There is a kind of parallel discussed by Stephen Greenblatt in The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. The humanists who seeded the European Renaissance—first and foremost Petrarch (1304–1374), joined by his contemporaries Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1374) and Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406)—were conscious of living in an age overshadowed by a glorious past, among whose ruins they lived, whose ways of thinking and living they were eager to recapture for themselves, which led to their obsessive seeking of ancient lost writings. “The urgency to the enterprise reflects their underlying recognition that there was nothing obvious or inevitable about the attempt to recover or imitate the language, material objects, and cultural achievements of the very distant past. It was a strange thing to do, far stranger than continuing to live the ordinary, familiar life that men and women had lived for centuries, making themselves more or less comfortable in the midst of the crumbling, mute remains of antiquity. Those remains were everywhere visible in Italy and throughout Europe: bridges and roads still in use after more than a millennium, the broken walls and arches of ruined baths and markets, temple columns incorporated into churches, old inscribed stones used as building materials in new constructions, fractured statues and broken vases. But the great civilization that left these traces had been destroyed.” Coupled with the dazzled admiration for the past was the acute sense of an unworthy present: “For his own present, where he was forced to live, Petrarch professed limitless contempt. He lived in a sordid time, he complained, a time of coarseness, ignorance, and triviality that would quickly vanish from human memory.” Zeal for the achievements of ancestors was converted into equally zealous ambition. “To prove its worth, Petrarch and Salutati both insisted, the whole enterprise of humanism had not merely to generate imitations of the classical style but to serve a larger ethical end. And to do so it needed to live fully and vibrantly in the present.”26 Salutati, who would channel his aspirations into ambitions for his beloved city-state of Florence, wrote, “I have always believed that I must imitate antiquity not simply to reproduce it, but in order to produce something new.” The ideal of the “Renaissance man,” with isotropic achievements shooting out in every direction like the rays of the sun, captures the kind of ambition that can be unleashed when a sense of former greatness sets the bar.
The Homeric normative vision, its ideal represented by a young man who would choose the short but song-worthy life, was an age that judged its own relative insignificance by the measure of a glorious past. Its heroic specimens of humanity must have lived, in that long-ago and legendary time, on the most intimate of terms with the denizens of Mount Olympus, sometimes so intimate that they mated with the gods or were the offspring of such couplings. It wasn’t the distance to the gods that was elongated in the imagination, but rather the distance to the mortals who had disappeared from earth. The Mycenaeans who had built the brilliantly engineered bridges and roads, the massive palaces and treasure-house tombs, who left behind stones inscribed with uninterpretable writing, represented realizations of the human possibilities that made them seem closer to the gods than to the sort of men who populated a time of coarseness and ignorance, destined to vanish from human memory. These epic poems created during the prehistoric period—until recently called the Greek Dark Age—were sung by bards and perfected over the course of the illiterate centuries, with certain phrases polished into formulaic idiom chunks—what the linguists call “collocations”—to aid both with memorization and with the constraints of the dactylic hexameter. These bards were called “rhapsodes,” meaning those who stitched together songs, and the finished works we now call the Iliad and the Odyssey were perhaps stitched together in their final form by one and the same person, whom we call Homer, who, if he truly existed—everything is questionable about this prehistorical time—lived sometime around 750–700 B.C.E. The Iliad and Odyssey can be thought of as a kind of wiki-epic, with many mutually anonymous authors collaborating. (It is a matter of fierce debate, going back at least to the first century C.E., whether Homer, assuming he existed, was himself illiterate.)27
In a mere few centuries, the Greeks went from anomie and illiteracy—lacking even an alphabet—to that explosive outpouring of creativity which was to set the bar for the Romans and thus for the humanists of whom Greenblatt writes. The Homeric tales were an integral part of to hellēnikon that united all the poleis. But whereas before they had sung of these heroes of a remote and superior age that had vanished forever, they now could imagine becoming avatars of the heroic themselves. As would happen once again with the humanists of the early Renaissance, admiration for the past was converted into ambitions for the present, the Ethos of the Extraordinary reconfiguring from backward-looking ancestor-awe into norms of action. This conversion was perhaps partly tied to the enormous shift that the reemerging stability brought about, over the course of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E., as the city-states emerged out of the anomie of the previous few centuries and literacy returned.28 Centuries of singing about heroes had prepared the way for an ethos that celebrated the extraordinary possibilities that human life can attain. The Greek-speaking peoples emerged into the historical period prepared to evolve into a society of unprecedented ambition and restlessness. Not only kings could aspire to inspiring tales of wondrous feats; that aspiration—if not its realization—was the birthright of all Homer-quoters. The heroes of the former age no longer functioned to cut a Greek down to size but to inspire him to assume heroic proportions himself. (And I hope Plato will forgive me the male pronoun here. One of the mysteries, still, of the Greek Ethos of the Extraordinary was the large gap between the female paragons, whether mortal or immortal, presented in their epics and dramas, on the one hand, and the female possibilities for achieving extraordinary lives, on the other. Plato was all for closing that gap. See his discusssion in Republic 451c–457b/c, which ends with the words “male and female guardians must share their entire way of life and … our argument is consistent when it states that this is both possible and beneficial.”)
But still, how did such a change overtake the Greeks of the historical age? How did they go from a mythology that stood in passive awe before the human possibilities of greatness to actively undertaking the realization of those possibilities for themselves? It must have been, for the most part, gradual, as all such processes are, but if one is to point to one historical event as relevant, then the choice is obvious. No collective experience so transformed the Greeks’ perception of themselves as their unlikely defeat of the Persians. In vanquishing the vastly superior forces of this world empire, the Greeks had given their poets something contemporary to sing about. Herodotus initiates his Histories, which is to say initiates the practice of history itself, with these words: “These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he published, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory.” The Greco-Persian Wars helped to transform the Ethos of the Extraordinary from a mythologized memory into a working normative framework. Aristotle, writing his Politics at least a century after the wars, observes the effect that the triumph over the amassed forces of the Persians had on the self-confidence of the Greeks, spilling over into the life of the mind that was of particular concern to him. “Proud of their achievements, men pushed farther afield after the Persian wars; they took all knowledge for their province, and sought ever wider studies” (Politics I.341).
And nowhere were this pride and this pushing more assertively on display than in the Athens of the fifth century, living out its days beneath the splendor of its Acropolis. The sense of Athenian exceptionalism added a political dimension to the Ethos of the Extraordinary. Athenian exeptionalism allowed for the extraordinary to be spread around, distributed among all Athenian citizens, solving the central paradox that the ethos presented in its desideratum that everybody must achieve an exceptional life—reminiscent of the fictional Lake
Wobegon as a place “where all the childen are above average.” All Athenian citizens, merely by virtue of being Athenian citizens, could rest assured that they were above average. Athenian exceptionalism granted its citizens a kind of participatory extraordinariness. The unique form of government, democracy, which it evolved by fits and starts, gave each Athenian citizen an extraordinary degree of participation in shaping policy. Many important decisions—for example, whether or not to go to war and whom to send as generals—were voted on by all the citizens. Other decisions were made by the Council of 500, but the council, too, was composed of average citizens who were chosen by lot and served for a year, each of the ten artificially constructed tribes contributing fifty members.29 So if Athens was singularly great, it was a singularity to which all its citizens could singularly lay claim. In his Histories, there is an extraordinary passage in which Herodotus of Halicarnassus takes much the same view of the Athenians as they take of themselves, breaking out into a paean of praise for the special freedom that the Athenians had achieved with their democracy, and crediting it with having made them the first among the Greeks.30
And if the bulk of the (otherwise ordinary) citizens didn’t intuit this participatory extraordinariness for themselves, there was their extraordinary leader, Pericles, whose very name means “surrounded by glory,” to articulate it for them. “In sum, I say that our city as a whole is a lesson for Greece, and that each of us presents himself as a self-sufficient individual, disposed to the widest possible diversity of actions, with every grace and great versatility. This is not merely a boast of words for the occasion, but the truth in fact, as the power of this city, which we have obtained by having this character, makes evident. For Athens is the only power now that is greater than her fame when it comes to the test.… We do not need Homer, or anyone else, to praise our power with words that bring delight for a moment, when the truth will refute his assumptions about what was done. For we have compelled all seas and all lands to be open to us by our daring; and we have set up eternal monuments on all sides, of our setbacks as well as of our accomplishments.”31 So declared Pericles in his famous Funeral Oration, burying the dead of one of the early battles of the Peloponnesian War—a war which can itself be seen as a result of the Ethos of the Extraordinary and the overreaching to which it led, both individually and collectively.32
It was under Pericles that the kleos-worthy urban renewal of the Acropolis had taken place.33 All that an Athenian citizen—an otherwise average Timon, Dicaeus, or Heiron—had to do in order to feel lifted above the ordinary was cast his eyes upward to the thirty-foot colossus of Athena, sculpted by the genius of Phidias from the bronze of the spoils of the Persians defeated at the battle of Marathon. There she stood, the symbol of their collective ascendancy, holding her ground between the Parthenon and the Propylaia, her spear in her right hand held aloft, its tip flashing in the sun-bronzed sky, bronze to bronze. Athena’s crested helmet and spear could be seen for miles out to sea.
If, as Aristotle attests, a great deal of Greece exploded into ambitions raying out in every direction, the epicenter of this explosion was Athens. It became, in the wake of the Persian defeat, an imperial power, forcing tribute from its allies, who, when they visited Athens and looked up at the magnificence displayed atop the Acropolis, might very well have felt something quite different from the the Athenian citizen’s pride of exceptionalism. Every year, when crowds from all over Greece arrived for the drama festival, bringing “tribute,” they might have reflected on how Athens had removed the Delian treasury to Athens, and the building campaign it had permitted, and thought of Athenian exceptionalism more in terms of theft and greed.34
While Sparta receded into its insularity—even recommending that the Ionian poleis be allowed to revert back to Persian dominion so as to provoke no further foreign wars—Athens, in the decades after the wars, exploded outward. The very notion of a shared Greek culture didn’t really emerge until Athens, after the Persian Wars, reshaped Greek culture in its own image.35 A speaker in Plato’s Protagoras describes Athens as “the prytaneum of Hellas” (337d), its central hearth and shrine. Pericles speaks of Athens as “the school of Hellas.”36 The epitaph for Euripides declared Athens “the Hellas of Hellas.”37
Athens was not just a city, in our sense of the term, but a polis, or city-state. All of the poleis of ancient Greece—of which there were, according to the best modern tally, 1,035, though not all were coexistent38—were independent states, with their own (very active) armies and their own forms of government. Each polis had a city center, its astu, usually walled and containing an acropolis, or “city on an extremity,” high up and thus defensible, probably the reason that the original settlement had grown around it. The astu was surrounded by extensive territories, the khora, which included farmlands, olive groves, vineyards. The more established cities—Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, Argos—also had colonial settlements, other cities that they either established or seized and that would pay taxes to the “metropolis,” the mother polis, and were required to be allies in war. Most poleis weren’t large. The average number of citizens was between 133 and 800.39 Athens had a citizen population of about 30,000, while its total number of inhabitants was in the vicinity of 100,000, which means that only one out of three residents had the rights of citizenship. Though there were no property qualifications, as there were in the Greek oligarchies, citizenship in the Athenian democracy was hard to come by. Women, children, and slaves were excluded from citizenship, as in all poleis. So too were foreign residents, the metics, who were often among the richest of those living in Athens. Athenians prided themselves on the myth that they, alone of all Hellenes, were autochthonous, literally “sprung from the earth,” by which they meant that they had always occupied the same soil. Being born of an Athenian father had long been a requirement for citizenship, but in 451 B.C.E. Pericles tightened this law, the pride in autochthony having strengthened following the Persian Wars and Athenian imperial hegemony. Now citizenship required both father and mother to be Athenian-born, making citizenship even more exclusive and desirable, just as Athens was asserting itself throughout Hellas as the standard for what made all Hellenes great.
Political experimentation was rife in ancient Greece, and one of the most radical experiments was the one that Athens pursued, off and on, but mostly on, dating roughly from, say, the reforms of Cleisthenes in the sixth century B.C.E.40 until the eventual triumph of Alexander of Macedonia in the third century B.C.E. We get our word “democracy”—rule by the people—from the form of government, the demokratia, that Athens pursued, often to the dismay and derision of the other poleis.
So potent had the sense of Athenian exceptionalism grown that participation in the life of the city might almost seem, to Athenian citizens, to provide the very definition of aretē—again a point that Pericles explicitly makes in his Funeral Oration, cataloguing all of the Athenian achievements, from the exceptionalism of its democracy to its superiority-bred magnanimity: “So that we alone do good to others not after calculating the profit, but fearlessly and in the confidence of our freedom” (ii.40). Its vanquished enemies should almost take pride, he suggests, in being vanquished by such specimens of humanity.
The suggestion is that all of humankind ought to aspire, if it were but possible, to what Athens was achieving, and most certainly all Hellenes, though they could not hope to become voting Athenian citizens, ought to look to Athens as providing the model of aretē.41 And it was true that artists and thinkers flocked to Athens, eager to be in the center of the world, even without the benefits of citizenship. Aristotle, who came to study at Plato’s Academy and founded his own Lyceum, had been born, as has been mentioned, far north in Stageira, in Chalcidice, his father the physician to the king of Macedonia. Athenian superiority drew to itself more superiority, intensifying its sense of its own exceptionalism, which typically happens with imperial powers. The ever-higher achieving that this allows is the most handy way for imperialism to defend itself,
should it feel the need, and this is true even now.42
And it was in the shadow of the Acropolis that Socrates went about his daily work, which was to try to sow doubt in his fellow citizens that they had any notion of what their lives were about. You’re quite right that the unexceptional life is not worth the living, but what is the exceptionality that matters? Aretē can’t be relegated to Athenian politics. It’s not enough, he’s constantly haranguing the Athenians, to be a citizen of Athens. You haven’t crossed the finish with the voice of the crowd chanting the sweet sound of your name, assuring you that you’ve achieved what most matters. You haven’t even gotten to the starting line.
Plato had probably known about Socrates since he was a young boy. His older brother, Glaucon, was a Socratic enthusiast before Plato was of an age to appreciate the point of Socratic antics.43 The soldier and historian Xenophon, who was also devoted to Socrates and left us his own anecdotes and impressions in several works, treats Plato’s older brother as something of a doofus. Xenophon recounts that Socrates interceded when Glaucon was in danger of making an ass of himself before the Assembly, or ekklêsia, the central institution of Athenian democracy, held under the open skies, on the hill called the Pnyx, with a wide open view of the Acropolis. Glaucon had wanted to set himself up as a man with whom to be politically reckoned, “and not one of his relatives or other friends could prevent him from getting himself dragged down from the tribunal and making himself ridiculous,” writes Xenophon. But Socrates—for the sake of Plato, Xenophon tells us, and it is the only time that Xenophon ever mentions Plato—intervened to inform Glaucon that he hadn’t a clue regarding the affairs of state.44 Though Xenophon scoffs in his telling, still it is a point in Glaucon’s favor that, though he fancied himself a would-be politician, he could be convinced that he didn’t know what he was talking about. In any case, this is only Xenophon’s version of Glaucon.
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