Athens: Better than The Rest
“ As I write, Buddhist monks are marching through the streets of Burma, denouncing the nation’s military dictatorship and chanting, “Democracy, democracy!”
How strange that is!
Would Catholic priests, even in secular France, chant for rule by lamas? For better or for worse, when the world thinks of a just and rational system of government dedicated to liberty, it turns to The West.
It turns not to ancient Peking or Persepolis, but to Athens.
Even when our despots lie, they use the language of democracy. They lie in a vulgar Greek.
I’m no idolator of The Vote. It’s A Tool, and needs to be judged as such, according to how well it secures justice, and encourages a people to live good lives.
But our schools teach two contradictory things about our democratic culture, and, marvelous to behold, they get both wrong.
First, they teach that the vote is not a tool but the very object of Justice. “Choice is everything, and it doesn’t matter what you choose.”
Second, they teach that different cultures are all equal, even cultures that do not respect our idol of Choice!
But this happy lie is impossible to uphold when we look at the legacy Athens has left us in government, science, art, and philosophy. Where do people prosper, enjoy leisure, and reap the benefits of great inventions and discoveries? In lands where the heirs of Athens dwell.
Sure, the Greeks were far from perfect. They were sinners just as we. They employed plenty of slaves. The worst-treated of these were those prisoners of war sent down into the silver mines; in a couple of years the toxic fumes would kill them.
Sparta survived and thrived by turning all of its free men of fighting age into professional soldiers, to ensure that the enslaved people of the surrounding countryside could not revolt.
Greek aristocrats developed a cult of pederasty : if your son had curly hair and a nice physique, you had to watch out. Women did much of the work in and around the house, but were not consistently honored for it; the farmer-poet Hesiod calls them pests sent down by Zeus to punish mankind.
Nor was Greek politics always a matter of rational argument in open debate.
Athens had at times been seized by tyrants, usually supported by the middle class. Pisistratus once tried to win an election by dressing an unusually tall woman as the goddess Athena, and having her cry out from a racing chariot, “Athena for Pisistratus!”
That early piece of demagoguery didn’t work, so he took power by a military coup. Then (for he was a benign man, otherwise) he bought the people’s support by means of building projects and elaborate festivals.
His sons who succeeded him never mastered that art. One was slain by a rival in a homosexual affair. The other was exiled, traveling to Persia to help the emperor Darius turn the Greek world into a tributary province. So there was good reason why Plato labeled democracy as the most debased form of government.
It was Democracy that brought Athens to humiliating defeat at the hands of Sparta.
It was Democracy that sentenced his teacher Socrates to death. It was Democracy that handed power to the passions of a rabble.
Imagine what Plato would say of our polls and focus groups.
Still, we owe those Greeks an incalculable debt. They gave us the defining epics of the West, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Out of an old religious festival to the wine god Dionysus they developed that heady form of art we call drama.
They sculpted the human form with a beauty and scientific precision that would not be equaled until the Renaissance.
They erected human-scale temples and courts of such incomparable beauty and convenience that even now, 2,500 years later, our homes and offices in the West echo their porticoes and pediments and colonnades. They learned all the mathematics the Babylonians had to teach, and incorporated it into a systematic geometry. Breaking free of the bonds of practical utility and bookkeeping, they invented the notion of proof, and added astonishing discoveries of their own, without the assistance of numerals. Archimedes estimated the number of grains of sand on earth, and in the midst of this jeu d’esprit came within a hair of inventing calculus.
When he wasn’t playing with number theory, Archimedes was more practically employed: inventing fancy catapults, for instance, to defend his city, Syracuse, against Roman invaders.
The Greeks invented rational analysis of modes of government — what we call political science.
Herodotus journeyed across Asia Minor and into Egypt to learn what he could about local life, and to pick up information from eyewitnesses of the Persian War. He is called The Father of History, but he might as well be called the father of geography and the father of ethnography.
The Greeks began Man’s Quest to discover the unseen unity and order underlying the wild variety presented by physical nature. Democritus coined the term atom, meaning a particle that cannot be split.
But when they turned their attention to Man, and The Good that Man longs to possess, the Greeks burst into a flowering of creativity that puts our schools to shame.
They invented philosophy and all its branches: linguistic, metaphysical, moral, political, and epistemological. Seldom has a poet written with more sensitivity to beauty than did the philosopher Plato, and among poets only Shakespeare and Dante can rival Sophocles for philosophical acuity. Only a philosopher at heart could have written Oedipus at Colonus, but only a philosophical people could have fully appreciated it.
The Greeks weren’t naturally more intelligent than anybody else. Then why did these things happen there? The answers will entangle us in political incorrectness at every step.
Conan:
What gods do you pray to?
Subotai:
[looks up]
I pray to The Four Winds... and you?
Conan:
To Crom...
But I seldom pray to him --
He Doesn't Listen.
Subotai:
[chuckles]
Ha! What Good is He, then?
Ah, it's just as I've always said.
Conan:
He is Strong!
If I die, I have to go before him,
and he will ask me,
"What is the Riddle of Steel?"
And if I do not know it,
He will cast me out of Valhalla
and laugh at me!
That's Crom -- STRONG!
on His Mountain!
Subotai:
Ah, MY God is Greater.
Conan:
[chuckles]
Crom laughs at your Four Winds.
He laughs from His Mountain.
Subotai:
My God is Stronger.
He, is The Everlasting Sky!
Your God Lives underneath Him.
Father, not mother
At the dawn of historical records, the people who lived in Greece, like other people near the Mediterranean Sea, worshipped fertility gods.
They sacrificed to Mother Earth, the womb and the tomb for us all, blindly ever-generating and ever-destroying Nature. But around 1500 BC, nomads from the steppes of central Asia, the so-called Dorians, swept into Asia Minor and Greece.
These Dorians spoke an Indo-European language, related to Germanic, Latin, Celtic, and Sanskrit. As they were not farmers, they did not adore the earth. Rather they worshipped the gods of the vast sky they saw all about them on the plains. These sky gods were also, naturally enough, Gods of Light and the things we associate with Light: freedom, beauty, laughter, and intelligence.
Their Chief God was Father Zeus (Germanic Tiw, as in “Tuesday,” and Roman Deus pater, which became Deuspiter or Jupiter). He was endowed with the glory and cunning and might that make one divus (Lat.) or dios (Gk.).
He was bathed in light. Now an odd thing happened : Just as the invading Dorians did not wipe out the natives, so their religion did not wipe out the old fertility cults. It only suppressed them, and that made for a rich system of incompatible gods.
The Story is told in Hesiod’s Theogony as a battle between the generations.
The Old Gods ruled by brute force, or tried to: Ouranos, God of The Heavens, hated the children of his wife Gaia, the earth, and stuffed them back into her belly.
Then Gaia, showing the first glint of intelligence in the cosmos, gave Her Son Cronus an iron sickle and told him to wait in ambush the next time Ouranos made love to her.
When Night fell, Ouranos 'covered' Gaia, but Cronus sliced off His Father's testicles and cast them into the sea.
No testicles, no throne.
Cronus then ruled by force. His trick was to swallow his children whole.
But his wife Rhea, aided now by Ouranos and Gaia both, slipped him a rock in a blanket while spiriting her baby away to be raised in hiding. That baby’s name was Zeus.
He in turn overthrew His Father, but—and here is the point—by intelligent alliances, and not by force alone.
He gave powerful positions to some of the older gods.
Hecate was made goddess of the underworld and patron of warriors.
The Styx, dread river of the underworld, gained the honor of being invoked whenever the gods swore an oath.
The horrible Titans of the hundred arms, Briareus, Cottus, and Gyes, were allowed to eat and drink with the young gods on Olympus. They proved indispensible when the other Titans tried to dethrone Zeus. It was no small advantage to have creatures who could hurl a hundred spears at once. It’s a strange concoction.
The “Old” Gods, associated with earth and blood and lust and vengeance, still exist, and claim their due. But they must be governed. They submit to Zeus, the cunning and mighty.
He is cunning, but he can be tricked; he is strong, but not strong enough to ignore the rest.
It’s a system that invites the mind to probe the riddles of human life.
How can the passions be governed by reason? Should they always be?
What is the relationship between authority and goodness?
Can the old traditions be violated at will?
Is there a law to which even the gods must submit — a law which Ouranos and Cronus violated, and perhaps Zeus too?
Is there such a thing as progress or moral evolution, and if so, where is it going?
What remains changeless?
Man turned a corner in Greece, and this religion was partly responsible. The dramatist Aeschylus recounts it in mythic form.
Orestes learns that His Father, King Agamemnon, has been butchered. Blood calls for blood; that is the ancient law of vengeance.
But The Murderer was his own mother, Clytemnestra. How can he kill the woman who bore him and suckled him? The Mother’s claim too is primal. What must he do?
The Traditions, by themselves, offer no escape. When he does kill Clytemnestra, he is pursued by The Furies, Ancient and Hideous Goddesses of The Underworld, who avenge those who violate the old taboos of blood. They are also the terrible gnawings of Orestes’ awakening conscience.
He cannot endure it; he flies to Athens to stand trial before The Gods.
There The Young Goddess of Wisdom, Athena, will preside.
It is The Old against The New, The Instinctual against The Rational, The Furies against Apollo, Orestes’ Protector, with Aeschylus giving The Furies the better of The Argument.
The jurymen deadlock.
Athena casts the deciding vote, for acquittal.
Because she was born from the head of Zeus, She Says, She always favors The Father.
Therefore She favors The Rights of The City : The King’s Murderer must be punished.
We mark here a shift from The Tribe to The Polis — free men debating and determining what course to take.
The biggest surprise is not how the jurymen vote (and, given The Case, their vote is fair), but that there is a jury at all. They are none other than The Free Men of Athens.
Men have the capacity — not The Right, but the capacity, if they set their minds to it — to govern themselves.
They can acknowledge The Rights of Tradition, of The Unwritten Laws, of Mothering Nature, and in so doing they can order their affairs rationally.
If they have A King, he should be like Sophocles’ Theseus : calm, patriotic, and wise in the glory and the frailty of man’s soul.
This self-government of a people is a gift from Zeus. It conforms them to that god enthroned upon Olympus whom they call 'Father of Gods and Men' not because of his reproductive habits (which are prodigious), but because of his political strategy and the power of his mind.
The Greek Isles Effect
The Compromise on Olympus reflected the sorts of government the Greeks almost had to invent. Consider the terrain of the Greek lands. It is furrowed with rugged mountains and ravines. There are plenty of splendid harbors, but no long navigable rivers.
The weather is excellent for farming, especially for cultivating The Grape and the all-purpose Olive, but it is hard to find enough flatland for raising huge stores of Grain.
The Greeks, then, could not be self-sufficient; they had to trade. Nor could any one city establish a vast empire covering the whole area. Before Alexander The Great and his armies, it was impossible.
So The Greeks built small outposts of highly advanced Civilization : The Polis, or City-State, from which We derive Our Word “political.”
These City-States studded the Greek peninsula, the Aegean, the Turkish shores, and, eventually, Sicily and southern Italy, with hundreds of self-governing communities.
They were not all democratic. Most began as hereditary Kingdoms or as aristocracies, governed by the influential men of the oldest and most established families. It was, if you will pardon an anachronism, a kind of Federalism, guaranteeing plenty of Freedom for The Polis, and making each into a Laboratory for Statesmanship, The Arts, Poetry, Philosophy, and almost any other Creative Endeavor you can name.
It’s worthwhile to pause to appreciate this phenomenon, which I’d like to call The Greek Isles Effect.
It isn’t peculiar to Greece. We can find it among the Christian monasteries in the Middle Ages, the fledgling states in America, and The Italian Republics of the Renaissance.
We can find it, though disincarnate, on The Internet now.
In all these cases there is some form of unity, more cultural than governmental, coinciding with great freedom to experiment.
Let’s look at The Unity first.
Allowing for dialects, the Greeks were united by a single language.
They were united by forms of worship; we see this at the Pan-Hellenic games, the most famous of which were in Olympia.
They were united by their mythological and literary heritage. A Greek from Halicarnassus off the coast of Turkey would recall Achilles’ dilemma in the Iliad, and would be able to discuss it with a fellow Greek born in Thebes on the mainland but now residing in Acragas, thousands of miles away in Sicily.
Precisely because they valued that Tradition, they could converse with one another. Unlike the students in our Tradition-despising schools, they had something to look at in common.
Ask a college senior to recite a short poem by that most American of poets, Robert Frost, and he will look at you blankly. Ask him to name a single general of the Revolutionary War other than Washington, and he will ask why you are troubling him with trivia.
Even if he has learned to think, he has very little to think about or with. He is, intellectually, like a peasant without the wheel and the plow.
The Greeks did not suffer that deprivation.
