What the Athenians knew about democracy
ATHENS — In the evening, from the rooftops, the Acropolis shimmers in the failing light. It was, to be sure, once a place of worship. But it also stands as a symbol of the glory that was Greece in the years in which its democracy was founded — the ancients’ great contribution to governance and an inspiration to our founders, whose 1787 Constitution was inspired by what the Athenians created in 508 B.C.
This is a country that in the past century has experienced a monarchy, a dictatorship, Nazi occupation, a civil war, a military regime, and a republic that now has a prime minister accused of traducing the very rule-of-law values Athens pioneered in antiquity. But all about this city of ruins, relics and reveries are references and monuments to Greece’s ancient democracy. They persist here in folklore and in pillars both real and metaphorical, as they do in the traditions and founding documents of democracies worldwide.
At a time when, 5,200 miles away, the world’s most important democracy is engaged in the greatest modern test of its values, the precepts of Athenian democracy seem especially relevant.
At the heart of this
American moment of judgment might be the view of Aristotle that “a democracy exists whenever those who are free and are not well-off, being in the majority, are in sovereign control of government.”
In a way, all of American civic life for nearly the past decade has been a wrangle over this statement, with a populist vanguard — first led by House insurgents calling themselves the Tea Party and then by a sitting president — arguing that a permanent and corrosive elite rules Washington and the state capitals and corrupts the country’s culture and government.
And while that debate continues to roil American waters, there are new pressures, from different directions, undermining the study of the very classical Greek thinkers whose notions shaped the view of the American founders. From one
side are those who dismiss the classics as an antiquated, elitist, irrelevant and whitedominated corner of traditional academic pursuit. From another are those who are equally dismissive of the study of the Greeks (and Romans, too) as a pointless diversion that detracts from preparing college students to take immediate and lucrative positions in the new economy.
In that context, we might be reminded that, as Plato said, ignorance is “the root and the stem of every evil.” In “The Birth of Politics: Eight Greek and Roman Political Ideas and Why They Matter,” professor Melissa Lane, the director of Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, argues that “the opinionated blogosphere makes the questions of Plato and Aristotle — whether social knowledge is enough, and how politics can take account of scientific expertise — pressing once again,” adding, “Rising levels of economic inequality and social immobility raise a challenge faced continually in antiquity, with fresh force: how, and in what circumstances, if at all, can the rich and the poor be enabled to act as political equals?”
A recent Congressional Quarterly listed the 18 top college majors of members of Congress. Classics was not mentioned. When Justin Smith Morrill shepherded the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 through Congress, he specified that the institutions the legislation was creating — today’s great state universities — were designed to provide “the sons of toil” with, along with practical courses, “the higher graces of classical studies.”
The study of the classics is not unknown today; Boston Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom majored in the classics; he believes it helps him adapt to the kinds of changes baseball executives must navigate.
But we have traveled a long way since the time, just after the Civil War, when Delaware was represented by two consecutive senators, George Read Riddle and James Asheton Bayard Jr., both classics majors. A recent Delaware senator, Joe Biden, displays scant familiarity with the ancients. A prominent University of Pennsylvania graduate, Donald Trump, shows none.
By contrast, most of the founders were steeped in the classics, and it was their familiarity with ancient Greece that led them to adopt an Athenian concept, the written constitution, and shape it to 18th-century needs (and 21stcentury disputes). The governmental structure of American states bears the fingerprints of the Greek polis. The American preoccupation with the rule of law has roots in ancient Greece.
Pericles’ Funeral Oration of 430 B.C., as written by the Athenian historian Thucydides in his “History of the Peloponnesian War,” provides an indispensable description of democracy in antiquity. That oration speaks of a government that “favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy.” Pericles goes on to say that the laws of such a government “afford equal justice to all in their private differences” and that “advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition.”
Hunter Rawlings, the classicist who was president of Cornell University, reminds us that American democracy is more like a republic, with elected representatives, while, he told me, “Athenian democracy was direct, that is, the Assembly of citizens (only male) made all the important decisions.”
Even so, the teachings of the Athenians have great resonance and relevance to us today.
We might be attendant to Plato’s remark that “the price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” And we have special reason to heed Herodotus when he tells us, “There is nothing more foolish, nothing more given to outrage than a useless mob.”
Public apathy, the impatience with elites, the outrage of mobs — these are all elements of contemporary life for which the Greeks have soaring lessons and sobering warnings.
“The Athenians were very proud of their democracy and they wanted to preserve it for future generations,” said Emily Katz, professor of philosophy at Michigan State University. “But it didn’t last very long. We think our democracy will last forever. If the Athenians taught us anything, it’s that it’s important to protect a democracy against threats.”