14 - It All Began in Greece

The birth of the polis and democracy paved way to modern civilization

The birthplace of Western civilization is Greece. Everybody agrees on this. That's where philosophy was born; for the Greeks this word did not mean arguing on abstract issues, but explaining what happened, i.e., thinking. This brought rational reflection, systematic research, doubt, irony, a taste for communicating, the discovery of the civic community and therefore of the equality of people. Democracy, which took its baby steps in Greece, could not be born without a preexisting specific mindset.
One thousand years b.C.E., the concept of democracy had precise connotations in Greece and a well-developed state form: the polis, the city-state. The concept of democracy grew and strengthened in the polis. The Greeks had always reacted violently to any attempt to bring them within a larger state: they liked to keep their borders within eyesight, look their rulers in the face and snoop into their affairs, as those were actually everybody's affairs. These were the premises that gave rise to the various polis that formed in Greece, almost constantly at war with one another, except when they were at war with some common foe.
This happened mostly with the Persians, who tried repeatedly, over most of the 5th century b.C.E., to conquer Greece in order to gain a bridgehead in the Mediterranean. Every time, sworn enemies Athens and Sparta joined forces to lead the terrible Greek reaction. In the plain of Marathon, 11,000 Greeks fought back 100,000 Persians; at the Thermopilae pass, 300 Spartans held out for days against an army 800 times as large: they were exterminated, but gave their allies time to get organized. The Greeks settled the score first at Salamis, where they sunk the much stronger enemy fleet, and then at Plataea, where they finally rid the Persian kings of their habit of coveting Greece.
This is the first part of the patrimony that Europe inherited from Greece: the polis, meaning freedom but also independence, self-rule, participation. In summary, democracy. In Italy, the polis would find an ideal continuation in the Medieval saga of the Free Municipalities. Much like in Greece the polis rebuffed the Persian kings, in Lombardy the same happened to Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. The municipal freedom would later originate the Signorias of Italian Renaissance and the regional states in the rest of Europe. Nowadays, the Ländern that make up Germany trace back their origins to those regional states. Solon
Greek democracy did not arise by mere chance. It had a father and a date of birth. The father was Solon, unanimously recognized as the greatest lawmaker of antiquity, and the date is 594 b.C.E., the year when Solon was elected 'archon eponymous' (a sort of Prime Minister) of Athens. Until then, whatever spontaneous form of democracy existed had been entrusted more to the benevolence of rulers (each of whom interpreted it in his own way) than to law. Solon was the first to give a comprehensive organization to democracy.
As soon as he took office, he decreed that no freeman could be enslaved for debts. This was a huge blow to the upper classes that used to secure zero-cost labour by putting defaulted debtors in chains. Then, he split the population according to wealth. After that, he proclaimed that all citizens were free and subject to the same laws, but with political rights that varied according to the taxes they paid. The more one paid, the longer he had to serve in the army, but the higher his place in peace and in war. In short, privileges were measured out based on the services one rendered to the community; wealth, rather than birth, determined one's career chances. For the times, a real revolution.
Split in four classes of citizens, Athens blossomed into democracy much like we understand it. From the upper two classes came the members of the government, who were elected by the Assembly ("Ecclesia") of all the citizens, which was the seat of the sovereignty. The Assembly had other tasks, too: it could investigate any official and held the functions of a Supreme Court over all the lower courts, which were composed of juries - another innovation - chosen among 6,000 citizens of good standing belonging to all four classes.
For the authority and prestige that his reform brought him, Solon was asked to stay as archon eponymous for life. He refused, "because", he said, "this would mean turning into a tyrant, and tyranny is a seat whence no one rises alive." However, before relinquishing his office he had the words "Meden agan" ("Without excess") carved onto the frontispiece of the temple of Apollo. That was his strength. Inevitably, with such premises Athens assumed a primary role in the development of Greek, and eventually European, civilization. Democracy, if scrupulously and fairly applied, is a booster for societies. Solon was once asked for a definition of democracy. "It's the regime," he replied, "where citizens obey their rulers and rulers obey the law."

Pericles
Some 150 years later, Pericles, another great lawmaker, consolidated this concept. To show how great was his influence on the political and cultural development of his city, we still talk of "Pericles' Athens".
For close to 40 consecutive years (467 to 428 b.C.E.), Pericles was reelected strategos autokrator, the state's top office. His teachers had been Athens' most famous philosophers: he learned from them how to be honest (and he exited the political scene with the same patrimony he had upon entering), to listen, to be tolerant, to have a sense of opportunity, to reject excesses. He added a clear vision of what Athens could become: a great international capital, and not just politically. For 40 years he spared no effort to this end.
His main point was the elimination, or at least a reduction, of the differences among the four classes that composed Athenian society since the age of Solon. He admitted the two lower classes to public offices, which stopped being a monopoly of the wealthy. He also strengthened the powers of the Assembly, getting the people to play a bigger role in public life.
He established the rule that people should not be expected to serve the state for free, introducing a pay for soldiers - a call to arms could spell financial ruin for poor families - and jurors, to avoid that delicate office to end up in the exclusive grip of the richest citizens. He also ruled that new jurors were to be drawn every day, to dispel any shadow of suspicion from the courts.
After consolidating democracy with his constitutional reforms, and strengthened by the power and richness of Athens, Pericles played another ace: public works. Under his rule, the city gained some of its greatest monuments, many of which survive to date. For instance, the Parthenon, Greece's most significant architectural patrimony of humanity. It was in Pericles' Athens that philosophy, drama, art, and science flourished. Naming names would be reductive, as much as limiting Greek civilization to Athens alone. All of Greece left an indelible mark. When, around 150 b.C.E., Rome annexed Greece, the conquerors were so captivated by Greek society and culture that Horace wrote "Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit" ("Conquered Greece conquered its ferocious victor"). It didn't conquer only the Romans.

Socrates
It is often said that Greek philosophers studied everything under the sky and everything above, meaning that they tried to find explanations for both earthly phenomena (which they called 'immanent') and divine ones (called 'transcendent'). Even when speaking of the latter, they never lost sight of the former. One of the earliest written fragments of Greek philosophy is a recommendation: "Since you are just a man, don't ask the gods for a long and care-free life, but for a great soul." That recommendation became a constant in European culture (from Julius Caesar to Napoleon). Many figures practiced it correctly, others aimed at the long and care-free life, quietly disregarding the great soul part. Contradictions are a characteristic of many Europeans.
Socrates tried to bring the contradictions of his contemporaries to light. He used to say that his job was akin that of a midwife, and actually called his method 'maieutics', that means 'midwifery' in ancient Greek. "I assist deliveries," he said. "Not of children, but of ideas." If ideas are unclear, there's contradiction.
He was possibly the greatest Greek philosopher. He was the first (400 years b.C.E.) to attempt a rational approach to the fundamental problem of the origin ('arché') of everything. That was another revolution, since until then people had simply accepted as a given that the world and everything in it came from the gods, and nobody questioned it. Socrates, on the other hand, questioned everything and posed the same questions to his disciples, helping them look for answers - the ideas he helped deliver. His maieutics is an anchoring point in the history of Western civilization, because it generated a new way of thinking, still valid today: first comes rational analysis of a problem, then the search for all possible solutions, and finally the choice of the best. Nowadays we take all this for granted, but 2,500 years ago it wasn't. That's why Socrates made history.
He tackled this sort of problem (e.g., what is good? Which political regime is best suited to achieve it?) not behind a desk but on the street, strolling with his disciples. When they met, he began with a premise. "I deem myself wise among men, because I know that I know nothing." After giving the subject for the discussion, he posed questions and listened patiently; after that, he gave his objections. "You talk of virtue, but what do you mean by that?" He passed every definition through the sieve of irony, rocking certain beliefs of his listeners. He mostly fought certain beliefs, discussing and doubting everything.
His attitude, and especially his call to discuss everything, could not go unpunished in a bigoted society, ill-prepared to accept him. He was charged with impiety and tried. He was sentenced to die by drinking hemlock, a powerful poison. He accepted the sentence without flinching. Shortly before the execution, his disciples were allowed to visit him. When one of them mentioned the possibility of escaping, since he did not deserve to die, he replied, "No, if I escaped then I would really deserve to die."

Magna Grecia
The Greeks had restless characters, and grew up in a cultural environment that made them even more restless. It was natural for them to feel constrained in the rocky land where they lived. They set sails both eastward and westward and founded stable colonies abroad, some 800 years b.C.E.
Eastward they penetrated the Black Sea and settled along its coast; westward they landed in Southern Italy, establishing Magna Grecia ("Greater Greece"), the name they gave to their colonies in Apulia, Calabria, Sicily, and along the Tyrrhenian coast. This accurately planned migration gave rise to Cuma, Naples, Taranto, Sibari, Kroton, Reggio, Metapontus, Locri, Gallipoli, Heraclea (today called Policoro), Zancle (Messina) and other towns and cities. Magna Grecia was not a mere duplicate of Greece. Not only for its size and the local environment, but especially because the Greek colonists, merging with the local populations, created a different civilization. That was unavoidable, but they brought with them the achievements of philosophy and politics, and from Southern Italy these achievements spread to the rest of Europe.
The polis that had made Greece great did likewise for Magna Grecia. If Greece had produced statesmen of the calibre of Solon and Pericles, the colonies had similar rulers, such as Zaleuco in Locri and Archita in Taranto. Zaleuco's contribution to modern law is far from marginal. In 663 b.C.E. he issued a series of laws with the double purpose of stemming private vendettas (apparently, Locri resembled the Wild West) and transferring the administration of justice from private individuals to the state. In order to appreciate the scope of this innovation, consider the date these laws were enacted.
Under Archita, Taranto became the richest and most powerful city of Magna Grecia. He wasn't just a ruler (strategos autokrator, like Pericles), but also an urban planner, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer. As a statesman, he turned Taranto into an advanced republic; as an urban planner he drew a general plan that regulated the growth of the city; as a philosopher he studied Pythagorean theories; as a mathematician he studied the properties of the cube; as an astronomer he measured interstellar distances. He also built numerous machines: he built a mechanical bird that, according to rumours, actually flew. That is the earliest flying mechanism we've heard of. In politics he was socialistic: he tried to tear down the class divisions, and went as far as allowing servants to eat at his table. This happened around 400 b.C.E.
No such thing happened by chance, because for centuries the cities of Magna Grecia kept cultural links with those in Greece regardless of administrative separation. They exported goods (Southern Italy was way more fertile than Greece) and imported ideas. Rome felt their fascination even before conquering Magna Grecia and then Greece: Roman patricians, for instance, sent their sons to Taranto to study politics and philosophy at their schools. Greece itself followed the development of the Italian colonies with great attention. Plato, another great philosopher, felt at home in Italy, especially in Syracuse, where he tried to create a "philosopher's republic", which would have entailed deep political reforms. He had no luck, because the rulers of Syracuse - Dionysius the Elder and then his son Dionysius the Younger - vetoed the experiment, despite holding Plato in the greatest esteem. He had to go back to Athens (after spending some time in Taranto with his friend Archita), where he founded the Academy, a still unequalled example of philosophical school that gave Plato a sort of international immortality. There is no place in the world where, in the present like in the past, he isn't studied, interpreted, analyzed, on the same, if not greater, degree as his teacher Socrates.

Aristippus
In Greece and in Magna Grecia there were great philosophers, artists, and lawmakers, but there were also some great bon vivants, such as Aristippus, the founder of hedonism.
We hope our readers will forgive us for not mentioning people of the standing of Aristotle, Pythagoras, Phidias, Parmenides, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Thaletes, Thucydides, Demosthenes, and many more who rightly belong to the pantheon of Greek culture, while at the same time mentioning a minor thinker. Point is, if we look to Aristippus with today's eyes and customs, we see his great relevance.
All we do, he said, we do to please ourselves. Our so-called 'wisdom' fools us: only our senses tell us the truth, and philosophy merely serves to sharpen them. A direct consequence of this theory was the subtle sense of humour which Aristippus used to use with even the toughest situations. Once, having gone to Syracuse at the court of king Dionysius, the king spat in Aristippus' face. He did not flinch, commenting, "I suppose that any fisherman gets wetter than this to catch a fish much smaller than a king." Another time, Dionysius ordered Aristippus to kiss his feet. Aristippus complied, later remarking, "It's not my fault if his feet are his noblest part."
Europe's mocking irony has him as an ancestor. Europe's constructive doubt has Socrates. The latter left no writing: what we know about him comes from his disciples. By committing his life and theories to History, they discharged their obligations in the best of ways: he taught them to think, and therefore to disobey. However, when it is prompted by reason, disobeying is one's duty.

14 - To Be Continued

Publication Date: 2004-08-29
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=4353