In doing good, too, we are the exact opposite of the rest of mankind. We secure our friends not by accepting favors but by granting them. And so this makes friendship with us something that can be counted on: for we are eager, as creditors, to cement by continued kindness our relation to our friends. If they do not respond with the same warmth, it is because they feel that their services will not be given spontaneously but only as repayment of a debt. We are alone among mankind in doing men benefits, not on calculation of self-interest, but in the fearless confidence of freedom.
In a word, I say our City as a whole is an education to Greece, and that our citizens yield to none, man by man, for independence of spirit, many-sidedness of attainment, and complete self-reliance in limbs and brain.
That this is no vainglorious phrase but actual fact is proven by the universal leadership that our way of life has won us. No other city of the present day goes out to her ordeal greater than ever man dreamed; no other is so powerful that the invader feels no bitterness when he suffers at her hands, and her subjects no shame at the indignity of their dependence. Great indeed are the signs and symbols of our power. Men of the future will wonder at us, as all men do today. We need no Homer or other man of words to praise us; for such give pleasure for a moment, but the truth will put to shame their imaginings of our deeds. For our pioneers have forced a way into every sea and every land, establishing among all mankind, in punishment or beneficence, eternal memorials of their settlement.
Such then is the City for whom, lest they should lose her, the men whom we celebrate died a soldier’s death; and it is but natural that each of us, who survive them, should wish to spend ourselves in her service. That, indeed, is why I have spent many words on the City. I wished to show that we have more at stake than men who have no such inheritance, and to support my praise of the dead by making clear to you what they have done. For if I have chanted the glories of the City, it was these men, and men like them, who have adorned her with such splendor. With them, as with few among Greeks, words cannot magnify the deeds that they have done.
Such an end as we have here seems indeed to show us what a good life is, from its first signs of power to its final consummation. For even where life’s previous record showed faults and failures, it is just to weigh the last full measure of devotion against them all. There they wiped out evil with good and did the City more service as soldiers than they did her harm in private life. There no hearts grew faint because they loved their riches more than honor; no poor man shirked his duty in the hope of future wealth. All these they put aside to strike a blow for the City. Counting the quest to avenge her honor as the most glorious of all ventures, and leaving Hope, the uncertain goddess, to send them what she would, they faced the foe as they drew near him in the strength of their own manhood; and when the shock of battle came, they chose rather to suffer the utmost than to win life by weakness. So their memory has escaped the reproaches of men’s lips, but they bore instead on their bodies the marks of men’s hands, and in a moment of time, at the climax of their lives, were rapt away from a world filled, for their dying eyes, not with terror but with glory.
Such were the men who lie here and such the City that inspired them. We survivors may pray to be spared their bitter hour but must disdain to meet the foe with a spirit less daring. Fix your eyes on the greatness of Athens as you have it before you day by day, fall in love with her, and when you feel her great, remember that this greatness was won by men with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense of honor in action, who, if they failed in private life, disdained to deprive the City of their services but sacrificed their lives as their best offerings on her behalf. So they gave their bodies to the commonwealth and received, each for his own memory, praise that will never die, and with it the grandest of all sepulchres, not that in which their mortal bones are laid, but a home in the minds of men, where their glory remains fresh to stir to speech or action as the occasion may require.
For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men’s lives. For you now, it remains to rival what they have done and, knowing that the secret of happiness is freedom and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly to stand aside from the enemy’s onslaught. For it is not the poor and luckless, the ones who have no hope of prosperity, who have most cause to reckon death as little loss, but those for whom fortune may yet keep reversal in store and who would feel the change most if trouble befell them. Moreover, weakly to decline the trial is more painful to a man of spirit than death coming sudden and unperceived in the hour of strength and confidence.
Therefore I do not mourn with the parents of the dead who are here with us. Rather, I will comfort them. For they know that they have been born into a world of manifold chances and that he is to be accounted happy to whom the best lot falls—the best sorrow, such as is yours today, or the best death, such as fell to these, for whom life and happiness were bound together. I know it is not easy to give you comfort. I know how often in the joy of others you will have reminders of what was once your own, and how men feel sorrow, not for the loss of what they have never tasted, but when something that has grown dear to them has been snatched away. But you must keep a brave heart in the hope of other children, those of you who are still of an age to bear them. For the newcomers will help you forget the gap in your own circle, and will help the City to fill up the ranks of its workers and its soldiers. For no man is fitted to give fair and honest advice in council if he has not, like his fellows, a family at stake in the hour of the City’s danger. To you who are past the age of vigor I would say: count the long years of happiness so much gain to set off against the brief space that yet remains, and let your burden be lightened by the glory of the dead. For the love of honor alone is not staled by age, and it is by honor, not, as some say, by gold, that the helpless end of life is cheered.
I turn to those among you who are children or brothers of the fallen, for whom I foresee a mighty contest with the memory of the dead. Their praise is in all men’s mouths; and even if you should rise to heroic heights, you will be judged harshly for achieving less than they. For the living have the jealousy of rivals to contend with, but the dead are honored with unchallenged admiration.
If I must speak a word to those who are now in widowhood on the powers and duties of women, I will cast all my advice into one brief sentence. Great will be your glory if you do not lower the nature that is within you—hers greatest of all whose praise or blame is least bruited on the lips of men.
I have said what I had to say, according to the law, and the graveside offerings to the dead have been duly made. Henceforward the City will support their children till they come of age: such is the crown and benefit she holds out to the dead and to their kin for the trials they have undergone for her. For where the prize is highest, there, too, will you find the best and the bravest.
And now, when you have finished your lamentation, let each of you depart.
Pericles’s words are echoed in other critical speeches of later Western history. His modest beginning cannot but remind us of Lincoln at Gettysburg—“The world will little note nor long remember what we say here”—even to the point of Lincoln’s exact phrase “the last full measure of devotion.” Pericles’s resolve—“the secret of happiness is freedom and the secret of freedom a brave heart”—and his rhetorical emphases on blood and toil are so very reminiscent of Churchill’s in his repeated promise to the British people during the Second World War of “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” And no wonder, for both orators knew their Thucydides and knew this speech.
For me at least, the most obvious later parallel is the 1961 presidential inauguration address of John F. Kennedy. America was then at the height of its power and prestige, the unembarrassed leader of the free world, whose classless way of life, civil tolerance, and freedom of speech were the envy of humanity. We were
, or so we thought, without peer or precedent, an open society dedicated to “the pursuit of happiness,” the opposite of the secretive Soviet Union and its dreary militarism, generous in victory, openhanded to those who sought our help. Kennedy’s cadences were as measured—and as tough—as those of Pericles: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” When Kennedy admitted that his was “a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out,” he exhibited Periclean modesty and balance, and there was none of the exaggeration and bombast that clangs through current political discourse. When he told of sacrifices yet to come, like Pericles he pulled no punches. It is hard today to imagine an American president reminding individuals of their obligations to the nation as a whole—or even daring to suggest that we must give up something as trivial as our SUVs for the sake of the common good. What an incredible moment it would be if we were once more to hear a president say with a straight face, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
Kennedy may remind us, if distantly, of Pericles in other ways as well. Known as the First Citizen of Athens and fifteen times elected stratēgos, Pericles [43] dominated not only Athenian politics but Athenian imagination. For he was not merely a political animal but a man of genuine intellectual and artistic interests, and he counted among his close friends the sculptor Phidias (who created the great statue of Athēnē Promachos at his request), the dramatist Sophocles (who gave us the skeptical Jocasta), Herodotus (the father of history), and the debunking philosopher Anaxagoras, who had called into question the existence of the gods. Though his first marriage ended in divorce, Pericles formed a lasting union with the cultivated Aspasia, an Athenian celebrity who had once been a courtesan (and therefore a woman of far more freedom and worldly experience than most of her sisters). The call to share the company of this romantic couple and the conversation of their table was the invitation most prized by fifth-century Athenians. Pericles’s death—by plague in the second year of the war—was a blow from which Athens never completely recovered, as it drifted politically and militarily from one disaster to another till the unthinkable happened and the empire itself was irrecoverably lost and with it most of the city’s power and prestige.
Of course, all ages and all leaders have their blind spots. The City of Freedom that Pericles lauded was full of slaves—and of freeborn women whose lives were lived in an obscurity that Pericles’s closing reference makes all too clear. But the Athenian empire was for Pericles an unquestioned good. The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave that Kennedy presided over was a land where dark-skinned people were relegated to a fearful obscurity that was not so far from slavery—and women, if known at all, were normally known as their husband’s wives. But American power was in Kennedy’s presentation always on the side of right.
One cannot fail to note how secular are the language and the overall approach of Pericles. The gods are hardly mentioned; Athenians must rely on themselves. No more does Kennedy take refuge in invocations of divinity; and only at the very end of his speech does he mention God: “Here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.” In other words, let’s stick to the world as we know it and leave God out of it. This is not a theology (or an anti-theology) but a strategy. In neither case is there a confession of atheism, just an implied acknowledgment that a politician is no oracle and has no business speaking on behalf of heaven. It was this lack of knee-jerk religiosity that prompted Harvey Cox, then a young, little-known Baptist minister, to write admiringly of Kennedy in The Secular City as the ideal secular politician, who refused, in a religiously diverse society, to tart up his speeches with pious cant: “Though there can be little doubt that [Kennedy’s] Christian conscience informed many of his decisions, especially in the area of racial justice, he stalwartly declined to accept the semireligious halo that Americans, deprived of a monarch who reigns gratia dei, have often tried to attach to their chief executive.”
After the Age of Pericles, as Athenian confidence dimmed, that famous confidence was all too often replaced by cynicism, modesty by cockiness, sincerity by manipulation, strength by bluster. Though the gods were more and more loudly invoked, the prayers rang hollow, the appeal to conscience turned mute, and any reference to social justice tended to be met with a knowing smirk. And though the parallels to our present day are only partial, they are vivid enough to give us pause, as God, now strangely shorn of his justice, appears to direct our every national move.1
THE FINAL CRUMBLING of Athenian confidence left a large social vacuum. In the arts, as we have seen, idealism was succeeded by realism, realism by a jaded desire for momentary stimulation (as in the surprise hermaphrodites—of which there were many), flagging desire by crabbed pessimism. In philosophy, the loss of Athenian independence precipitated a narrowing of subject matter. No longer did philosophers aspire to the deep spiritual insights and broad moral vision of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They divided into conflicting schools and wandered through the Greco-Roman world as permanent immigrants, picking up tutoring jobs as they could. The names of their schools are still with us, not so much as descriptions of current schools of philosophy as of human temperaments and mind-sets. There were the Sophists, who taught their charges how to win an argument without regard to the truth; the Skeptics, who believed that no certain knowledge was possible; the Cynics, who taught self-sufficiency; the Stoics, who taught virtuous detachment from material things; the Epicureans, who taught that “pleasure is the beginning and end of living happily.” All these schools (and many more) were in competition with one another—for the minds of men as well as for tutoring jobs—and within each school were serious thinkers whose philosophies were far more modulated and subtle than my broadside characterizations of their teachings would suggest. But the upshot was a debased intellectual climate, fragmented and agnostic. Well, the Stoics may be right, so I think I’ll spend the rest of the day practicing self-denial. On the other hand, the Epicureans may be right, so I think I’ll tuck into another plate of that scrumptious wild boar.
Religion also fragmented. The Greeks and the Romans tended to interact with one another in prickly, high-handed ways. The conquered Greeks, knowing they were the cultural and intellectual superiors of their conquerors, could be touchy, resentful, and unbending. The Romans, having the inferiority complex of all arrivistes, took refuge too easily in shouting, bullying, and otherwise throwing their weight around. Greek artists and philosophers, dependent as they now were on Roman wealth and patronage, were not unlike contemporary Frenchmen who cannot bear to acknowledge that France is no longer the cultural and economic navel of the world. Often enough, in the eyes of the Romans, there seemed no way to placate Greek outrage. But the Romans did try. They sat at the feet of Greek tutors to improve their minds, they read and imitated Greek literature, and they commissioned myriad copies of Greek buildings and sculptures to enhance their simple towns. And they copied, insofar as they could, the external manifestations of Greek religion.
Of the many peoples of Earth, the Romans may have had the most boring religion of all. They had a pantheon of gods, patron-protectors of various families and tribes, but most of these gods were little more than names. Contact with the impressive stories of Greek mythology and the thrilling art that accompanied them—a contact that began as a result of the Greek colonization of southern Italy—encouraged the Romans to dress up their own religion in Greek fashions. Their high God, Jupiter, they reinterpreted as a variant of Greek Zeus. (In this, they were certainly right. The prehistoric people who lived in an area of southern Russia and spoke the original Indo-European language worshiped the Sky-Father and called him “Diespiter”—the word that became “Zeu Pater,” or “Father Zeus,” to their primeval Greek-speaking descendants and “Jup-piter” to their primeval Latin-speaking descendants.) Roman Venus was assigned the Gre
ek stories about Aphrodite, Juno took on the stories of Hera, Minerva those of Athena, Mars those of Ares, Vulcan those of Hephaestus, and so forth. This instant mythmaking gave the Roman gods faces as well as stories and considerably enlivened Roman imagination.
Roman religion was basically a businessman’s religion of contractual obligations. Though scrupulous attention was paid to the details of the public rituals, which had been handed down from time immemorial, it was all pretty much in the spirit of “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”—rituals for favors. Not only were there few Roman myths, there was virtually no theology or interest in the theoretical aspects of religion, the very enigmas that had sparked the speculations of the earliest Greek philosophers. Sometimes, even the name of a god was forgotten. In the Aeneid Virgil presents the Trojan prince Aeneas, the supposed ancestor of the Romans, being led by Evander, a local Latin king, to the Capitoline Hill, where the king informs the Trojan: “This grove, this hill, tree-topped, are some god’s home … although we do not know which god.”
The Romans, being practical, can-do folk, did at length take some interest in the ethical end of philosophy—the question of how best to live—which encouraged them to sit still long enough to gain some tips from the later Greek philosophers, especially the self-denying Stoics and the pleasure-loving Epicureans—the two philosophical vogues that most caught Roman fancy (such as it was). Love of Order, the very quality that made the Romans such skilled administrators of their vast empire, limited their aptitude for things intellectual and artistic. The creative curiosity that made the Greeks such cultural giants limited and, finally, undid their earlier imperial successes. Their vibrant energy was far more stirred by art, ideas, and political innovation than it ever was by the day-to-day business of empire.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea Page 22