Ben Platt

Ancient Athens in 2007

39.png“We had the spirit, after abandoning our city, after sacrificing our property (instead of deserting the remainder of the league or depriving them of our services by dispersing), to throw ourselves into our ships and meet the danger, without a thought of resenting your neglect to assist us.  [....] The cities which you had left were still filled with your homes, and you had the prospect of enjoying them again; and your coming was prompted quite as much by fear for yourselves as for us; at all events, you never appeared till we had nothing left to lose.  But we left behind us a city that was a city no longer, and staked our lives for a city that had an existence only in desperate hope, and so bore a full share in your deliverance and in ours.” - Thucydides, History Of The Peloponnesian War – Book I, Passage 74

My first sight of the Acropolis was from the top of the Athens Centre, where students from all across the world take classes in Greek language and history.  Having spent the better part of two days traveling, most of the previous night in jetlagged disarray, and too long carefully ascending the rickety metal stairs while spilling coffee on myself, I finally gazed at the ineffable, indisputable epicenter of modern and ancient Athens. Though Athens is not nearly as flat as Chicago, the Acropolis still bursts from the surface of the city like some cresting leviathan revealing a small fraction of its girth. The colossal fragments on its summit, especially the remains of the Parthenon, seem ethereal and alien as they sail above this thoroughly modern city of crumbling concrete, tight alleys, billboards, trams, garbage piles, motorbikes, and cars.  But at first sight, the bleached white columns and half-walls seem the wick to a great and powerful flame, consuming the surrounding vista along with one’s thoughts, worries, and preconceptions. This rapture was broken though with a great bang, as a group of painfully modern fighter jets screamed across the sky, followed by another group, and then another – each set flying low enough to obscure and dominate the Acropolis again and again.

Startled, I made my way to the lecture being given by the director of the Athens Centre, a thin and dignified old man, with a large smile and a soft voice that frequently erupted with hand waving when he got excited. ‘This Sunday, March 25th,” he began, “is a holiday, Greek Independence Day.  Independence from whom, you might ask.  The Ottomans? Yes, this day marks the beginning of our revolt against their empire.  You have at least heard the planes practicing for the parades.” He paused, then excitedly exclaimed, “But what of the Venetians?  And the British or the French? The Nazis? The Byzantines? The Gauls? The Franks? The Macedonians? The Romans? The truth is that Greece, this Greece all around us, Greece didn’t exist as even a nation until less than two hundred years ago, didn’t even get its current borders until the end of the second World War. Greece isn’t even Greece, that’s a name given to us by the Romans!  The city, and land all around you, is Ællas, or Ællada– and we are part of Hellenic Republic, a country which has existed as a free, autonomous nation for less time than your United States.”  Outside, more planes began to fly overhead.

Ancient Greece, viewed by many to be the fount of Western civilization, is a concept that encompasses an overwhelming multitude of shifting political and social structures over the span of nearly a millennium. This civilization is commonly understood to have emerged from the remains of an earlier culture intimately tied with, and faithfully modeled upon, the authoritarian empires of Mesopotamia.  Centuries after the collapse of that ‘Mycenean’ society, ancient Greece began to coalesce into autonomous, self-governing city-states which were to form the basis of Greek political and social life that would generate the immense and historically unique cultural, scientific, and artistic flowering of the Classical era.  The classical city-state thrived until the ascendancy of regional monarchies following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the subsequent conquest of what little remaining independence there was by the Roman Republic in 146 BC.  Beyond this, Greece as any sort of autonomous body is lost until the modern era – subsumed into empire after empire, and often compelled to forget its once brighter past.

The classicist Edith Hamilton writes, “Something had awakened in the minds and spirits of the men there which was so to influence the world that the slow passage of long time, of century upon century and the shattering changes they brought, would be powerless to wear away that deep impress… which so molded the world of mind and of spirit that our mind and spirit to-day are different… In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind” (The Greek Way, 13, 16). Their greatness was always devoid of the constraints of the physical.   This defiance of circumstance is seen in Socrates’ dying proclamation of the undying power of truth, and in the continuing efforts of the city to adhere to a radically unique government in the midst of the fiercest war they had ever known. Greek civilization has both inspired and illuminated countless historical moments, and fundamentally recrafted the manner in which our society understands itself.   Its example inspired resistance and revolution in every form: the Roman intellectuals rejecting the oppressive weight of empire; the Byzantines creating a new identity in the midst of chaos; the ideas and changes of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; the European and American revolutions. It continues undiminished today.

This abiding resistance, both spiritual and mental, to the tyranny of physical and political setbacks – by people as real and imperfect as any today – has bequeathed so much to modernity. Thus my physical inheritance matters little, for I trace my spiritual ancestry, my citizenship, and my allegiance, back to Athens herself.  “We were always loyal to lost causes,” exclaims a classics professor in James Joyces’ Ulysses, “Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination… I ought to profess Greek, the language of the mind… The closetmaker and the cloacamaker will never be lords of our spirit. We are liege subjects… of the empire of the spirit, not an imperium, that went under with the Athenian fleets at Ægospotami. Yes, yes. They went under… Loyal to a lost cause.” (133).   

The unrelenting pace of industry, progress, and discovery has transformed this world to the point where a traveler from antiquity would be hard-pressed to find any sight familiar to him, or any city he knew and loved that wasn’t in broken shambles.  Much of ancient Athens now lies in nearly unrecognizable ruins, to be meticulously catalogued by archaeologists. These ruins are inconsequential to me, and I hope to my unnamed traveler as well – for we both remember that once, abandoning their homes to face an uncertain fate against the immeasurable fury of the Persian empire, the Athenians risked their lives for “a city that was a city no longer… for a city that had an existence only in desperate hope.”