Capitulo 2 libro politics

Chapter 2
The Classical Greeks: How to
be a Citizen
P olitics among the ancient Greeks was a new way of thinking,
feeling, and above all being related to one's fellows. Citizens
varied in wealth, beauty, and intelligence, but as citizens they
were equal. This was because citizens were rational, and the only
appropriate relation between rational beings is that of persuasion.Persuasion differs from command in assuming equality between speaker
and listener. Plato provides a noble vision of this form of political life in his
dialogue the Crito. The philosopher Socrates, having been sentenced to
death for corrupting the youth, refused the offer of help to escape Athens,
arguing that to flee would be rationally inconsistent with the commitment
to the city expressed inthe way he had lived his whole life. Even the mode
of his execution reflected this basic belief that violence was not an
appropriate relation between citizens: he was given a cup of hemlock to
drink. The Greek freely obeyed the law of his polis and was proud to do so.
His very identity was bound up with his city. The worst of fates was exile, a
form of civic death sometimes imposed bythe convention of ostracism on
Athenian statesmen whose power was thought to threaten the
constitution.
Among the Greeks we find most of the conditions of freedom: a life lived
among equals, subject only to law, and ruling and being ruled in turn. The
Greeks were the first historical people to create societies having this form;
certainly they were the first to create a literatureexploring it as an
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experience. Politics was the activity specific to this new thing called a
'citizen'. It might take many forms, even the debased forms of tyranny and
usurpation, but on one thing the later classical Greeks were adamant:
oriental despotism was not politics.
Such is the formal position, and these were the forms which left so deep
an imprint on our civilization. Thereality was no doubt a great deal more
complex. Democratic and oligarchic factions fought bitter battles within
cities. Farmers lived on the edge of destitution, and bad harvests might
impel them towards debt slavery. Equality within cities was not matched
by equal relations between cities, and war was endemic. The Greeks were
a talkative, passionate people, and their politics was oftenviolent and
sometimes corrupt. None of this qualifies, however, the fact that they were
capable of brilliant exploits, such as their victory in repelling (and ultimately
conquering) their Persian neighbours. In reading much of the literature of
their time, we find it easy to think of them as our contemporaries: being
rationalists, they speak across the millenniums to us, their culturaldescendants, with a deceptive fluency. For all the common ground,
however, they were immensely different from us, in their religion, their
customs, and their conception of human life. It is this difference which
makes studying their civilization so exhilarating.
The Greeks were humanists, but of a kind strikingly different from the
humanism (transformed by Christianity) found in the modernworld. Their
basic proposition was that man is a rational animal, and that the meaning
of human life is found in the exercise of rationality. When men succumbed
to the passions, they were shamefully descending to a lower form of
being. When pride, or hubris, led them to think they were gods, they lost
sight of their human limitations and suffered nemesis, the destructive
resentment ofthe gods. The secret of life was human self-knowledge,
and a balanced expression of one's human capacities. In deliberating
about law and public policy, man found his highest and purest form
of self-expression. It could only be enjoyed in the political life of a
city.
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Humanists often look to the Greeks as ancestors, but their view of the
world has one remarkable (and in modern...