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For some time, I’ve wanted to publish my thoughts on my generation’s near-total ignorance of the classical world. I worried whether I would come off sounding like a pretentious snob, pining for an age when Greek and Latin were requirements of education. But when I read a gross misrepresentation of the Greeks in the Oct. 26 edition of The Maine Campus [“A better democracy — the example of ancient Greece”], I could not hold my silence.
People are mistaken to call our nation a democracy in terms of a direct descendant of ancient Athens’ political system. Most Greek city-states, like Sparta, were oligarchies, where elites guaranteed internal stability and sound foreign policy. History shows Athens’ institution was a matter of circumstance.
Athens was wedged between mountains and the sea. Such isolation, combined with a small population, demanded economic self-sufficiency and little interaction with other regions — conditions that allowed pure democracy to thrive. All Athenian citizens could attend a general assembly, whose agenda was prepared by a council of 500 citizens chosen by lottery, with a daily overseer.
In the United States, with a 300-million strong population, adopting this primitive system as Christopher Burns recommends would be disastrous.
Whoever idolizes the democratic ideal hasn’t read the history. Athens aspired to superpower and succumbed to its fatal flaw: pure democracy. Athens strove to globalize the Greek world into an economic empire and maintain it by force of arms. In the Peloponnesian War, as detailed in the first true work of history by Thucydides, the interests of demagogues swayed the power of the people. Factional rivalry destabilized military command, whose weakness led to the Athenian army’s annihilation in Sicily and government’s collapse in 404 BCE. Without a centralized state, stable executive power and a bureaucratic system over subject territory, a selfish mob cannot sustain an imperial power such as our own.
Educating the masses solves no problems either. Athens’ meager existence constricted the socioeconomic gap. For most, equality was the circumstance, not the aim. It was an age when the means of production — highly dependent on slavery and a misogynistic household patriarchy — was the private property of individuals. Modern capitalism created our socioeconomic hierarchy. If everyone went to college to get philosophy degrees, our economy would collapse. This idealistic folly is already evident as plumbers’ unions are starving for young recruits.
The reality of Athenian democracy was not what inspired subsequent states’ political systems. It was the political philosophy of Plato, whose mentor Socrates was put to death by a jury of commoners. He would agree a rational-minded, enlightened sovereign body would know better than a popular majority. James Madison knew this when he wrote our constitution. Athenian democracy was not his model; Rome’s senate was.
In 509 BCE, a year before Athens adopted its populist system, the Romans ousted monarchy in favor of a republic — the real inspiration of our Founding Fathers. The Roman people democratically elected magistrates from the aristocracy, whose wealth afforded the education necessary to govern a massive state. Imperial expansion relied increasingly on the executive strength of consuls and later emperors.
The American empire is not much different. Wealthy senators, chosen by the people, use their knowledge to make laws. Governors manage their states. The singular vision of the president guides the nation from the Oval Office. Constitutional justice is the real ideal. Don’t scrap it for a system proven to fail.
This is why everyone should study ancient history. It clears away the mirage of those philosophical utopias. In their place, we find a world governed by the same forces of human nature that have created our own. This sobering reality is the true lesson we must learn from Athens: The failure of democracy to handle everything that our republic now conducts on a global scale.
Jeremy Swist is a junior history and Latin student.
Bangor Daily News