The Rise of Athens

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As a small child I devoured a Victorian storybook that told tales of Greek and Roman mythology. I read every word, except for the sickly sweet poems that were scattered across its pages.

My paternal grandmother noticed my interest in the ancient world and bought me three Penguin Classics, then a new publishing enterprise. She chose E. V. Rieu’s versions of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and a translation of Plato’s Symposium. A farmer’s wife, she was no classicist, and the last of these books came a little early for a prepubertal child, who was mystified by the references to Hellenic homosexuality. But I could not have been given a better sense, smell, flavor, of Greek civilization. Homer and Plato introduced me to a world that was new and ravishing, which, for all the tragedy and the bloodshed, radiated the sunlight and luminous skies of free thought.

For a span of two hundred years in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the ancient Athenians pioneered astonishing advances in almost every field of human endeavor. They invented the only real or complete democracy (the word itself is Greek) that has ever existed outside the classical age. Whereas we merely elect representatives to act on our behalf, citizens then met in assembly and took every important decision themselves. (I need to enter a reservation here: the franchise was limited to adult males and so excluded two large social groups—women and slaves.)

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