When the dictator Pisistratus returned from exile to Athens
in a golden chariot he was accompanied by an extremely tall woman dressed in
full battle armor. He presented to citizens the imposing figure as the Goddess
Athena herself, come to restore order and well-being to the strife-ridden city
of Athens. People knelt down to the goddess and gave thanks for their salvation
from the tumult surrounding them.
Reading in these stormy days Thomas Cahill�s beautiful book,
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, Why the Greeks Matter, I was struck by the
analogies between the misty history of ancient Greece and contemporary America.
That book led me then to other works on Greece and to collections of the great
Greek plays that read extremely well today 25 centuries later.
It was the year 546 B.C. Athens had evolved from a monarchy
to rule by the aristocracy. Pisistratus, the son of the aristocrat Hypocrates,
had built a political power base in Athens as a populist. He first came to
power illegally in 565 B.C. which calls to mind the dubious presidential
elections in the United States in the year 2000 A.D.
A born conspirator, Pisistratus first faked an attempt on
his life, after which he convinced the Popular Assembly to grant him a powerful
bodyguard. He used this super police force, a kind of militarized FBI, to
conquer the Acropolis, the Capitol Hill of ancient Athens.
After the first term of his despotic rule, an alliance of
rival parties forced the dictator into exile. But Pisistratus, crazy for power,
soon began plotting his return. Then, to the surprise of the na�ve Greeks a
goddess escorted a mortal political leader back in power.
Roberto Calasso narrates in Le Nozze di Cadmo e Armonia
how Pisistratus taught the beautiful country girl, Phye, to act like a goddess.
Dressed in armor and mounted in the chariot at his side, she must have looked
majestic. Proceeded by heralds announcing to the Athenians the good tidings
that the goddess herself was conducting him back to the Acropolis, Pisistratus
returned to power.
Historians concur that Athenians believed that the divinity
had come to earth to install Pisistratus. Strangely, this old story of public
gullibility rings familiar and contemporary: God was on the side of the
dictator. God was stepping in to save Athens, its children, its faith, and its
�way of life.�
Aristotle later wrote that �this deception was the most
ingenuous since the sophisticated Hellenic people had diverged from their barbarian
forebears.� According to Herodotus, Athenian credulousness about the goddess
was alien even to the childish ingenuity of the barbarians.
Yet, it was a deception that reveals a truth which otherwise
could escape our notice. That truth is that the citizens of Athens not only
believed in their gods but they accepted the possibility that one day the
goddess Athena would enter their city in a chariot. Because they deserved the
protection and special blessing of the gods.
Mythology? Nonsense? Well, no. God is always a magic word on
the lips of political leaders. They can�t leave God in his place. They bring
Him to the market place. It was as easy to con the Athenians as it is for
George W. Bush to con Americans today. God and public prayers work. Mention God
and that He is on their side and people listen. People still fall for it. Our
political leaders today use the same trick old Pisistratus used, two and a half
millennia ago. Over and over and over.
Later, a more modern Aristotle treated the return of
Pisistratus with the goddess at his side as mythological and allegorical, as
much of earlier Greek history in fact was. Yet, if that deception really did
happen, it seemed that it was the last appearance of the credulous world of the
barbarians in which the dividing line between gods and mortals was still alive.
In the ancient world the power of metamorphosis was such that a market girl
could be venerated as the Goddess Athena.
Yet, public gullibility for the demagogue never dies.
Moreover, divine intervention went down just as well for the
no less credulous members of the Popular Assembly, the Athenian Congress, as it
did for the gullible Athenian people. They too fell for the absurdity of Athena
in battle armor at the side of Pisistratus.
We should not be surprised. There are enough credulous
people and an abundant supply of corrupt politicians to sweep into power the
unscrupulous liars with God ever on their lips. In the 2,500 years since �God�s
intervention� in Athens, one would expect that such confusion between God and
man, between the spiritual and the human, would have been overcome.
Ancient Athenians were a festive people. The plays of the
great Athenian writers lay at the heart of their festivities. Greek playwrights
and philosophers understood that a people so cocksure of themselves and their
�way of life� were in constant need of warnings that there were other forces in
life that they were shutting their eyes to that could destroy their way of
life.
And to be sure, the tragic flaw the Greeks saw in every man,
the hamartia, brought down the leaders, one after the other. After
reaching the heights of power, they fell, victims of their own failings. There
is no more despondent figure than Sophocles�s blind King Oedipus. One day
all-powerful, the next blinded by his own hubris, his insolence --
another of those potent Greek words we have inherited -- Oedipus is led away
into oblivion. The later comment of the Roman conquerors of Greece that �so
passes worldly glory� still holds water today.
Reading Cahill and Calasso, and the Greek playwrights
themselves, one is struck by the forthrightness of writers of two and a half
millennia ago in their refusal to be victims of �political correctness.� I like
to imagine they detested euphemisms. Their role was to warn and admonish and
accuse. They did not search for the equivalent of today�s appropriateness
or moral clarity. Athenians did not accuse their writers of moral
vacuity and lack of taste and sensitivity, as after September
11 in Bush�s America when it became inappropriate to warn of
encroachments on civil liberties and of secret prisons and torture. Or, as
after the dikes broke in New Orleans, when it was inappropriate to speak
of the criminal negligence of pertinent authorities.
Euphemisms are fashionable in the political world. Modern
America has perfected their use to a science. The media quickly fall in line
and propagate them. A few examples of euphemistic newspeak suffice to make the
point: In today�s jargon, military strikes against poor nations like Sudan is
called humanitarian intervention (Here I do not have in mind the moral
right or necessity of intervention in such cases; I am speaking only of the
fashion for not calling things by their names.). Illegal war or state terrorism
is called anti-terrorism, and the bloody suppression of the innocent is
labeled counter-terrorism. Fanatical enthusiasm for war is courage.
Objections to war are labeled cowardly and traitorous. Murder of
women and children from supersonic bombers is collateral damage. Crimes
against humanity are defense of our values, life style, and the future of
our children.
The list can go on and on: Marchers for peace are terrorists
and evildoers. Opposition to school prayers and to the phrase �under
God� in the Pledge of Allegiance is un-American. Stem cell research
becomes abortion on demand. Lies are now called truths, the give and
take of democracy, and of no real significance.
No wonder the widespread acquiescence to the whims of the
Washington government in face of admonitions like, �You�re either with us or
you�re with the terrorists.� And no wonder the president�s words, �I�ve made up
my mind,� can become reason and justification for entering the self-defensive
war in Iraq.
The Greek playwright Euripides had no patience with
euphemism. Nor did he know reticence in his criticism of power. His King
Pentheus says to the great Greek god Dionysus, god of wine and wildness,
representative of inspiration and darkness and madness and chaos: �You do not
know the limits of your strength. You do not know what you do. You do not know
who you are.�
After Dionysus drives the king mad and takes him under his
spell, he tells his crazed victim that his mind was once unsound but now he is
�thinking as sane men do.� But of course Pentheus must still pay for his
earlier words: the worshipping followers of Dionysus rip him to pieces.
Their playwrights told the Greeks uncomfortable truths; they
used politically incorrect words: the people were responsible for their own
ills. They were not special in the world of men. They were not above human
truths. They too bore the human flaw. And they would have to pay for their hubris.
While Athenian playwrights satirized and admonished both
citizens and leaders, their philosophers thought and tried to get to the core
of things. Concerned with truth, their primary objective was to understand what
the thing was that made the universe tick. Were things of the cosmos
permanent or forever in change? Will everything that has been, be again? Was
there a god or gods or a powerful mind behind it all? And what was man�s place
in all this? It was a mystery. It is a mystery. The great mystery is that
though the world makes sense, its sense eludes us. Sometimes we feel that thing
hanging just out of our grasp. It is a hairsbreadth away. It is on the tip
of our tongue but we cannot articulate it. That mysterious thing is the
most beautiful thing of our lives. But we do not know what it is.
American democracy is frequently compared to that of ancient
Athens. But the two models are only superficially similar. Despite its hideous
slavery and a citizenship limited to 20 percent of the city�s population,
Athens is defined as the most participatory government in history. For the 20
percent who were citizens it was full democracy, e.g. rule by the people.
Democracy? We should wonder about the state of ours. Can one
claim that the 45 million American citizens living below the poverty
level are represented by their government? Where is the truth in our democracy,
the truth hidden deeply, mysteriously, behind the euphemistic gobbledygook?
Today, instead of discussing important issues openly, nonsensical euphemisms
are on the lips of leaders and media people and academics alike. Right-thinking,
Blame America Firsters, wrongdoers, secularists, you�re
with us or against us, exportation of democracy.
One wonders who invents euphemisms become lies. Do the
leaders coin the cover-ups that the media then inculcate in the people? Or do
the media and academics teach the untruths to the politicians?
Or is there perhaps a secret Euphemism Department, concealed
underground someplace, staffed by perverted minds dedicated to reinventing
newspeak? Dedicated to the naive lie. Some experts explain that the tragedy of
New Orleans was fate. That the ozone does not exist, that earth-warming is a
myth, or if not fate then it was the fault of local officials that the dikes of
New Orleans broke and not the denial of federal funds.
The truth is that the gap between rich and poor in ancient
Greece was minimal in comparison to the economic abyss in the United States
today. Between the fabulously wealthy and the 100,000 mostly Blacks who
couldn�t afford to leave New Orleans in time, and who are only the tip of the
iceberg of the poverty in the world�s richest country.
Thucydides wrote that men go to war out of honor, fear and
interest. And wars always cause the degeneration of society. That has not
changed despite the claims of the neocons. More than degeneration! Confined to
their own garden, convinced of their superiority, and refusing to meditate on
the past and human affairs, the proud Athenians sank into xenophobia and hubris
-- contempt for things not their own, their fear of otherness, and their own
social insolence. Their state fell to successive waves of Spartans, Macedonians
and Romans.
How familiar and modern it all rings.
Gaither
Stewart grew up in Asheville, North Carolina. After studies at the University
of California at Berkeley and other American universities, he settled first in
Germany, then in Italy. Following a career in journalism as Italian
correspondent for the Rotterdam daily newspaper Algemeen Dagblad and
contributor to the press in several European countries, he began writing
fiction full-time five years ago. Since then he has authored three novels and
two short-story collections. He has resided in Italy, Germany, The Netherlands,
France, Russia and Mexico. Today he lives with his wife, Milena, in the hills
of north Rome.