The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives

"This is a modern structure. Plutarch wrote Parallel Lives : so he went after a Greek and a Roman that he could put together in a single book. At a scholarly level, we get angry when people rip these books apart and put the lives into new collections, as in, ‘here are Greek lives of the Athenians and here are Roman lives from the Republic.’ That said, this Penguin collection does a really good job of grouping lives that are useful to read together. So in The Rise and Fall of Athens , you get to see four stages in the development of Athens over time. In the early stages, Plutarch has to push back into legendary and mythological times, with the founders like Theseus and even Solon. Even there, we see resonances of the way we mythologize or turn the stories of our founding figures into legends. In the US, for example, we have George Washington, who cannot tell a lie. We have these little myths that we tell to demonstrate the character of our founding figures. That’s what Plutarch is dealing with in those early lives and he says it quite bluntly: ‘This is the quality of the material I’m working with. I’m trying to turn myth into history and write about these figures as if they were real.’ “If you’re thinking about how to be a leader, it’s the character of the individual that is most important.” Then we get into the lives of the earliest real historical figures, such as Themistocles and Aristides. They were living at the time of the Persian Wars, when Greece was under attack by this large power and managed to fight it off. The Greeks that were living at this time realized that things were different before and after the invasion of the Persians. This stage resonates with people who have lived through the 20th and into the 21st century, because for Athens, it was like the big industrial push that happened as a result of World War Two. Athens was left with a huge navy—we would probably call it a military industrial complex—and they used it to knit together an empire in the Aegean Sea. Ostensibly, it was to keep the Persians from coming back, but in fact they asserted their own authority over large areas and did much more than simply protect against invasion. So this is the period of empire-building and commercial domination that follows the Persian invasion. Then, in the age of Pericles, Nicias and Alcibiades—and even Lysander, who is the one Spartan included here—it’s about how the Greek cities got along and interacted in this new, globalized economy. The fact is they didn’t, and a 30-year chunk of the classical period of Greece is taken up by war. It’s waged by Athens and its empire or its allies on one side, and Sparta and its allies on the other. So these lives deal with leaders in that environment. That can be very instructive for the modern situation, seeing what Greeks were doing and how individuals responded. We see what sort of character worked in leadership in those days and what sort of character didn’t. Plutarch has examples of both. Plutarch really likes Pericles. It’s a hard lesson, perhaps, because the only way that Pericles is successful is by being something of a demagogue and a little bit too authoritarian. He realizes, for example, that the assembly at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War is going to make bad strategic decisions. So he refuses to call them to vote, to keep them from making a mistake. I was actually teaching a class on Greek civilization the very same week your prime minister, Boris Johnson, was refusing to call Parliament into session because he didn’t want them to make certain decisions about Brexit. To my mind, it was a very easy parallel. I could just grab newspaper headlines and put them on the screen for my students and say, ‘The stuff we’re reading about Pericles is not arcane; it’s happening right now again.’ So if you’re looking for examples of leadership, there’s an example of circumventing a democratic process because you’re wary of the outcome. The flipside is someone who was related to Pericles, Alcibiades. Here’s someone who, in Plutarch’s telling of the story, can never really subordinate his own interests to the interests of the state. It’s always about him. And bad things happen to the Athenians, to the whole state, because of his desire to be this larger than life figure. There is no distinction. In fact, Plutarch would argue that what you’re doing in your private life will predict what’s going to happen if we put you in charge of public life. If you can’t run the small economy of your household in a competent way, why would we put you in charge of the city’s economy? It’s that way of thinking. No, there’s another body of work that’s collectively called the Moralia, which are treatises on lots of different topics. Most of them are philosophical and some of them are political. As he’s writing the Parallel Lives, he’s also writing political essays that take the principles and use examples from the Lives in a briefer form, to reinforce or support the arguments he’s making about how to be successful in politics. There are parts about mentoring, that the best way to start in politics is to attach yourself to someone who’s experienced and learn by example. On the flipside, if you’re an experienced politician, you need to devote some of your energy to bringing the next generation along. You also need to be ready to step out of the way and give them a chance. We’re having that struggle right now in our own presidential election, where we have three candidates who are 70 years old or older. They’ve had a long career: shouldn’t they be stepping aside and letting another generation come through and take over? Why does the younger generation have to beat down the older generation to have a chance? That’s an issue Plutarch addressed pretty directly. He wants older politicians to remain engaged, but in a more relaxed way. So he would not approve of a 70-year-old man on stage debating and arguing back and forth with a 40-year-old man. He would like the 70-year-old to step back and be summoned by the people, who recognize his experience and want his help if, say, the ship of state runs aground. To name names, maybe Joe Biden has an argument here. He’s saying, ‘Our state is running aground and I need to come back to help right it. I’m the one with experience who can fix things up.’ He would be happy that he’s made himself available to lead, though he’d be a little bit nervous that it’s Biden who’s pushing himself forward. He’s become the frontrunner now, so perhaps the party is saying, ‘Joe, we need you, come back in!’ I think, though, that Plutarch might question whether Biden’s motives are pure or whether he just can’t resist trying to get access to that highest office that’s eluded him in his career. There’s no other way. Plutarch has an essay, ‘To an Uneducated Leader.’ It sounds like an insult, but it could have been entitled ‘How to Become an Educated Leader,’ and the answer is philosophy. It’s what allows you to realize that an enthusiastic crowd cheering you on is not a good thing in itself, or that gaining wealth or being put in charge of an army is not a good thing in itself: what’s valuable is the good that you can do as a result of wielding power or holding office. If you’re satisfied with doing good—as opposed to gaining glory and gaining wealth—then you can be a good leader. And the only way to develop that realization, to have that maturity of thought, is through philosophy. That’s where you learn what is really valuable, what is really good. That’s where you learn the self-control and the self-discipline and how not to be distracted by the cheering crowd or the ability to become rich. If you can develop that kind of maturity, then you can become a good leader. It’s a very elitist system. You have to be well-educated and it’s your family and your money that are going to allow you to learn to speak well and to have access to philosophizing. Our word ‘school’ comes from the Greek word schole , which means leisure time. If you’re able to be educated, it means you don’t have to work every day to live. So the only way you can reach that status is to come from a wealthy, aristocratic background. For Plutarch, school is a huge privilege, because the alternative is going out every day and scratching the field and hoping that your land returns you enough to live through this year so that you can repeat the process next year. It’s never-ending. Ancient Greek agricultural life is very dreary. It repeats every year and it never gets better. You never work your way up. So schole is a really big deal. It’s the same in Latin. Ludus is school, but it’s also the word for a game or an entertainment. If you have time for ludus and fooling around, you can become educated, but it’s the one per cent that have that opportunity. Another reason you have to have your own wealth as a leader is because, even in your own city, you’re going to have to pay for a festival or build a new portico on the front of the theatre."