THE FIFTH CENTURY ENLIGHTENMENT NOMOS PHYSIS DISTINCTION

This was a pivotal distinction, developed at this time.  At the simplest, it was a distinction between, or a relationship between, law, convention, and custom, nomos; and what was conceived of as nature, physis.

 

'Once the view had gained currency that laws, customs and conventions (nomoi) were not part of the immutable order of things (nature, physis), it was possible to adopt very different attitudes towards them.'

 

A code of laws drawn up by a human lawgiver...could not, ostensibly, be accepted in the old way as part of the everlasting order of things...

 

On the other hand, the Greeks had long seen laws in the making, yet still had attributed their force and validity to Apollo (immutable order of things, both divine and natural), advising the legislator through the oracle at Delphi.

There had also developed by this time a distinction within the concept of nomoi, but one identifying certain nomoi with the divine and with physis, a pietistic distinction if you will, between written and unwritten laws, wherein the unwritten laws of the gods regarding mens' conduct trumped mens' written ones.

In contradistinction from the written unwritten distinction, there rose a thread of thought maybe tending toward agnosticism or atheism, with nomos in the ascendancy in a sense over physis, seen in Euripides' Hecuba's plea for mercy that nomos is master of the gods because it is by nomos that we believe in them. See Guthrie, V. 3.