Learning from the Greeks

H.D.F. Kitto. The Greeks. Penguin, 1957. 0-14-020220-X

Antony Andrewes. Greek Society. Penguin, 1967 (1971). 0-14-021367-8

Given that the Andrewes book originally appeared in a Hutchinson edition as The Greeks, it makes sense to read these two books together. They are both informative and stimulating general overviews of Ancient Greece, and both cover more or less the same ground: via a brief mention of prehistory, from the Mycenaeans to the rise of Macedon and the arrival of Alexander the Great. Both concentrate on the classical period; but Kitto looks longest and hardest at the Athenian polis, and Andrewes makes an attempt to be more geographically comprehensive. These are old books by current standards, but that ought not to deter anyone from turning to them for a clear and comprehensive introduction to classical Greece. Newer work will contain new ideas and new information; but the subject is old, and every period produces standard interpretations made to suit different times and tastes. We are not so far removed from the 1950s to assume that their thinking about the Greeks is no longer worth our attention.

Thanks to the significant degree of overlap in their subject matter, these books are an interesting study in contrasts: how these two authors work with the same set of facts and the same sources to produce significantly different books. Kitto has a story to tell: about the rise and fall of the special combination of cultural traits and regional conditions that gave rise to classical Greek political structure. He concentrates on the ‘polis’ as a central feature of Greek life: how the Greeks perceived their community and perceived themselves within that community. This involves more than just politics: his topic is really the rise and fall of a certain moral vision of the world, and of a way of thinking about the place of human life in that world. Kitto demonstrates that the Greek way of the mind was particularly productive; and there are echoes of its influence everywhere in the contemporary world. Kitto’s book is an example of the best kind of interpretative history: the meditations of an historian on a subject that historian knows particularly well, and about which that historian has something particularly useful to say.

If anyone can be motivated to look through these books on my recommendation, I advise against the order in which I read them. Andrewes is in the business of facts, and consequently comes off a bit flat on being read after Kitto. Both of these books are very thoroughly organized; but Andrewes’ organization is almost ruthless. One can almost hear the beads of an abacus clacking as he counts off aspects of Greek society and slots them into the rows and columns conventionally reserved for them in contemporary social-science history. His final chapter, called ‘Open Speculation’, finally takes up the task of synthesis and general commentary that occupies Kitto for the whole of his book. In the end, Andrewes nudges dangerously close to a sin roundly condemned in Kitto: the application of contemporary standards and ways of thinking to the inner life of the ancient Greeks. Kitto’s great strength is his ability to approach the Greeks as much on their own terms as can be possible from such a great distance. He plainly refuses the temptation to catalogue the good and bad point of Greek culture – to tot up how much they got right in comparison with us. This can make it sound as though Kitto’s is the more ‘objective’ book; but in fact the opposite is true. When we come to look at the ancient Greeks, it is impossible to reach any sensible conclusions without talking about morality. Andrewes consciously avoids moral reasoning and interpretation, while Kitto makes such themes the major focus of his book.

We must be clear that when we talk about ‘moral reasoning and interpretation’ we are not merely casting about for sticks with which to beat distasteful things. The moral implications of historical writing can come from a variety of sources, but their ultimate origins must be grounded in historical fact. Contemporary thinking about society and history can uncover a host of such sources. Changes and developments that had a profound impact on the moral order of classical Greece are also at work in our own time. In the classical period, the lifeways and interests of people who lived in rural and urban Greece began to diverge to a significant and unparalleled degree. At the same time, the whole Greek world expanded in size and complexity – an expansion that affected the structure of local communities and markets. The whole structure of Greek society changed as Greece came to be specialized and professionalized: a change that made their former political life impossible.

Classical Greece continues to act as an emotional ancestor of our political system in the West. However much it can be shown that Athenian democracy was fundamentally different from our own, the very fact that it existed has been an inspiration for the representative democracies of the modern world. There are dangers in this admiration, particularly if we use our political system as a measure of how far the ancients were on or off the right track: this will inevitably result in our time looking much better than theirs. It seems better to pick a harder object of comparison: in this case, morality and its place in the order of things. This is a much more difficult, and much more apposite, influence and question.

Democracy is now part of a social system that has the notion of ‘freedom’ as its moral centre. An essential component of this freedom is the ability of the people to exercise sovereignty over themselves. For the Ancient Greeks, ‘democracy’ involved the rights and responsibilities of citizens in the administration and conduct of law and government. It was one part of a social system that stressed ‘public virtue’ as its moral centre. Greek style democracy would have ceased to be democratic in their eyes if it became representative: the whole point was that the highest level decision-making body was an assembly of the citizens themselves. This is obviously impossible in a modern state, which can have several hundred million citizens with the right to sit in such an assembly.

We should also ask if it would be possible for a classical Greek democracy to function in a social system without ‘public virtue’ as a moral centre. Modern culture values ‘freedom’ and a consequent rational pursuit of self-interest above a moral commitment to general welfare. Our culture requires a constitutional break on general sovereignty to avoid the state disintegrating into a chaos of competing interests. Balancing the need to avoid chaos against the need to preserve ‘freedom’ is the greatest challenge faced by modern states. Moral and logistical factors forge the character of a state, or of any political system. Ancient Greek democracy worked as long as the Greeks were committed to the moral factors that underpinned it, and as long as the needs served by their political system were not too complex for it to handle. The lesson of this comparison should be to encourage us to develop different models for our political aspirations: it is too misleading for us to idealise our claim to be the heirs of classical Greece.

Kitto’s book came out of the 1950s; Andrewes out of the 1960s. It would make an interesting study to see how the style of writing Greek history changed in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Kitto represents an older way of looking at history: not at all afraid to take moral lessons from his study, but at the same time, cautious and clear-eyed about the gulf separating himself and the Greeks. With Andrewes, it seems that the willingness to draw moral conclusions is gone, and only the gulf remains. He may well admire the Greeks, and he certainly respects them, but one never gets the same sense of lively engagement with the past that one finds in Kitto. The writing of history is less of a literary art in Andrewes: it is several steps along the road to being a strictly academic work, a repository of information rather than a persuasive text. I wonder: with the proliferation of such repositories, all collecting information to permit specialists to draw their own conclusions in private, do we retain a space in public for definitiveness or interpretation?

2002/06/01

Date posted: 2003-09-01