Making Athens Great Again | The Atlantic - April 2017 Issue

Photo: Rebecca Goldstein

"How does a citizen respond when a democracy that prides itself on being exceptional betrays its highest principles? Plato despaired, but he also pointed the way to renewal." notes Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author, most recently, of Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away. 

Photo: Owen Davey

What happens when a society, once a model for enlightened progress, threatens to backslide into intolerance and irrationality—with the complicity of many of its own citizens? How should that society’s stunned and disoriented members respond? Do they engage in kind, resist, withdraw, even depart? It’s a dilemma as old as democracy itself.

Twenty-four centuries ago, Athens was upended by the outcome of a vote that is worth revisiting today. A war-weary citizenry, raised on democratic exceptionalism but disillusioned by its leaders, wanted to feel great again—a recipe for unease and raw vindictiveness, then as now. The populace had no strongman to turn to, ready with promises that the polis would soon be winning, winning like never before. But hanging around the agora, volubly engaging residents of every rank, was someone to turn on: Socrates, whose provocative questioning of the city-state’s sense of moral superiority no longer seemed as entertaining as it had in more secure times. Athenians were in no mood to have their views shaken up. They had lost patience with the lively, discomfiting debates sparked by the old man. In 399 b.c., accused of impiety and corrupting the young, Socrates stood trial before a jury of his peers—one of the great pillars of Athenian democracy. That spring day, the 501 citizen-jurors did not do the institution proud. More of them voted that Socrates should die than voted him guilty in the first place.

It’s all too easy to imagine, at this moment in American history, the degree of revulsion and despair Plato must have felt at the verdict rendered by his fellow Athenians on his beloved mentor. How could Plato, grieving over the loss of the “best man of his time,” continue to live among the people who had betrayed reason, justice, open-mindedness, goodwill—indeed, every value he upheld? From his perspective, that was the enormity Athenians had committed when they let themselves be swayed by the outrageous lies of Socrates’s enemies. Did truth count for nothing?

A despondent Plato left the city-state of Athens, whose tradition of proud patriotism and morally confident leadership at home and abroad had been recently and severely shaken. Whether he was witnessing the end of Athenian exceptionalism or a prelude to the long, hard work of rebuilding it on firmer foundations, he could not have begun to predict.

Plato was in his late 20s when he lost Socrates. Born an aristocrat, he boasted a lineage that went back, on his mother’s side, all the way to Solon the Lawgiver, the seventh-century sage often credited with laying the cornerstone of Athenian democracy. As Plato confessed in the famous Seventh Letter (which, if it wasn’t written by Plato himself, was composed by an intimate familiar with the details of his life), he had planned to take an active role in the leadership of his illustrious polis.

Enshrined in the city-state’s mythology was the fiction that its inhabitants were autochthonous: They had literally “sprung from the earth,” which gave them a special claim to the soil they occupied. The Athenian triumph in the Greco-Persian Wars in 479 b.c., after a dozen years of on-and-off fighting, had intensified the pride in autochthony. Eligibility for citizenship—already an exclusive privilege denied to women and slaves, of course, but also to most tax-paying alien residents (some of them very wealthy)—was tightened. In 451 b.c., the statesman Pericles proposed a law that only those with two Athenian-born parents, rather than just a father, qualified. Still, as Athens asserted dominance throughout the region, presiding as the standard for Hellenic greatness, the emerging imperial power drew in immigrants. The best and the brightest arrived, hoping to engage in the city-state’s achievements, its art and its learning, even if they were excluded from its vaunted participatory democracy.

But Plato, born and bred to play a prominent role within “the Hellas of Hellas”—as Athens had lately been anointed—turned his face away. On a voyage that lasted about 12 years, he ventured well beyond the borders of the Greek-speaking lands. He went south and studied geometry, geography, astronomy, and religion in Egypt. He went west to spend time with the Pythagoreans in southern Italy, learning about their otherworldly mixture of mathematics and mysticism, absorbing from them esoteric sources of thaumazein, or ontological wonder. Plato, already primed by Socrates not to take Athenian exceptionalism for granted, was on a path toward metaphysical speculations and ethical and political reflections beyond any entertained by his mentor.
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Source: The Atlantic