Hello, I'm Zay Harding.
In the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century, archaeologists began unearthing
evidence of many ancient civilizations across the planet, civilizations that left behind
remarkable ruins.
As they were ancient, they were often viewed as primitive, and because the writers of history
and archaeology came from countries embroiled in war, these early civilizations were most
often interpreted almost exclusively in terms of war, invasion, and conquest.
Now in our series, Ancient History, we shall see these civilizations in a new light and
appreciate their accomplishments afresh.
The Greek city-state democracy is a story of what can happen when a people value freedom
and individual excellence above all else.
When the Parthenon was built, the city-state of Athens was at its zenith.
It was the golden age of Athens.
However, Athens was not ancient Greece.
Yet nothing represents more clearly that most remarkable 500 years of accomplishment during
which the Greek civilization flourished.
It was a civilization that brought beauty into the daily life of its citizens, laid out the
foundations for western scientific thought.
And it was the civilization that gave the world a new form of governance, democracy.
So much so that the Greek concept of citizen became the model for American democracy, and
the western world's ideal of self-governance, justice, freedom.
All you need to do is to look around Washington, and you will see how it has affected the western
civilization.
There are neoclassical buildings everywhere, so this approach to architecture is really
the basis of the western idea of beauty, and it has to do with moderation, with a sense
of measure in all things.
The rule whereby the Acropolis was built, and the Parthenon in particular, is the so-called
golden rule, which is the rule of perfect balance.
This golden rule was a product of free men, free citizens.
I think the Greeks invented citizenship.
In a world in which everybody else was a subject of a king and a queen, or even if they claimed
that they were a citizen, they were dominated by a small group holding power, an oligarchy.
And somehow, and this is one of the great mysteries in human history, a certain number
of Greeks decided that they were going to have a new way to share power.
In fact, they were all going to be partners in deciding the most important decisions affecting
their lives.
Where are we going to live?
How are we going to defend ourselves?
How are we going to worship our gods, and how are we going to distribute our wealth, our
resources?
The idea that these decisions should be made by people who had an equal say in what would
happen to them, and that just because you were better looking, or richer, or came from
a more famous family, you did not get an extra share or an extra vote, that was something
really new.
How did they come up with this idea?
At the center of the ancient Greek civilization and its massive accomplishments was the city
state.
The origin of the Greek city state owes much to geography.
Greece is a part of the greater Mediterranean Sea in climate.
The territory is composed of a rugged mountainous mainland and many offshore islands set in
the Aegean Sea.
The mountains and the islands established the quilt work of city states and isolated
them one from another.
Thomas Martin has written a book on the origins and accomplishments of the Greek city states.
There were many city states in what is today the modern nation of Greece, but there were
also Greek city states on what is today the west coast of the nation of Turkey, in southern
Italy, on the magnificently rich island of Sicily, in southern France, and there were
even Greeks living farther the field in North Africa, in Egypt, on the coast of Syria.
There was anywhere from say 700 or 800 to 1500 different communities.
Most of them very small by modern standards that count as Greek city states.
Geographic factors also restricted the size of the Greek city states.
First, the amount of tillable land was quite small because the mountains dominated the
landscape.
Second, the Mediterranean climate is hot and dry in the summer and cool in the winter,
often punctuated by intense storms.
In short, a climate not conducive to consistent high yield agricultural production.
The largest city state, as far as we can tell, was Athens, the name that you hear the most.
And it was much bigger than many other city states.
The total population, men, women, children, foreigners with legal permission to live in
Athens and the slaves, were perhaps as many as 250,000.
But you could have a perfectly valid city state with a population that was only in the
hundreds even, or several thousands.
So what was the size of the normal Greek city state?
Well, probably in the low thousands.
The Greek city states began to emerge out of an early Greek dark age around 700 BC.
The cornerstone of these city states was a new concept for humankind.
It was citizenship.
The idea of shared power and individual rights.
There had never been anything like it before.
With this freedom from the tyranny of kings and elite ruling classes, pockets of Greeks
found a new way to govern themselves.
They created wealth, and built beautiful buildings.
And they learned to write again.
In this early period, they wrote down two of the all-time great classics of literature,
the hitherto oral poems of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey.
Warrior hero stories that laid out the Greek notion of personal excellence.
Concurrent with the creation of city states, and the revival of writing, came something
equally remarkable.
The Olympics.
One more way the Greeks were committed to the ideal and actuality of personal excellence.
The Greek city state, as an organized political system, gets going into 700 BC.
Well, that's also when the Olympic Games got going.
In the Olympic Games, we're different from the city states because they were international.
The competitors in the Olympics came from all over the Greek world to this international
festival on which the whole world was focused every four years.
So focused, in fact, that the Greek state's agreed that they would stop fighting each
other, that they would stop warring so that people could get to and from the Olympic Games
safely.
Now, you competed in the Olympic Games as an individual.
You didn't come as a part of a national team.
But when you were a winner, this made you an international celebrity.
The Greeks, in fact, probably invented the whole concept of celebrities, by the way.
Interestingly, the Greek city states never saw themselves as one nation.
Each city state valued its freedom and independence.
Citizens were Athenians, Spartans, Corinthians, and so on in the beginning, not Greeks.
In fact, city states often moored with one another, conquered one another, and at other
times formed military alliances and economic partnerships with one another.
What they did share was a common language.
They shared many of the same values, worshiped the same gods, and had their own interpretation
of the great myths associated with these gods and heroes.
These myths told them how to live a virtuous life.
Because myths tell you something really important about what happened in the past and how you
should live in the present.
Myths often involve gods interacting with human beings.
The gods are very powerful, but they're also very unpredictable.
They don't necessarily love human beings.
The gods don't have the duty of taking care of human beings unless they favor them.
So the myths teach human beings about how to deal with unpredictability, with tragedy,
with sadness, and also that they have to be constantly thinking about the past in order
to understand the present and make decisions about the future.
So the ancient Greeks knew that much of life was out of their control, but much was also
in their control.
Therefore every free man and woman was responsible for much of his or her own life.
They saw themselves as free, but responsible citizens of their city-state.
In order to remain free, free to pursue excellence, beauty, and knowledge, three things had to
happen.
First, a new concept of justice needed to be created.
Second, freedom of speech needed to be preserved.
And finally, decisions affecting the city-state needed to be made democratically.
Emilio's Buretinos is a modern Greek philosopher who studies the remarkable Greek invention
of democracy.
It means the common search for truth.
The people who went to the agora who didn't know the answers, and they knew that they
didn't know, what they wanted to do is through discussion of any subject that was of interest.
And anything could be a subject of discussion, for instance, a child's illness.
The mother would go to the agora and would ask the people there if they could give her
any advice on how to cure it.
On the other hand, there would be a political issue, for instance, should Athens go to war
against Sicily, for example, this was a hotly debated subject.
How about economic or commercial relationships with other cities?
How should they proceed?
Everything was discussed, and everything started from a zero point.
We don't know, and let us get together and find the answer together.
So democratic decision-making and free speech were critical to the governance of the Greek
city-states.
But so was equal justice.
One of the most important parts of city-state life and of this invention of a new way of
living, citizenship and democracy, was as it is in any state deciding what's just and
what's unjust.
Why does that matter?
Because the state, the political community, gets to decide who's punished for doing wrong.
The state gets to decide when can we use violence against people to punish them or change their
behavior?
When can we put people to death to use the most extreme example?
So those are the most important decisions in deciding is your society fair by whatever
way you decide fair goes.
If you're the king or the queen, you think fair is whatever you want, whatever you decide.
In the Greek city-states that were run by citizens in a democracy, the citizens decided.
And so they invented, with the help of the gods they said, democratic courts where the
people to decide who was right and who was wrong, who would be punished and who would
not be punished, was decided by majority vote of ordinary citizens picked at random.
Not some kind of clique or faction or inside group who would get to beat up on their enemies
and reward their friends.
No justice decided by the majority of the community.
So 250 years after the rise of the Greek city-states, the Greeks were about to embark
upon the greatest golden age in the ancient world.
Among the city-states in present-day Greece, three were most remarkable.
Current, which was governed sometimes by a small group in oligarchy and sometimes by
a democracy, existed almost exclusively on its skill as a nation traded by sea internationally.
And they were extremely famous for this.
In fact, they probably are the ones who invented the best kind of ships, both for trade and
also for warfare.
Sparta was another.
The Spartans were the odd man out.
The Spartans lived in a way that was very different from these other city-states.
It was really an oligarchy, a small group running what they claimed was a democracy but
really wasn't.
But the Spartans lived in a completely different way from these other Greek city-states, Corinth
and Athens.
What did Spartans do?
They prepared for war.
Every day, all day, their whole lives they prepared for war.
And lastly, there was Athens, the greatest of the city-states, the greatest of the democracies,
and the birthplace of Western philosophy, science and theater.
In the 21st century, Athens is a sprawling metropolis of over 4 million people.
It is the capital of the present-day nation of Greece.
It is today, as it has been for three millennia, a harbor city, a magnet for shipping, commerce,
and exchange of ideas.
But Athens' center is a most remarkable geographic feature, a mesa, now known simply as the Acropolis.
The Acropolis is marked by steep-sided slopes in a spacious flat summit, at its base, fresh
water springs.
Just the right place in ancient times to attract a civilization, a civilization that would
build on its flat top, one of the great wonders of the ancient world, the Parthenon.
Now under almost constant repair and restoration, it still grips the soul of visitors with its
splendor and sheer beauty derived from its representation of perfect balance and harmony.
The Parthenon was built during the classical period, sometimes called the Golden Age of
Athens, approximately 450 years before the birth of Christ.
It was ordered by the Athenian law-giver Pericles as a symbol of Athenian democracy, at a time
when democracy was at its zenith in Athens.
From my point of view, the classical period, because that's what we're really speaking
of, the Parthenon is the most brilliant expression of classical understanding, classical art.
The classical period is an expression of moderation in all things.
The Parthenon and the adjacent buildings were great civic works built to honor and house
the city's patron ***, Athena.
But those glorious buildings were also a place for the citizens of Athens and visitors to
experience the unique architectural and artistic expression that is the Parthenon.
The Parthenon was not the only structure built on the Acropolis.
Others had stood there before, and had always been a fortress, a virtually impregnable rock
of safety.
In fact, Athens had been occupied for over 2,500 years before the building of the Parthenon.
Even at the height of Athenian economic power, it would have been hard to build the Parthenon.
They took marble from the mountain Pandelli, which is just east of here, some 3 kilometers,
and it was an engineering feat to transport this marble to Athens and to take it up the
Acropolis, because Acropolis is a rock, very steep incline, so it must have been a very,
very difficult job to carry the slabs of marble up there.
In all, 20,000 tons of that marble, the dimensions of the Parthenon were staggering for structure
at that time, 250 feet by 100 feet, 8 columns for each end, and 17 for the sides, 50 columns
in all.
One of the most remarkable features of the Parthenon is that a conventional rectilinear
building produces an optical illusion, making the sides appear curved.
The designers of the Parthenon compensated for this fact in such a way that the building
appears perfectly straight and ordered, a profound statement by the Athenians that they
could create order in the midst of disorder.
The Parthenon is remarkable in yet another way.
These splendid decorations along the sides not only glorified the gods, but also represented
the citizens of Athens.
This had never been done before.
Idealized and perfect in human form, these depictions are at the core of what it meant
to be a free Athenian, the striving for excellence.
You have liberty, but you also have responsibility.
You have to figure it out for yourself.
And even if you believe that there's a benign creator behind nature, that you really have
to figure out what the Greeks called nomos, which can mean law, convention, custom, agreements
between human beings.
That we really are responsible for what it means to be a human being.
And I really like that idea that there is this individual responsibility within the context
of freedom in a world that we can't control.
I think the Greeks understood this profoundly and it didn't depress them.
They accepted this and they found a way to have joy and art and pleasure in their lives
and interacting with each other and in striving for excellence as a human being, which was
hard, but that was enough.
You didn't have to be a ***.
There are other structures atop the Acropolis.
Balancing the Parthenon on the north is the Temple Erection.
Built after the Parthenon, the Erection is of more conventional Greek architectural design.
Six ionic columns support the temple and four beautiful marble figures harken back to early
kings of Athens.
Here's a rendering of how the Acropolis might have looked at the height of Athens' golden
age with all its buildings and staircases.
Spectacular as the Acropolis and the Parthenon were, the real business of living took place
in the city below, in particular in the Agora, a place on the edge of the old city market.
Here Athens' citizens would gather to debate the issues of the time.
They would often cluster in the store located here.
A store is a narrow public building designed to provide protection from the sun or rain.
There was this profound feeling among the Athenians that what democracy is about is truth.
That is why the discussions were all held under the edges of the goddess Pithor and everybody
was free to say whatever he wished.
You couldn't prosecute anybody for saying anything, including rude remarks about the
gods themselves or about the authorities.
You could say anything you wanted, nobody could touch you.
Outside the Agora, you had to be a little more careful living.
The one Greek who took the principles of the Agora, free speech in the search for truth,
to the extreme was Socrates.
Perhaps the greatest philosopher of all time, his unrelenting pursuit of the truth and the
meaning of justice got him in trouble.
Socrates got in trouble because he was the ultimate individual who tried to do good for
others without caring what they thought about it.
He was incredibly brilliant, he was incredibly strong, he never wore a coat in the winter,
he never wore shoes, he could drink anybody under the table.
He wasn't just a great brain, he was a great physical specimen even though he said I have
a stomach a little too large for convenience.
He didn't look great, but he was great.
Socrates started out as a scientist studying astronomy in the natural world, but he gave
that up because it didn't give him the real explanation that he wanted, what is justice?
What does it mean to be good?
He discovered that nobody had the answers to those questions even though lots of people
thought that they did.
So he thought his business was to show people, first of all, they didn't know what they
thought they knew, that what they thought was just or good or proper would turn out on
relentless questioning by Socrates not to be good or just or proper at all.
And so he said you have to stop what you're doing, you have to stop going to work, you
have to stop looking after your family, you have to stop caring about the city, you have
to care about the goodness of your soul and until you figure that out, you shouldn't do
anything else.
Well, this was way too radical for everybody, but I think most people were going to put
up with Socrates until political events really created so much anger that Socrates was finally
put on trial.
On trial, Socrates was convicted and sentenced to death.
Resisting his friends pleased to escape into exile, he accepted the execution by drinking
the poison hemlock.
His ways of searching for truth, known as the Socratic dialogue, were continued by his students,
particularly the philosopher Plato.
Inventing modern philosophy is just one of the Greek's many accomplishments to have stood
the test of time.
Others were theatre, drama, and comedy.
Architecture, mathematics, and most importantly, the creation of Western scientific thought.
All of these accomplishments were based on the city-state and the ancient Greeks' love
of freedom and the pursuit of excellence in all things.
As a result, the Greeks were willing to live by a system of self-governance that preserved
freedom of speech and maintain justice and equality.
In short, they gave themselves and the world democracy.
Thank you.