Chapter Ten
Sage, wo ist Athen?
[Tell me, where is Athens?]
—Friedrich Hölderlin, “Der Archepelagus”
BY THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century, Mitford’s place on the shelf had been usurped by a Greek history of a very different stamp. Today students of Greece are not likely to go back any farther than Grote’s History in their secondary research; Mitford’s work is not found in many libraries, and where it is, its several volumes sit quietly for the most part and gather dust on the shelf, consulted more often by historiographers than by historians. There is no question that a pronounced shift in political currents in England was the proximate cause of Grote’s new perspective—on Athens in particular—and of its warm reception. At the same time, however, important political currents outside the British Isles contributed to Grote’s enthusiasm for Athenian government, while in Britain itself, though Mitford’s work was quite popular in some circles, Grote was hardly the first to cry foul.
For all Mitford’s energy, and for all his scholarship, his History of Greece was a work whose time was passing even as it was being painstakingly turned out volume after volume. Many factors contributed to this development besides the changing political climate in England. To begin with, each successive year undermined the belief that the American experiment was doomed to end in anarchy. Because of its bad—and Athenian—associations, the word “democracy” had been avoided by eighteenth-century egalitarians, but it was used early in the 1790s by Thomas Paine, and by 1816 Thomas Jefferson was comfortable writing that “we in America are self-consciously … democrats.”1 In Europe, a shift in the connotations of the word was perceptible around 1800. The later eighteenth century, moreover, had seen a surge of enthusiasm in Germany for the Greek aesthetic ideal, and this increased appetite for Greek literature and sculpture inevitably suggested that the Athenians had perhaps possessed some important virtues that the Spartans, for instance, had lacked: the holistic approach to culture that marked many German thinkers made it difficult to compartmentalize art and government in such a way as to facilitate an easy division between the aesthetic and political spheres. In France, the old enthusiasm for Sparta was slowly being replaced by a new appreciation of Athens; and revolution was still in the air—not only in France and America, where the dust had begun to settle, but in Greece itself. For Hellas captured the hearts of many Europeans and Americans in the war of independence it began from Turkey in 1821, the war that sparked a furor of philhellenism whose most famous product was Byron’s encomium “The Isles of Greece.”
The first attested use of the term democracy in a positive context may have been in France during the 1730s, when d’Argenson circulated secretly his Considerations on the Government of France; but though the word appeared repeatedly in d’Argenson’s manuscript, it did not catch on among republicans.2 The sorts of revolutionary Americans who left writings behind them did not call themselves democrats, but the word crops up in France in 1789, perhaps coined by Dutch revolutionaries in the 1780s. Tom Paine was in France when he began work on The Rights of Man, in which he used the word democracy frequently. Two years later democracy was praised, once more by name and repeatedly, in Robespierre’s speech to the Convention in February of 1794, where it was proclaimed that “democracy is the only form of state which all the individuals composing it can truly call their country, and which can therefore count on as many interested defenders as it has citizens.”3 Peter Ochs of Basel wrote in the constitution penned for the Helvetic Republic in 1798 that the government of the republic should at all times be a representative democracy. Democracy was also used in a favorable sense during the very last years of the eighteenth century, as the future Pope Pius VII in a curious 1797 Christmas homily assured his diocese repeatedly that Christianity was not necessarily incompatible with democracy. Times were changing, and with them the meanings of words; for at least a handful, democracy had come to betoken a broad power base rather than anarchy and chaos.
THE BIRTH OF GERMAN HELLENISM
At the same time that the notion of democracy was slowly inching toward respectability in Western thought, a remarkable Hellenic revival was taking shape in the least likely of quarters. Classical studies had flourished briefly in Germany in the sixteenth century, but this efflorescence was short-lived and was followed around 1700 by a rejection of all that was not Christian. The primary credit for initiating the German classical revival probably belongs to Johann Matthias Gesner. Schoolmaster successively at Weimar, Ansbach, and Leipzig, Gesner was summoned in 1734 to the new university at Göttingen, where he was given the position of Professor of Eloquence. It was Gesner who took the crucial initiative in directing the steps of German Hellenism not back to the Old Humanism that had entailed the formal and verbal imitation of Latin models but rather toward what came to be called New Humanism, which sought through the reading of both Greek and Latin texts to reenter the minds and recapture the spirit of the ancients. Both Gesner and his successor at Leipzig, Christian Gottlob Heyne, exemplified a broad and holistic approach to ancient civilization that contrasted sharply with the stale classicism of sixteenth-century Germany.4
The year 1755 witnessed the appearance of Winckelmann’s Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechen in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Reflections on the imitation of the Greeks in painting and sculpture). A cobbler’s son who walked eighty miles in order to purchase classical texts, Winckelmann was a remarkable individual. His work on ancient art made him an overnight sensation, and the second half of the eighteenth century was so conspicuous for its German neo-Hellenism as to have sparked in this century Eliza Butler’s book entitled The Tyranny of Greece over Germany.5 Political concerns were generally far from the minds of German phil-Hellenes, and by far the bulk of the Germans’ interest in Greek antiquity focused on the Greek aesthetic ideal and its expression in the arts; but because Athens was viewed as the cradle of Greek sculpture, philosophy, and drama, her stock rose dramatically, and some thinkers connected the flourishing of the arts in Athens directly with her democratic government.6
Winckelmann’s attribution of the glorious era of Athenian art to Athens’s democratic constitution is cited with approval by Herder in his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, which appeared in 1791.7 In Athens, Herder argues, democratic government fostered the growth of architecture since it called for numerous public structures for government, religion, exercise, and entertainment. He argues too that it was the investment of the Athenian people in everything that carried their name that accounted for the splendid temples to the gods. In the Greek city-states, Herder maintained, “grandeur and magnificence were not so divided as in modern times, but concentrated in whatever pertained to the state.” Pericles, consequently, did more for the arts “than ten kings of Athens would have done.” Besides, he goes on, statesmen in democracies need to please the public, and what better avenue “than such kinds of expense, as, while they tended to propitiate the tutelary deities, were calculated to gratify the eyes of the people, and afford subsistence to many?” The oppression of the allies and other similar wrongs Herder sees as justified by the adornment of the city, particularly with temples.8
Herder has high praise for Greek government in general, and he stands squarely apart from the tradition that viewed the city-states as faction-torn centers of endless squabbling. In general, he maintains, “All the mistakes and errours of the governments of Greece are to be considered as the essays of youth, which commonly learns to be wise only from misfortune.”9 Once again here he awards the palm to Athens, and it is the political institutions of Athens that he singles out for analysis.10 For, he writes, “if enlightening the people with regard to those things, in which they are most concerned, ought to be the object of a political establishment, Athens was unquestionably the most enlightened city throughout the whole World,” with which no ancient or modern city can compete.11 Dissociating himself from the tradition eager to condemn Athens for the execution of Socrates, Herder maintains that without Athens, even the virtues of Socrates and his disciples would have failed to bloom, “for Socrates was no more than a citizen of Athens, and all his wisdom was only the wisdom of an Athenian citizen.”12 Herder also departs from conventional wisdom in his defense of Athenian oratory and drama, questioning the prudence of inferring public morality from the stage and eloquently praising the political engagement of the Athenians in words that foreshadow the work of George Grote and Edward Freeman. For all the rashness of the Athenian assembly, he contended, daily experience in deliberation “opened even the ears of the unruly mob, and gave them that enlightened mind, that propensity to political conversation, with which all the asiatic nations were unacquainted.”13
Sharing in the cultural relativism of Voltaire and Ferguson—Herder had read Ferguson’s History of Civil Society— Herder insisted on taking the ancients on their own terms and refused to judge them as failed moderns. This outlook combined with his view of history as the study of communities rather than as that of the exploits of famous men to produce an account of Greece significantly different from those composed early in the century. Like Vico in Italy, Goguet and Montesquieu in France, and Hume and Ferguson in Scotland, Herder abandoned the traditional emphasis on the doings of powerful politicians and military men. His focus on the dynamics of the Athenian community fostered a view of Athens that liberated it significantly from its previous image as the persecutor of martyred statesmen.14
In 1795 Schiller published his letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man. His goal in the letters was to formulate a program for the education of mankind for a life of freedom. The French revolution, Schiller believed, had failed because the moral education of the revolutionaries had not equipped them with the sensibilities necessary to build new structures to replace the ones they had destroyed. Schiller’s construct for the overhauling of mankind involved some kind of return to the wholeness and integration that marked the ancient Greek individual and the ancient Greek state, although he was well aware of the obstacles to this regeneration.15 The alienation that marked modern civilization, he argued, arose because man had become fragmented, with his senses and his reason divided and set against each other. If one compares the ancient Greek state to the modern state, Schiller maintained, the modern will rival the ancient; but if we compare the ancient Greek individual to the modern individual, the modern is a fragment. Schiller attributes the fragmentation of man in large part to the division of labor and sees the happy era of integration lying in Greece as it was before this division developed. “The zoophyte condition of the Grecian states,” he writes,
where each individual enjoyed an independent life, and could, in case of necessity, become a separate whole and unit in himself, gave way to an ingenious mechanism, when from the splitting up into numberless parts, there results a mechanical life in the combination. Then there was a rupture between the state and the church, between laws and customs; enjoyment was separated from labour, the means from the end, the effort from the reward. Man himself, eternally chained down to a little fragment of the whole, only forms a kind of fragment; having nothing in his ears but the monotonous sound of the perpetually revolving wheel, he never develops the harmony of his being.16
Schiller has a clear sense of where the Greek ideal was most visibly realized: it was in Athens. “Who among the moderns,” he asks, “could step forth, man against man, and strive with an Athenian for the prize of higher humanity?”17
Schiller’s preference for Athens among the Greek states was developed more fully in his essay on The Legislation of Lycurgus and Solon. It is with vehemence that Schiller rejects the Spartan system, which, he argues, was appropriately designed for an inappropriate end. Though the laws of Lycurgus were well calculated to preserve a self-sufficient and stable system, that very stability was posited on the complete absence of the aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual growth that is in fact the end of human existence. The institutions of Lycurgus dulled human feeling and treated human beings as means rather than ends. To the Lycurgan program, that of Solon presents a dramatic contrast. Though he disapproves of the degree to which Solon placed power in the hands of the multitude, Schiller sees the Solonic legislation as fundamentally dynamic, flexible, and conducive to growth; for Schiller some of the most dramatic evidence for the stark difference between the approach of Solon and that of Lycurgus lies in Solon’s instructions for his laws to remain in force for a hundred years. Solon, Schiller believed, had seen farther than Lycurgus, for Solon “understood that laws are only the maidservants of a culture, that nations in their manhood require a different kind of guidance from what they needed in their childhood.”18 Time, Schiller concludes, is a correct judge of merit, and he sets himself conspicuously apart from the laconophiles in denying that Lycurgus’s institutions in truth endured the test of time; all Lycurgus accomplished, he claimed, was to eternalize the spiritual infancy of the Spartans.
How humankind was to restore the ideals of Solon is unclear. Neither hard labor nor leisured contemplation, Schiller argues, is conducive to Hellenic wholeness. In Naive and Sentimental Poetry, Schiller distinguishes between Arbeit, labor, which is exhausting and distracting, and Tätigkeit, activity, which is energizing and positive. Although Schiller seems to have associated social hierarchy with the fragmentation and alienation he sought to eliminate, it is hard to imagine a universe in which more than a minority could arrange their lives in happy Tätigkeit, freed from the draining demands of Arbeit, and in time Schiller himself came to question whether attempts to resurrect the Hellenic ideal were not perhaps a bad use of energy. Before abandoning his hopes for the restoration of a Greek-style wholeness in human life, however, Schiller had imparted his enthusiasm for the Hellenic ideal to his wildly sensitive protégé Friedrich Hölderlin.
For Hölderlin, Greece represented a lost paradise in which man was “one with all,” and Hölderlin was to play an important part in the romanticizing of ancient Greece in general and Athens in particular.19 The search for the Greek past forms the theme of Hölderlin’s cloyingly sentimental novel Hyperion, composed between 1797 and 1799. The plot, such as it is, concerns the longings of Hölderlin’s hero Hyperion, a contemporary Greek, for Greek antiquity and for a world that contrasts not only with the decadence of contemporary Greece but with the sad state of contemporary Germany as well. It is the quest for this Greek paradise that unites Hyperion with his (male) companion Alabanda, another Greek, in a passionate bond that Hölderlin couches in the form of a betrothal. (The lines in which Hölderlin describes this connection make Antigone’s attachment to her brother Polyneices appear chaste and temperate by comparison. Hölderlin published a free rendition of Antigone in 1804.20) The friendship of Hyperion and Alabanda is compared to that of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, particularly when they join together in the Greek uprising against Turkey in 1760, the year of Hölderlin’s birth. Hyperion also develops a consuming passion for a Greek girl, whom he names Diotima. Diotima was not only the name of the high priestess of love in Plato’s Symposium to whom Socrates attributed his knowledge of the subject; it was also the name Hyperion had given to Susette Gontard, the (evidently Platonic) lover whom he met when her husband engaged him as tutor for their children and to whom he remained devoted throughout his life. It is Diotima who “teaches” Hyperion that the agony he experiences upon a rift with Alabanda arises from his identification of Alabanda with the lost world of ancient Greece. “It was no man that you wanted,” she says in an echo of the original Diotima’s speech on love and beauty; “believe me, you wanted a world. The loss of all golden centuries crowded together, as you felt them, in one happy moment, the spirit of all spirits of a better time.”21
Though on the whole it is a generalized picture of ancient Greece that fires Hyperion’s mind, Athens is singled out for praise and contrasted to its advantage with Sparta. A long discussion of Athens takes place as Hyperion and his friends approach the city. Sparta, Hyperion explains, excelled Athens in its “exuberant vigor” and for that reason required the Lycurgan discipline; but the very result of that discipline was that “every excellence was laboriously conquered, bought at the price of conscious effort,” with the result that the “Spartans forever remained a fragment.” On the Athenians, however, Hyperion bestows praise evocative of the “praise of cities” genre that had generated the Panathenaic orations of Isocrates and of Aelius Aristides as well as Bruni’s panegyric to Florence. Drawing also on Thucydides’ account of early Greek history, he explains that the Athenians grew to manhood “freer from ruthless interference than any other people on earth,” and he praises too the moderation with which Athens had been granted the bounties of nature, receiving “neither poverty nor superfluity.” Dwelling on the earliest periods in their history, Hyperion is able to boast that the Athenians were intoxicated by no success in war and were urged on by no rash wisdom. Again evoking the Symposium of Plato, he maintains that the “first child of divine Beauty is art,” and so it was among the Athenians, in whom beauty of mind and spirit “inevitably produced the indispensable sense of freedom.” He goes on to make invidious comparisons between the Athenians on the one hand and the Egyptians and the “sons of the North” on the other.22
Athens, then, for Hölderlin, stands as an emblem for the greatest cultural attainments of the Greeks, and he ascribes the freedom of Athens to her aesthetic excellence. By dwelling on the earliest days of Athenian history, he is able to avoid a number of potentially awkward topics. It is significant that Schiller also focused his attention on the early period of Athenian history and seems to imagine that the unhappy division of labor did not develop until sometime in the fifth century. For writers as different as the sober intellectual Herder, the nostalgic Schiller, and the borderline hysteric Hölderlin, Athens appeared to be the focal point of Hellenic excellence; what for Hölderlin was a sentimental attachment to the cradle of the arts was emphatically for Herder, as for Winckelmann and to some degree for Schiller, a rational and articulated belief in the integrity of Greek civilization in general and Athenian civilization in particular, an integrity that linked Athens’s government indissolubly with her achievements in the visual and literary arts.
HEGEL AND ATHENS
Hölderlin died insane. His discovery that his mentor Schiller had led him down the garden path of nostalgic Hellenism only to abandon the attempt to resurrect the Greek ideal may have been a contributing cause of his decline.23 Constructs about the relationship of the decay of civilization to the collapse of the integrated Greek worldview continued to be made, however, by one of Hölderlin’s closest friends, a thinker more hardheaded and analytical than any of the German neo-Hellenists (except perhaps Herder) who had gone before.24 In his early essay The Positivity of the Christian Religion, Hegel decried the feebleness of a faith that had “emptied Valhalla, felled the sacred groves,” and “extirpated the national imagery as a shameful superstition.” Lamenting the lack of meaningful national heroes in specifically Athenian terms, he asks: “Who could be our Theseus, who founded a state and was its legislator? Where are our Harmodius and Aristogiton to whom we could sing scolia as the liberators of our land?” To modern, Christian Germany with its divorce between religion and nationalism, classical Athens presented a stark contrast, its joyous national festivals answering a need left unsatisfied by wearisome recitations of the Augsburg Confession.25 The massive Phenomenology of 1807 also contrasted the exuberance of the Olympian outlook with the poverty and fear of the Judeo-Christian worldview and its humbling of humanity before an awesome and distant authority. There Hegel expressed nostalgia for the simple moral universe of the earlier Athenians and the mentality personified by Antigone, in whose unquestioning obedience to a comforting and familiar ethical code Hegel saw the last gasp of the integrated worldview before it was torn asunder by the unavoidable tensions that divided Antigone and Creon, male and female, religion and government, family and state.
The roughly contemporaneous Lectures on the History of Philosophy and Lectures on the Philosophy of History also reveal a deep yearning for what was good in the Athenian way of life and the polis that made these things possible. Hegel shared Schiller’s view of Sparta as narrow and limited, distorted by the regular subordination of individual consciousness. Athens, on the other hand, avoided this imbalance. For Hegel, Athens’s achievements were tied closely to her democratic form of government. Athens, he maintained, owed her primacy in the arts and sciences to the character both of her constitution and of its spirit as a whole. Athens shared with Sparta the substantial unity of the consciousness of the citizens with the laws of the state, but it was a “purer democracy” than Sparta—whatever that means—and differed dramatically from Sparta in giving free rein to the individual mind. (Hegel did see one important similarity between the two states, for he believed that the work of daily life was done in Athens by slaves. It was slavery, he contended, that enabled the Athenians to enjoy participating in government, celebrating festivals, and coming together to exercise26).
In the Philosophy of History Hegel articulates the contrast between Athens and Sparta in detail.27 Athens and Sparta, Hegel maintains, both enjoyed political virtue, but only in Athens did this virtue develop itself to a work of art, that is, Free Individuality.28 As in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel makes clear in the Philosophy of History that for him the democratic spirit represents what is most characteristically and positively Greek. He praises not only Solon and Cleisthenes but also Pericles and the weakening of the Areopagus. As a general principle, he writes, “the Democratic constitution affords the widest scope for the development of great political characters; for it excels all others in virtue of the fact that it not only allows of the display of their powers on the part of individuals, but summons them to use those powers for the general weal. At the same time, no member of the community can obtain influence unless he has the power of satisfying the intellect and judgment, as well as the passions and volatility of a cultivated people.”29 From the Athenians, Hegel maintains, sprang a band of men whose genius would become classical for all centuries, and he has kind words even for Aristophanes, whom he views as a patriot and a deeply serious man. We recognize in the Athenians, Hegel wrote, not only enormous industry and élan but also “the development of individuality within the sphere of Spirit conditioned by the morality of Custom,” and he ascribes the censure of the Athenians found in Plato and Xenophon (probably the pseudo-Xenophontic author of the Constitution of the Athenians) to the period of the decline of democracy; for the true verdict of the ancients on political life at Athens he commends readers rather to Athenian statesman such as Pericles—the “Zeus of the human Pantheon of Athens.” He goes on to quote at length from the funeral oration.30
The democratic principle, however, was safe in Hegel’s view only when it was naive and spontaneous; once reflection and self-consciousness set in, corruption was inevitable. Both in the Philosophy of History and in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel stresses the role of Socrates in the decline of Athens. In the History of Philosophy, Hegel argues that for all its freedom, Athenian democracy was dependent on an unreflective virtue (Sittlichkeit) that could not last. Once Socrates transformed the Athenian universe by the introduction of reflective virtue (Moralität), the Athenian mind became vulnerable to a second transformation into an individualism that ultimately starved the state rather than feeding it. In the earlier days of the democracy, Hegel maintained, the Athenians had been virtuous spontaneously, and, like Antigone, did what they instinctively knew to be right. Socrates, however, advocated reflection to make that virtue self-conscious, the product of deliberate and deliberative moral philosophy. Hegel found the Athenians’ reaction to Socrates perfectly reasonable, as the Greek world of Socrates’ day “could not yet bear the principle of subjective reflection,” essential as this development is in the developing consciousness of the self.31 Because the principle of individual determination of right and wrong was “not yet identified with the constitution of the people,” Athenian life became weak, and the State powerless, as its spirit was hopelessly divided within itself.32
Hegel in his depiction of the decline of Athenian democracy works variations on several familiar themes. Some of his arguments are the traditional ones. He reflects concern about the “new doctrine that each man should act according to his own conviction,” a doctrine that inevitably entails “a subjective independent Freedom, in which the individual finds himself in a position to bring everything to the test of his own conscience.” Even Thucydides, he writes, notices this decay in observing that everyone believed things were going badly when he had no role in their management. But Thucydides was in many ways profoundly antidemocratic, and here Hegel echoes the Athenians’ complaints about their own form of government. In portraying the Athenian democracy as a rather squawky form of government in which everyone was a critic, Hegel echoes not only Thucydides but Thucydides’ own enemy Cleon, who in the Mytilenean debate complained of the Athenians’ habit of scrutinizing and improving their laws at every turn and opposed to it the antidemocratic notion that bad laws that stay the same are better than good laws that change. Hegel also reiterates the complaint familiar in ancient and modern times about the persistent envy and leveling equality in Athens, arguing that “confidence in Great Men” is antagonistic to “a state of things in which every one presumes to have a judgment of his own,” and he reflects some nostalgia for the authoritarianism of the past when he maintains that in the days when Solon and Lycurgus had overhauled the governments of their respective poleis, it was “evidently not supposed that the people in general think they know best what is politically right.”33
In casting aspersions on the moral fiber of the sophists Hegel certainly stands within a long tradition. He sets himself distinctly apart, however, in including Socrates’ teachings about the worthlessness of the unexamined life as a principal factor in the decline of Athens, which he viewed as integrally bound up with Socrates’ exaltation of questioning and self-examination. It was in a direct line, Hegel maintained, that Socrates led citizens to secede from practical and political life and dwell instead in a world of thought. When Socrates wishes to induce reflection, Hegel points out, his discourse “has always a negative tone” as he brings his interlocutors to recognize that they do not know what is right. Even in its decay, however, the spirit of Athens remains majestic since it “manifests itself as the free, the liberal…. Amiable and cheerful even in the midst of tragedy is the light-heartedness and nonchalance with which the Athenians accompanied their national morality to its grave.”34
No one had ever called the Spartans amiable or cheerful.
Hegel’s arguments about the decline of Athens are problematic, for the agitation of Socrates was only one turning point he identified in the collapse of unquestioned values; there was also the matter of Antigone. Like Hölderlin, Hegel was fascinated by Sophocles’ Antigone. For Hegel, moreover, Antigone’s gender adds an additional dimension to her rebellion against Creon, which he discusses in both the Phenomenology and the later Philosophy of Right and treats as if it were a historical event of the mid–fifth century. Hegel in the Phenomenology had defined womankind as the internal enemy of the state, and at one level this belief system conduces to a view of Antigone’s action as disruptive; wrapped up in family concerns, she is by her female nature unable to achieve transcendence. He would later write in The Philosophy of Right that whereas man “has his actual substantive life in the state, in learning and so forth … woman, on the other hand, has her substantive destiny in the family and to be imbued with family piety is her ethical frame of mind.” This construct fosters a view of Antigone as a prisoner of her female nature, trapped within the ideology of the family, a slave to emotion, and unable to ask the hard questions necessary for transcendence. And yet, of course, Antigone’s imprisonment ultimately takes place at the hand of Creon, whose vision is in some ways narrower than hers, and Hegel in the Philosophy of Right recognizes the conflict between the king and his niece as “the supreme opposition in ethics and therefore in tragedy, … individualized in the same play as the opposing natures of man and woman.” Problems are raised, in other words, by Hegel’s characterization of Antigone’s family piety in The Philosophy of Right “as principally the law of the woman, as the law of substantiality, at once subjective and on the plane of feeling, the law of the inward life, a life which has not yet attained its full actualisation, as the law of the ancient gods, ‘the gods of the underworld,’ as ‘an everlasting law, and no man knows at what time it was put forth.’ ”35 For insofar as Antigone is reconciled to the religious order and at one with it, she represents for Hegel a positive force, but insofar as she is out of joint with the civil order, she is disruptive. It is Creon, of course, who has created this dissonance, but Hegel’s enthusiasm for the civil state as the guarantor of freedom puts him in an awkward position where Creon is concerned, and altogether he manifests a striking ambivalence: is Antigone to be applauded for her adherence to the values of the good old days when people knew instinctively what was right—the happy Sittlichkeit of early Athens—or censured for her failure to reconcile with the new, improved order of civil society? Hegel’s ambivalence about the value of these ancient and divine laws inevitably colors his view of Antigone’s actions. As Joanna Hodge has pointed out, for Hegel “the opposition between woman as bearer of the ethical order of the family and man as legal person in civil society, cannot be sustained as absolute, since for Hegel these two incomplete parts—ethical life and legality—must be reunified in the state. Hegel seeks to show that just as women and men are two parts of a single unity, which is brought into being through marriage, so ethical life and legality are two parts of a single unity, which is brought into being in particular states.”36 If it is the goal of the state to integrate the competing claims of family and government, religious and civil law, both Creon and Antigone are at fault, but if it is the state’s function to transcend the lesser, more circumscribed interests of women, whose thought patterns are confined by the limiting parameters of family, then Antigone alone is to be blamed; and Hegel cannot seem to make up his mind.
Hegel’s notion, then, that Antigone’s worldview reflected a happy and unreflective time in the development of Athenian civilization is undercut by much of his own logic, and altogether it remains unclear how, in his construct, her rebellion fits into the disintegration of which Socrates’ advocacy of analytical reflection was the next step. What is plain, however, is that for Hegel the dissonances revealed in the conflict between Creon and Antigone and in the intellectual questing of Socrates marked the predictable but poignant collapse of a secure and comforting moral universe, consistent, cohesive and predictable. Hegel sought to console himself for what was irretrievably lost by the notion that the subjective freedom that had destroyed Greek civilization could be contained in modern society and that some elements of the Greek worldview could be incorporated into the modern world despite the alienation and estrangement that he saw around him. As Philip Kain has put it, according to Hegel “the greatness of modern society is that it combines subjective freedom with the organization and stability of the whole, the philosophy of right.” Whereas in Greece the interests of the state were those of the citizens, because reflection, subjectivity, and private interest had not yet developed and the state “was not abstract,” the modern state “stands above its citizens.”37
Predictably, however, Hegel saw no future for democracy based on the Athenian model. The breakdown of the unity that had characterized the Greek polis at its best and the divorce of subjective and objective wills precluded the resurrection of the Greek ideal, and Hegel did not share Schiller’s optimism that the Greek ideal could be resurrected and reconstituted mutatis mutandis to suit modern conditions (though he was hopeful at times that Christianity might serve to forge a new fusion of will and psyche that would be superior even to that known to the Greeks).38 At a more mundane level, modern states were simply too large, their populations too diverse; they lacked that “unity of opinion” that can be accomplished only by oral persuasion rather than in the “abstract, lifeless” mode of writing. Even the tabulation of referenda would be insufficient to outweigh the deadness of such a system— hence the failure of the French convention. A political entity of this kind, Hegel maintains, “is destitute of life, and the world is IPSO FACTO broken into fragments and dissipated into a mere Paper-world. In France, consequently, democracy was never realized, but rather despotism in the guise of freedom and equality. Hegel’s arguments against an Athenian-style state, however, go far beyond this, for in his view the justification of democracy rests on the “still immanent Objective Morality,” and for the “modern conceptions of Democracy this justification cannot be pleaded.” The success of a system based on thoroughgoing popular involvement in government is posited on the notion that the interests of the state are the interests of its individual members, but “the essential condition in regard to various phases of democracy is: WHAT IS THE CHARACTER of these individual members?” For they are “authorized to assume their position, only in so far as their will is still OBJECTIVE WILL—not one that wishes this or that, not mere ‘good’ will,” for good will rests on the conviction and subjective feeling of individuals that “constitutes the principle and determines the peculiar form of freedom in OUR world.”39
J. Glenn Gray in his study of Hegel and Greek Thought has observed that whereas Herder and Hölderlin were inclined to see Greek values in the light of a new Germany, stressing the likeness of the two peoples and upholding the possibility of a new Periclean age, Hegel’s interpretation of Greece arose “not out of a sense of its likeness to his own age, but out of a sharp sense of antithesis. The classic world was dead, palingenesis impossible.”40 Similar ideas would soon be voiced by Marx. But though the various German thinkers who wrestled with the question of the resurrection of Greek ideals came to different conclusions, there was a consensus that Greece represented a prelapsarian universe of some kind in which man had not yet become fragmented within himself and alienated from the structures around him. It was at Athens, so it was believed, that the individual Greek had most fully attained wholeness within himself and integration into society and the state. The intense preoccupation with the Greek aesthetic ideal, moreover, worked to the inevitable detriment of Sparta, whose self-immolating patriotism appeared impoverished in comparison.
ANCIENTS AND MODERNS RECONSIDERED
It was no coincidence that among the German thinkers the one who was least optimistic about resurrecting the Greek universe also came last. Predictably, an increasing awareness of the complexities of modern life undermined the happy congruence that had been perceived between Greece and Germany by those who in the full bloom of the adolescence of classicism and romanticism alike had come upon the Hellenic ideal and surrendered themselves to it with all the customary passion of youth—and all the unquestioning obedience Hegel had associated with prelapsarian Athens. At the same time, similar questions about the relationship of the ancient world to the modern were being asked in France, where fallout from the revolution had allowed antiquity to be approached with rather more perspective than had been possible in the tumult of the revolution itself.
Radically different interpretations of the relationship of antiquity to contemporary Europe were offered in Chateaubriand’s Historical, Political, and Moral Essay on Revolutions Ancient and Modern and Benjamin Constant’s essay On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns. The twenty-two years that separated the two works placed them not only in different generations but in different centuries. No two intellects, moreover, could have been less similar than those of Chateaubriand and Constant. For Chateaubriand, the similarities between Athens and France were paramount, whereas for Constant the differences were crucial; yet, for all that, Constant hoped for a synthesis of ancient and modern civic values whereas Chateaubriand despaired of the regeneration of ancient virtue.
If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, then Chateaubriand may have enjoyed a very capacious mind indeed. The Essay, which he later disowned but did not suppress, ranged over the whole spectrum of ancient and modern history with the idea of demonstrating patterns in revolutions. Though some of Chateaubriand’s parallels are facile and unpersuasive, he does allow for some important differences between cultures—stressing, for example, the way in which the opening up of communications had transformed the modern world and made contemporary France significantly different from ancient Greece. By and large he avoids simplistic determinism. Nonetheless, he plainly sees history repeating itself in the republican revolution in France, which he compares with the upheaval that overthrew monarchies throughout Greece and established the rudiments of democracy at Athens. Persia is Germany, the Persian Wars and the Delian League the French wars of the 1790s. Chateaubriand views the parties of Solon’s day as parallel to those of his own, matching the parties he calls the Mountain, Valley, and Coast with the Jacobins, aristocrats, and moderés, respectively (though elsewhere he follows his contemporaries in casting the Jacobins as Spartans). None of these parallels surprises him, as he sees the Athenians and the French sharing a deeply ingrained national character: unsteady in prosperity, firm in adversity, gifted in the arts, exceedingly genteel in times of domestic tranquility, brutal in times of civil strife, “floating like a vessel without ballast at the will of their impetuous passion,” ambitious, fond of novelty, “charming in their own country, insupportable everywhere else”—such, Chateaubriand concludes, “were the Athenians formerly, and such are the French now!”41 (A British perspective on the same question was offered a few years later in the Quarterly Review, where an essay on an English translation of Aristophanes contended that in Athens people were “credulous, not like Englishmen, from an unsuspecting honesty, but like Frenchmen, to whom their character is very similar, from vanity and self-conceit.”42)
In one respect, however, Chateaubriand sees an unbridgeable gap between classical Athens and contemporary France, and that is in the area of morality. Unlike those who perceived the revolution as opening up bright new vistas and replacing the limited polis of antiquity with a broad representative system that floated on the wave of the future, Chateaubriand viewed the principal difference between the system of his own day and that of ancient Athens as a sheer and precipitous moral decline that boded no good for the future. Solon and the French reformers, he writes, were in virtually identical situations, with many voices clamoring for an equal division of land; but whereas Solon refused to confiscate the property of the rich, the national assemblies of France were less squeamish. Chateaubriand takes this comparison as a point of departure for a general contrast between morality at Athens, where women were pure and no man of depraved morals would presume to serve as a legislator or judge, and France, where wantonness and decadence were the order of the day. Some of this difference he ascribes to the replacement of Athenian piety with French atheism. The French, in Chateaubriand’s construct, though fanatical in their admiration of antiquity, had borrowed all its vices and none of its virtues.43 Though Chateaubriand reflects a great deal of anxiety about popular government, nonetheless he praises the Athenians for having possessed in reality the democratic constitution to which contemporary France only pretended.44 Where his contemporaries have gone wrong, Chateaubriand suggests, is in modeling themselves not after their soulmates, the Athenians, but after the cruel and rigid Spartans—a topic to which he devotes an entire chapter. The “total subversion,” he argues, that the Jacobins tried to effect in the manners of France “by assassinating the men of property, transferring estates, changing the customs, usages, and even worship of the country is only an imitation of what Lycurgus did in Lacedaemon.”45 In Chateaubriand’s construct, then, two obstacles had hampered the resurrection of Greek virtue in modern France. First, morality had declined so sharply that the French would not tolerate a return to the rectitude of ancient days. Second, the revolutionaries had sought their model not in genteel Athens but in barbaric Sparta.
Chateaubriand’s mother was apparently upset by the Essay, and her distress may explain why he subsequently disowned it. Around the same time as the Essay appeared, the question of the relevance of ancient values to modern France was exercising vastly keener and more responsible minds. Many of the ideas in Benjamin Constant’s 1819 essay On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared to That of the Moderns were surely derived in conjunction with Madame de Staël, by whose 1798 Circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution they were plainly adumbrated. (What role Constant played in shaping the 1798 essay is unclear.) Like Chateaubriand, Constant and de Staël traced many of the problems of their own day to the misguided attempt to resurrect the ancient polis in modern France. Constant also shared Chateaubriand’s concern that the mantle of Greek republicanism was being used to pass off as democracy something that was in fact very different. Constant set himself sharply apart from his contemporaries, however—Chateaubriand included— by his refusal to pine for the polis. In Constant’s view, the problem in returning to the political universe of the Greeks lay not in the irreversible moral decline that had intervened but rather in the ethically neutral march of historical change. Seen in this light, attempts to revive ancient virtues and ancient liberty revealed an inadequate understanding of the nature of history.
Ancient liberty, in Constant’s view, consisted of the right not only to have input into government but to exercise that input directly and immediately. Constant views the right to a say in government as fundamental to a satisfying existence, but he sees direct participation of all citizens in government as incompatible with fulfillment in private life in general and in commercial life in particular. Both the ancient and the modern state, he argues, worked on the premise of a trade-off. Citizens of ancient states were able to participate directly in government. This participation was made possible by the comparatively small size of ancient states and by slavery, which afforded citizens of classical states leisure for frequent deliberations. On the other hand, the closed system of the polis empowered the group at the expense of the individual. Privacy and freedom of religion were essentially unknown. The universe of the polis encouraged uniformity among its citizens; the primary focus of ancient energies was war, which ties the citizenry together, whereas in the modern world it is commerce, which sets people apart. Warfare, moreover, was seasonal and afforded breaks for deliberation, while commerce demands constant attention. Constant sees Athens as the most modern of the ancient states because of its intense involvement in trade. Even in Athens, however, the harmony of the state was founded not so much on the integration of its diverse elements as on the fundamental homogeneity of its members.
As a consequence of the satisfaction afforded them by direct and constant participation in government, ancient citizens did not need the same freedoms modern ones require. Individuals of Constant’s day, compelled by the size of modern nations to delegate political power to representatives, find their satisfaction in private endeavors, chiefly in the sphere of commerce; and in order to protect their private opportunities, they require new liberties—not only majority rule and trial by jury, as in Athens, but also freedom of speech and of religion, and a system of checks and balances in government.
Because of these essential differences between the needs of ancient and modern citizens, Constant saw the attempt to restore classical political ideals as destructive, founded as it was on an anachronism that offended his strong historical sense. Though Constant applauded the determination of ancient citizens to exercise political responsibility vigilantly and directly, he saw no virtue in romantic nostalgia for a closed society that would not accommodate pluralism or individuality. Constant did not view the champions of ancient values as entirely innocent in their misguidedness. Rather he believed that ancient republicanism was invoked in the most calculated manner to justify tyranny and oppression—not, as so many of his contemporaries feared, on the part of the majority but rather on the part of various minorities. Stephen Holmes in his impassioned study of Constant has denied that Constant’s liberalism was in any sense antidemocratic. He calls attention to Constant’s 1829 observation that all tyrannies in France in his lifetime have been tyrannies of various minorities. “The majority,” Constant wrote the following year, “never oppresses. One confiscates its name, using against it the weapons it has furnished.”46 Constant viewed the invocation of ancient liberty as an incantation with which authoritarians from Mably and Rousseau to Robespierre and beyond sought to legitimize the empowerment of the state over the individual.
Among the ancient states, Constant did not hesitate to choose Athens over Sparta. Though he often expressed admiration for Rousseau, he was revolted by Rousseau’s philolaconism, and he observed trenchantly that Mably, who had the deepest disdain for Athens, “detested individual liberty as one detests a personal enemy.”47 But it is not only the preference for Sparta over Athens that Constant censures; he also abhors the resurrection of anachronistic Athenian usages in the service of tyranny but the guise of democracy. In 1802, he reports, an attempt was made to introduce ostracism into France, and a steady stream of orators invoked the name of Athenian liberty to give legitimacy to the brutal project. Predictably, he recoils from this attempt to exile citizens under the pretext of protecting the public welfare, and he takes the occasion to launch into a long contrast between the assumptions of the ancient polis, founded as it was on the right to participate in government but not the right to be left undisturbed by government, and those of the modern state, in which citizens have renounced the right to participate directly in government in exchange for the right to pursue their private interests unhindered. A deep passion underlies Constant’s plea for the freedom of citizens to live their lives unmolested, and it is difficult not to imagine that he foresaw himself as a likely winner in any Athenian-style unpopularity contest: No one, he writes (with what was exceptional fervor even for him), “has the right to snatch the citizen from his fatherland, the landowner from his holdings, the merchant from his trade, the husband from his wife, the father from his children, the writer from his contemplations, the old man from his daily routine.”48
Constant was also repelled by the use men like Robespierre made of the classical tradition of the all-knowing lawgiver and by their insistence that the state take the lead in the moral formation of citizens. A Protestant in Catholic France, educated at the University of Edinburgh during the Scottish Enlightenment, Constant was vitriolically anticlerical and intensely engaged for the last decade and a half of his life in combatting the attempts of the ultraroyalists (often led by De Bonald) to impose their will on others by censoring the press, making divorce illegal, and ensuring Catholic control of education. Here his line of argument is diametrically opposed to that of Chateaubriand, who discarded government intervention in morality along classical lines only because he considered his countrymen beyond redemption. So far from wanting to maximize the role of government in the lives of citizens so as to bind them together in the happy harmony of the ancient polis, he sought a government that would leave citizens free to maximize their individual potential. As Holmes has put it, “Unlike the ancient politeia, [Constant’s] modern constitutional order was not meant to generate or contain all valuable human possibilities. Its principal task was to protect chances in life produced by extrapolitical institutions.”49
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The birth of German Hellenism had a dramatic impact on perceptions of the Athenian state. The militaristic uniformity of Spartan virtue lost much of its charm once primacy was given to questions of aesthetics. Formerly viewed as productive only of decline and decay, in the light of the new enthusiasm for Greek aesthetic ideals the Athenian democracy came to be perceived as the seedbed of great art. Winckelmann and Herder were convinced of the connection between Athenian art and Athenian democracy, and Schiller identified the once-idealized stability of the Spartan state with the absence of the aesthetic and spiritual aspiration that is the true goal of human existence. Hegel praised both Pericles and democracy, though he saw little hope of resurrecting Athenian ideals in his own day.
In both France and Germany, indeed, the postrevolutionary generation reinforced the fundamental judgment of the eighteenth century that the modern world was very different from the ancient and that the gap that divided the two worlds could not ultimately be bridged. A liberal like Constant who saw the Revolution as a vital step in the dismantling of age-old privilege was nonetheless alienated by what he saw as the exploitation of reverence for the past to pass authoritarianism off as classical republicanism, whereas Chateaubriand, to whose fluctuating ideology it would be impossible to assign a label, saw his own age standing on the near side of an irreversible decline. While Frenchmen reacted to the Revolution, Germans became disillusioned with the first bloom of the Hellenic revival, and by the time Hegel died he had come to share Constant’s view that the gulf that divided the ancient world from the modern called for new ideals, though unlike Constant he saw the hope of the future in the replacement of the objective morality of old with a subjective morality that would find its expression in Christianity. Sharing Constant’s conviction that the size and diversity of modern states obviated any Athenian-style democracy, which depended for its success on oral persuasion of a homogeneous populace, Hegel also saw the need to formulate a new ideal that would define the relationship of the individual to the state. The various ideals with which he toyed, however, were dramatically different from Constant’s. Hegel saw no future in the individualism Constant was so eager to protect.
The mania for antiquity had a longer history in France than in Germany and had been put into practice during the Revolution with quite dramatic effects; this along with a radically different temperament led Constant to reject straight off what Hegel only turned away from when it became clear that no amount of wishing would revive the prelapsarian world of unreflective virtue, of Sittlichkeit. In the end, though, both men agreed that the attempt to resuscitate classical republicanism was a waste of time. For both men, as for Chateaubriand, it was Athens that was the greatest temptation. Constant indeed did not fully reject Athens. Though her use of ostracism made clear that she conformed in essentials to the ancient construct for the state, one that asserted its unlimited power over individuals, still in the hustle and bustle of her commercial life—combined with majority rule, jury trials, and at least a modicum of free speech—Constant saw some overlap in Athens with the modern state. And it was Periclean Athens that for Hegel embodied the lost paradise (though Antigone was produced in 441, which limits the golden age to only a few years). Despite the burst of laconism in France in the generation that preceded the Revolution, in France as in Germany it was ultimately Athens that triumphed. But the enthusiasm for Athens, although it certainly fostered the higher valuation of Athenian democracy that was to come later in the century, did not in all cases amount in itself to endorsement of Athenian government. It was not on the whole the Athens of Aristophanes or of Plato, not the Athens of Nicias or Alcibiades and certainly not the Athens of Demosthenes that appealed. Herder and Constant had genuine affection for Athens. But Schiller, Hegel, and Chateaubriand fixed their admiration on an early period in Athens’s history. Schiller ascribed the collapse of the Greek ideal to the development of economic specialization—a development so early that one has trouble imagining just when he conceived the glorious days of Athens to have been. For Hegel, all was lost when Socrates began making waves. Chateaubriand saw the victory over Persia and the attendant lust for conquest as the point from which decline can be traced.
It would not be in France or Germany that Athens would first be exalted in the full flower of democracy and empire. While Constant and Hegel were busy penning alternate ideals for modern times, English intellectuals were wondering once again whether Athens might not offer an example to be followed rather than a negative role model to be rejected at all costs.