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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 in London 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 are to believe the 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 British Museum 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
playwright Aristophanes to 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 seen the 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 Athens sent 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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