Authors: Eric Weiner
But wait, I hear you say, hasn’t wartime generated all sorts of innovations—the jet engine, radar, and much more? Yes, war can spark a few innovations, but they are narrowly focused—a better gun, a faster plane. And while these advances do sometimes spawn civilian applications, the net result of war, concludes Dean Simonton after an exhaustive study, is negative, and “the negative effect holds true for every form of creativity, even for technology.”
Aristotle and I are sitting on a stone slab as old as the ages, the Mediterranean sun bearing down on us, the tourists swarming like angry wasps, when
I ask point-blank what he thinks. Why Athens? What was in the air?
Aristotle doesn’t have a ready answer, no illustration in his backpack to whip out, no clever one-liner. People don’t usually ask him that question. Athenian greatness is taken as a given. He thinks for a long while before finally speaking.
“It had to be the political system. First of all, there was freedom of speech and open debate. Something that the other city-states didn’t have. In the assembly, you had to stand up at the speaker’s platform and address some seven thousand men, forty times a year. No topic was off-limits. If you had any ambitions to become a statesman, you needed the skills of public speaking, and you also had to be educated. Plus, you needed stamina. They would stay there from sunrise to sunset and start with mundane issues, like water or grain supply, then move on to weightier issues.
“So, yes,” Aristotle says, the certainty in his voice peaking, “it was democracy.”
I’m not so sure. For starters, there is the old chicken-and-egg problem. Was Athens creative because it was democratic, or was it democratic because it was creative? And then there is the voice in my head, that of Dean Simonton, who, again, has crunched the numbers and says no correlation exists between golden ages and democracy. Freedom, not democracy, is what’s needed, he had told me. They’re not the same thing. “You can have enlightened autocrats. China never had democracy but they had enlightened autocrats.” Some psychologists go even further, suggesting that oligarchies may actually foster
more
creativity than democracies since, with less public oversight, they’re more willing to engage in risky or “unnecessary” projects. So, as much as I hate to disagree with someone named Aristotle, I don’t think democracy alone explains Athenian greatness. I need to keep digging.
We’re on the move again, this time, Aristotle assures me, heading to the heart of ancient Athens. It was not, as many people (myself included) assume, the Acropolis. We have left that sacred site far behind. A few minutes later, we enter a gate and spread before us is a collection of ruins, some nearly intact, others little more than stumps of stone. “This is it,” says Aristotle with a verbal flourish.
The
agora
. It literally means “place where people gather,” but it was much more than that. When Athenians set about rebuilding their city after it was sacked by the Persians, they did not begin with the temples of the Acropolis, as you might expect. They began here, with the true heart of the city.
This messy, chaotic place was replete with the sound of shopkeepers hawking their wares, sophists their oratorical services. It also had an undercurrent of menace. Often, arguments broke out, and sometimes scuffles. Athenians loved their agora, but others didn’t see the appeal. The Persian king Cyrus said he had no respect for a people who allocated a special space “where they could come together to cheat each other and tell one another lies under oath.”
The Athenian agora was the original everything store. If it existed in the ancient world, you could find it for sale at the agora. As the comic poet Eubulus enumerates, items available included “figs, witnesses to summonses, bunches of grapes, turnips, pears, apples, givers of evidence, roses, porridge, honeycombs, chickpeas, lawsuits, beestings-puddings, myrtle, allotment machines [for random jury selection], irises, lambs, water clocks, laws, indictments.” Everything had its place. Separate sections existed for fresh fruit and dried fruit, smoked fish and nonsmoked, spices and perfumes, footwear, and horses. There was even the agora of the
kerkopes
, the thieves’ market, where stolen goods were sold.
No one was fonder of the agora than Socrates. He came here to haggle with shopkeepers, catch up on the latest gossip, to discuss the nature of beauty. He is said to have idled away hours at the shop of a cobbler named Simon. No one knows for sure, though. Just when archaeologists think they’ve found traces of old Socrates—a clay cup, for instance, with the name
SIMON
etched on it—it turns out to be a false lead. I can hear Socrates laughing across the centuries. “I’m over here; no, over there. Catch me if you can.” He was a man who refused to be pinned down—in life and in death.
It’s getting late. Aristotle and I are about to say good-bye when he stops and turns. He’s been thinking about my geographies of genius, my attempt to nail down a recipe of sorts, and he’s not optimistic. “To
be honest,” he says, strands of auburn hair cascading down his face, his hands uncharacteristically still, “I don’t think you will ever find a formula for these places of genius.” His words bounce off me and tumble downhill before landing with a thud on the hard and ancient ruins of the agora.
We say good-bye and head in opposite directions. The harsh afternoon sun has softened into a pleasant crimson, and though Tony’s Hotel is quite far, I decide to walk, like Socrates.
“Socrates was the Dude.”
The words are spoken with great certainty, without a trace of irony. I’m not sure how to respond. By now, I know something of Socrates. I know he is one of the founders of Western philosophy, that he liked to ask lots of questions, and that he was, sadly, executed by the city he loved, charged, unfairly, with impiety and “corrupting the youth.” His dudeness, though, comes as news to me. Perhaps I misheard.
“Socrates was the Dude,” I hear again, this time with even greater conviction. The words are spoken by Alicia Stallings, poet, longtime Athens resident, and certified genius. She’s a recipient of the coveted (and lucrative) MacArthur Fellowship, informally known as a genius grant. If anyone can explain the genius of Athens, surely it is Alicia. At least that’s what I’d thought until she started with this dude business.
Earlier, she had suggested we meet at a café in her neighborhood. “It’s near the Temple of Zeus,” she had told me, as if that were the most natural landmark in the world. That’s what I love about Greek directions; they’re so much more
interesting
than back home. “Look for the Temple of Zeus” resonates more deeply, is freighted with more history, than “turn left at the Dunkin’ Donuts.” Athenians aren’t being pretentious when they name-drop the gods. They’re simply working with what they have. The Temple of Zeus. McDonald’s. They’re all part of the mix.
And so here I am, wine in hand, trying to wrap my mind around this Socrates-as-dude theory. Alicia is clearly using
dude
in
The Big Lebowski
an sense, which is the best sense, but still, comparing one of history’s greatest thinkers to a White Russian–drinking, pot-smoking character in a Coen brothers movie? I don’t know. It seems wrong.
Look at the facts, Alicia says, sensing my skepticism. While the world swirled around him, Socrates remained an island of calm. A rock. That’s very Dude-like behavior. During his long and fulfilling life, Socrates never wrote a single word. He was too busy being the Dude. And then there is this: at the hour of his execution, just before drinking the hemlock that would still his enormous heart, Socrates implored his followers, “I would ask you to be thinking of the truth and not of Socrates.” Not only is that statement admirably Dude-like in its selflessness—it’s not about me, it’s about the truth—it is also noteworthy in that Socrates spoke of himself in the third person. You don’t get any more Dude-like than that.
Yes, Socrates was the Dude, but more than that, he was an Athenian dude.
The
Athenian dude. Never before or since have a man and a city been so perfectly matched. He loved Athens and would never consider living—or dying—anywhere else. He could have avoided execution by fleeing Athens, but rejected that offer out of hand. He had a contract with the city, and he was going to fulfill his end of it.
Eccentric, barefoot, and endearingly stubborn, Socrates occupied that precarious position that all geniuses do—perched between insider and outsider. Far enough outside the mainstream to see the world through fresh eyes, yet close enough so that those fresh insights resonated with others.
Genius is many things, but beautiful is not one of them. Socrates was a profoundly ugly man. “Bearded, hairy, with a flat, spreading nose, prominent, popping eyes, and thick lips,” relays the historian Paul Johnson. Socrates, though, was not the least bit troubled by his appearance and often joked about it. In Xenophon’s
Symposium
, Socrates challenges Critobulus, a handsome young man, to a beauty contest. Critobulus points to Socrates’s elephantine nose as evidence of his ugliness. Not so fast, retorts the great philosopher. “God made the nose for smelling, and your nostrils are turned down while mine are wide and turned up and can receive smells from every direction.” As for my outsize lips, Socrates continued, they confer kisses that “are more sweet and luscious than yours.”
Whatever Socrates lacked in physical beauty, he made up for with exquisite timing. He was born at a propitious moment in human history, during
the time of Pericles, a mere nine years after the Chinese philosopher Confucius died. Socrates was twelve years old when the Hebrew priest Ezra left Babylon for Jerusalem, bringing with him a freshly transcribed version of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Torah. During this period, known as the Axial Age, old orders were crumbling, and new ones were not yet solidified. Cracks appeared, and as it’s been said, the cracks are what let the light in. The genius, too.
Socrates, like all geniuses, benefited from “zeitgeist fit.” This doesn’t necessarily mean he fit happily with the spirit of his times. What distinguishes geniuses is not a seamless fit with their times but, rather, what psychologist Keith Sawyer calls “the capacity to be able to exploit an apparent misfit.” This was certainly the case with Socrates; he pushed the boundaries of acceptable discourse—and got away with it, until he didn’t. His ideas resonated even as they riled. That is the way it is with geniuses. They fit in their times the way a pearl fits in an oyster shell. Uncomfortably yet essentially. A useful irritant.
Socrates is remembered as a great philosopher, but he was first and foremost a conversationalist. Before Socrates, people talked, but they didn’t have conversations. They had alternating monologues, especially if one person was of higher status than the other. Socrates pioneered conversation as a means of intellectual exploration, of questioning assumptions, ones so deeply ingrained we don’t even know we have them.
Conversation, I realize, is also a vehicle for the sort of group genius I’m probing. Sometimes ideas are the deliberate result of conversation, but just as often they arrive as an unexpected, but no less pleasing, by-product. Henry James recounts how his novel
The Spoils of Poynton
grew from “mere floating particles in the stream of talk.” Socrates dipped into that stream often, delighting in how it was never the same stream twice and he was never the same Socrates.
As the waitress brings another bottle of wine, Alicia tells me how she contracted the Greek bug at an early age. “The ancient authors are more modern than what is being written now,” she says, delighting in the apparent contradiction. “Their writing has an immediacy to it.”
I sip my wine and ponder her words. They explain a lot. They explain
why Alicia speaks of the ancient Greeks in the present tense. They also explain what distinguishes a good work, even a great one, from a true work of genius. A good poem or painting speaks to people of a certain time. A work of genius, however, transcends those temporal bounds and is rediscovered anew by successive generations. The work is not static. It bends, and is bent by, each new audience that encounters it. As Pablo Picasso said, “There is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present, it must not be considered art at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past, perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.”
If I’m going to understand the Greek mind, Alicia tells me, I need to step back and put myself in their sandals. The Greeks didn’t have a word for “create,” at least not in the way we mean it. If you asked a Greek poet what he was doing, he would say he was engaged in
poiesis
, literally “to make,” a word that applied equally to making a poem or making a fire or making a mess. “They weren’t trying to
do
poetry or
be
creative,” says Alicia. The Greeks created much of what we now consider art, but, as we saw with the vases, didn’t put it on a pedestal. So large did the arts loom in daily life that they were a given. Art was functional. Beauty was a bonus.
This kind of embedded beauty is, I think, the best kind. Today, we go to great lengths to ensure that the rarefied world of art never brushes against our grubby, workaday lives. We have proclaimed art “special” and therefore placed it out of reach.
Alicia knows a thing or two about the intersection of art and life. One day, not that long ago, she was at home with her eight-year-old son. Her husband was at a dentist’s appointment. The phone rang.
“Are you alone?” the caller asked.
Alicia thought this was an odd question. “Well, my son is playing in the other room, but other than that, I am alone. Why?”
That’s when the caller told her that she had been selected as a MacArthur Fellow. It came with a cash award of $500,000, plus the unofficial title of “genius.”
Alicia hung up the phone. That much she remembers. Everything afterward is a blur. If geniuses are the secular world’s gods, Alicia was
now sitting atop Mount Olympus, peering down at the mortals. The view from up there is nice, but godliness comes not only with benefits but also burdens. For a while she couldn’t breathe. Then she could breathe but couldn’t sleep. This phase lasted two weeks. She would sit up at night excited, but also worried. Worried about an army of envious poets ambushing her. Worried about the unanticipated consequences of her newfound notoriety. Her sudden genius “has been something to navigate,” she says, as if describing a rough patch of white water, or an Athens street during rush hour. “Sometimes I feel like a genius. I mean, the words are flowing. Other times, I write something and think, ‘Do I want to publish this? This is not a work of genius. It’s a crappy poem.’ ”