Classics Part I: On Gov't
The Jefferson Club | Discussing Ideas of Government and Republicanism
Professor’s Preview
As we turn now to the ancient world’s understanding of government, one word demands immediate clarification: republicanism. This has nothing to do with political parties — nothing at all. It has everything to do with how people in the ancient world understood what government was for, how it should be organized, and what dangers lay in wait when it went wrong. These were not idle questions. They were questions the ancients took with the kind of seriousness we reserve for matters of survival, because for them, that is exactly what they were.
The Greeks of the Classical period thought about this harder than almost anyone who came before them (that we know of) — and produced writing that still demands to be reckoned with. Their arguments traveled across centuries, crossed oceans, and landed squarely in the minds of the men who built the American republic.
Thomas Jefferson read them. He borrowed from them. He was shaped by them in ways he himself acknowledged. The debt ran deep enough that when Jefferson stood over the grave of his wife, what he chose to put into the earth with her was not an original sentiment but borrowed verse — lines from Homer’s The Iliad: “If in the House of Hades men forget their dead, yet will I even there remember you, dear companion.”
That a man of Jefferson’s ambition and intellect reached, at the moment of grief, for words written twenty-five centuries before him — that tells you something worth knowing about the staying power of what we are about to examine.
The reading below is sourced in its entirety from:
Kordas, Ann, Ryan J. Lynch, Brooke Nelson, and Julie Tatlock. World History, Volume 1: to 1500. Houston: OpenStax, 2023. https://openstax.org/details/books/world-history-volume-1
The Classical “Golden Age”
Many historians view the Greek Classical period and the cultural achievements in Athens in particular as a “Golden Age” of art, literature, and philosophy. Some scholars argue that this period saw the birth of science and philosophy because for the first time people critically examined the natural world and subjected religious beliefs to reason. (Other modern historians argue that this position discounts the accomplishments in medicine and mathematics of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.) For example, around 480 BCE, Empedocles speculated that the universe was not created by gods but instead was the result of the four material “elements”—air, water, fire, earth—being subjected to the forces of attraction and repulsion. Another philosopher and scientist of the era, Democritus, maintained that the universe consisted of tiny particles he called “atoms” that came together randomly in a vortex to form the universe.
Philosophers questioned not only the traditional views of the gods but also traditional values. Some of this questioning came from the sophists (“wise ones”) of Athens, those with a reputation for learning, wisdom, and skillful deployment of rhetoric. Sophists emerged as an important presence in the democratic world of Athens beginning in the mid-fourth century BCE. They claimed to be able to teach anyone rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, for a fee, as a means to achieve success as a lawyer or a politician. While many ambitious men sought the services of sophists, others worried that speakers thus trained could lead the people to act against their own self-interest.
Many thought Socrates was one of the sophists. A stonecutter by trade, Socrates publicly questioned sophists and politicians about good and evil, right and wrong. He wanted to base values on reason instead of on unchallenged traditional beliefs. His questioning often embarrassed powerful people in Athens and made enemies, while his disciples included the politician Alcibiades and even some who had opposed Athenian democracy. In 399 BCE, an Athenian jury court found Socrates guilty of impiety and corrupting the youth, and he was sentenced to death.
Socrates left behind no writings of his own, but some of his disciples wrote about him. One of these was Plato, who wrote dialogues from 399 BCE to his death in 347 BCE that featured Socrates in conversation with others. Through these dialogues, Plato constructed a philosophical system that included the study of nature (physics), of the human mind (psychology and epistemology, the theory of knowledge), and ethics. He maintained that the material world we perceive is an illusion, a mere shadow of the real world of ideas and forms that underlie the universe. According to Plato, the true philosopher uses reason to comprehend these ideas and forms.
Plato established a school at the Academy, which was a gymnasium or public park near Athens where people went to relax and exercise. One of his most famous pupils was Aristotle, who came to disagree with his teacher and believed that ideas and forms could not exist independently of the material universe. In 334 BCE, Aristotle founded his own school at a different gymnasium in Athens, the Lyceum, where his students focused on the reasoned study of the natural world. Modern historians view Plato and Aristotle as the founders of Western (European) philosophy because of the powerful influence of their ideas through the centuries.
Athens in the Golden Age was also the birthplace of theater. Playwrights of the fifth century BCE such as Sophocles and Euripides composed tragedies that featured music and dance, like operas and musicals today. The plots were based on traditional myths about gods and heroes, but through their characters the playwrights pondered philosophical questions of the day that have remained influential over time. In Sophocles’s Antigone, for example, Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, must decide whether to obey the laws or follow her religious beliefs.
The study of history also evolved during the Golden Age. Herodotus and Thucydides are considered the first true historians because they examined the past to rationally explain the causes and effects of human actions. Herodotus wrote a sweeping history of wide geographic scope, called Histories (“inquiries”), to explore the deep origins of the tension between the Persian and Greek worlds. In History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides employed objectivity to explain the politics, events, and brutality of the conflict in a way that is similar in some respects to the approach of modern historians.
Finally, this period saw masterpieces of sculpture, vase painting, and architecture. Classical Age Greek artists broke free of the heavily stylized and two-dimensional art of Egypt and the Levant, which had inspired Greek geometric forms, and produced their own uniquely realistic styles that aimed to capture in art the ideal human form. Centuries later, and especially during the European Renaissance, artists modeled their own works on these classical models.
