And so, bearing in mind that I am here smack in the context of discovery and not the context of justification, let me summarize:
Socrates radically departed from the Homeric Ethos of the Extraordinary, most especially as it had been intensified and politicized by imperialist Athens. The Greek adjective atopos, meaning out of place, strange, and the noun atopia, the quality of being out of place, strangeness, are used by Plato repeatedly to describe Socrates.51 Socrates was strange in a way that only those normatively at odds with their society are strange. Athens put him on trial for violating their values, and they were right that such a violation was exactly what he had in mind. How more transgressive can you be than to go after so central a notion as aretē, the linchpin of the Ethos of the Extraordinary? One of the charges against him may have been put in religious terms—he introduces new gods—but, as Plato takes pains to show us in his setting up of the Republic,52 the Athenians were tolerant of new gods. Socrates was a heretic at another level, far more deeply disturbing to his fellow Athenians, especially at that moment in their history, as we’ll see in chapter ζ.
Just how dangerous was it to debate what it means to live a life worth living in the shadow of the Acropolis? The answer to that particular question lies in the bottom of a vial of hemlock.
* * *
1A keystone of Athenian democracy was the abolition of any property qualifications for citizenship. There were some property classifications in Solon’s original constitution, but they were allowed to lapse into disuse so far as the rights of citizenship went. See pp. 151–152 below for what substituted for property in determining Athenian citizenship.
2It had been the Ionian states on the coast of Asia Minor, absorbed into the massive Persian empire, which had precipitated the war. When the Ionian states rebelled, Athens came to their rescue, and Darius resolved to teach all the Greeks a lesson. His first attack had come in 490 B.C.E. and he was defeated. Xerxes, whose empire by then reached from India in the east down to northern Africa in the south, had mounted a stupendously large force, intending to use his defeat of Greece to move into Europe. Herodotus, who wrote his account of the Persian Wars some fifty years later, estimated the Persian soldiers to have numbered more than a million, and the entire number of “barbarians,” including those who fed and ministered to the troops, to have been well over five million. Modern scholars consider this a gross overestimate, estimating the fighting force to have been somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000, but the invading force was, without a doubt, daunting; and Herodotus’ overestimation is a measure of just how extraordinary the Greeks had come to think of themselves for their defeat of the Persians.
3Themistocles was later subjected to ostracism, one of the safeguards of Athenian democracy by which they tried to prevent any one person from growing too influential, swaying the crowd until he assumes the power of a tyrant. Ostracism was put to the vote—the first vote was on whether to have an ostracism in any given year, and if the result was affirmative, the next vote was whom to ostracize. The ballots were broken pieces of pottery, ostraka. After ten years the ostracized individual could come back and resume his life as he’d left it. Themistocles, however, never returned and, ironically, ended his days in Persia.
4The Greeks also vanquished the Persians at the sea battle of Mycale, off the Ionian coast—traditionally on the very same day as the land battle of Plataea, though modern scholars are skeptical of this last piece of lore. In any case, the victory of Mycale probably quickly followed the news of the victory at Plataea.
5The helots were ritualistically abused. For example, every autumn, during the coming-of-age ritual for Spartan young men known as the Crypteia (a word meaning secret, from which we get our word “cryptic”), the helots could be hunted down and slaughtered with impunity. They were conquered Laconians, traditionally said to have been the residents of nearby Messenia, and thus fellow Hellenes, though, as with everything having to do with the ethnicity of the ancient Greeks, there is a world of discordant scholarship.
6Sparta was, in its own way, as intent on achieving the extraordinary as Athens, but its conception of the extraordinary was rigorously collective rather than individualistic. This collective aspect of Sparta’s notion of virtue invited Plato’s respect. There was, I’d argue, a conflict within Plato between Athenian individualism and Spartan collectivism. This conflict will surface in chapter δ, under the prodding of co-panelists Sophie Zee and Mitzi Munitz.
7Bomb Magazine 65 (Fall 1998): 36–41.
8Unlike Homer, Plato’s Socrates doesn’t measure the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary in terms of kleos, that is, the acclaim of others. Rather the difference, for him, between the ordinary and extraordinary is measured in moral terms (Apology 28b–c). This change in the measure of the extraordinary is of the essence of Socrates’ and Plato’s departure from Athenian norms. As has been remarked, Myles Burnyeat, among others, has argued that Socrates was guilty of the crime with which the Athenians charged him—namely his rejecting their values in favor of new ones. And we can see here, in Socrates’ both embracing Achilles’ choice of the extraordinary and rejecting the Homeric interpretation of what counts as extraordinary, exactly where the departure from Athenian norms resides.
9The Greek conception of the afterlife, such as it was, wasn’t designed to offer solace. One of the most searing moments in the Odyssey occurs in Book 11, when Odysseus, traveling to the underworld, meets various shades, among them the most heroic of them all, Achilles. Odysseus greets him with reverence, “blessed in life, blessed in death,” but Achilles quickly disabuses Odysseus of this mortal illusion, telling the living man that he would rather be enslaved to the worst of masters than be king over all the dead. The moral to be drawn is that whatever solace there is for human limitations must be sought in our earthly lives.
10Plato has Socrates, himself quoting the priestess Diotima, explain the obsessive love for kleos in pretty much these same existential terms, connecting it with a desire to defeat death: “In every way, this zeal, this love, is in pursuit of immortality.… When, if you will, you look at people’s fondness for fame, you may be surprised by their irrationality, unless you keep in mind what I have said and consider how terribly inflamed they are by a love of becoming a famous name and ‘laying down immortal glory for eternal time,’ and how they’re ready to face any danger for this—even more than for the sake of their children, to squander their money, to endure any pain, and even to die. So you think … that Alcestis would have given her life for Admetus, or that Achilles would have sought out death after Patroclus died, or you own Codrus would have sought to be the first to die for the sake of his sons’ kingdom, unless they thought there would be the immortal memory of their arête that we now have? That’s a long way from being the case. On the contrary, I believe all these people engage in these famous deeds in order to gain immortal virtue and a glorious reputation, and the better people they are, the more they do so, because they love immortality” (Symposium 208c–e). Plato isn’t himself endorsing, as Diotima does, this obsessive pursuit of kleos. In fact, he introduces the above quote by writing, “Like a perfect sophist, she said …”
11Known as the Tetragrammaton, because of the four Hebrew letters composing it, the name was permitted, according to the Mishnah (Berakhot 9:5), for everyday greetings until at least 586 B.C.E., when the First Temple was destroyed. In time, its pronunciation was permitted only to the priestly caste of Kohanim, traditionally regarded as descendants of Aaron, brother of Moses and first high priest, who would pronounce it in their public blessing of the people. After the death of the high priest Shimon the Righteous around 300 B.C.E. (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yoma 39b), the name was pronounced only by the high priest in the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur (Mishnah Sotah 7:6; Mishnah Tamid 7:2). The sages then passed on the correct pronunciation of the name to their disciples only once (some say twice) every seven years (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Kiddushin 71a). Finally, upon the destruction of the
Second Temple in 70 C.E., the name was no longer pronounced at all, though on Yom Kippur, when the liturgy of the Temple is recalled, the congregation and its leader prostrate themselves in simply remembering, but not enunciating, its pronunciation. Since the vowels are omitted from the Tetragrammaton, Jews traditionally believe that the correct pronunciation is no longer known, that “Jehovah” is, most likely, not the correct pronunciation. Still, in the home in which I was raised, we were never allowed to say that there was a Jehovah’s Witness at the door, but rather referred to the visitor as a Witness, just in case, so awesome was the power the word was felt to hold within itself.
12Karl Jaspers, The Way to Wisdom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 100.
13The Mind-Body Problem (1983; repr., New York: Penguin, 1993). Reissued in e-book form by plymptom.com.
14See, for example, G. Loewenstein and K. Moene, “On Mattering Maps,” in Understanding Choice, Explaining Behavior: Essays in Honour of Ole-Jørgen Skog, ed. Jon Elster, Olav Gjelsvik, Aanund Hylland, and Karl Moene (Oslo, Norway: Oslo Academic Press, 2006). Reprinted as “How Mattering Maps Affect Behavior,” Harvard Business Review (September 2009).
15Archaeologists say that belief in the supernatural—animistic spirits of nature lodged in animals, wind, trees, rivers, sun, moon—extend back at least 30,000 years to Cro Magnon man, whose cave paintings, requiring their gaining access to torturously inaccessible places, are interpreted as expressions of supernatural beliefs. Why else go to all that inconvenience? But I am here concerned with the quite different kind of preoccupations that motivated the normative responses of the Axial Age. I discuss the relation of the will to matter to religion at greater length in “Feminism, Religion, and Mattering,” Free Inquiry 34, no. 1 (December 2013–January 2014).
16David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011), p. 238.
17Nicolas Baumard and Pascal Boyer, “Explaining Moral Religions,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17, no. 6 (2013): 172–180.
18Pindar, “Isthmian V,” for Phylakidas of Aigina, pankration, 478? B.C.E., lines 7–12, from Pindar’s Victory Songs, trans. Frank J. Nisetich (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 311.
19Pindar, “Olympian 1,” for Hieron of Syracuse, race for single horse, 476 B.C.E., lines 81–85, in Pindar’s Victory Songs, trans. Frank J. Nisetich, p. 84.
20Pindar, “Pythian 8,” for Aristomenes of Aigina, wrestling, 446 B.C.E., lines 88–96, in Pindar’s Victory Songs, trans. Frank J. Nisetich, p. 205.
21The only two characters called godlike in the Iliad are Achilles and Helen, both of them remarkable for their beauty, though Achilles was remarkable in other ways as well. Helen earns her divine status merely by virtue of her beauty, since it was sufficient to make her name live on forever. There’s a poignant scene in the Iliad, when Helen remarks to Hector, the greatest of the Trojan heroes who will soon lose his life because of Helen’s tragedy-inspiring beauty, that they all seemed to be living a story for generations still unborn, “so even for generations we will live in song” (Iliad 6:358). She says it mournfully, since there is misery to be experienced and that’s never pleasant, but with a sense, too, of achievement. She will not pass into nothingness so long as she lives on in song and memory. Kleos-measured aretē is never to be equated with happiness.
22Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 78.
23Xenophanes, Fragment 2. This translation is taken from Andrew M. Miller, Greek Lyric: An Anthology in Translation (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1996), pp. 108–109. The Greek original is in elegiac couplets.
24Most of the clay tablets inscribed with Linear B were found in Knossos, Thebes, Mycenae, Pylos, and Cydonia. The extant writing is almost exclusively concerned with administrative matters connected with the palaces. It’s been hypothesized that the writing is all the work of a small guild of professional scribes, who were employed by the palaces, and that when those palaces were destroyed, literacy too was destroyed. Linear A is an even earlier script used in the Minoan civilization. Although Linear A and Linear B are clearly related to each other—with Linear B, a syllobary, being more advanced because it uses fewer symbols—Linear A has still not been deciphered.
25Their pottery and vials of perfumed olive oil were found in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and as far west as Sicily.
26Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). Quotes from pp. 117–119 and 124.
27The Jewish historian of the Judeo-Roman Wars known as Josephus argued, on the basis of the premise of Homer’s illiteracy, that the Greek people were not so very ancient, having only quite recently acquired writing. “However, there is not any writing which the Greeks agree to be genuine among them ancienter than Homer’s Poems, who must plainly be confessed later than the siege of Troy; nay, the report goes, that even he did not leave his poems in writing, but that their memory was preserved in song, and they were put together afterward, and that this is the reason of such a number of variations as are found in them” (Against Apion, 1.2.12), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2849/2849-h/2849-h.htm. The debate continues unabated today, with much ink spilled over one ambiguous line in Homer’s Iliad, which may or may not refer to writing. (Iliad 6.168–169). But, of course, Homer’s knowing of writing doesn’t entail that he, or any of the anonymous bards of the Iron Age knew how to write. For a display of contemporary passions stirred up by this question, see “Homer’s Literacy,” Joseph Russo in reply to Hugh Lloyd-Jones, New York Review of Books, March 5, 1992.
28Literacy was regained, with the import of a Semitic alphabet by way of the Phoenicians, which the Greeks adapted to their own language, using the signs for sounds that they didn’t have to indicate vowels, for which the Phoenicians lacked symbols. In adapting this imported alphabet to their own needs, the Greeks produced a system of writing for which there was a one-to-one correspondence between sound and symbol—and they were the first to do so. Literacy, however, remained the possession of the aristocracy.
29Instead of having the unwieldy 500 sitting day after day for the year of their office, each tribe sat on the administrative and executive council for one-tenth of the year.
30“Thus did the Athenians increase in strength. And it is plain enough, not from this instance only, but from many everywhere, that freedom is an excellent thing, since even the Athenians, who while they continued under the rule of tyrants, were not a whit more valiant than any of their neighbors, no sooner shook off the yoke than they became decidedly the first of all. These things show that, while undergoing oppression, they let themselves be beaten, since they worked for a master; but so soon as they got their freedom, each man was eager to do the best he could for himself. So fared it now with the Athenians.” The History of Herodotus, V, 78, translated by George Rawlinson, http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.5.v.html.
31Paul Woodruff, trans., Thucydides: On Justice, Power, and Human Nature; Selections from “The History of the Peloponnesian War” (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), ii, 41 (p. 43).
32See Appendix B.
33Plutarch describes how Pericles pulled the common people, whose champion he always represented himself as being, into his great schemes for using the riches of the empire to build Athens into a city of splendor. “And it was true that his military expeditions supplied those who were in the full vigor of manhood with abundant resources from the common funds, and in his desire that the unwarlike throng of common laborers should neither have no share at all in the public receipts, nor yet get fees for laziness and idleness, he boldly suggested to the people projects for great constructions, and designs for works which would call many arts into play and involve long periods of time, in order that the stay-at-homes, no whit less than the sailors and sentinels and soldiers, might have a pretext for getting a beneficial share of the public wealth. The materials to be used were stone, bronze, ivory, gold, ebony, and cypre
ss-wood; the arts which should elaborate and work up these materials were those of carpenter, moulder, bronze-smith, stone-cutter, dyer, worker in gold and ivory, painter, embroiderer, embosser, to say nothing of the forwarders and furnishers of the material, such as factors, sailors and pilots by sea, and, by land, wagon-makers, trainers of yoked beasts, and drivers. There were also rope-makers, weavers, leather-workers, road-builders, and miners. And since each particular art, like a general with the army under his separate command, kept its own throng of unskilled and untrained labourers in compact array, to be as instrument unto player and as body unto soul in subordinate service, it came to pass that for every age, almost, and every capacity the city’s great abundance was distributed and scattered abroad by such demands. So then the works arose, no less towering in their grandeur than inimitable in the grace of their outlines, since the workmen eagerly strove to surpass themselves in the beauty of their handicraft. And yet the most wonderful thing about them was the speed with which they rose. Each one of them, men thought, would require many successive generations to complete it, but all of them were fully completed in the heyday of a single administration.” Parallel Lives: The Lives of Plutarch, 12–13, vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library edition, 1916, pp. 39–40, trans. Bernadotte Perrin, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg,0007,012:12.
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