Its kiosks are the best-stocked in the world, its souvlaki stands are without parallel, its Acropolis regularly appears on world tourism’s Top Ten, but it is above all as the birthplace of democracy that “glorious, violet-crowned” Athens still stands among the most renowned cities of the world.
Inevitably, all visiting VIPs to Athens, whether they arrive on three-masted private yachts or Lear jets, at their first interview, say how terribly moved they are to be in the cradle of democracy. And if they’re picking up a $100000 cheque from the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation they go about on this subject at great length, even in Erasmian Greek if they’re really carried away.
But before we get all misty-eyed and choked up on the anniversary of this blessed event, it is perhaps well to note that democracy’s conception was far from immaculate and, in labor, proved to be a breech baby that came out bottom first and had to be pulled out with forceps.
The reason to mention these unseemly medical details is germane to Greece and Greek politics today for the country is often being scolded internationally for not living up to its Democratic Ideal, or what at least foreigners imagine this to be. For example, when a prominent British statesman came to Greece in the summer of 1967 and wove some prettily-turned phrase around this cradle business, he was interrupted by a local fellow who muttered, “Better to call it the coffin of democracy.”
Lest we become tongue-tied with admiration, it is well to remember, too, that ancient Greece was also the cradle of tyranny, autocracy, oligarchy, anarchy, tyranny – all excellent Greek words. The reason for this, of course, is that Greek civilization was the first to reach a level at which individual man might conceive the idea that he could become free, and since free man is free to create the Good and the Beautiful, or go the Devil in his own way, this goes a long ways to account for the vitality and sloppiness of Greece politics today, yesterday, 2500 years ago, and, let us hope, tomorrow.
One of the sure signs of the vitality of democracy is how views of it change in the context of their times. Its bothersome to think that 50 years after the birth of democracy there wasn’t a philosopher in Athens who wasn’t sighing his heart out for authoritarianism based on the Spartan model. Indeed, for most of its long life, democracy has been equated with mob-rule. Only with the French and American Revolutions did it come back into the odor of respectability because the average citizen had again reached the level whereby democracy could be a viable form of government.
Even so, our ideas of Athenian democracy are very different from those of a century ago. In those liberal/ imperial times Pericles was the hero of Golden Age democracy, strolling through marble colonnades, ‘knowing himself and ‘doing nothing in excess’ and saying wise, democratic things.
Fifty years (and two World Wars) later, Pericles was branded as a closet-despot, a vote-snatching Populist, who built the pretentious Parthenon to store stolen loot in, who created an empire that trampled on its allies, mouthed hypocracies, and was finally defeated to the relief of all.
Today, another 50 years (and a long Cold War) later, the focus of attention on Athenian democracy has changed again. It is to the beginnings, to its first mulings and pukings, that we turn, and this is fitting and proper in light of what is going on right now all over the world.
These days we are comemmorating the 2500 anniversary of the reforms of Cleisthenes; that is, the political changes in Athens which made democracy a workable way of organizing and carry on social life. Some time earlier Solon had worked up a constitution based on democratic principles but it could never function practically.
So, a tough set of improvised checks and balances amongst tribes, demes, the Haves and the Have-nots, and a general political will to make it stick, evolved in a kind of hit-or-miss, catch-as-catch-can sort of way. It is well to remember that democracy was not born of an ideal; it became an ideal only after it had come into being.
Cleisthenes has had a mixed press. Was he an aristocrat who turned to the people in order to break the power of rival families? Probably. This enabled the newly-enfranchised to take matters into their own hands later. Familiar today, but this was the first time it worked.
It’s very unlikely that Cleisthenes knew what he was bring about. Does it matter? Democracy’s birth was certainly not the first to be conceived in ignorance. Isn’t it true of the best of us?
Certainly, one of the delightful things about the birth of democracy is that its begetters don’t seem to be expecting it. Lately, we have seen those beautiful, bewildered looks around the Brandenburg Gate, St.Wenceslas Square, Red Square, even right inside the parliament in Moscow. On its 2500th birthday this year, democracy has been getting heaps of presents. Bless all of the newly-liberated who gave.
There’s been a persistent rumor these two-and-a-half millennia that democracy is not the issue of lawful matrimony. That’s what the puritanical, oppressive totalitarians say, and always will. What’s certain, though: its only true begetters were Athenians, wed or not, since the family resemblance is too striking to be otherwise: noisy, gregarious, quarrelsome, innovative, corruptible, messy, life-loving, spirit-lifting – the best possible form of government because it is cut to the measure of man.
Happy birthday, dear democracy, and all praise to your progenitors from whom this newspaper has been honored to take its name.
