The Word That Is Greece: Freedom

Robert Zaller

Greece celebrates freedom on March 25, but lives it every day of the year.  The English word is too cramped.  The Greek one, eleuftheria, has wings that lift it to flight.  It spreads itself everywhere, and, as the great Greek gift to humanity, it is the world’s common possession.  We keep it, only by using it.

It isn’t that other peoples don’t know freedom.  It’s the common aspiration of the human soul.  But its quality in Greece is different.  Some of that is obvious.  Where freedom exists in its fullness, the world awaits discovery, and expansion too.  Humans explore it, create with it, and realize themselves through it.  The ancient Greeks did this as no one else.  Their art, their drama, their institutions, their thought all reflected this.  Their great public buildings, erected in cities but also in places of natural splendor—Delphi, Sounion—reflect the sense of a seamless relation between the human, the vista of land and sea, and the divine.  For you cannot fully understand the experience of Greek freedom, a work of the spirit, without comprehending the unique landscape in which it is set, the endlessly variegated perspective of mineral, earth, and wave that leads the mind irresistibly upward toward the dazzle of its light, a light celebrated throughout the world.  There are of course many beautiful places in the world—the world is its beauty, as a great poet said—but none such as Greece, where it seems a single sculptor has shaped it, rock, field, and sea, all encompassed in the double blue of sea and sky.  The ancient Greeks found their gods there, gave them limbs and garments, and made their stories for them.  If we don’t worship them in their temples now—rather a pity, one might say, because the free human being is made for worship—we pay them homage still in the modern cathedrals we call museums, and make our own stories about them in new guises to populate our stages.  We send them to the farthest stars to name them.  It’s not merely an accident, or a convention.  They are, still, our lights.

Freedom is thus the basis of contemplation, investigation, creativity.  There have been civilizations with slaves, but there is no such thing as a civilization of slaves.  That would be a prison.  We’ve had some, some very large ones.  But the only permanent impulse they produce is the desire to escape them.

Freedom is also action, and that is its most important component. The Greeks of Athens devised a way of expressing and containing this, democracy.  It wasn’t perfect, and it didn’t last long, not in its true vigor.  But it did not fade, and in the modern world it has been rediscovered, if not always recovered.  The Athenian example is still instructive.  The beginnings of democracy were already visible in Athens in the sixth century, but what bore it to fruition were the struggles to preserve Greek independence against the Persian empire.  In the war of 480-479 BCE—the last of three launched against Greece from 492—it was Athens that, at first fighting almost alone and in the end as leader of a Panhellenic alliance, repulsed the Persians.  Had those wars, still the most important in Western history, not been won, democracy would not have been realized, and with it the astonishing cultural achievement of the fifth century that, more than anything else, was to shape the story of the West.

Democracy, however, while essential to the fullest expression of freedom—of that form of action we call political—was not necessarily coextensive with it.  As a democracy, Athens would acquire its own seaborne empire, in celebration of which it erected what has become the world’s greatest symbol of freedom, the Parthenon.  That empire would soon be lost in the ill-conceived Peloponnesian War, whose successive missteps would be chronicled by its great historian, Thucydides, who ended his days in exile, as did its last great tragedian, Euripides.

Exile was not, however, the fate of Athens’ greatest figure, and the man who today, as for many centuries, has represented its most critical contribution to Western history.  Socrates lived his entire life in Athens.  He was a philosopher who, unlike others of his time who made it a trade to ply or a doctrine to propound, spent his life seeking the deepest meaning of the fundamental conceptions of thought and language.  Nothing human escaped him, and no certainty satisfied him.  This made him a suspect figure in times of crisis, and his enemies, at the disastrous end of the Peloponnesian War, sought to make a martyr of him.  He might have chosen exile but, still unwilling to accept anything but truth, accepted death instead.  During the Christian centuries of antiquity, his name was the one most closely associated with that of Jesus, who too had accepted martyrdom in the Gospel records.  Democracy, in practice, was a search for consensus so that action might be agreed, but freedom, in the last analysis, was something higher:  the demand for truth.

Freedom then, for the Greeks, meant the imperfections of practical choice, but also a quest for the purest truth, the most virtuous path, so that error might not stand but be corrected.  In this, Socrates had stood opposed to his rivals, the Sophists, for whom philosophy was rhetoric, the art of persuasion.  Language was what you wanted of someone else.  It meant what you wanted him to believe, and to do at your instruction.  But Socrates believed that each word, if pursued to its end, contained its own truth.  You might never reach it in its entirety, but the quest was there, and true democracy lay with it.  So democracy found itself in act, but only act that sought the good and the ideal—the truly ethical, the truly desirable.  And the act that pursued only interest and advantage led only to the premature conclusion, the sale.

Thucydides and Socrates are generally read separately, the historian and the philosopher.  But the climax of the first part of Thucydides’ History, the great funeral oration of Athens’ leader Pericles, is with its celebration of Athenian democracy the great statement of what it aspired to as the polity in which the quest for truth, and virtue in truth, was open and available to all citizens in free and unfettered discussion.  To be sure, no one could seek it with the manner of the Socratic dialogue, in which the master and his students approached their subject matter which by question, response, and counter-question discussion proceeded in the form of progressive refinement known as the dialectic.  Since such discussion was in the continual process of revision, it was open-ended, and Socratic wisdom was communicated only orally:  Socrates spoke, but never, like the great religious figures who preceded and succeeded him, Buddha and Jesus, wrote anything down, and even Moses carried only the tablets written for him.  It was Socrates’ student, Plato, who undertook to dramatize him in writing, and gave us what we can actually know of his teaching.  As for Thucydides, his account of Pericles is followed by the successive debates in the Athenian Assembly in which policy devolved into rhetoric as, folly by folly, the city moved toward final defeat.  It would be that same Assembly that would try and condemn Socrates, as if completing the last act of a tragedy—the tragedy of Athens itself.

Greece nonetheless remained a seedbed of constitutional experimentation, especially after the breakup of Alexander’s empire, particularly in the third century BCE when the independent states of Greece rallied to resist the advancing Roman empire, and in the second century to battle it.  Rome conquered them at last, but its high culture—religious, cultural, scientific, philosophical—was Greek, and its center of political and economic gravity increasingly so as well.  Rome fell, we are told, to the barbarians, but in fact the Greco-Roman world reconstituted itself in Byzantium, and Christianity revived.  It was not until the Ottoman Conquest of the fifteenth century that Greek preeminence in the Eastern Mediterranean was lost, only to migrate again to the West in the art and culture of the Renaissance.  The Arab empires of the Middle Ages had preserved and translated the texts of Aristotle and Plato, and through them Socrates as well.  They had penetrated and reshaped the Scholastic philosophy of the West before the Renaissance, which added to this the revival of Greek art, architecture, and mythology—the latter a remarkable phenomenon in the context of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, with their long struggle for control of Christian orthodoxy.  It is no longer fashionable to speak of what was once called Renaissance “individualism.”  But Renaissance portraiture and landscape art, with the personality of the former and the free scope of the latter, made a new and vital connection with antiquity.  If any doubt of it could be, the prevalence of Greek ruins that anchored and defined the landscapes and the figures of Greek mythology that frequently populated them could leave no question.

But the dream of political freedom had never died in Greek hearts during the centuries of Ottoman occupation, and it would revive—reciprocally—in Enlightenment Europe and Greece itself.  Europe’s major revolutions, the American and the French, preceded that of Greece, but the constitutions of the ancient world and the commentaries on them by Aristotle had a critical influence, particularly those on majoritarian governance.  Even before them, they were anticipated by the influence on antiquarianism on Western culture, particularly in the revival of classical architecture that came to define so much of the public building of the era.  It was no accident that both Independence Hall in America and the Royal Tennis Court building in Versailles, although originally designed for other purposes, became the sites of both the American Constitutional Convention in 1787 and the French one two years later both evoked classical design and decoration.  It was as if they were both awaiting their intended use.

The Greece that took up the banner of revolution in 1821 was hardly the locus of a classical architecture revival; it was abundant only in ruins, and the Parthenon had been stripped of much of its surviving glories by Lord Elgin.  But, though the majority of its population was impoverished, Greece had developed a prosperous merchant class in the eighteenth century, and its contacts with Europe stimulated a reciprocal interest in the cause of Greek freedom.  America and the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Central and South America had or were shaking off the yoke of their imperial masters; France had liberated itself, and, in the Napoleonic conquests, shown (if briefly) the possibility of independence for much of the rest of Europe.  Greece, the mother of freedom, was ripe for its moment, and though in the reaction that followed the fall of Napoleon had produced a great-power consensus to thwart further revolution in the Old World, it was not to be denied in Greece.  The situation was complex, because Britain, though willing enough to loot Greek ruins, was resolutely set against overthrowing governments.  At the same time, though, the opportunity to extend its naval power into the Eastern Mediterranean was too great a temptation to resist.  And the Greek cause, at the same time, had fired the imagination of too many.  One of those who responded to it was the British poet and aristocrat Lord Byron, who gave his fortune and finally his life to the fight to free Greece as the most famous of those the world would call, as it still does, Philhellenes.  Byron gave his reason for it simply:  “I have never been happy a day outside Greece.”  It is a sentiment all Philhellenes can understand, and that some share.

For Greeks themselves, the struggle to shake off the stifling centuries of Ottoman rule was bitter, costly, and protracted.  It threw up more than its share of heroes, men and women, whose feats and stories are the backbone of modern Greek history.  But neither independence nor freedom was an easy affair.  The major powers acquiesced in it, but, neither convinced of the Greek capacity for self-rule and seeking to contain the virus of revolution, it imposed a German dynasty on the new state which, despite periodic expulsion, persisted for nearly a century and a half.

For more than a hundred years, Greeks worked to reclaim all that had once been Greek, until—through successes and failures—the modern state resurrected the old one.  All peoples, to a greater extent or lesser, strive to claim or reclaim the soil that has been theirs.  None has fought for it more doggedly than the Greeks.  Only to a language will a people cling as fiercely.  Soil and language:  inseparably, they are freedom.  The ancient Greeks made their language immortal, and when the Western world lost it, it recovered its own heritage only when the works of Aeschylus and Plato, Sophocles and Aristotle, were once again part of it.  And that is no less true today.

Just as the words of the great Greek dramatists and philosophers still resound everywhere that culture abides, giving voice above all to freedom, so did the spirit of Marathon cry from Greek throats in the single word that confronted the fascist invaders of 1940, Oxi!  No one needed to call the people into the streets on the morning of October 28; they were there as one, on a continent that had already surrendered to a tyranny on the march.  No people rejoiced more openly when that battle was won.  Fifty years later, I passed a monument erected by a roadside on Crete, the island where freedom beats perhaps most strongly in the blood.  It was not a public monument, but a private one put up by an Australian soldier, willing to give his life for a people on the other side of the world and in gratitude for the islanders who had fought with him in their common cause and saved his life.  If there’s another stone like it in the world, I don’t know of it.

And then freedom was betrayed, not by conquest but from within.  Greeks arose on an April morning to find themselves shackled to chains forged by those entrusted to defend them.  Greek freedom, it seemed, had become too rowdy, too irresponsible for the masters who dictated its terms from far away.  The seven long years of the Junta began.  If the sea and sky and stones seemed the same—almost the same, for the Junta plastered what seemed every available rock with its propaganda—the landscape itself seemed to have lost something, as if the human spirit was essential to it as vice versa.  People spoke more softly, walked more quietly.  The cabdrivers no longer bantered as before.  There were places in the city you didn’t go near because of what was going on in them, even if you couldn’t hear the sounds from inside.  Open resistance, it was soon apparent, would be futile.  Many were imprisoned on the islands.  The lucky ones—slightly luckier—were able to go into exile.  That was no less hard, as the poet Nikiforos Vrettakos would testify:

Herds of monsters roam the earth,

the heavy guns storm the redoubts of the masses.,

crush the philosophers, silence the poets.

The new dinosaurs drive out man

As man once drove out the dinosaurs.

But a ray of light must

have stayed with us from the precious morning

dreamt of by saints.

Perhaps, anyway, God excuses everything

but the poet who deserts his post—

May the sun never see

that last turret strike its post.

(“The Dinosaurs”)

Vrettakos, on his way to exile, saw his one possession still intact, “the proud hawk” of freedom with “its claws dug in rock” (“The Rock and the Hawk”), but still waiting “from her pinnacle in Constitution Square” (“Thirty Years in the Rain”) for liberation to come.¹   It did come, borne by the students of the Athens Polytechneion.  The last months of the Junta, although it clung to power, was a death watch.  Its leaders turned on each other, until all fell together.  Coincidentally, it came at the same time that Richard Nixon resigned the presidency as the Watergate tapes revealed the full scope of his attempt to undermine American democracy.  Nixon went off to a comfortable retirement, fully pensioned, and with no accounting for his crimes.  Greece taught us what should have been a better lesson.  The colonels were put on trial in 1975, and duly convicted as traitors.

I observed some of that trial, and remember thinking about how those who taken away freedom justly deserved no less than to lose theirs.  I thought, and wrote then, that freedom requires justice if it is to be fully restored, and that while Greece had understood this, America had not.  In these perilous days that now confront us, it is a lesson to be more remembered than ever.

Endnote

1. All translations of Vrettakos are by Lili Bita and Robert Zaller, from Thirty Years in the Rain: The Selected Poetry of Nikiforos Vrettakos (Boston, MA:  Somerset Hall Press, 2005).