Athenian History
STALLINGS, A.E.
Athenian History The glory that was, briefly, Greece. BY A.E. STALLINGS Never has a city been so identified with an idea, or an idea with a city, as Athens and democracy. By Athens, of course, we...
...He finds this panhellenism embodied in such institutions as the ancient Olympics...
...And just as the great tragedians used their plays not only as sacred entertainments but as mirrors held up to the citizens of Athens in which they might behold the morality and consequences of their actions, so Waterfield presents the history of Athens as a cautionary tale for the United States...
...Within thirty years, Athens was defeated by her arch-rival, the quintes-sentially undemocratic Sparta—a nation-state marked by a cult of militarism and ruled by a narrow band of elites in constant fear of revolt by the slaves that greatly outnumbered them...
...Waterfield is in favor of their return...
...The remaining two and a half millennia occupy only the next hundred pages or so— with short sections devoted to Lord Byron's galvanizing involvement in the Greek War of Independence, the destruction of the Parthenon, and the still controversial topic of Lord Elgin's removal of the Parthenon marbles to England...
...Indeed, that shining symbol of democracy, the Parthenon, might just as easily be seen as a symbol of the arrogance of empire, built with money contributed by Athens' allies for their mutual defense against the Persians— but diverted by Pericles to the ornamentation of his beloved city, even while those allies were being turned Athenian subjects...
...Waterfield quotes Pindar: They cower in back alleys, / Keeping away from their enemies, / Full of remorse at their failure...
...Death to the blasted captain who brought me here...
...Such allegories work best when done with a light hand...
...Yet one of the most refreshing aspects of Athens: A History is Waterfield's affection not just for the ideal Athens—the marble building projects of a Periclean golden age and all they've come to represent— but for the real, contemporary city's chaos, cacophony, and vibrancy...
...The contemporary version of this Victorianism, in the list of virtues being advertised for the 2004 Olympics, is "effort...
...The fascinating chapters on the ancient Olympics and the modern Olympian movement are the most original and elegant, enlivened with a wealth of quotations from primary sources in the author's own translations...
...Passed over by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Athens became a Balkan backwater of the Ottoman empire, a huddle of houses in the shadow of the marble bones of the Parthenon, and an eccentric and even perilous afterthought for travelers on the Grand Tour...
...Perhaps the return of the Olympics marks the movement when her long sunset will finally be followed by a rosy-fingered dawn...
...Athens no longer has anything sublime except the famous names of places...
...Waterfield himself admits in the introduction that, for various reasons, he has "dealt with the era since 1834 in some haste...
...Yet as Robin Water-field points out in his excellent Athens: A History, Pericles' oration was a eulogy not only for the fallen of war but, unwittingly, for democratic Athens itself...
...It was natural during the Cold War to feel some echo of the long struggle of the Peloponnesian War between democratic Athens and totalitarian Sparta...
...Athens continued to be a cultural beacon after it lost the Peloponnesian War to Sparta, becoming, in essence, the university town of the ancient A.E...
...In Athens: A History, Waterfield amusingly traces the disappointment to the contemporary tourist who, dismayed at the smog and the sprawl of cement apartment blocks, might want to exclaim along with Synesios of Cyrene (410 a.d...
...So now, perhaps, during the struggle in Iraq, it is tempting to meditate on the Athenians' debate over their preemptive expedition to Sicily...
...Throughout Athens: A History, Waterfield sees the vital choice for Athens as being between the arrogance that is the temptation of empire and a panhellenism which acknowledges the equality of other Hellenes in a step towards acknowledging the equality of man...
...Pericles himself shortly succumbed to the plague...
...Waterfield portrays this fall as a Greek tragedy (itself an Athenian invention), with the Aristotelian ingredients of hubris, self-destructive drive, and tragic flaw...
...Waterfield acknowledges that the ancient Greeks would not have recognized many of the modern virtues ascribed to sport—particularly the Victorian schoolboy virtues expressed in Sir Henry Newbolt's oft-quoted lines For when the One Great Scorer comes / to write against your name / He marks not that you won or lost / But how you played the game...
...Here the author is preaching, unlikely to persuade those not already in choir-robes...
...Visitors, reared on orators, poets, playwrights, and philosophers, have always found the real Athens a letdown...
...The subtitle of the book, From Ancient Ideal to Modern City, appears something of a misnomer, in that a full two-thirds of the book covers the rise of Athens—its unique form of government, its short-lived empire, the disaster of the Peloponnesian war—through to 411 b.c...
...Her first collection, Archaic Smile, received the Richard Wilbur award...
...The years since Greece achieved independent nationhood (not to mention Athens' radical change from charming neoclassical town to modern mega-sprawl) are relegated to a mere handful of pages...
...But when Waterfield makes the comparison explicit—ending the book with an envoy that warns America against Athenian overreach—the argument loses much of its power...
...Stallings is an American poet living in Athens...
...The epilogue on the 2004 games was dated even before the opening ceremonies this month, since there was a change of government in Greece in the lead-up to the Olympics...
...Yet even with the paucity of Hellenistic and Byzantine sources on Athens, he manages to bring history to life with anecdotes—such as when, during a battle over the Acropolis in 1821, the besieging Greeks supposedly sent up bullets to the Turks to stop them melting down the lead joinery of the Parthenon for ammunition...
...By Athens, of course, we mean the Athens of the fifth century b.c., and by democracy we mean the government described by Pericles in his funeral oration of 431 b.c., as given to us by the historian Thucydides...
...world...
...As far as the ancient Greeks were concerned, winning was everything—not higher, faster, stronger, but highest, fastest, strongest— and woe to the losers...
...If Athens was at its zenith under Pericles, its descent was precipitous...
...It is a slight flaw that this solid book is framed by the ephemeral topicality of the 2004 Olympics and the war in Iraq...
...But the city was locked into a descent that continued for millennia...
...Free peoples have always associated themselves with the Athenians...
Vol. 9 • August 2004 • No. 47
