 This is a very exciting show. This is history is here to help every couple of Thursdays at 11, like that 12. And this one is special because we've been lining up for this for a long time. The title today is Classical Origins of Democracy in the West. Because we seem to live in a time where everybody's focused on what happened today. We don't necessarily connect the boss to last week, much less to last millennia. And that's what we need to do. We need to see how humankind has evolved and how democracy has evolved over the life of humankind, especially back to the classics. So what could be more appropriate than talk to a classist? When you talk about history, do the broad sweep, right? As Sandy Schwartz, as a classist at UH Manoa, and she is going to help us understand the grand sweep of democracy in Western life and in global life for that matter, because it all started in Europe. Sandy, thank you so much for coming on the show. OK, my pleasure. I love talking about this topic. So what I'd like to do today is to talk about the foundations of what we know as democracy. The etymology, Deimos, means a is a village. And Kratos, which is where we get crassie, democracy, is the Kratos means power, power of the people. Oh, I love it. Yeah. So democracy began in very humble places where people around the Aegean Sea and also in the Mediterranean, they settled in areas where they could make a go of building a community and a town. There are many archaeologists have found hundreds of different towns in this area. In the Mediterranean Sea, the Mediterranean Sea was a connective network. And so we have parallels and comparisons that help us understand the real cultural phenomena that people had developed around the 7th century BCE. The 7th century BCE was a period of time when new tools were being developed, particularly the tools of iron. And that enabled people in the Mediterranean basin to be able to use agricultural tools and develop an ability to grow your population. So that's the foundational part, that agriculture is the foundation. And as these cities began to grow and families could support more children, many of the polis would become larger and larger. And that's just the simple way of understanding how these polis developed. Now, they could have been here in the East just as easily. They could have been brutal dictatorships just as easily. OK. Something happened in Greece. Something happened in Greece. Yes, something happened in Greece. When these cities started to become larger, there would be more specialization. And that would enable more wealth to come into the city. And these communities, the polis, were mostly egalitarian in the early periods. People would have the same size houses. They would probably have the same homogeneity. Families would be coming together. But once in the 6th century, as the boom in development of cities, there was a really important phenomenon. And that was there had to be some sort of coordination in the management of the city. So at first, we have this homogeneous system. But then what happened afterwards was a group of people, typically the people who surrounded usually a big man and a physically big man. Not necessarily a physically big man. But there were individuals who could amass a coterie of supporters around this big man, which we call a tyrant. Now, the word tyrant actually doesn't come from the Greek or Latin words. That would be later on. A tyrant was a name for a Phoenician leader. And the Greeks had no experience of that. And so they picked the name from the Phoenicians, which was called a tyrant. And from there, that became the tyrant. So the Phoenicians were earlier in the city building phase than the Greeks were. Of course, the Phoenicians and the Greeks had communication across the Mediterranean. So what typically happened in these poles is that there was typically an aristocracy. The people who surrounded the tyrant, we'll call them the tyrant now. And I won't say it's a tyrant. It's the aristocracy. Aristocracies are very competitive. And what happened was that when the city became very large and prosperous, the people, the farmers, the artisans, the tradesmen, they then turned to the tyrant. And they turned to the aristocracy. And an aristocrat would typically break from the aristocracy and ally himself to the workers of the polis, the tradesmen, the craftsmen, and agricultural workers. And so what happened was that the tradesmen, the workers, lifted one of the members of the aristocracy would take the workers into their own union. I guess it's kind of like a union. So what happened was that over the 6th century, more and more towns began to throw off the aristocracy and to bring in a singular individual who would take control of leading the workers that up until then, the aristocracy just didn't even pay attention to them. So with this new individual, he could then amass power and he could amass power from the workers and he could then create a new system. So there was this process of having a new kind of system. It was kind of like a revolution in a way. And the tyrant was the hero. But it was participatory, right? It was democracy, it was the voice of the people. I mean, was it a utopian world we're talking about? Or maybe a tyrannical one? No, not at all. It was not at all utopian, not at all. They had all of their political dynamics in each of the cities, in many of the cities. Some of them differed in different ways. But there was a sense that there could be a strong man who would help raise the workers and to break the aristocracy. OK, so the first thing you have to know is that tyrants aren't necessarily bad in ancient Greece. It was a way of breaking the aristocracy. So there was a wave of these kinds of new settlements, new kinds of settlements. And so these polis came to dominate the community, the members of the city. So the most familiar story about the tyranny in ancient Greece came about when there was a tyrant in Athens. His name was Pisistratus. And he had overseas contacts that could prop him up and bring him to the nascent city of Athens. Pisistratus was good for Athens. He had those kinds of connections in foreign places. And he settled in Athens. Now, it goes back and forth. The story of how these cities grow goes back and forth, of course. But Athens obviously grew to be the biggest city. Yes. And the city that had some influence or even domination over other polices and the country, if you want to call it a country, of Greece at the time. Right. So there were many cities in Greece that were vying to grow in their area. And that then created a significant military battle. And Greece is very rocky. There aren't a lot of large plains. And so in the 6th century, there were more and more people trying to get land grabs. So when Pisistratus came into Athens, he found that there were different communities in the hilly areas of Attica. Attica is the province where Athens is. Pisistratus made a grand plan to impress the citizens of Athens by finding a very tall woman. He dressed her up as the goddess Athena. And he took a chariot and brought her to Athens. And this was like a great PR coup for Pisistratus. But the problem with Athens was that there were different areas of Athens. And the people who lived in those areas had different ideas. So for example, there was one third of Attica was divided into areas around the Aegean. Then there was another area where the hilly areas were. And people populated this whole area. And it was until Pisistratus came with his coup to bring this dressed up Athena to Athens. This became his program of uniting all of Attica. So earlier he had to make deals. He had to make deals with all the people on the hills there. And he had to offer them an opportunity to participate against the origins of democracy in Greece. Right, right. So Pisistratus was the first tyrant. Of course, tyrants don't last long, especially when there are people or the sons of tyrants end up becoming the new tyrants. So Pisistratus' sons had kind of broken down what Pisistratus had built. And so Pisistratus' sons came to the Panathenaic procession in Athens, which was one of the great parades in Athens. And at the head of the parade, one of the sons of Pisistratus was assassinated. And so then all bets were off. And the people of Athens, who had been subjected to the depredations of the sons of Pisistratus, they then decided that the Athenian citizens themselves decided that they needed to organize a new kind of political system. And so the Spartans, the Spartans were the enemies of Athens. And many people in Athens were pro-Spartan because Spartan had a very well-run system. It was a very military, militaristic city. And so there was a faction in Athens that wanted to have a military dictatorship like Spartan had. And then other people in Athens decided that they would make a new kind of organization, a new kind of political organization. And from that came to a figure in Athens. There are always these amazing leaders in Athens. And the Athenian people really had an extraordinary sense of their responsibilities to their deems, to the town, to their they they had the Pan-Athenaic festival was part of this way of getting the people of Athens to understand what Athens was. So it was a perfect storm. Because all the pieces were in place. It didn't have to happen. Almost like a mutation that you have all these pieces in place. And then one day some magical thing happens, some twist of history, some personalities in contradiction to each other, in contention with each other, and then bingo, magic. And it lights up. And it is democracy. It's the finest thing. My right, it is the finest thing that has happened up to that point in human history, right there, almost by accident in Athens. Wow. And then there was a period of time in which it developed and it became even more refined. Am I right? Yes. And it still went back and forth. But then in the fifth century, the Athenian citizens really took it upon themselves to make their city. Theater was an important aspect of Athens. Athenian playwrights wrote hundreds of plays that really brought a mirror to the Athenian citizens so that they could see themselves and they could understand what the values were of Athens. What a lovely thought. So it wasn't just entertainment. It was actually a forerunner of the First Amendment. They were speaking honestly about what was happening to them as a political organization. Right. And they took it seriously. They took the theater very seriously because it had the most profound values to be supported throughout the Athenian citizenship. Of course, some women went to the theater. Some didn't. There's a lot of interesting plays that have to do with gender and sexuality and the family and how things worked. All these great classical drama that we have is really a kind of way of teaching the masses about what Athens was. And again, if you're a classicist, there's no better way to find out the way the Greeks lived than reading their plays. Right. Right. Absolutely. And I mean, there's amazing archaeology that around the foothill of the Acropolis, the Acropolis was the topmost hill in Athens, archaeologists have excavated the areas around the Acropolis. And you can see in Athens today, they have plexiglass where you can see into the houses of Athens. And the interesting thing about the houses of Athens was that they were all the same size. It was egalitarian. And their work. Would that mean that there was a value, a point of limitation? In other words, if I was a wise guy and I was a trader using those forts in Greece to make money on selling things and importing, exporting, and I made money. And I wanted to build a house three times the size of my neighbor. There had to be a limitation, a cultural limitation, where people would stop me from doing that somehow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the Athenians, they had courts. They had elections. They tried to randomize people who would go into the courts. It's an amazing story about how the Athenians were able to figure out a system that would be fair to everyone. What about brutality? What about unfairness? What about the dark side? Was there a dark side? There was slavery, of course. Then in the ancient world, slavery was endemic. Most houses had a slave. Many slaves had to work in the fields. So we have this utopia on the hill, but it wasn't really a utopia on the hill. There were also political problems, factionalism. There were traitors. One of the most famous of the traitors was Al-Sabaides. He convinced the Athenian navy to go to Sicily. And he really botched that job. That is in Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War. So there were always people who, like the early tyrants, they wanted to try to get the golden ring, I guess you could say, and try to get all the power of Athens. Because when you have this egalitarian system, there's always a threat that a tyrant can come in again. In this system, Sunday, was there a formalized rotation, a change of management, a transfer of power? Or was it power as long as you could hold on to it? During the period of classical Athens, the citizens really took, as I said before, they took responsibility for their actions. In Athens, there was a name for someone who didn't want to participate in the government. And the name of that person, or the type of person it was, they called him an idiotace, which means someone who does not go with the community, an idiotace. And it was frowned upon. It was absolutely frowned upon. In Athens, again, you must go to Athens at some time in your life. What you can see is that the citizens in Athens spent the day outside all the time. There were stoas. There were lanais, as we would call it. And when I first came here to Hawaii, I remember going to the Fort Street Mall. And there were all these Filipino men. And they would sit there on the benches by rosses. And all day long, they would sit and they would talk. They would gossip. And that, to me, when I first came to Honolulu, it really made me feel that I was in Athens because people were walking around. You'd see people face to face. You'd bump into each other. And so, in a way, the Athenians were very gregarious. But if anyone didn't want to be part of that, people would be suspicious of that. What about public spaces? Public spaces, I have looked at materials covering public spaces in Rome, which you and I will have to talk about next time. But public spaces found to me very important in a community, in a country, in a culture like this, because you have that gregarious, face-to-face kind of experience, very healthy, very collaborative. And so, did they understand the value? I really appreciate they understood the value of plays. But what about public spaces as a place to gather and exchange ideas? Well, there was the agorah, the marketplace. And there would be fresh markets all over the agorah. And that's what people did. They just hung out in the agorah. Men, mostly, women, less so. Women were expected to stay at home. But there were other market women who would be able to practice their trade and so forth. So the agorah would have been a real, I think the agorah, when you think about it, when I think of Aloha Stadium, when you have the swap meet, that's what it would be, and that's what it would have been like. So here we are, we're at the top of the world, right? Am I right to say that there's really no place in Europe that is this socially advanced and these people are having, subject to a few problems that maybe they didn't see it as problems, but a few issues that we would see as issues now, they were leading a pretty good life. And person to person, it wasn't a bad time. And at least in substantial part, that was because they had a system in which they all participated or could participate. And we're gonna have to get off soon, but I wonder if you could sort of set the stage for us about how this healthy in moment in Greek history declined and how the ideas and to the extent the ideas passed to Rome, possibly through trade or through facilities and the Peloponnesian wars, what have you, how these ideas passed around the Mediterranean and wound up in Rome from Greece. And how long that took? Well, I think that I, how, let me see how I can answer this quickly. So Athens had developed a major empire in the Aegean Sea and around the Mediterranean. The Athenians had two wars against the Persians. And that then enabled the Athenians to build a massive fleet. I don't think I can do justice in such a short time. You just set the stage for us, that's all. Okay, so Athens grew because they had to build ships. And eventually the Athenians created an empire within the Aegean. Now the Aegean Sea has lots of islands, coastal areas on what's Turkey today. And so there were many polis on the eastern coast of the Aegean Sea as well. And so Athens created a fleet of ships called triremes. And with that, the Athenians were able to go shake down the smaller polis around the Aegean Sea. And so Athens became a major producer throughout the Aegean. And then when the Persians came in to try to take over Greece, those were the Persian wars. So Athens always looked to the sea to get what they needed. Athens wasn't, I mean, their homegrown agricultural produce was basically olive oil, and they used that to trade throughout the Mediterranean Sea. So Athens had become the premier city around the Aegean Sea. And it stayed that way. In 432 BCE, one of the most amazing orders came to the Athenian assembly. And he, his name was Pericles, and he was the leader of Athens. And it's kind of, sometimes it's kind of, hard to understand what the impact was of having such an adept leader who was completely patriotic. He wasn't a tyrant, he was the mouthpiece of Athens. And so that really became a hallmark of Athens. Athens came to be the place where the ideas were, where the ideas of whatever, what does Pericles say, he said, we are the school of Helos. And the school of Greece, and that came to be in later generations the memory of Athens. Pericles was the author of the beautiful Parthenon, or the, he didn't build the Parthenon, but he marshaled all the resources of Athens to build the temple of Athena on the Acropolis. And he also was the architect of building the fleets that enabled Athens to thrive. So- Why don't we leave it there, Sandy? Why don't we leave it there? Okay. That's a great place to leave it, because we have this sort of the top of the world moment for Greece under Pericles. And we're gonna address two questions. We're gonna address the question of how all of this was transferred to and to extent, accepted by Rome over a period of time. And also a bigger question for our next discussion, really important is some of these names are familiar. Which of these concepts, which of these social constructs that they somehow came together during the time of Greece and the time of Rome do we have in our society today? Wow. Okay, so let's schedule another show soon. I didn't want to try to cover too much today. I think we covered a lot of good stuff. Next time we'll go forward and cover more. Okay. Thank you so much. I'm in sports. Thank you so much. Aloha. Thank you.