Athens (& Syros, Naxos) & democracy

Last Friday Travelling Companion and I visited the Acropolis in Athens. On the top of the hill there is only rock, marble buildings and people (and also water, from vending machines). All day from afar you can see people climbing up to the entrance, climbing down. This movement of the people helps generate some kind of idea of what the Acropolis was like 2400 years ago.

Afterwards Travelling Companion and I talked about the numerous missing bits of the Acropolis that are in the British Museum. What is the best parallel for this? Is it how Vermeer’s thirty six surviving paintings are scattered across Europe and America? Delft, where he made them, gives additional meaning to his work; but is that enough of a reason to argue that all the paintings should be there?

Or, should we imagine that each of the four original manuscripts of the Magna Carta (1215 AD) has been cut into pieces; that half these pieces are now in a library in Washington DC; that 45% of them – but not enough to reconstitute any one of the manuscripts in its entirety – are in the British Library; and that the remaining 5% are distributed between libraries in Copenhagen, Würzburg, Munich, Paris, the Vatican, Palermo and Vienna (the fragment that was in Heidelberg having been returned to London in 2006)?

In any case, what you can see at the Acropolis museum and the Acropolis itself is well presented and magnificent.

Meanwhile, from about 500 BC, on a hill facing the Acropolis called the Pnyx, most of the men of the city of Athens – many thousands – met ten times a year to take the city’s political decisions by majority voting. They sat on the ground, and later on wooden benches. To speak they stood on a low stone platform.

I am a politically-minded person, but before that, I am a democrat. You can’t think about democracy without thinking about what those Athenians did. Yet at the Pnyx there were hardly any tourists and hardly any clear indication of what you were looking at. There should be.

The assembly sat to the left. The person who was speaking stood on the steps at the right.

Stories about what that assembly did and how it did it might bring ancient Greece to life, for visitors, in ways that even the Acropolis cannot.*

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My last post got long so I’m keeping this one short. Before Athens we went to Syros. Its capital is the nineteenth century town of Ermoupolis. This is the main square.

In the evening, when we went there for a drink, it was full of people. Children played football using mineral water bottles for goalposts.

Before Syros we were in Naxos. The old town there consists of an infinite series of variations on the photograph below.

The best thing we saw on Naxos is this kouros, a marble statue of a young man. It was an early one, from the 7^th century BC. It is the first with a leg advanced that is known. Travelling Companion, who sculpts, says it was probably trying to do this tricky thing that caused them to break it, and so to leave it lying here.

They’d carried the marble down from this quarry.

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* For example: In 428 BC, during the Peloponnesian war, the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos revolted unsuccessfully against Athens. Next year the Athenian assembly voted unanimously to punish the city by putting all its male citizens to death and selling the women and children into slavery. A trireme was sent to Mytilene carrying this instruction to the garrison commander.

Next day Athenians had doubts. Cleon defended the decision. According to Wikipedia, He argued that the “constant change of measures” was a threat to the stability of the empire, and that “bad laws which are never changed are better for a city than good ones that have no authority”. Against this, Diodotus argued that “the two things most opposed to good counsel are haste and passion” and that the decision was not in the interests of Athens. The assembly voted by a narrow majority to revoke its decision.

Another trireme, double-manned to row overnight, was sent to Lesbos. It arrived just in time to stop the massacre.

This is a story that we can read in different ways, that we can do things with. I have a photo of a man taking part in a post-referendum anti-Brexit march wearing on his head a model trireme labelled ΜΥΤΙΛΗΝΗ (Mytilene). Unfortunately it’s at home; please imagine it here.