The Human Story

by James C. Davis

  Herodotus wrote mainly to enthrall and entertain the Greeks who paid to hear him give public readings from his History. He tells many anecdotes such as this one about the homeward voyage of Xerxes after the Greeks had beaten him. A storm blew up, and the captain told Xerxes that the ship would sink “ ‘unless we can rid ourselves of this crowd [of Persian noblemen] on deck.’ ”

  Herodotus writes, “On hearing this Xerxes is supposed to have said, ‘Gentlemen, now is the moment for each of you to prove his concern for the king; for my safety, it seems, is in your hands.’ The Persian noblemen bowed low, and then, without more ado, jumped overboard; and the ship, lightened of her load, came safely to her port on the Asian coast.” As soon as he was on shore, Xerxes gave the ship’s captain a gold crown as a reward for saving his life, and then, “to punish him for causing the death of a number of Persians, cut off his head.”3

  3Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (1954), pp. 539–40.

  Herodotus was not just a storyteller; he was also an artist and historian. Running through his History like a crimson thread is a majestic theme: how a mighty despotism fell victim to its pride and failed to overcome a people who were poor but free and gifted. Even his anecdote (above) about Xerxes helps to make that point, though Herodotus comments skeptically about that story that it seems unlikely that Xerxes would have sacrificed his noblemen when he might simply have flung overboard an equal number of rowers. The point of the anecdote is that the Greeks valued life more than did the Persians.

  Herodotus wanted to show how sharply customs sometimes differ. On one occasion, he says, the Persian emperor Darius summoned some Greeks who happened to be at his court and “asked them what they would take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers. They replied that they would not do it for all the money in the world. Later, in the presence of the Greeks…he asked some Indians [from India], of the tribe called Callatiae, who do in fact eat their parents’ dead bodies, what they would take to burn them. They uttered a cry of horror and forbade him to mention such a thing. One can see by this what custom can do, and [the poet] Pindar, in my opinion, was right when he called it ‘king of all’.”4

  4Herodotus, Histories, pp. 190–91.

  History, someone said, surveys the past in order to find what it is that makes us human. The Greeks also invented another way of exploring our humanity: the tragic drama. Greek tragedies were short, tense plays that explored the meaning behind the suffering caused by some unintended harmful act. Even for the poorest Greek, these tragedies became a passion. At a festival held in Athens once a year, audiences of many thousands sat on stone in open-air theaters for as much as ten hours a day, on four consecutive days. Each day they watched four or five dramas.

  The most famous of all Greek tragedies is Sophocles’Oedipus the King. Like almost all these dramas, it is based on an appalling tale. The audience would already have known this story before attending the play, but that was quite all right. They expected not to hear a new story but an old one, retold in such a way as to move them to pity and understanding.

  This is what had happened before the action starts in Oedipus the King. Young Oedipus is raised in Corinth as the son of its king, until one day he learns from an oracle that he is fated to kill his father and marry his mother. Since these would be horrible offenses to the gods, to avoid committing them Oedipus flees from Corinth and heads for the city-state of Thebes. At a remote crossroads, he meets a stranger, who arrogantly orders him out of the way. Oedipus kills this man. After he arrives at Thebes, he rids the town of a man-eating monster by solving a riddle. He is rewarded with the throne and also with the hand in marriage of the queen, whose husband, Laios, has recently been murdered.

  When the play begins, Thebes is suffering. Cattle are dying, crops are failing, and a dangerous disease is spreading. Oedipus, who is now a respected king and the father of four children, learns the cause of the troubles: the gods are angry because the killer or killers of the late King Laios live, unpunished, in Thebes. Oedipus decrees a terrible punishment for the killer or killers unless they give themselves up, and then he sets out to solve the murder. “I must not hear,” he says, “of not discovering the whole truth.”

  Piece by piece Oedipus unearths the truth: It was he himself who killed King Laios, who was the stranger he fought with on the road to Thebes. What is more (the horror mounts) he is himself the son of Laios and of Laios’s widow, who is his own wife, Jocasta. When he was born, it turns out, an oracle had told Laios that his son was fated to kill his father. To avoid this, Laios had the child abandoned on a hill to die. But the child was rescued and ended up in Corinth, where he was raised believing himself the son of the Corinthian king. That son of course was Oedipus.

  When he learns all this, the horrified Oedipus rushes into the palace and learns that Jocasta, his mother, his wife, and the mother of his children, has just realized the truth and hanged herself. He seizes her brooch and gouges out his own eyes. As he is led away, the onlookers wail: “Everyone said, ‘That is a fortunate man’; and now what storms are beating on his head! Call no man fortunate that is not dead. The dead are free from pain.”

  What is Sophocles telling us in this haunting tragedy? Perhaps that fate is far, far stronger than we are. And also that Oedipus trusted too much in his own reason and his own senses. He successfully used them to solve a riddle and to learn the truth, but with what a terrible result! Of course, Sophocles was a Greek, and he certainly approved of the use of reason. He admired the way his fellow Athenians used their minds to plan wars, run a government, make money, design temples, and write history and philosophy. But he didn’t want to see them follow reason too far, and devalue the gods, and delve into mysteries better left unsolved. They must not imagine that they were stronger than the fate that ruled them.

  Among the crowds in the theater, and on the streets, in the marketplace, and at the sports parks was a fat, bald, snub-nosed man in shabby clothes who loved to talk. This was Socrates, a teacher who charged nothing for his lessons, and a philosopher who wrote nothing at all. He liked simply to chat with friends and ask them questions that made them reconsider their ideas. We would know very little about him if his best pupil, Plato (of whom more below), had not recorded, and perhaps partially invented, these discussions.

  In one of the dialogues, Socrates runs into a professional seer named Euthyphro, who is about to prosecute his aged father for murdering a man who was himself a murderer. Euthyphro thinks that prosecuting his father for this crime is the pious or holy thing to do, and the gods demand it. Socrates is not so sure.

  SOCR. By Zeus, Euthyphro, do you think you yourself know accurately how matters stand respecting divine law, and things holy and unholy, that…you can prosecute your own father without fear that it is you, on the contrary, who are doing an unholy thing?

  EUTH. I would not be much use [as a seer], Socrates…, if I did not know all such things as this with strict accuracy….

  SOCR. Then tell me, what do you say the holy is? And what is the unholy?

  EUTH. Well, I say that the holy is what I am doing now, prosecuting murder and temple theft and everything of the sort, whether one’s father or mother or anyone else is guilty of it.

  Socrates, however, doesn’t want mere examples of holiness. He wants to know what is the nature of holiness so that he may decide for himself what things are holy. Euthyphro tries one definition after another, but each time he does a few questions from Socrates make it clear that he has not thought the matter through. Come on, says Socrates, you must know what holiness is or you would not be prosecuting your father. Tell me!

  EUTH. Some other time, Socrates. Right now I must hurry somewhere and I am already late.5

  5Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, trans. R. F. Allen (1984), pp. 41–58.

  That is how the dialogue ends.

  Sophocles, Herodotus, and Plato. These are only three of the many Athenians in the fifth century B.C. who reflected on the human past, explored the meani
ng of life, and built temples and meeting places worthy of human beings. While they were doing these things, other Athenians directed the city-state and the empire, fought battles, and of course ran their farms and shops. They were a busy people, many of them with several interests. Sophocles, for example, not only wrote about 120 plays; he was also a dancer, a lyre player, and a wrestler, and he served Athens as a diplomat and general. This was the Athenian ideal (so different from the Spartan one): to seize and savor all of life.

  ITS BRILLIANCE, THOUGH, could not save Athens from the fear and envy of the other Greeks. This was the price it paid for forming a league against the Persians and then turning the league into an empire. A leader among its enemies was Corinth (where Oedipus grew up), which lies on the northeast end of the Peloponnesus. Corinth was known for its produce (the seedless raisins called currants are named for it), and for its trade, its thinkers, and its beautiful pottery. It also gave the name Corinthian to an elegant building style that architects have used for thousands of years. The Corinthians saw empire-building Athens as a threat to their own trade and wealth. It was time, they said, to go to war, so they allied themselves with other Peloponnesian city-states. Then they urged the Spartans to join them.

  The Spartans were not sure what to do. A war might realize their worst nightmare by leaving their serfs unwatched, thus giving them a chance to rebel. For some time, however, they too had been alarmed at Athens’s growing power. A couple of decades earlier they had even fought a brief war against Athens to block its expansion. And they had this to think about: if they stayed out of the coming war they might lose their place as the leaders of the Peloponnesus. After some hesitation, Sparta joined the alliance, and war broke out in 431 B.C.

  We know a great deal about this war because one of the Athenian generals, Thucydides, wrote a history of it. At the beginning, Thucydides warns his readers that in his history they may miss “storytelling.” This is probably a gentle dig at that fine storytelling historian, Herodotus. Thucydides too could tell a story, but above all he wanted to explain why things happened. “I shall be content,” he wrote, “if the future student of these events, or of similar events, which are likely, given human nature, to occur in later times, finds my account of them useful. I have written not for immediate applause but for posterity.” He succeeded in this aim; readers still call his History of the Peloponnesian War a masterpiece.

  At first, Thucydides tells us, the Athenians fought with care. They used a strategy that made sense for a sea power battling a land power. Every year they allowed the Spartans to invade the land around Athens and lay it waste, knowing that the Spartans could not get over their high walls and into the city itself. Meanwhile, the Athenians took to their ships and sailed around the Peloponnesus, raiding towns along the coast.

  Thucydides shows us how the war brought out the basic natures of the city-states. After the first campaigning season of the war, the Athenians held a public funeral for its men who had been killed in battle. The whole town gathered, and their wartime leader, Pericles, addressed them. He aimed to inspire them by contrasting Athens with Sparta and other cities. “Our laws,” he reminded them, “provide equal justice for all in their private disputes. Our public opinion welcomes and honors talent in every field of achievement…ours is no mere work-a-day city. No other provides so many recreations for the spirit — contests and sacrifices all the year round, and beauty in our public buildings to cheer the heart and delight the eye day by day….

  “[The Spartans] toil from early boyhood in a grinding pursuit of courage, while we, free to live and wander as we please, march out none the less to face the very same dangers…. Our citizens attend both to public and private duties, and do not allow absorption in their own various affairs to interfere with their knowledge of the city’s. We differ from other states in considering the man who holds aloof from public life not as ‘quiet’ but as useless.”6

  6Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War (1960), pp. 110–17. The translation is by Sir Alfred Zimmern. I have made minor changes in the wording.

  Eventually, the Athenians dropped their strategy of sticking to what they did best, naval warfare. Instead, they set out to conquer the large Greek-settled city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily. Their rationale was that Syracuse was a wealthy friend of Sparta, and therefore a danger to Athens. The attack on Syracuse was a disaster, and most of the Athenian invaders were killed. But Athens wasn’t finished, and it battled on. A decade later though, with the help of gold from Persia, Sparta won the war. In 404 B.C. the Spartans sailed into Athens’s harbor at Piraeus and tore down the walls that for so long had kept them out of Athens.

  Its victory left Sparta the strongest city-state, but it used its power unwisely. During the war Sparta had promised all the city-states that it would restore freedom from Athens’s domination. Now, however, Sparta turned over the Greek Ionian cities on Asia Minor to Persia, the old enemy of Greek liberty. Sparta bullied the others, and for about thirty years it tried to force them into an empire of its own, harsher than the shattered one of Athens.

  The truth, however, is that Sparta was itself declining, and had been for decades. Yes, it had won the war, but largely because of Athens’s blunders. Sparta’s military system was breaking down, both at home and abroad. Many Spartan soldiers lost the farms that fed them, and when this happened they also lost their status as full members of the ruling class. When there were no longer enough of them to fill the army, Sparta refused to recruit new citizens. Instead it armed freed serfs, and social outcasts, and even men who fought for pay. Meanwhile, Spartans forgot the sacrificing spirit they had learned as boys. They now took bribes, and their kings took the biggest ones.

  Athens pulled itself together fairly quickly. A decade after the war had ended, Athens, Corinth, Thebes, and Argos and some other towns allied to overthrow the rule of Sparta, but nothing came of this. A generation later it was Thebes, not Athens, that defeated Sparta. Thebes did this in a way that up till then had seemed impossible: its army beat the Spartans in 371 B.C. in a straight-out battle. It was the first time in three centuries that Sparta had lost in such a fight. The bad news reached Sparta during a festival, while the men’s chorus was performing. The overseers let the chorus finish, and then they informed the families of the dead. As Spartans would, they told the women not to mourn in public but to bear the loss in silence.

  Athens, meanwhile, defeated its old rival in a way that counted even more than victory in war: it remained true to its vibrant self. In the fourth century B.C. Athens was still a prosperous business center, and able men were still proud to serve in its government. Athens was still the school of Greece, rich in artists, writers, and especially teachers and philosophers.

  The most famous of its thinkers were Plato and Aristotle. Plato was a pupil of Socrates, the teacher and gadfly. He wrote down his teacher’s dialogues and may also have composed some of them, as well as other books of his own. His mind ranged very far, and he touched on all the topics that a thinking person ponders at some point in life. Someone once observed that the history of philosophy is only a series of footnotes on what Plato wrote about the big questions.

  Perhaps the most important of these questions was this: how does one produce good men and a good state? In his most famous book, The Republic, Plato gives his answer. The important thing is to select a few talented people and educate them well. Sparta, he decided, was good at choosing future rulers and preparing them; the only trouble was that the Spartans did not teach the right things. Plato wanted to instruct his future rulers so that they could understand the goals that they should strive for. The basic test that Plato wanted rulers to apply to any public act was this: will it make us better humans than we were before?

  Aristotle was at one time a pupil of Plato, but he became a different kind of thinker. Whereas Plato dealt with great ideas, Aristotle surveyed fields of knowledge. His rules were: gather facts, analyze them, classify, discuss. This may sound dull, but, after all, f
acts are interesting. And so are Aristotle’s opinions. He believed, as Plato did, that the aim of each of us should be to understand what constitutes a good life, and then to live it. The purpose of a government is to help its members do this. However, he thought Plato’s ideas about philosopher-kings would not work. After studying the constitutions of many states, he decided that the best thing a city-state could do was to leave power in the hands of the middle classes, by which he seems to have meant the smaller landowners. They had the leisure time needed for government and were likely to oppose violent changes.

  Aristotle thought that human beings are at their best in city-states. “Man is an animal,” he wrote, “whose nature is to live in a city-state.” If you did not live in one, if you were unlucky enough to live outside Greece under a different kind of government, then you were something less than man at his best.

  Even these philosophers could get things wrong. Often, when they were describing an ideal government, both of these Athenians used Sparta as their model. The reason is clear: they admired Sparta’s order and discipline and its skill in shaping minds. They seem to have forgotten that in Sparta they, with their inquiring minds, would never have been encouraged to think freely on a range of topics, much less given the freedom to teach about them.