Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy
Flaherty, Francis
will understand why Tobias Wolff, in his introduction, claims that for Dubus "the quotidian and the spiritual don't exist on different planes, but infuse each other." You will also know,...
...As Kagan puts it, "[I]n spite of the [Persian ] peace," Pericles "had no thoughts of abandoning the league that had become an empire...
...In this arena, as complex as any modem cold war, Pericles and others first hatched such notions as defensive alliances and limited deterrence...
...The admirable presumption was that all citizens should be able to perform most public duties, and that they have an obligation to do so...
...In two-and-a-half millennia, he says, "only in Athens and in the United States...has democracy lasted for as much as 200 years...
...The poor, for instance, could hardly serve for free in the military, on juries, or in other public activities...
...And then there was the grapheparanomon, which taxed Athenians with knowledge of all their laws...
...Soon, they slowly begin to walk over to the Pnyx, a nearby hill, for a meeting of the city assembly...
...Nor did he wish to sacrifice the glory, the political and railitary power, and the money that went with it...
...The Athenian Empire began as the Delian League, a voluntary association of Greek cities formed to counter the perennial Persian threat...
...Herodotus, the father of history...
...They write stories because they have to...
...You will also know, freshly, the gift of the storyteller...
...Too, Pericles promoted and presided over a rare flowering of intellectual and artistic achievement...
...Three fines would cost him his citizenship...
...Sparta and its Peloponnesian allies...
...He crowned all Greece with temples and statues and he counted among his friends Sophocles...
...Requisite qualifications: A Master's degree in Divinity or its equivalent, five years' pastoral experience, preferably in a college setting, administrative abilities and commitment to Ignatian Spirituality and Jesuit education...
...And, of course, he gave the world a grand new political vision in which common folk, through free and open reasoning and debate, controlled their own destiny...
...Through such vignettes, Yale classicist Donald Kagan brings to life the world's first democracy...
...Pericles's is a great tale, and Kagan tells it well...
...The writer's challenge, as Goethe once put it, is to turn the harsh truth of one's life into poetry...
...But the cessation of that threat made it clear that Pericles--statesman, democrat, peacemaker--was also a purposeful imperialist...
...While not technically the founder of democracy--his grandfather, Cleisthenes, was--Pericles broadened its practice dramatically...
...698: Commonweal...
...My advice: Read the book---but stop at page 270...
...There were, then, moral tradeoffs Pericles made for his democratic experiment...
...all classes (though the door stayed shut to women, slaves, and foreigners...
...A modem The College Chaplain of The College of the Holy Cross The College of the Holy Cross is seeking a Director of the Chaplain's Office (the College Chaplain) beginning in August of 1992 or earlier, if available...
...The College of the Holy Cross is a small (2,700 undergraduates), highly selective, Jesuit and Catholic liberal arts college located in Worcester, Massachusetts...
...that the high-living, eponymous Sybarites barred roosters from their town of Sybaris so they could sleep late...
...In a deeper sense, which Andre Dubus demonstrates, there is a further task, to turn poetry into revelation...
...and that a main job of the Athenian city commissioners was to make sure the dung collectors didn't deposit their materials within ten stadia of the municipal walls...
...The College Chaplain works with and is available to students through liturgies, committees, group meetings, individual pastoral care and counseling and programs of study and service in Latin America, Appalachia and in the city of Worcester...
...Pericles made no less a mark in foreign affairs...
...because they cannot rest...because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop the quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it...
...To capitalize on the upsurge in democratic interest since Communist Eastern Europe began to crumble in 1989, Kagan says...
...Athens needed the empire to protect its own security and to support the creation and maintenance of the great democratic society Pericles had in mind...
...On this basis, Kagan gives us an insightful, admiring but objective, portrayal of a rare man and the city he led Jrbr nearly three decades...
...Finally, as you will have come to see in "The Judge and Other Snakes,'" a story of a young girl rescued from a beating by a town bully, it will be no surprise that Dubus stopped for those strangers on the highway...
...Everything takes "three times as long...
...That's a vivid and revealing glimpse of life in the Athens of Pericles, fifth century B.C...
...1 mistrust politicians more than any guy in this bat...
...Shortstory writers," insists Dubus, "simply do what human beings have always done...
...It is his habit, the habit of one perhaps more inclined to brawl than the next fellow, but one who learned from an unlikely quarter to turn his strength to other purposes...
...The Office of the College Chaplain comprises a professional staff of three priest& two lay women and one woman religious...
...Pericles made payment for such service routine, thus opening democracy to REVIEWERS DAVID TOOLAN, S.J., is associate editor of America magazine and director of the Catholic Book Club...
...Members of the Society of Jesus are encouraged to apply...
...His touchstone is Pericles, Athenian aristocrat, builder of the Parthenon, and visionary of democracy whose political genius brought us such tools of statecraft as the economic embargo and treaty arbitration clauses...
...One gets a feel, too, for the simplicity and small scale of Athenian democracy, so unlike our vast, modem, multilayered version...
...Pericles himself is rendered with equal vividness...
...Through such recitations, Kagan makes us rethink the meaning of "civic duty...
...and Hippodamus of Miletus, the first city planner...
...CITIZENSHIP: THE ORIGINAL VERSION PERICLES OF ATHENS AND THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY Donald Kagan Free Press, $22.50, 287 pp...
...Problem is, such conclusions are so broad and out-of-step with the rest of the volume that one is tempted to think there was a printing foul-up and these last pages of Pericles are actually the first pages of some other text...
...For despite all the lip service, democracy is "one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience," Kagan cautions...
...Besides the assembly, called the ekklesia, which met a minimum of forty times a year, Athens chose the bulk of its public officials by lot among the citzenry...
...Without self-pity, with unflinching honesty, we come in the last third of this wondrous book to the accident--and to what it's like to be a paraplegic...
...Pacifists might well meditate the paradox, as Dubus puts it, that "the Marine Corps develops in a recruit at boot camp, an officer candidate at Quantico, the instinct to surrender oneself for another...
...expands that instinct beyond families or mates or other beloveds to include all Marines...which means, sadly, that the Marine Corps, in a way limited to military action, has in general instilled more love in its members than Christian churches have in theirs...
...Certainly, the book provokes fruitful if unflattering comparisons between our democracy and the original one...
...For example: "The evidence is strong that democracy and economic freedom are more likely to bring prosperity than any other system," Kagan writes...
...In a scene, the reader learns that common folks participated in the legislature and that their participation was required...
...For all his admiration for his subject, though, Kagan is generally objective, shining his light on such darker parts of the Periclean vision as the question of empire...
...Like "good counselors who won't let you get by with the lack of honesty and commitment we bring to abstractions...short story writers simply do what human beings have always done...
...You cannot move quickly enough, for instance, to prevent your infant daughter from slicing off her index finger in the sprocket of an exercise bicycle...
...On the other hand, Kagan does deliver a little more of the military blow-by-blow than this reader wanted...
...It is no wonder that the Peloponnesian War and other events of that time are staples of study today at the Naval War College and Harvard's John E Kennedy School of Government...
...But they soon quicken their pace: For city officials are carrying the rope soaked in red dye forward toward the meeting place, and any tardy citizens with the telltale stain on their clothing will be fined...
...Interested persons should send a resume, three letters of reference and a one-page personal statement of one's vision of Campus Ministry to: Chair, Search Committee for the College Chapla ~n, Chaplain's Office, College of the Holy Cross, | College Stre,.~t, 8ox 16A, Worcester, MA 01610-2395...
...A high percentage (90% or more) of the students identify themselves as Roman Catholic...
...Relations among Athens and its empire...
...FRANCIS FLAHERTY is a New York-based writer specializing in legal issues...
...Colle of the ge Holy Cross 22 November 1991:697 book about democracy's first and maybe foremost statesman can help Eastern Europeans and others seize the unprecedented opportunity this geopolitical shift represents, he believes...
...Francis Flaherty itizens are chatting and laughing in the Agora, the marketplace of ancient Athens...
...Reporting directly to the College President, the College Chaplain coordinates, encourages and supervises the ministry of the office...
...More important, the author--who has taken conservative positions on such hot campus issues as the multicultural-curriculum movement and the wave of criticism of the "politically correct"--makes similarly conservative noises in the last chapter here...
...The reader learns that Pericles had an elongated head that was fodder for many Athenian gibes...
...Understanding those tradeoffs, and the man's other failings, is as vital as understanding the greatness of his vision...
...The Chaplain represents the office and its special place within the College on a number of college committees, at special functions, meetings and liturgies, at pastorally sensitive moments and, often, in working with other offices and departments of the College and with the Jesuit Community...
...Review of applications will begin on December 1, t991...
...No small thing, the book is an entertaining read too, full of fun facts...
...Phidias the sculptor...
...Why a biography of Pericles...
...and Persia were suffused with continual wariness, episodic war, and shifting alliances and perceptions...
...Under the doctrine, if a citizen made a proposal inconsistent with any other statute, he would he fined...
...And seized it should be...
...Of course, as in any crowd, there are some laggards...
...With respect to the red-dyed rope, for example, the modem reader can only be abashed at the Athenians' broad political participation...
Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 20
