Chapter 4 – Section 4

The Age of Pericles

Male Narrator: No it’s not a scene from a Hollywood epic. This is the Thames at Putney inLondon this morning, when a replica of a Greek trieres is showing off its paces. Its 170 rowers can thrust it forward at up to 10 miles an hour, a compelling reminder of how Athenian naval power ruled the civilized world. This warship symbolizes the freedom Greece secured for itself by routing the Persians, but it was also the instrument that made Athens rich by extracting tribute from its empire. So just how starry eyed should we be about the city that gave us the Acropolis, Socrates and Plato? If we areto believethe man who presided over the golden age of Athens,Pericles,then the place and the way it was governed should be an example to us all.

Male Speaker: Our constitution is called a democracy because the power is in the hands not of a minority, but the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes everyone is equal before the law. When it is a question of putting one person before another, in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability a man possesses.

Male Narrator: But as this inscription in the BritishMuseum demonstrates Athenian freedom was built partly on the oppression of others. Here the Athenians are imposing their democratic system on the people of Erythre. Most of the Aegean was forced by Athens’ navy to cough up money and ruthlessly suppressed if it refused. At home slaves and women had no vote,which prompted the comic playwrightAristophanesto allow his women to express that exasperation with the system, but if you were an Athenian citizen you took part in a direct democracy. The world has not seenthe like of it since.Everyone could turn out at the debates, everyone could speak, everyone could vote on every issue. The people, the demos was truly sovereign.And it is occasionally looked like rule by the mob. We must remember that when Athenssent trieres and foot soldiers into the Peloponnesian war at the end of the fifth century,her first priority was hardly the lofty ideal of extending democracy. It was essentially a naked struggle for power with Sparta, which Athens lost.

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