Authors: Eric Weiner
Nikos, though, understands it. As I said, he’s a philosopher, and a good one.
“What does it feel like to be a twenty-first-century Greek philosopher?” I ask.
“Hungry. It feels very hungry.” He’s joking. Sort of. The sophists of ancient Athens may have made a killing, but in today’s Athens philosophy doesn’t pay well, and meanwhile the ghosts of Plato and Socrates haunt the academic corridors.
Nikos is most acutely aware of “this awful burden,” as he calls it, when he attends seminars abroad. “If you say you are Greek, they say,
‘Aha, you are coming from the land that created philosophy,’ so you better be good. If you are good, it is very good, but if you are not good, it is very bad,” he says philosophically.
The philosophers of ancient Athens—unlike, say, the pharmacists of ancient Athens—still have much to teach us. “Each great philosopher is like a monument that stands on its own, and it never gets old,” he says. “You can read Plato and he is as alive now as he was two thousand years ago. But, actually, I don’t read Plato. I don’t like him.”
Whoa. Did I hear correctly? You don’t like Plato? You are a Greek philosopher and you don’t like the philosopher king himself? Isn’t that like being a classical musician and not liking Mozart, or a New Yorker and not liking bagels?
Nikos laughs, his voice crackling over the phone line. He’s clearly not afraid of Plato’s ghost. “Plato was a good writer but not a very good philosopher. He was an aristocrat and he hated democracy. Also, he separated the body and the soul. No, I don’t care for Plato.”
This is an advantage, one of the few, of being a Greek philosopher in the twenty-first century. You can say things like “I don’t like Plato” and get away with it. Heritage has its burdens but its privileges, too.
Before saying good-bye, I’m curious about something. Philosophy is a big tree with many branches. What did Nikos specialize in?
“The Skeptics,” he replies. “My PhD dissertation was on the Skeptics.”
Of course, I think, hanging up the phone. Of course.
The next morning, I find myself in need of inspiration when I discover that not far from Tony’s Hotel is a place called the Hill of the Muses. I like the way this sounds. What writer wouldn’t? Most Greeks considered the muses minor deities, but not the poets. For the poets, and other “creative types,” the muses were definitely majordomo deities. The muses determined not only when you wrote but also
what
you wrote. Homer was the world’s first writer and also, it turns out, the world’s first writer with writer’s block. He begins
The Odyssey
by thanking the muses. Like all authors, Homer craved legitimacy. Today, that is provided by the likes of
the
New York Times Book Review
and Goodreads. In Homer’s time, it was the muses. The original validators.
We may have outgrown many unfortunate Greek practices, such as slavery, but when it comes to the creative process, we are still very much Greek. We still beckon our muse. We may not believe they are actual beings, but these forces remain just as mysterious, and fickle, as the nymphs who romped on the Hill of the Muses. It’s impossible to understand Greek creativity, friends tell me, without understanding these deities. They speak a garbled tongue, though. Best to bring an interpreter.
Mine is Robert Pitt. Robert is an epigraphist. He reads the writing on the walls. On the pottery and statues, too. He comes highly recommended, not only for his command of this ancient language but for his ability to breathe life into it and, in true Greek fashion, simplify it so that even a cretin such as me can understand.
Robert is a trim, lanky man who looks considerably older than his thirtysome years. But nothing about him is the least bit geriatric, mind you. He’s just one of those people who was born middle-aged. Like the ancients, Robert believes in the power of place. That’s why he lives in Athens, not Oxford or Boston. To truly know the Greeks, he tells me, “you need to know their topography, their mountains, sounds, and smells.”
As we hike the winding path that leads to the summit of the Hill of the Muses, Robert tells me how as a young boy growing up in England he fell in love with the ancient Greeks. “I remember reading
The Iliad
and just being blown away by it, by the artistry and the story, and the immediacy of it.” A three-thousand-year-old tale with immediacy to it? I realize that for the Roberts and Bradys and Alicias of the world, the past is not such a foreign land. For them, I suspect, it is the present that is alien.
It’s still early but already the Mediterranean sun has grown fierce. I suggest we rest for a while. We find two rocks in the shape of benches and sit. “Socrates might have sat here,” says Robert matter-of-factly. That’s what I love about Athens. The past is always brushing up against you, with such tantalizing what-ifs as “Socrates might have sat here.”
I ask Robert about the role that language played in the Greek miracle.
Words mattered to the ancient Greeks, he says, in ways we can hardly imagine. For them, “talk was the breath of life.” They had a word for those who didn’t speak Greek:
barbaros.
It is where we get the English
barbarian
.
“It was an extraordinarily poetic language, yet at the same time an incredibly precise and subtle one,” he says. Not content with simply the active and passive voices, the Greeks invented an intermediate voice, something no other language had.
Always keen to synthesize, the Athenians combined their love of language with their love of drinking. The result was a game where participants tried to outverse one another. Robert has seen this practice preserved on pottery. “We have lots of vases from the symposia where people are scratching out verses and shouting, ‘Oh, I thought of a good one.’ ”
The love of language was instilled at an early age. Children were weaned on a steady diet of Homer—and expected to memorize all twenty-seven thousand lines. It’s difficult to overemphasize the influence of Homer on Greeks of this time. Think Shakespeare, Freud, Mark Twain, and John Grisham combined and you get an inkling of how large Homer loomed in the Greek imagination.
More than just the imagination, actually. In a fascinating study, psychologist David McClelland found a direct link between Greek accomplishments and the prominence of “achievement themes” in the literature of the day. The greater the amount of such inspirational literature, the greater their “real-world” achievements. Conversely, when the frequency of inspirational literature diminished, so did their accomplishments.
At first, this might seem odd. Backward. We believe that thought shapes language, and not the other way around. First we have a thought, then we express it. Or do we?
Consider the color blue. In English, we have one word for blue. We can modify it by describing something as light blue or dark blue or sky blue or baby blue. But with the exception of artsy hues such as cobalt and ultramarine, blue is blue. Not so in Russian. That language has two distinct words for blue:
goluboy
for lighter blues,
siniy
for darker blues.
Something interesting happens if you show a group of Russians and
Americans flash cards with colors on them. Not only can the Russians describe more shades of blue, they can actually
see
more shades. In the 1930s, linguists Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir advanced a theory first suggested by nineteenth-century thinkers called linguistic relativity. Language, the theory claims, determines not only how we describe the world around us but also how we
perceive
that world. Language doesn’t merely reflect our thinking, it shapes it as well. The Greeks used words not only to record greatness but to manufacture it as well.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that Robert, a lover of languages, dead or otherwise, chooses Thucydides, “the Shakespeare of his day,” as the historical figure he would most want to meet. “He was a genius,” Robert says with quiet certitude. “He’s literally inventing language. He’s a linguist and a psychologist. He’s not only describing events, he’s looking at why they happened. He’s really the first to investigate why people do the things they do and what are the patterns, what are the relationships between words and deeds. He basically invented this entire field and did it in such a way that even today, after being studied for two thousand years, we still see books and articles written about him, and you go, ‘Oh, God, absolutely. Here’s another whole layer of genius beneath all these other layers.’ ”
Thucydides, like so many geniuses, was a tragic figure. Exiled from Athens, he died, unsung, his masterpiece,
A History of the Peloponnesian War
, unfinished. It’s brilliant nonetheless, Robert assures me, and recommends a translation.
Enough sitting. We resume our trek up the Hill of the Muses, climbing higher and higher. As we finally reach the summit, Robert says slyly, “You wanted to know what made Athens Athens. Well, there it is.”
Spread below us like a blanket of blue is the Aegean Sea, glimmering in the bright afternoon light. Some twelve miles away, the waters meet a spit of land. The port of Piraeus.
Without that port, there would be no classical Athens, says Robert, and quotes Pericles: “Because of the greatness of our city, the fruits of the entire earth flow in upon us.” Athens was the world’s first global city. The Athenians, master shipbuilders and sailors, journeyed to Egypt,
Mesopotamia, and beyond and brought back every good imaginable. Embedded in those goods were some stowaways: ideas. This happens often. Ideas insert themselves into the fiber of merchandise and lie dormant until a careful observer unlocks them. This is why authoritarian regimes that believe they can open their economies but not their politics are fooling themselves. It may take a while, but eventually these subversive ideas, embedded in a can of tomato soup or a pair of Crocs, squirm free.
The Greeks readily “borrowed” these foreign ideas, if you’re feeling generous, “stole” them if you’re not. Here I find myself staring down an uncomfortable but unavoidable conclusion: The ancient Greeks didn’t invent much at all. They were, in fact, tremendous moochers. They borrowed the alphabet from the Phoenicians, medicine and sculpture from the Egyptians, mathematics from the Babylonians, literature from the Sumerians. They felt no shame in their intellectual pilfering. The Athenians, for all their many flaws (see slavery and treatment of women), didn’t suffer from the Not Invented Here complex. They recognized that, as Goethe said, “it is unconscious conceit not to admit frankly that one is a plagiarist.”
It sounds like a sacrilege, I know. Was Einstein a plagiarist? Bach? Picasso? Yes, in the sense that they borrowed liberally from others. Picasso was largely influenced by Velázquez and van Gogh, as well as African art. Bach by Vivaldi and Lutheran hymns. Of course, they took those borrowed ideas and put their own stamp on them. Athens did, too. Whatever they stole, they then “Athenized,” or, as Plato, with more than a touch of hubris, put it, “What the Greeks borrow from foreigners they perfect.”
Take pottery. The Corinthians invented the craft but never deviated from their standard animal frieze. Competent work, yes, but static and dull. The Athenians added richer colors and entire narratives: a couple embracing, a child playing a game, men drinking and reciting poetry. Similarly, the Egyptians invented statuary thousands of years earlier. They were stiff and lifeless representations, though. The Athenians animated them, liberating the human form from the block of stone.
This willingness to borrow, steal, and embellish distinguished Athens from its neighbors. Athenians were more open to foreign ideas and, in the
final analysis, more open-minded. At the symposia, they enjoyed the poetry of outsiders as much as that of locals. They incorporated many foreign words into their vocabulary and even began wearing foreign clothes. Athens was both Greek
and
foreign, in much the way that New York is an American city and not.
Athens embraced not only foreign goods and ideas. It also welcomed foreigners themselves. They were free to roam the city, even during times of war, an admittedly risky policy since, as Pericles himself acknowledged, “the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit from our liberality.” The Spartans, by comparison, walled themselves off from the outside world, and nothing kills creativity faster than a wall.
These foreigners who lived in Athens were known as
metics
(today, we’d call them resident aliens), and they contributed mightily to the city. Some of the best-known sophists, for instance, were foreign-born. Athens rewarded them with everything from a simple wreath to meals for life at public expense.
On an individual level, psychologists have identified this “openness to experience” as the single most important trait of exceptionally creative people. The same holds true for societies, as Dean Simonton’s research shows. He examined a country that has, historically, been among the world’s most closed societies: Japan. Looking at a long stretch of time, from 580 until 1939, Simonton compared Japan’s “extra cultural influx” (travel abroad, immigration, etc.) and its national achievements in such fields as medicine, philosophy, painting, and literature. He found a consistent correlation: the greater Japan’s openness, the greater its achievements, especially in the arts. This hold true, he believes, for all cultures; every leap forward is preceded by an exposure to foreign ideas.
It isn’t the ideas themselves, though, that drive innovation. It’s that they shine a bright light on that normally invisible sea called culture. People realize the arbitrary nature of their own culture and open their minds to, in effect, the possibility of possibility. Once you realize that there is another way of doing X, or thinking about Y, then all sorts of new channels open up to you. “The awareness of cultural variety helps set the mind free,” says Simonton.
Athenians tolerated not only strange foreigners but also homegrown eccentrics, of which there were many. Hippodamus, the father of urban planning, was known for his long hair, expensive jewelry, and cheap clothing, which he never changed, winter or summer. Athenians mocked Hippodamus for his eccentricities, yet they still assigned him the vital job of building their port city, Piraeus. Athens even tolerated characters such as Diogenes, who lived in a wine barrel and regularly ridiculed the famous and powerful. (After Plato described man as a rational animal, a kind of featherless bird, Diogenes plucked a chicken and tossed it over a wall, yelling, “Heads up. Here comes a true man.”) Then there was the philosopher Cratylus, who was so determined not to contradict himself that he was reduced to communicating only through simple gestures. Athens welcomed them all.