Ancient Athens, ruined yet resiliently ever renewing of the ideals of human excellence, lies all around me.
For long I lay awake last night thinking about what makes this place without peer. Was it a matter of chance that just the right combination of people, resources, ideas, and ambitions came together here in the fifth century B.C.? Other Greek cities shared some (much? all?) of the cultural heritage that enlivened the Athenians, after all.
Or was it rather the case that nowhere else did people think and aspire as they did in Athens? No, that cannot be it, for what we discern in the giants of old Athens is a fulfillment, at least to a degree, of a common potential shared by all human beings. Arete thrived in Athens, but not precisely taken in sui generis form, but in a particular realization of what people everywhere might be—an unprecedented and powerful realization to be sure.
Is there more to it, though? Was Athens made great because its people received a singularly great divine blessing? Did God reward their piety—or is it wrong to speak of it so? “Everything is full of gods,†they (or some of them) thought. In their still enchanted grasp of an enchanted, God-made cosmos, did they find excellence because they discerned something of its source?
To ask such questions is to conflate in a variety of ways my priorities and theirs, but not unwittingly or impossibly so. And it’s also to lump far too many figures into an ambiguous “they.†Of Socrates, taken individually, how might these questions be answered? Of Plato? Of Aristotle? Of those that gathered with them?
Day has broken in this busy city. I arrived last night, after some twenty-six hours in transit, with Scott Moore as a traveling companion. For both of us this is a first visit.
Much is or seems that it should be familiar. Yet so much is strange. Seeing the Greek language everywhere is odd—so different from the neatly constrained limits of a book page. Often it’s transliterated, inconsistently, and even in some cases translated. Pronunciations are not what my intuitions suggest, but they strike me as consistently counterintuitive, so perhaps there’s hope of reforming my intuitions.
We’re meeting a local agent after breakfast whose counsel will guide our next couple of days. Thereafter we’re bound for the New Acropolis Museum, just opened to international fanfare in the last month. We’ll ascend the acropolis, walk the district of Monastiraki, visit the ancient agora, and see where the philosophers talked, the politicians deliberated and judged, the poets and playwrights were celebrated, and the craftsmen sold their labors and wares.
Are we really in this place? Can it be here, all around us, and not merely part of a made-up myth we tell our students?
Indeed, it is here, we are here, and in both of those acknowledgements stands a reality that is of profound importance. Who we are and what we know and the things we teach matter. It is no little way of passing time or making a living. Our lives, our understanding, our progress in virtue, our heritage and stories, our aspirations and ends, our god-forsaken or god-blessed ways—all of these things matter to the very core. And so it is that Socrates’ dictum holds no less now than then, that the unexamined life is not worth living. God help me to live thoughtfully, piously, and well.
