Anacharsis the Scythian, and Greek philosophy[1]
Half Scythian and half Greek by birth and education, Anacharsis was a Scythian prince who travelled to Greece in the 47th Olympiad (592—589 BC), where he met Solon, a lawgiver considered to be one of the earliest pre-Socratic thinkers. The Greeks greatly esteemed Anacharsis, who is often listed as one of the Seven Sages of Antiquity} and Aristotle treats him as a major philosopher.
The Scythian’s most famous philosophical argument is reported in a number of slightly variant versions, mostly short and pithy. The best attested one, which is considered to be genuine, reflects the kind of logic attested in Early Buddhism, including its Taoist relative (both discussed below). It reports in an indirect quotation what Anacharsis said:
He wondered why among the Greeks the experts contend, but the non—experts decide.
The basic point of this comment is epistemological and sceptical, calling into question the basis of our entire cognitive ability, both individually and collectively. It is also a sceptical comment about the Greeks’ quasi-religious political belief in “equality”. The statement is thus deeply insightful not only for such an early period but for modern cultures too.
His sceptical attitude is praised by the ancient Pyrrhonists, the Classical Sceptics par excellence, who considered him to be the earliest Sceptic. Sextus Empiricus says, “Anacharsis the Scythian, they say, does away with the apprehension that is capable of judging every skill, and strenuously criticizes the Greeks for holding on to it.” In his comedy The Frogs, the playwright Aristophanes, who lived about two centuries after Anacharsis, dwells exactly on the issue of judging, using a scale to measure the “weight” of the dramatic poems of Aeschylus and Euripides. Yet the judges are not poets—the relevant experts—quite as Anacharsis notes two centuries earlier. He thus seems to be the first in Greece to suggest the philosophical question known as the Problem of the Criterion as a philosophical problem that entailed dealing with entities such as ethical antilogies. Other statements of his, whether genuine or simply accretions to the Anacharsis tradition, also focus on striking anomalies. Some are discussed by Aristotle, who shows them to be logically structured. For example, an ethical remark attributed to Anacharsis addresses the question of happiness, in which context Aristotle quotes him as saying, “Play, in order that you may work hard.” Anacharsis may thus be considered the spiritual founder of Greek logical—epistemological Scepticism.
Although Thales, Solon, and others are said to be the earliest Greek philosophers, they were not “Philosophers” per se, in our modern strict sense of the word, but rather in the sense ofa “wise man” or “lawgiver”, frequently a “natural phil osopher”—-which meant a natural scientist, or often, an engineer or inventor. We know very little about Anacharsis or the other earliest thinkers in the Greek world, but it is clear that in the Classical period itself Anacharsis was viewed mainly as a Philosopher in the modern sense. Accordingly, though this might not be a popular idea in some quarters, Anacharsis the Scythian seems to be the earliest actual Greek philosopher.
[1] This article contains excerpts from the book by Christopher I. Beckwith: The Scythian Empire