In philosophical terms, time before the age of Socrates is known as Pre-Socratic. Before philosophy there was Mythology. Mythology is where everyone found the answers to life's questions. Mythology was a sort of religion. The only answers it supplied were based on the supernatural gods. "The sea is cold today because Poseidon wanted to make it that way." Every question was basically answered in the same fashion: "because of the gods," and for several hundred years, this never seemed to trouble anyone. Everyone simply accepted that the gods did what they wanted and that affected everything around man. The Pre-Socratic philosophers changed everything. There aren't many records of their writings since they were so old, but they got the ball rolling.
             Pre-Socratic philosophers interest me a lot mainly because they were the originators. Everything after them springs from them, and no one can deny that even though a lot of their most prized theories are these days known as clearly false. They were the ones who had the audacity to step up to the plate and rule out all religious reasoning and take a different path to find the answers to the questions they were looking for. Questions about beginnings, questions about ends, questions about existence, questions about change, and the war of the opposites are what plagued these men, and they wouldn't accept the traditional mythological answer "because of the gods." They were the bold few, who probably suffered criticism from most other people, because most people were not only religious (and atheism was unheard of), but also they all shared the same religion in Greece: that on which mythology is based.
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