How did the first democracy die?

Summary

Episode Summary: "How did the first democracy die?"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Search Engine
• Host: PJ Vogt
• Description: No question too big, no question too small. On Search Engine, PJ Vogt answers the questions you might ask the internet when you can't sleep. If you find the world bewildering but also sometimes enjoy being bewildered by it, we're here for you.
• Episode: How did the first democracy die?
• Release Date: November 8, 2024

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Introduction to the Episode

In the episode titled "How did the first democracy die?", host PJ Vogt explores the rise and fall of Athenian democracy, drawing parallels to contemporary political systems. The discussion delves into historical contexts, the mechanisms of Athenian governance, and the eventual decline of their democratic experiment.

The Roman Empire Meme and Athenian Democracy

The episode begins with a lighthearted conversation about the viral meme where people—particularly women on TikTok—ask their husbands or boyfriends how often they think about the Roman Empire. This segues into a deeper reflection on democracy, with PJ Vogt expressing his personal connection to the topic.

Quote:

"When I get deeply upset about our democracy, I think about theirs. Athens was the very first democracy in human history, one that faced some of the same problems we face... and then died in spectacular fashion." ([03:37])

Introducing the Expert: Lawrence Sammons

To provide authoritative insights, PJ introduces Lawrence Sammons, a seasoned professor of Greek history and democracy at Boston University. Sammons shares his extensive background and highlights his interest in the interplay between democracy and imperialism.

Quote:

"My interests have been democracy and imperialism and the historians who write about democracy and imperialism for pretty much my whole career." ([04:19])

Thucydides and Historical Perspectives on Democracy

Sammons discusses the influence of Thucydides, an Athenian historian whose works have profoundly impacted his understanding of democracy. Thucydides' cynical view of human nature and his belief that history offers valuable lessons for the future are emphasized.

Quote:

"Thucydides has an extremely dark view of human nature... he's someone who recognizes the tragedy of the fact that human beings tend to make similar mistakes over and over again." ([05:09])

Structure and Functioning of Athenian Democracy

The conversation shifts to the unique aspects of Athenian democracy. Unlike modern representative systems, Athens employed direct democracy with mechanisms like sortition—the random selection of citizens for public offices. This section highlights the radical inclusivity of Athenian democracy for its time, despite existing exclusions.

Quote:

"And this is one of the things that makes Athenian democracy different... because the Athenians lowered the property qualification to the point eventually you don't have to own property to be a citizen and vote in the assembly." ([10:45])

Virtues and Flaws within Athenian Democracy

While Athenian democracy was innovative, it was not without its flaws. The system's openness allowed for the rise of demagogues who could sway public opinion, leading to problematic decisions such as the execution of Socrates. Additionally, practices like ostracism, originally intended to prevent tyranny, were sometimes misused for personal vendettas.

Quote:

"If you have voting in elections, you're going to have rule of the rich." — Aristotle ([12:26])

The Role of Demagogues and Public Sentiment

Sammons explains how demagogues exploited democratic mechanisms to gain power, ultimately destabilizing the political system. The public's susceptibility to persuasion without adequate safeguards contributed to the erosion of democratic principles.

Quote:

"The Athenians kept having jury trials and they kept electing officials. Right? They still played democracy." ([30:16])

The Decline and Fall of Athenian Democracy

The episode details the factors leading to the decline of Athenian democracy, including excessive spending on public services and military campaigns. These financial strains, coupled with internal political strife, made Athens vulnerable to external threats, culminating in its conquest by Philip of Macedon.

Quote:

"Athens ends up losing a battle, finally, that it can't bounce back from. Philip of Macedon... conquer the Athenians at the Battle of Chaeronea." ([27:51])

Reflections on Modern Democracy

PJ Vogt and Lawrence Sammons reflect on the lessons from Athenian democracy's demise, contemplating the relevance of these historical insights to today's political landscape. They discuss the persistent challenges within democratic systems and the potential for future governance models to evolve beyond current frameworks.

Quote:

"The story of Greek democracy is appropriately, a tragedy, a story whose end was inevitable because of the character of the people in it and the setting in which they found themselves." ([37:25])

Conclusion and Insights

The episode concludes with a contemplation of human nature and its impact on governance. Vogt and Sammons emphasize the importance of vigilance and active participation in democracy to mitigate the inherent flaws that have historically led to its downfall.

Final Quote:

"We go through moments where humans improbably organize themselves towards something better, more reasonable, and then the madness takes over and then we begin again." ([35:23])

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Lawrence Sammons ([05:09]): "Thucydides has an extremely dark view of human nature... he's someone who recognizes the tragedy of the fact that human beings tend to make similar mistakes over and over again."

• Lawrence Sammons ([12:26]): "Aristotle said, you can't define democracy by voting in elections, because if you have voting in elections, you're going to have rule of the rich."

• Lawrence Sammons ([27:51]): "Athens ends up losing a battle, finally, that it can't bounce back from. Philip of Macedon... conquer the Athenians at the Battle of Chaeronea."

• Lawrence Sammons ([37:25]): "The story of Greek democracy is appropriately, a tragedy, a story whose end was inevitable because of the character of the people in it and the setting in which they found themselves."

• Lawrence Sammons ([35:23]): "We go through moments where humans improbably organize themselves towards something better, more reasonable, and then the madness takes over and then we begin again."

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Key Takeaways

• Thucydides' Perspective: Understanding human nature's repetitive flaws is crucial in preventing historical mistakes.

• Athenian Innovations: Direct democracy and sortition were groundbreaking but had inherent vulnerabilities.

• Demagoguery: The rise of demagogues can significantly undermine democratic systems by manipulating public sentiment.

• Financial Mismanagement: Excessive spending on public services and military endeavors can strain a democracy's sustainability.

• Legacy and Lessons: Studying the fall of Athenian democracy offers valuable lessons for contemporary governance, emphasizing the need for informed and active citizen participation.

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This episode of "Search Engine" provides a thorough exploration of Athenian democracy's lifecycle, offering listeners deep historical insights and reflections applicable to modern democratic challenges.

Transcript

[PJ Vogt]

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[Co-host]

Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big, no question too small.

[PJ Vogt]

No question too old.

[Co-host]

We're gonna do something different this week.

[PJ Vogt]

How often do you think about the Roman Empire?

[Lawrence Sammons]

How often do I think about the Roman Empire?

[Sponsor Voice]

Yeah, maybe three or four times a month.

[PJ Vogt]

Few times a week. I'd Say, last fall, this meme circulated.

[Co-host]

Where people, mostly women on TikTok, asked their husbands or boyfriends how often they thought about the Roman Empire.

[PJ Vogt]

Why do you think about the Roman Empire?

[Lawrence Sammons]

It's a very interesting time. You don't think so?

[PJ Vogt]

It's blowing my mind.

[Lawrence Sammons]

Well, you. You never think about it. What do you think about then?

[Co-host]

Not the Roman Empire. It was a moment where once again, we learned there are two kinds of people this time. Those who think about Rome all the time and those who do not.

[PJ Vogt]

But there was a third type of.

[Co-host]

Guy never mentioned in this meme, and.

[PJ Vogt]

That guy was me.

[Co-host]

I don't think about the Romans much, but I do think about ancient Greece a fair amount of the time. Specifically, I think about ancient Greece as a coping mechanism.

[PJ Vogt]

When I get deeply upset about our democracy, I think about theirs. Athens was the very first democracy in human history, one that faced some of the same problems we face some problems of their own and then died in spectacular fashion. I know this might not be the escapism some people are looking for this week, but walk with me for a sec. Any book can be a self help book. And for the past few years, mine has been what's Wrong with Democracy? From Athenian Practice to American Worship, which is a factual academic look at the problems of Athenian democracy in the 5th century BC. I spoke to its writer this week. Okay, first things first. Can you just introduce yourself?

[Lawrence Sammons]

Sure. My name's Lawrence Sammons, but everyone calls me Jay. And I teach Greek history and Greek and Latin at Boston University and have done so for over 30 years. I also work for the American College of Greece in a consulting role in Athens. And my interests have been democracy and imperialism and the historians who write about democracy and imperialism for pretty much my whole career.

[PJ Vogt]

One of the ancient historians who Jay thinks about most often is a Greek writer named Thucydides. Jay first encountered his work decades ago as a student.

[Lawrence Sammons]

When I got to graduate school, I still thought I was going to be a Roman historian, but it was really Thucydides that dragged me into Athenian history. I found him so interesting that I abandoned my Roman studies and focused on the Greeks.

[PJ Vogt]

And what was it about Thucydides? Like? What about the way that he wrote?

[Lawrence Sammons]

He was so dark. I mean, Thucydides has an extremely dark view of human nature. He's very much like my father in many ways. If you think things are as bad as they can possibly get, you're definitely wrong. They're going to get worse. But I think sometimes people think Thucydides is sort of taking joy in that, that he's saying it's good that human beings exercise power in this really sort of awful way. But I think that's wrong. He's someone who recognizes the tragedy of the fact that human beings tend to make similar mistakes over and over again.

[PJ Vogt]

Thucydides was an elite in Greek society, a general who was exiled from Athens after losing a big battle. He ended up spending time in enemy land, the only place he was welcome for much of his life. Exile is hard on people, but it can be useful for writers. And Thucydides took the opportunity to try to understand Athenian society from his new position outside of it. A lot of what Thucydides wrote, you could be forgiven for thinking it was about us today. Complaining about Athens, his hometown around 400 BC, he observed that quote. Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear. Huh?

[Lawrence Sammons]

Of course, one of the most famous things Thucydides said is as long as human nature remains the same, similar things will happen again. And that's why he believed his work would be useful for those who want to know about the future. Not because history is cyclical, not because history repeats itself, but because human beings repeat themselves and make the same kinds of mistakes generation after generation.

[PJ Vogt]

So Thucydides is going to be our primary source for this story. And he really was there. He watched the first democracy rise and fall.

[Co-host]

Chapter 1 Athens. When the story begins, around 650 BC.

[PJ Vogt]

Greece is a series of city states.

[Co-host]

Athens was a typical one.

[PJ Vogt]

The city itself very small, maybe 10 or 20,000 people live there. On the top of the big hill, there's a few temples, some spots for public gatherings. Most people live down below. Eventually, they'll build a city wall outside the city. Miles and miles of rural farmland where the majority lived. And then if you keep traveling further throughout the Mediterranean, there's something like a thousand other city states that looked more or less like Athens did.

[Co-host]

These city states are independently ruled and constantly at war with each other. And like our American states, they're a series of experiments, each representing a different way society could function. Spartans lived in a country with more women's rights, but also lived under military rule. Corinthians knew their state was the wealthy commercial hub, but that it was run by oligarchic elites.

[PJ Vogt]

Athens, when our story begins, is not yet known as the home of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle. As the cradle of Western philosophy and government. Athens is known instead as kind of A backwater.

[Lawrence Sammons]

Athens was a second tier state, maybe even a third tier state in the 7th and 6th centuries BC.

[Co-host]

And what does that mean? Like what is a third tier state at that time?

[Lawrence Sammons]

Well, I mean that they a, they weren't as powerful as some other states. Their military strength was not up to some other states. But what I really mean is that they didn't have the early history that other states had, like Sparta and Thebes and Argos. Those are names that ring through mythology and what the Greeks thought of their very ancient past. Whereas Athens, for example, if you take Homer, the Iliad, Athens plays almost no role at all in the Iliad. Most classicists can't even name the Athenian hero of the Iliad because he's a nobody in the story. He appears four times and twice he's being called a coward. But they do know that Odysseus comes from Ithaca and Ajax comes from Salamis. So you have all these other heroes that come from other places that seem far less important than Athens. But to an Athenian reading Homer, he fails to find himself there. So what does this mean for the Athenian psyche? And I think it's actually a major factor in how the Athenians thought of themselves.

[Co-host]

You mean that they had like what, I'm from Philadelphia, like they had what Philadelphians have, which is like this feeling of like sort of being sandwiched between.

[PJ Vogt]

Places that thought of themselves as greater.

[Co-host]

Like this sort of angry, overlooked feeling.

[Lawrence Sammons]

Yeah, yeah. I do think that that's probably making it too strong. I think that this feeling rarely rises to a kind of conscious level, but it's active, it does rise to a conscious level. For example, Pericles in one of the speeches that Thucydides records says we don't need any Homer to sing our praises. That's a really odd thing to say. We don't need any Homer. We know we're not there and we don't need him. We're going to write our own epic.

[PJ Vogt]

This nation that wanted to write its own epic, it had a plan. The Athenian experiment. Athens plan to make a name for itself involved constantly picking fights with its neighbors. The Athenians were obsessed with imperialism. That's how they believed they'd get into the history books as a conquering power. That's their goal. But in the 5th century BC, they happen to make what will turn out to be a very consequential choice for human history. They offer widespread voting. There were some other Greek city states that allowed voting, but it was restricted to small groups of elites, aristocrats, property owners, In Athens, the politicians start allowing more and more regular people to vote.

[Lawrence Sammons]

And this is one of the things that makes Athenian democracy different. It starts to look different from other Greek city states because the Athenians lowered the property qualification to the point eventually you don't have to own property to be a citizen and vote in the assembly.

[PJ Vogt]

This was an extraordinarily radical idea. Of course there were big groups excluded women, foreigners, enslaved people, but by the standards of the time, letting the masses vote was unheard of. And what's most interesting is that Athenian voting looks completely different from the voting we do today in America. Like to them the idea of an election day where we all show up and pick the politician who will represent us and then get a little sticker afterwards. The Athenians would have found this comical in Athens. What would happen instead was much more exciting. The Athenians had a stone machine called a claritarion, which it's sort of hard to picture, but you could just imagine instead, if you want the random ball jumbler from a bingo hall. The claritarian helped randomly assign random citizens to the Athenian version of congress. There they would serve for a year. You didn't vote for your congressman, you became one at random and then got to put forth laws which any other citizen could vote on. If this sounds crazy, it has an upside. The lottery system, sortition prevents the thing. We have a system where we, we get to vote for our politicians, but those politicians are usually elites and wealthy people use their money to influence that vote. Another Greek writer, Aristotle, foresaw this problem over 2000 years ago.

[Lawrence Sammons]

Aristotle said, you can't define democracy by voting in elections, because if you have voting in elections, you're going to have rule of the rich. Aristotle said this necessarily follows from elections that you'll end up with rule of the rich.

[PJ Vogt]

They saw it that early?

[Lawrence Sammons]

Yeah. Isn't that amazing? I mean, that's obviously not true. I mean, clearly Aristotle got it wrong.

[PJ Vogt]

This is something Jay clearly relishes about the Athenians. How their dark view of human nature meant that in some ways they could predict problems with democracy that we encounter as surprises. I had my own moment where I felt a shock of recognition hearing about a different part of Athenian democracy. It had to do with how they ran their justice system. So I should say I first found Jay's book in 2021, which meant I was reading it during a very unique moment in American life. People were angry about society and that anger was roiling on social media. At the time. It felt like every week there were these Impromptu public events, some trial by Internet. These speedy affairs where some schmo was paraded out, almost always found guilty, and then usually ostracized, sometimes permanently, sometimes just temporarily. I witnessed a lot of these events as a spectator. I even reported on a few. And then one day, I found myself inside of one as the schmo. The main thing I was struck by was how uniquely modern it felt. Even when I tried to write about it, it felt too modern to describe. There were no words, or all the words were wrong. Reading Jay's book, I realized this was not as modern as I had believed. What I thought was an unprecedented system of justice was, in fact, a very precedented system of justice. Chapter three, the people Decide. So just help me picture, like, I'm.

[Co-host]

Accused of a crime in ancient Greece. What does my trial look like in Athens?

[Lawrence Sammons]

Well, it's going to be heard by a jury, a large jury of Athenians.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay.

[Lawrence Sammons]

You're going to have to defend yourself. There's no lawyer to defend you. You can hire someone to write a speech for you, but you're still gonna have to deliver that speech yourself.

[Co-host]

And am I delivering that speech in, like. I'm assuming I'm not in a mahogany courtroom?

[Lawrence Sammons]

No.

[PJ Vogt]

Where am I?

[Lawrence Sammons]

They're outdoors. The Athenian courts were typically outdoors. Jurors sitting on benches around you. No microphones, no amplification, no nothing. The whole trial is gonna happen in one day. Prosecution will make its case. The prosecutor will also not be a public prosecutor. It'll be an individual Athenian citizen who has the ability to bring this case against you. And you're going to defend yourself, and the whole thing will be over in a day. The jurors will vote whether you're guilty or not. And if they find you guilty, then they're going to vote on what punishment you're going to get and what.

[Co-host]

How many people are sitting on my.

[PJ Vogt]

Jury in a trial?

[Lawrence Sammons]

500, 1,000, sometimes more than that.

[Co-host]

So I am pleading my case in front of 500 to 1000. Am I screaming the whole time?

[Lawrence Sammons]

I hope so. If you want to be heard, if you've got any chance. And you need to think about entertaining the jury, too.

[PJ Vogt]

Right?

[Lawrence Sammons]

You've got to hold people's attention. It's just like public speaking anywhere else. You know, you may have all the evidence in the world, but if you can't hold their attention or if they just don't like you, I mean, let's just say they. Duros don't like you. They've been looking for a chance to get Rid of you. Right. And there's no mechanism for making sure that only evidence is used here.

[Co-host]

One of the practices the Athenians engaged in that I found very fascinating was that they had a formal system of ostracism.

[PJ Vogt]

Can you just describe for me how that worked?

[Lawrence Sammons]

Sure. Once a year, the Athenians would get together and vote on the question, are we going to ostracize anybody this year? Ostracism would mean sending somebody away for 10 years. Their property wasn't seized. Nothing was done to them. They were just sent away. So there's no right to property that prevents the Athenian people from doing this. The Athenian people can do what they want. It is, in fact, a direct democracy. Of course, I always tell my students, I'm definitely voting yes. You know, every year, are we going to have an ostracism? Yes, definitely. I don't know who we're going to ostracize, but I don't want to miss the choice chance of having an ostracism. That's pretty great. So. And then a few days later, they would come back and they would have the actual vote. And the day of the vote, you would write the name of the person you wanted to ostracize on a broken piece of pottery. That pottery is called an ostracon. So that's what gives ostracism its name. And so you wrote the name of the person you wanted ostracized, you know, Professor Sammons. And then you turn that in. And if 6,000 people voted, then whoever got the most votes had to go.

[Co-host]

No matter what.

[Lawrence Sammons]

No matter what. There's no appeal. There's nothing you can say, well, they just don't like me, you know, they have a bias against people from Arkansas like me, you know, and they're throwing me out. There's no appeal to this. You have to go.

[Co-host]

And why, like, at what point did they realize our society will function better if once a year we can take the human desire to cast some of ours out and formalize it?

[Lawrence Sammons]

Right. So this looks pretty clearly to have been something they invented right after the Persian wars and in the context where Athens had gotten rid of its tyrants, but the Persians had tried to bring a tyrant back and impose a tyrant on Athens, a previous tyrant. And the first people who were ostracized were people who could be associated in some way with the tyrants. So it looks like the Athenians thought to prevent a potential tyrant, we will use this thing, ostracism. Right. We can't trust having this guy around. Even so, we're going to get rid of them, but it turns into something else.

[PJ Vogt]

I think we both know where this is going, but before it does, it is only fair to acknowledge that the mob was not always wrong. Athenians used ostracism to remove some very dangerous tyrants, people who may have broken no laws, but who did threaten society. The mob also. I mean, this one's just funny. They ostracized Aristides the Just, in part because they were so irritated by his nickname, which, to be fair, does sound a little bit like virtue signaling. Over time, as you'd expect, elites began just casting each other out of society for all sorts of reasons, some fair, some not. Athenian democracy was not concerned, as we sometimes are, with due process. It was concerned strictly with amplifying the voice of the people. And today we question some of the Athenian people's choices, like when they tried, convicted and executed Socrates. Socrates, perhaps the greatest philosopher in the history of the west, found guilty of being insufficiently pious, of corrupting the youth with his strange ideas.

[Lawrence Sammons]

In Socrates case, we're told that more people voted that he should be executed than found him guilty. So there were people who voted for Socrates innocence who still voted that he should be executed. And why, why in Socrates case, he had annoyed a whole lot of people, including some very powerful people.

[PJ Vogt]

This is part of what's so confusing about how to think about the first democracy. The Athenians gave us, Socrates. They also killed him. And every democracy since has had to wrestle with this moment, this moment where the people got exactly what they wanted. And how much were the American founders thinking about Athenian democracy when they designed our democracy?

[Lawrence Sammons]

Oh, they thought about it, but they didn't see it as a positive example. Almost everything they said about it was, we want to avoid that. The founders just didn't want the American system to be that open to the will of the people. The will of the people had to be controlled to some degree. It had to be blunted, you know, the force of the will of the people.

[PJ Vogt]

James Madison, one of our founders, wrote that had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob. And in Athens, unlike in America, the leaders really learned to fear the people. Generals who lost wars, wars that people had voted for, were sometimes executed, often exiled. Sometimes the people would ostracize a general, then a few years later realize they wanted him back and have to hit undo. It was a raucous, I would suggest, insane way to run a city state. And over time, the leaders who would learn to thrive in a society like this would be the ones who would help destroy it. After the break, a new word becomes popular in Athens. Demagogue.

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[PJ Vogt]

Welcome back to the show. Chapter 4 Greek Tragedy when our story began, Athens had been a third tier city state, a backwater. But by the middle of the 5th century BC that had changed. They defeated the Persians while fighting alongside the Spartans. They dominated islands like Naxos, Ahena, Evia throughout the Aegean, all these cities are paying tribute back to Athens. Things look good. The threat to Athenian democracy when it arrives, it won't come from one of Athens neighbors, it'll come from its people. One of the early ideas in Athenian democracy had been that all these random people who are being pulled off their farms and into public service, they should get paid. A good idea. Which spun into something else.

[Lawrence Sammons]

One of the things is that the pay for public service in the fifth century became eventually pay for all kinds of things, including in the 4th century, they paid themselves to vote.

[Co-host]

They're paying themselves to vote, like a lot.

[Lawrence Sammons]

Well, no, not a lot. What you would get paid as a laborer for one day. Something like that.

[PJ Vogt]

It's funny, I have to say, on first blush, the idea of paying people to vote does not seem so bad to me. It'd be more people voted, maybe more working people voted. But what happened in Athens is that the demagogues realized offering to pay people to do things was a very good way to buy public support.

[Lawrence Sammons]

Eventually they got to the point where they paid themselves to go to the theater so that they subvented. They underwrote theater tickets for Athenians.

[Co-host]

And why were they making.

[PJ Vogt]

Those are terrible decisions?

[Lawrence Sammons]

Well, I mean, how do you. If you're in an assembly and a politician gets up and says, I think you guys should be paid to vote, who's going to vote against that?

[PJ Vogt]

Right?

[Lawrence Sammons]

I mean, once that idea is out there, once the idea of paying people to do X or Y is out there, it's just impossible, it seems to me, in a democratic environment, to get people to go, no, no, I'll give up that money. I don't want to be paid. No, I don't want to get that extra benefit.

[Co-host]

So with the crowd voting for what the crowd wanted, government spending in 5th century BC, Athens starts to go a little cuckoo bananas. For instance, the tax revenue that was being used to fund the military. Some demagogue suggests, why don't we just use that money to fund entertainment instead? More festivals, more theater, more religious holidays. The crowd, in its infinite wisdom, agrees.

[PJ Vogt]

Which required politicians to find even more innovative ways to accumulate silver.

[Lawrence Sammons]

They borrowed money from the goddess Athena.

[Co-host]

How do you borrow money from a goddess?

[Lawrence Sammons]

Yeah, it's funny. Athena was very willing to loan. They saw that money in their treasuries, and that was owned by their gods as available for human use. It wasn't that the money owned by the gods couldn't be used.

[PJ Vogt]

So they would.

[Co-host]

Just to make sure.

[PJ Vogt]

I understand.

[Co-host]

So the state would like, you know, mine silver from the mines.

[PJ Vogt]

It would have reserve.

[Lawrence Sammons]

Exactly.

[Co-host]

Some of those coins would be given.

[PJ Vogt]

As tribute to the gods.

[Co-host]

But they're not like throwing it down a well where they can't get it.

[PJ Vogt]

It's available.

[Co-host]

And so then you can borrow from the gods.

[Lawrence Sammons]

Right. So the Athenians kept those books separate. The money that was taken out of the mines, that was money that didn't have to be borrowed, but the money that they borrowed from the gods, some of which they had taken from other Greek states, some of that imperial money gets dedicated to the gods.

[PJ Vogt]

So the Athenians were melting down their statues of the gods for gold. They're also spending the money they'd set aside for the gods to fund endless wars.

[Lawrence Sammons]

That money had to be paid back and had to be paid back in interest. And Athena was very generous during the Peloponnesian War, she lowered her interest rate from something like 7% to 1 1/2 percent. Something like that. What's nice of her. But the Athenians basically spent all the money they had that they had accumulated through their empire. And that debt was a debt to the gods, but they never paid it back. A state, a democratic state, can just spend itself into oblivion. And in fact, I would go so far to say it will spend itself into oblivion.

[PJ Vogt]

So you think in some ways the.

[Co-host]

Mistake they made is just like they overspent.

[Lawrence Sammons]

They overspent. And that overspending led to more military action. Because why the empire is generating some of this money that's being used to pay people. Yeah. And to build the buildings and to pay people to serve on juries. The Athenians quite well understood that sailing out and attacking other Greeks and imposing tribute payments on them was paying them. Right. There was a direct relationship between those two things. They understood that. So the democratic system of paying for public service and building these buildings is generating empire. It's not that the Athenians weren't imperial before. Athens was always aggressive. Even before democracy, the Athenians had an unusually aggressive profile. It's part of their national character for some reason. But boy, democracy really amped it up.

[PJ Vogt]

There must have been Athenians who knew that if the state paid everybody to vote, paid everybody to serve on the thousand seat juries, paid people to go to Athenian coachella, that eventually the need for silver would force them into a war they would lose. Thucydides actually describes how the few Athenians who knew also knew to shut up. He writes, quote, with this enthusiasm of the majority, the few that liked it not feared to appear unpatriotic by holding up their hands against it, and so kept quiet.

[Co-host]

At least in the Athenian story, the desire to be democratic led to people voting for wanting more money, essentially, or wanting to be paid to do more things, which necessitated more imperialism, which they didn't have a problem with. There's no Howard Zinn of Athens.

[Lawrence Sammons]

No, no. I mean, there were. There were. By the end of the 5th century, there are Athenians who are saying things like, this imperialism thing is a little out of control. It's a tiny, tiny voice in a chorus of. But more empire is better.

[PJ Vogt]

Chapter 5. The End the inevitable finally happens in 338 BC. The Athenians have voted too many times to pay themselves, not enough times to fund the military that they keep sending off to fight. Some generals now are even relying on their own private resources to keep things together. Athens ends up losing a battle, finally, that it can't bounce back from. Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great. He is the one to conquer the Athenians at the Battle of Chaeronea. The Athenians are no longer a sovereign people. The first democratic experiment in human history is over and about 200 years after it had begun. When we picture the end of our democracy lately, people talk about fascism, how it's going to be the Handmaid's Tale or Germany in 1933. But the end of Athenian democracy wasn't really like that. In fact, there were plenty of Athenians who were pretty okay with life under the new reign of Philip.

[Lawrence Sammons]

Philip didn't destroy Athens. The Athenian city state continued. And the Athenians actually kept having jury trials and they kept electing officials. They just weren't sovereign anymore. Athens wasn't running its own show. Right. They got to worry about the Macedonians. They're not making their own policy anymore. They're not deciding whether they're going to go to war or not. Macedon is calling the shots on that.

[PJ Vogt]

Right?

[Lawrence Sammons]

Eventually the Romans are going to call the shots on that. So that's what changes. But internally, they still had elections and they still had officers. Right? They still played democracy. We could call it. That's probably unfair to call it playing. But they had lost that thing that had defined the Greek city state before, which is being the absolute sovereign authority over yourself. You make your own laws, you make your own foreign policy. You decide whether you're going to go to war or not. Nobody else is going to tell you whether you're going to do that. They lost that.

[PJ Vogt]

Right.

[Co-host]

And like the moment where the most important decisions are not the city state's decision to make, I feel like, you don't call that a democracy anymore.

[PJ Vogt]

Like, you're a place that gets to.

[Co-host]

Vote on some things, but you're not. You're not a democracy.

[Lawrence Sammons]

And see, it sounded to me like you were describing the world we live in now, a place where you get to vote on some stuff. Yeah, I mean, I've had this really dark thought over the last few years. Maybe I have too many of them. But, you know, Aristotle says man is suited to live a life in the polis and that the sort of heavy responsibilities of citizenship is the best way for a human being and the ideal way for a human being to spend his public life. And maybe I still believe that that is true. I'm an ideal world. But it just seems to me that human beings in the end, find that too burdensome and that they retreat.

[PJ Vogt]

Jay says a strange thing about studying the Athenians as a historian is how much they thought about how they'd be perceived by future historians. In a weird way, how much they were thinking about him. America will one day end. Everything does. We know there will be some future society that looks back on us, tries to understand the choices we made so that it can better understand itself somewhere, many centuries ahead. There's another J. Some devoted scholar reaching back to this moment, asking why. Jay says that he started to fall deeper into Athens when he became more disappointed in the present. At first it felt like an escape from the modern politicians he couldn't stand listening to in America. But more and more, he found himself recognizing us in the Athenians and really seeing the truth in what Thucydides had said, that human nature itself is a constant.

[Lawrence Sammons]

Look, in the late 80s and early 90s, I realized that I had to stop basically watching the news, and I had to, you know, retreat to some degree into Thucydides and these other authors. But the problem is that you keep seeing the same things in those authors that you see around you. So my copy of Thucydides has in the margins, it'll have, you know, November 1992 written in the margin or something. You know, I go, this reminded me of something. It's not that I don't follow the news at all anymore, but I realized I just couldn't become someone who was in that game of what's the next winning move in this political sport.

[PJ Vogt]

Jay retreated into Thucydides, and later I retreated into Jay's work. Not because I was disappointed in democracy. I was disappointed in the Internet. The same way Athenian democracy naturally created demagogues and over time drove most other People away. I feel like our social media actually worked in a very similar way. And so for a while I turned away from the Internet. Honestly, I think I even turned away from society. But here's a good We Greeks believe that a man who takes no part in public affairs is not merely lazy, but good for nothing. That's Thucydides. Despite his very dark view of human nature, his faith that people were ultimately ruled by fear, self interest, and a desire to be seen favorably by their peers, he still believed. We had to show up. We had to show up to a democracy that would always be vulnerable to demagogues who would stir up crowds for their own short term gain. We had to show up and take our place in a crowd that would often make the wrong choice. We had to show up despite knowing that real leaders would be rare, and when they did arrive, we might just punish them for their honesty. We had to show up despite knowing that human nature itself is an incurable condition, that we're likely to make the same mistakes as our ancestors centuries before. The story of Greek democracy is appropriately, a tragedy, a story whose end was inevitable because of the character of the people in it and the setting in which they found themselves. I understand that not everybody finds a tragedy reassuring, but I do. It helps me to think that the way we are is not new. We're always like this, or at least we're always struggling to not be like this. We go through moments where humans improbably organize themselves towards something better, more reasonable, and then the madness takes over and then we begin again. Is there any part of you that just thinks like, the Athenians had a rough draft number one, the Romans had rough draft number two, America might be rough draft number three. Like, no, you don't think there's gonna be rough draft number four, you don't think there should be, or what?

[Lawrence Sammons]

Oh, I find this hilarious that people assume that democr. Democracy is somehow the ultimate form of government. And this has been a running shtick of mine for years, that you go to any political science department in the west and you won't find somebody who goes, no, the next thing is going to be this really better thing. It's not democracy at all, right? Somehow they're all studying ways to make democracy better and ways to make democracy more democratic. So you're caught in this kind of circle where you evaluate democracy against the principles of democracy. I don't think that works. You got to evaluate it by some external standards. How much justice does it produce, how much goodness does it produce, how Much wealth does it produce? How many families does it produce? There's all kinds of ways you could evaluate it that aren't how democratic is it? That thing just won't work in terms of an evaluation process for me. So I really hope that we're not just going to keep reinventing democracy over and over and that human history hasn't ended with this thing, that we're just going to keep tweaking. Like, isn't it possible that mankind will actually produce a system of government in the future that's superior to democracy? It's at least possible, I think. And so if it's possible, we should be thinking about it. But I still think if we focus too much on that political thing, we take our eyes off the other things that are actually more important.

[PJ Vogt]

Right. It just feels like government is our tool. If Thucydides felt that human nature was both a constant and had a dark view of it, yes, then I guess it's easy to think, well, we're not going to change human nature, and so we just need to keep changing the rules around people to try to guide them towards something better.

[Lawrence Sammons]

Right? That's true. But I'll also just add in Thucydides defense that he did have a dark view of human nature. So do I. But that no historian believes that mankind is completely irredeemable. Because you would never write about the past if you didn't think a better future was actually possible. Thucydides had to believe a better future is actually possible. That's what he says, in fact, early in his history about the future. He doesn't put it quite in that optimistic a way, but it's implied.

[PJ Vogt]

What does he say?

[Lawrence Sammons]

Well, he says that he wants his work to be a possession for all time. He says for those who want to know about the future, this work will be valuable. Because as long as human nature is what it is, similar things will happen again. And if you know the kinds of things that are likely to happen, you can in fact plan for them and you can try to avoid them. It's not that you're likely to avoid them, but it's possible. You may, and I think, no, I believe this. This is, to me, the inherent optimism that goes along with history, even if you have a dark view of human nature. So I don't believe that it's impossible for better things to happen in the future. And it's one of the reasons I study the past.

[PJ Vogt]

Dr. Lauren J. Sammons, Executive Director of the Institute for Hellenic Culture and the Liberal Arts at the American College of Greece. His most recent book is called Pericles and the Conquest of A Political Biography. What's wrong with democracy is harder to find, but you can find it. It's worth looking After a short break, we have an announcement to make.

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[Co-host]

Minimum purchase required that is our show this week.

[PJ Vogt]

We have a lot more episodes coming up in 2024. We are publishing through the holidays and we will have our final board meeting of the year on Friday, December 6th. Our board meetings is when we do a Zoom meeting with all of our paid subscribers. Way, way way too many people to put into a zoom meeting. It's Athenian democracy up there. One wise man. That's me, the Socrates of my time. Garrett, my Plato, watching in pain as I suffer my last stand before an unreasonable crowd. That's you guys. Plus you can ask us where we get ideas for stories or if I'm still friends with people I used to work with. I'm just kidding. Please stop asking that. We will tell you how the business of the show is doing right now. We'll have lots of stats, only some of them concerning and we'll talk about what we plan to do next. This is only for our paid subscribers, but don't worry if you have not signed up. There's still time. We have a limited amount of paid subscriptions in stock. Hurry, hurry. Act now. You can sign up for incognito mode over at Search Engine show. And for everyone who already has, thank you so much. Again, our final board meeting of the year Friday, December 6th, 1:00pm I just found out 1:00pm Eastern Time. We will be sending out a Zoom link to join Week of Knowing Me Morning of Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt and Shruti Pinamaneni and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact checking by Claire Hyman Theme Original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss Berman and Leah Rhys Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perillo and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, JD Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Matt Casey, Maura Curren, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney and Hillary Schaff. Our agent is orin Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJVote now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.