Authors: Eric Weiner
That evening, back at Tony’s Hotel, I heed Robert’s advice and curl up with Thucydides. No, that’s not right. One does not curl up with Thucydides. One does battle with Thucydides, locks horns with him. There’s nothing cuddly about the general. He’s all hard edges and cold facts. I’m trying to
get
him, to see what Robert Pitt sees in him, but it’s tough going, and I find solace in the words of historian Edith Hamilton, who concluded, “There is no joy in the pages of Thucydides.” Amen.
No joy, perhaps, but plenty of insights. Thucydides was the world’s first historian and journalist (sorry Herodotus). His chapter on the great plague of 430 BC captures not only the medical details but also the incredible suffering that swept through Athens. Thucydides describes how “people in perfect health suddenly began to have burning feelings in their head; their eyes became red and inflamed . . . next the stomach was affected with stomachaches and with vomiting of every kind of bile that has been given a name by the medical profession.” That profession, such as it was at the time, was helpless in the face of the disease and, adds Thucydides, “equally useless were prayers made in the temples, consultation of oracles, and so forth.”
That is about all Thucydides has to say about the gods. Zeus, Apollo, Athena, and all the rest do not appear in his pages. This is no coincidence.
He couldn’t say the gods didn’t exist—that would be impiety and could land him in Socrates-size trouble—so he cleverly chose to simply ignore them. Sometimes what distinguishes a work of genius is not what is included but what is omitted.
I read on and find that, page after page, Thucydides recounts, in great detail, various forms of death and suffering. The ancient Athenians were keenly aware of their mortality, and I realize that this awareness, oddly, contributed to their creative breakthroughs.
Psychologists Christopher Long and Dara Greenwood recently investigated the connection between awareness of death and creativity. They asked a group of undergraduates to write humorous captions for
New Yorker
cartoons. Some of the students, though, were first “primed” with subliminal messages of death. These students produced cartoons judged to be more creative and more humorous.
What might explain this finding? Is it simply a matter of laughing in the face of death? Or is there more to it?
Armand D’Angour, a classicist who was also trained as a psychotherapist, believes that this ability to process grief actually helps explain the Greek miracle. “The inability to acknowledge and mourn loss is apt to lead to a shutdown of vital creative impulses . . . only the resolution of loss allows for a fresh start and renewed access to sources of creativity,” he says in his book
The Greeks and the New.
This is a remarkable statement. He’s suggesting that mourning, the fully conscious encounter with loss, is not only vital for our mental health but for our creative lives as well.
This dynamic might explain why a disproportionately large number of geniuses, of any era, lost a parent, usually a father, at a young age. A study of some seven hundred historical figures by psychologist J. M. Eisenstadt found that 35 percent lost a parent by age fifteen and nearly half, 45 percent, by age twenty. The list includes Dante, Bach, Darwin, Michelangelo, Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf. These geniuses possessed not only an ability to rebound from suffering but to transform that suffering into productive, and creative, outlets. Winston Churchill, who also lost his father when he was young, said, “Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong; a boy deprived of a father’s care often develops, if he
escapes the perils of youth, an independence and vigor of thought which may restore in afterlife the heavy loss of early days.”
That’s a big
if
though. Psychologist Robert Sternberg reviewed the data and concludes, “The only other groups that suffered approximately the same proportion of childhood trauma caused by loss of a parent were delinquents and suicidal depressives.” The question is why some people who lose a parent go on to become geniuses while others become delinquents or suicides. Perhaps, I think, dog-earing Thucydides and reaching for a glass of ouzo, what marks the genius is not
that
they suffered but
how
they suffered. Carl Jung defined neurosis as “a substitute for legitimate suffering.” The Greeks were not neurotic. They suffered legitimately, and authentically. They knew that, as John Adams said some two thousand years later, “genius is sorrow’s child.”
I wake the next morning with a bad Thucydides hangover. Symptoms include headache, dry mouth, and frequent urges to smite a Spartan. What would Socrates do? He would no doubt pepper me with many annoying yet pointed questions, tricking me into examining assumptions that I didn’t even know I had made until, eventually, I realized, in a flash of insight, that the truth was right in front of me all along.
Okay, what
else
would Socrates do? He would go for a walk. Yes, that is what he would do, and that is what I will do. I will walk. Like Socrates. Unlike Socrates, mine is not an aimless ramble; I have a destination in mind, and despite my anti-museum bias, it is in fact a museum. Brady had recommended this one, at the agora, assuring me it would induce a minimal amount of guilt, and hinting that important clues to the Great Athenian Mystery are to be found there.
I stumble downstairs and find Tony yelling at his TV. It is not poetry that rouses the modern Greek but soccer. I inform Tony of my plans, and he says he approves of walking, though judging by the size of his expanding paunch, this approval does not extend beyond the realm of the theoretical. Tony’s belly says more about the divide between ancient and modern Athens than a library’s worth of books. They’ve gone from a city of walkers and thinkers to one of sitters and worriers.
I climb a steep street near the hotel before reaching a dirt path that circles the Hill of the Muses. Yes, I think, this is good. I can see why the ancient Greeks liked walking so much. It quiets the mind without silencing it completely. With the volume turned down, we can hear ourselves again.
I pass a few hearty runners, huffing and puffing, and a small flock of dog walkers. A short time later, I find myself in another Athens, this one sanitized for your comfort. Tram cars painted like toy trains circle, their occupants snapping photos of ancient relics as if on safari. Now here comes a woman selling balloons, and, yes, one of them is of Mickey Mouse. The transformation is complete. Ancient Athens has been Disneyfied.
I stroll down the Pantheistic Way, the Broadway of its day, before passing under an archway and entering the small Agora Museum. In one room, I find myself staring at a collection of tiny bottles behind the glass of a display case. How cute. What could they be? I squint and read the small placard: “Black glazed medicine bottles perhaps used to hold hemlock—employed in executions.” On second thought, maybe not so cute. I move on to a collection of Athenian coins. They are impressive, with detailed, intricate designs that put our quarters and nickels to shame. Once again, I marvel at how the ancients infused beauty into everyday objects. Not us. We segregate form and function. Occasionally, someone comes along and unites the two, and we call him a genius.
I turn a corner and there it is, the clue I’ve been seeking: several dozen reddish pottery shards. Etched on each is white lettering, still clearly legible after all these centuries. These are no ordinary shards. They’re called
ostrakon
, the source for our word
ostracize
. They are ballots. The white letterings are names. This was not a contest you wanted to win, though, as the placard explains: “Each voter scratched or painted on a potsherd the name of the man he thought most undesirable.” The “winner” was exiled for ten years. That’s a long time. Accounting for inflation and limited longevity, it was even longer back then.
What could get an Athenian citizen voted out? Questioning the existence of the gods could do it. That’s what happened to Protagoras, the
Richard Dawkins of his day. So could excessive vanity. Phidias, a painter, was exiled for sneaking a portrait of himself onto a statue of Athena, in what amounted to an early form of photobombing. These cases are understandable. What is more mysterious is why the Athenians also exiled some of their most successful citizens, often on flimsy charges.
We gain some insight by this comment from one Athenian citizen: “Among us no one should be the best; but if anyone is, then let him be elsewhere and among others.” In other words, people were expelled for being
too good.
For the Greeks, banishment was a way of keeping the contest fair, a way of providing, as Nietzsche put it, “protection against the genius—a second genius.”
When I first read that, I was perplexed. A second genius? What does that mean? And if there is a second genius, who (or what) is the first genius? The answer is Athens itself. As competitive as the Athenians were, they did not, as we’ve seen, compete for personal glory but, rather, for the glory of Athens. Anyone who lost sight of that imperative risked exile.
Ostracism, though, served another constructive purpose, albeit an unintentional one. Some of those ostracized Athenians did their best work while in exile. Thucydides, for instance, wrote his masterpiece after he was banished, ostensibly for bungling a military campaign. Does rejection spur some people toward greatness?
Sharon Kim, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, conducted a series of experiments designed to investigate the relationship between rejection and creativity. The results were surprising. Those who had been made to feel rejected scored higher on a creative-thinking exam than those who had not. This was especially true for those who had, in a questionnaire, described themselves as “independent.” For these people, says Kim, rejection “confirms what they already feel about themselves, that they’re not like the others,” and that confirmation actually drives them to greater creativity.
The findings raise some intriguing public policy questions. These days, every school district and corporation across the land preaches the importance of inclusion. Should they instead engage in selective rejection? How do
we identify those who are likely to benefit from rejection and those who will be harmed by it?
The Greeks didn’t have the benefit of studies like these, but they clearly understood the power of rejection, and its close cousin, envy. They believed that man is naturally envious, and that
this is a good thing.
At first blush, this seems absurd. Envy, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins—and, as essayist Joseph Epstein points out, the only one without any redeeming qualities.
For answers, we must, as usual, turn to the gods. In this case, Eris, the goddess of strife. She had two very different sides. “One you would welcome when you came across her, the other is hateful,” writes the poet Hesiod. The good Eris, he said, propelled men to great heights by “rousing them to labor” and to outperform their compatriots. This good envy enabled the Greeks to transform competition from a toxic to a productive force. Somehow, they extracted the motivational juice from envy (I want to best my neighbor) without succumbing to its darker side (I want to strangle my neighbor). How did they pull this off? And if they can do it, why can’t we?
As I walk back across the Hill of the Muses, past the toy trains and the Mickey Mouse balloons, past the souvenir shops selling philosopher calendars (Socrates is Mr. November), past the runners and the dog walkers, I turn the question over and over in my mind, rotating it like the spits of lamb I see at the ubiquitous souvlaki stands.
I walk and think, think and walk, unconsciously reenacting a ritual as old as this hill. Before I know it, though, I’m walking into the lobby of Tony’s Hotel, invigorated by my outing but with no answers, only better questions.
Good,
I hear Socrates say.
Keep asking. The road to wisdom is paved with good questions.
On my last day in Athens I head to the Bridge for one final espresso and some serious sitting. Ensconced at my favorite table, I reach for my notebook and draw a question mark.
Why Athens? Of all the volumes I’ve read about these strange and wonderful people, one sentence, from Plato, stands out: “What is honored
in a country will be cultivated there.” I marvel at its simplicity, how it conveys something both obvious and profound. We get the geniuses that we want and that we deserve.
What did the Athenians honor? They honored nature and the power of walking. They were no gourmands but enjoyed their wine, as long as it was sufficiently diluted. They took their civic responsibilities, if not their personal hygiene, seriously. They loved the arts, though they wouldn’t have phrased it that way. They lived simply and simply lived. Often, beauty was thrown in, and when it was, they paid attention. They thrived on competition, but not for personal glory. They didn’t shrink from change, or even death. They deployed words precisely and powerfully. They saw the light.
They lived in profoundly insecure times, and rather than retreat behind walls, as the hawkish Spartans did, or under a plush blanket of luxury and gourmet food, as other city-states did, the Athenians bear-hugged that uncertainty, thistles and all, remaining open in every way, even when prudence might dictate otherwise. This openness made Athens Athens. Openness to foreign goods, odd people, strange ideas.
The Athenians got so much right, yet their golden age was, as I said, remarkably brief. What went wrong? In a way, nothing.
In 1944, an anthropologist named Alfred Kroeber published a little-known book called
Configurations of Culture Growth.
Despite the dreadful title, this ambitious and fascinating work aimed to do no less than chart the ebb and flow of human accomplishment. Kroeber believed that culture, not genetics, explained genius clusters such as Athens. He also theorized why these golden ages invariably fizzle. Every culture, he said, is like a chef in the kitchen. The more ingredients at her disposal (“cultural configurations” he called them), the greater the number of possible dishes she can whip up. Eventually, though, even the best-stocked kitchen runs dry. That is what happened to Athens. By the time of Socrates’s execution, in 399 BC, the city’s cupboard was bare. Its “cultural configurations” had been exhausted; all it could do now was plagiarize itself.