That brende the temple of Ysidis
In Athenes, loo, that citee.”
“And wherfor didest thou so?” quod she.
“By my thrift,” quod he, “madame,
I wolde fayn han had a fame
As other folk hadde in the toun.”
Contemporary analogues are unfortunately plentiful. As a recent book argues, the easiest way to become famous, if that is your most urgent goal and you are endowed with no particular assets or talents, is to “kill innocent people. The more random your victims the better because it sends the message that no one is safe. And when they’re scared, people pay attention.”2 Obviously, the author isn’t endorsing random violence as a course of action, but rather seeking to explain the mind-set that transforms too may ordinary settings into scenes of mayhem and tragedy. Perhaps a society that has slipped back into celebrating “acoustic renown” as an end in itself should be extra careful about its gun regulations. But back to ancient Athens.
If one aspect of the culture goaded a Greek to spare no efforts and to produce a life that would leave others gaping in astonishment, then excess and overreaching were exactly what was called for. It was as if the two clashing imperatives—one derived from the Ethos of the Extraordinary and the other from the advice inscribed on the Delphic temple—might somehow be reconciled in a life that would, at one and the same time, accept nothing less than the extraordinary and yet also be sensible, safe, and temperate, avoiding the wanton transgression of hubris.
The tension can be transposed into the language of the gods. On the one hand, there is the desideratum, Go forth and be godlike! And on the other hand, the antiphonal response comes back: In knowing thyself, O mortal, know first and foremost that you are no god! It seems a dilemma, with no help forthcoming from Mount Olympus. There’s never much help emanating from that particular sphere, most especially of a normative nature.
The Olympian gods and goddesses don’t inhabit a higher moral plane, from which ethical standards can issue, together with divine assurance that our lives are worth something in their eyes. The Olympic denizens are only more powerful versions of ourselves3 and, given their power, must be propitiated lest they lower the odds of our getting through life unscathed by tragedy. They can hold us back in our worldly endeavors or they can help us, demote us or promote us, and we must try to haggle and barter with them, which is what Greek prayers tended to do. The gods are less like the unspeakably holy Jehovah and more like idolized but bribable elder siblings—tantalizingly beyond us, yes, but not so unthinkably beyond that we can’t emulate them, thereby living extraordinary godlike lives. But this achievement itself is fraught with danger. Just like those older siblings, the gods can turn mean when they feel us gaining on them, do something spiteful just to show us that they can. Even when they favor us, they can turn on a drachma, desert us at the very moment when we need them the most—just as Apollo did to Hector, leaving him to the blood fury of Achilles. Our reversals of fortune are to be read as signs of their disfavor, whether because of something we ourselves did or failed to do, or for some other reason entirely, a deal they’d hatched among themselves. The gods exist for their own sakes and not for ours and do little to make us feel at home in the cosmos, being unreliable at best and at worst downright hostile. The existential upshot is that, despite the Olympians’ propinquity, we’re left all on our own when it comes to solving the existential questions that emerged over wide reaches of the world during the Axial Age. In this sense, Greek society, as rife with religious rites as it was, prepared the way for a secular worldview.
It also prepared the way for the genius of Greek tragedy. Our being ultimately all on our own forms the background assumption of many of the masterpieces of Greek tragedy, none more so than Prometheus Bound, with its genocidal Zeus:
When first upon his high, paternal throne
He took his seat, forth with to divers Gods
Divers good gifts he gave, and parceled out
His empire, but of miserable men
Recked not at all; rather it was his wish
To wipe out man and rear another race. (229–234)4
If there was a certain strain in the culture that exhorted a person to become godlike—and Plato, in his own way, endorsed such a goal—then it wasn’t in order to attract the attention of the gods. All things being equal, it’s better if they just don’t notice you. You must at once both impress your fellow mortals while also not attracting undue attention and possible resentment from the touchy gods.
It’s odd for us—whether we adhere to a particular religion or not—to consider a religion that is silent regarding issues on which religions as we now know them are loquacious. I was brought up as a child to believe that all my deeds—a nibble from a friend’s (not certified “kosher”) Hostess Twinkie, a donation from my meager allowance to a charity for orphans, a spin-doctored rendition of a quarrel with a sister—get inscribed in a heavenly book, which, come the autumnal Days of Awe, will be scrutinized, tallied, and evaluated. Terrifying, yes, but also quite effective in inducing a robust sense of human consequentiality. No less than the Lord of the Hosts himself takes note of that Hostess Twinkie.
The Abrahamic religions powerfully address the problem of human worth, as do other religions that have demonstrated their millennia-long staying power. In the case of the Hebrews, the phrase bi-tzelem elohim, meaning “in the image of God,” provides an answer to the question of human worth. The phrase is used three times in Genesis, all of them in what have come to be called the Priestly portions of the Torah, usually dated to the sixth or fifth centuries B.C.E., meaning relatively late for the Torah’s authorship. It’s in the last of the three passages (9:6) that the normative dimension of the phrase fully emerges. As the King James Version translates it: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” The implication is that God’s impressing his image on man confers worth sufficient to make the shedding of blood prohibited. The Abrahamic religions have, in their turn, so impressed themselves on ethical thought that it is sometimes hard for adherents, even now, to fathom how humans could have worth without this divine impression.
In fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive how non-believers can muster sufficient commitment to their own lives to get out of bed each morning, let alone the ethical wherewithal to regard others as deserving of moral regard. Once one “comes out” as an atheist, these are the inquisitions to which one is often subjected.
But if we find Greek religion odd in its reticence regarding such questions as had prompted my neighbor to twist himself into a metaphysical pretzel, it’s only because we’re forgetting that religion, as we have come to know it, provides only one possible solution to the question of human worth. In western culture, there is a tradition that seeks to solve our existential and normative problems in strictly human terms, and this is the tradition that goes back to the Greeks.
It goes back to the Greeks, even predating Socrates and Plato, an aspect of the normative framework summed up by the notion of aretē, as Nehamas explained it, with its significant social dimension, bundled up with the idea of kleos. “From earliest times, the idea of aretē was intrinsically social, sometimes almost the equivalent of fame (kleos).” It was human sociality and its institutions—the family, the deme, the phratry, the polis—that provided the context for understanding and exhibiting aretē. The power of the polis, perhaps most especially in Athens, the sense of social identity and exceptionalism that it yielded during the years of political and cultural hegemony, made the institution of the polis particularly prominent in the conceptualization of aretē. Aristotle’s comment, quoted as one of the epigraphs of this chapter, bears repeating: “One who is incapable of participating, or who is in need of nothing through being self-sufficient, is no part of a polis, and so is either a beast or a
god.” There was an intimate connection between the notion of aretē and the polis—Plato, like Aristotle, acknowledged it—and yet what that connection was could be interpreted in various ways, with the primary concept tipping toward either the one, aretē, or the other, the polis. Is the best state the one that maximally allows aretē to exist and to flourish, where aretē is independently defined? Or is aretē to be defined in terms of the qualities that will allow a person to become justifiably notable in the polis, the qualities of an individual that best allow the values-setting polis to exist and to flourish? Plato (as well as Aristotle) will go in the first direction, though never so far as to cancel out the moral relevance of the polis; but the Athens that tried and executed Socrates tipped the balance toward the second direction. Plato moralized political theory, while the Athens to which he objected politicized morality—or at any rate it politicized aretē. And it judged Socrates to be severely lacking in the qualities that would conduce to the flourishing of his polis, which made him, though notable, not justifiably notable, and so deficient in aretē. Thus, once again we can say that, on its own terms at least, Athens was justified in judging Socrates guilty of normative heresy, since he rejected its values.
The politicizing of aretē made quite a bit of sense in a culture that so valorized extraordinary achievement and the striving that brings it about. How will a society of individuals striving to gain on the gods (only not enough to excite divine jealousy) attain political stability? Achilles didn’t think about what might conduce to the greatest good of the greatest number of his fellow Greeks as he allowed his comrades to be slaughtered, their blood staining Trojan soil red. He sat in his tent, playing the lyre and singing of kleos.5 But one can’t make a civil society out of citizens all of whom are going single-mindedly after their own personal kleos. The valorization of the extraordinary leads to an antisocial conclusion.
Thrasymachus, in the first book of the Republic, embodies that conclusion, a sophist who argues that an extraordinary person has a perfect right to do whatever he can get away with. (Callicles in the Gorgias argues along a similar line. Thrasymachus and Callicles, by the way, are among Plato’s most arresting characters. They jump off the page. Just as in fiction, it’s often the least laudatory characters who are the most lifelike and fascinating.) It is only the weak who seek to restrain him, and without any natural right on their side. Thrasymachus is a problem not only theoretical but practical. Plato has his ideas about how to dispatch a Thrasymachus, but then so did the polis.
The political configuration of Greece asserted a strong prescriptive normativity which offered a political solution to the Thrasymachus challenge. Duty to the polis, like duty to the family and the other social institutions, yielded behavior-regulating oughts. Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him (especially if he’s lucky enough to be an Athenian citizen) to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught in an agonistic struggle to outdo his peers. Even religious ritual was absorbed into civic duty, with the patron god or goddess of one’s polis—Athena and Poseidon for Athens, Artemis and Ares for Sparta—largely regulating rituals, which, communally performed, strengthened the devotion to the polis. As Pericles puts it in his Funeral Oration, Athenians should feel erōs for Athens: they should fall in love with their polis.
The politicizing of aretē provides a solution to the Thrasymachus challenge. So long as the abundance of energy and striving encouraged by the Ethos of the Extraordinary is channeled into participatory extraordinariness, the free radicals of outsized ego can be soaked up and neutralized. Godlike striving can be deflected from the individual onto the polis and personal hubris avoided (though collective political hubris remained actively in play, as those non-Athenians staring up at the Acropolis might have had reason to reflect). Not surprisingly, the politicizing of aretē was most stressed by the two most extraordinary poleis, Athens and Sparta, with Sparta funneling its sense of exceptionalism into its collective martial superiority, whereas Athenians assessed their exceptionalism in far more varied terms—military, commercial, political, cultural, intellectual, psychological, ethical—as Pericles enumerates the Athenian virtues in his Funeral Oration.
But what of an extraordinary person who refused to be dictated to and defined by the polis, who defied the politicizing of aretē and insisted on his singularity remaining exclusively his own, unwilling to deed it over to any one polis? Such a person might be expected to arouse violently contradictory emotions. His fellow citizens couldn’t help but revile him for violating the politicizing of aretē, while at the same time they could not help admiring him—especially if he also happened to possess a beauty so extravagant that a contemporary might write of him that “if Achilles did not look like this, then he was not really handsome.”6
I am speaking now of none other than Alcibiades, who provided fodder for the Athenian version of Gawker throughout his whole life—from his obstreperous childhood,7 through his attention-grabbing career, to his violent death at (perhaps) the hands of hired assassins. Alcibiades was never in love with Athens; he was, rather, intent that the Athenians should be in love with him. At every stage of his life, Plutarch tells us, he exemplified the physical beauty appropriate to it, and “never did fortune surround and enclose a man with so many of those things which we vulgarly call goods.” It was as if Athens, in the reclamation of Greek-speaking post-Homeric glory that reached its height in the time of Pericles, had produced an avatar of Achilles. Everything about him conspired to make him a person who lived out a life that was abundantly worth the telling—and also to make a thoughtful person question whether living a kleos-worthy life was necessarily a good thing, if not for the person himself then for everyone else involved.
In his own time, there was nobody like him, and there haven’t been many since, a point forcefully delivered by a chart I found on the comedy site Cracked.com:8
(illustration credit ill.7)
His uniqueness grew out of the uniqueness of Athens. It took the special nature of Athenian democracy and Athenian hegemony to produce the mix that was Alcibiades. The nature of its democracy shaped how he honed his intelligence into rhetorical brilliance. The people adored him, and he adored their adoration. And because he was, as Cracked.com put it, “hilariously rich,” he could be lavish, a trait cherished by Athenian citizens, who were often not above being bought. (Pericles did plenty of buying.) Wanting to be certain that he would go home with an Olympic prize one year, Alcibiades extravagantly entered seven chariots—everybody couldn’t stop talking about it—especially when he then won first, second, and fourth prize.9 He was, of course, an aristocrat, a scion from one of the most ancient families, the Alcmaeonidae. (This also meant that he carried the famous curse of the Alcmaeonidae.)10 But, like Alcmaeonidean Pericles, he threw his lot in with the demos of Athens—with the people—whom he would by turns delight, outrage, thrill, provoke, torment, charm, shock, mystify, and seduce. But he always kept their attention, kept them talking of him. Imagine John F. Kennedy, Donald Trump, David Petraeus, Muhammad Ali, Julian Assange, Johnny Knoxville, Bernie Madoff, and Jude Law all combined in one.
Pericles, who was a cousin of Alcibiades’ mother, became Alcibiades’ legal guardian when the ten-year-old’s father was killed in battle, so that Alcibiades was raised in Pericles’ house, which makes the difference between them the more dramatic. Pericles, more than anyone, articulates the politicizing of aretē, of which Alcibiades would have little.11 Alcibiades refused to yield his prodigiousness to the polis, claiming his superiority as supremely and inviolably his own. Still, his recklessness could not be contained in the personal sphere, and the ruin that he made of his life would be Athens’ ruin as well.
Here are some highlights from the extravaganza that was his life:
He convinced the ekklêsia to undertake a risky attac
k on Sicily in the middle of the Peloponnesian War, in 415 B.C.E., and then talked them into assigning him as one of the co-generals.12 Having gotten his way in regard to the Sicilian venture, he and some of his high-spirited companions may or may not have chosen the night before the fleet was to sail to go on a spree of vandalism, defacing the faces and genitalia of the herms—stylized statues of Hermes that were used as property-boundary markers throughout the polis. Hermes was the god of travel, which would have made the sacrilege a bad omen for the voyage to Sicily. It is unlikely that Alcibiades was involved, but such was his reputation that many Athenians, according to Thucydides, blamed him. Alcibiades and his lark-loving friends were also rumored to have staged a blasphemous charade of the solemn initiation rites of the Eleusinian mysteries, with Alcibiades officiating as high priest. (A slave named Andromachus brought evidence against Alcibiades.)13 He set sail for Sicily the day after the herms debacle under a cloud of misgivings. Knowing his power to turn public opinion his way, he pleaded to be allowed to clear himself of the charges first. It was his enemies who hastened his departure. And sure enough, while he was sailing to Sicily, the hysteria over the impiety (asebeia) grew, with Alcibiades’ enemies arguing that the blasphemy bore all the marks of outrageous Alcibiades. Obviously, he couldn’t at the same time be leading an Athenian force on a major expedition, and so a trireme was dispatched to fetch him back to Athens for trial.14 The full extent of the trouble that Alcibiades was in was minimized for fear that his men would mutiny if they suspected he was being taken back to be treated harshly. Alcibiades wasn’t taken prisoner but was allowed to follow under his own sail. But he quickly caught on to the situation, and, miffed at how little faith his polis had in him, he promptly vindicated the lack of faith by defecting to Sparta, offering invaluable advice on how they could use Athens’ attack on Sicily to their advantage. The attack did indeed prove disastrous to Athens. Athens sentenced him to death in absentia.
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