.
The other problem is the gods. They are much like what we would be if we were immortal. There are no constraints whatsoever on their behavior except the will of Zeus. They do what they want, with and to whom. Zeus himself is more than a seducer—he is a rapist. He rapes his sister Demeter, then has sex with their daughter Persephone, who gives birth to Dionysius. And so on, and on, and on; for Zeus, of course, is immortal.
Imagine being a young Greek, who has been taught by your religious authorities to worry that the Lord of Heaven may show up and rape you.
Another scary thing about Homer’s gods is that they are not outside us: they have complete access to our minds. They make us feel and think things with such intimacy that Julian Jaynes located them as parts of our minds; in modern terms, they were hallucinations. That category, to be sure, is anachronistic: a hallucination, to us, is something inside the mind which seems to be outside it. But the Homeric mind seems to have no inside or outside: certain outside things have free access to it, for (as Plato puts it somewhere) the mind is, at least sometimes, unwalled—like a belfry with birds flying in and out of it.
And this cognitive dependence on the gods was scary because they were undependable; they might do terrible things to us, as when Apollo confuses Patroclus so that he dies at the hands and sword of Hector.
This whole religion is clearly not working out. The Greeks need a good vision of immortality to replace their horrible Hades, and they need to make the gods dependable and get them out of our minds, so that we can gain some control over our fates. The gods have to be cleaned up.
This became an urgent task after the series of Athenian disasters I mentioned before. Philosophers had already taken it on, beginning with Xenophanes of Colophon in the sixth century BCE, who complained:
Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods
Diels-Kranz, B11
all sorts of things that are matters of reproach and censure among men:
theft, adultery, and mutual deception.
Fixing this meant, first of all, making the gods self-consistent: instead of impulse and variability, each god should have a single basic character, from which she or he never departs. Exemplifying that character, a god can never change and so always affects us in the same way: what it causes in us is always the same, no matter the occasion. Furthermore, since nothing can come to be from nothing, a cause must exemplify the property it always causes; otherwise that property would come about from nothing (which means that it wouldn’t, really, have a cause at all).
Because the gods’ effects on us are always the same, they can also give us unchanging immortality, i.e. eternity. And since for Plato, as I noted above, the mind never gains stable boundaries, if the gods are going to be outside our minds they must be outside the rest of our world as well, for mind and world interpenetrate.
So the ancient gods turned in their togas, and became Platonic forms. Philosophy, replacing them, was well underway in the West. But Homer was the pioneer.