Visiting Philosophical Athens
Something unique happened in ancient Athens. The western world credits this time and place as the beginning of democracy, culture, and philosophy, which likely developed in support of each other. If democracy is to be viable, the citizens should be educated. If the people are the ones making the decisions of how the government will run, what programs to prioritize, and what wars to undertake, the experiment would not last long if they were easily fooled or incompetent. And so an educational system was composed named the artes liberales: the skills required of freemen to participate in voting, to serve on juries, and hold public office. These specifically thinking competencies were decided to be logic, rhetoric, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. The term for anyone who was not interested in being prepared for civic life or engaging in the rhetoric of ideas was an idiotes. The thinking life was glorified. Greek mythology supported the development of the liberal arts, with temples built in respect to the goddess of wisdom and strategic battle, monuments constructed to the muses who inspire the arts, all under the favor of the Olympian gods and a guided fate under Athena’s patronage. With a population educated in thinking, and the glorification of beauty in the work of the mind, the space was ripe for philosophy to develop. And develop it did, in a few public places under the sun, in the center of the city, as an activity in which Athenians of any age or profession were invited to participate via dialogue.
Athens was establishing itself as a great city state, a model of democracy and civilization for the world, and the people decided they should pick a patron deity to guide and bless them. Poseidon and Athena came forward to answer the challenge. Poseidon made a dramatic show of piercing the ground with his trident, the place where it struck suddenly breaking way for a spring. The citizens rushed over, excited to have a source of water for drinking, watering, and washing. But they were quickly disappointed when they tasted the water, for it was salty—Poseidon being the god of the sea. Athena amusedly knelt down and quietly covered something in the ground. Up sprouted an olive tree. The citizens realized at once the value of flavoring their food, fueling their lamps, and trading the precious oil. Athena had won. The city and the goddess of wisdom would ever after have a special bond of mutual adoration.
6000 years ago, up Mount Parnassus from Delphi, the Oracle served in the Corycian Cave long before the Temple of Apollo was the site of pilgrimage for Greeks. The cave was known as a temple for nymphs, the home of Dionysus, and once the prison of Zeus. This place has been considered sacred since 4000BCE, and the vibrations of six millennia of worship inspired quiet awe. A visit to the Oracle was considered essential for ancient Greeks before making life altering decisions—reflection and contemplation were thus very important. Before you spoke to the Oracle, the edict was to “know yourself”: to live an examined life, to question your assumptions, and to consider your choices.
Situated in the mountains, the awe of the religious pilgrimage to Delphi is still tangible. The Temple of Apollo, seen in the background, is where Greeks would visit the Oracle of Delphi. Apollo, god of truth, foreknowledge, the sun, and light, blessed the people of Delphi with foresight, which is the reason Greeks would travel the distance and the height to visit his temple and speak with the Oracle. But down the mountain a bit is the Temple of Athena Pronaia. Traveling to the west to get to Delphi, visitors would approach Athena’s temple first. To be blessed or to be purified, this location of respect for Athena seems intentional. First you honor Athena, then you wash and drink from the Castalian Spring, and only then do you approach the Oracle. Zeus may be the foremost of the Olympian gods, and Apollo the patron god of Delphi, yet the respect for Athena seems to be the most sacred. How appropriate that Ancient Greece, who held the goddess of wisdom in the highest regard, would now be known for the development of philosophy, democracy, and culture.
What would your question to the Oracle be? You were only allowed one. The god Apollo blessed the people of Delphi with the ability to see the future, and one maiden dedicated her life to serving as the Oracle. Greeks would travel from far just to ask their question. Will I be successful at war? Should I ask her to marry me? How do I live a good life? But be warned: the answer is not always clear or easily understood. Take for instance the answer:
…
Go to war,
Die not;
Return home.
…
Go to war, die;
Not return home.
…
Sometimes the same words can be read differently. Sometimes even having the answer does not help to make the right decision. Yet the Ancient Greeks took their important decisions to Delphi to benefit from the Oracle’s wisdom.
Socrates was a man who asked many questions. He asked questions for two major reasons: first, because he was genuinely interested in knowing, thinking, and wondering; and second, because he wanted to provoke others to think with him. He would ask for an idea articulated as an argument. Then he would ask questions to examine the idea’s presuppositions, deepen the idea, problematize the position, inviting the interlocutor to test and refine their thinking as the dialogue developed. His way of questioning is now known as the Socratic Method.
Socrates was interested in the ideas of others, so he spent time in heavily trafficked public spaces in order to speak with the people of Athens. The agora was perhaps the most popular and public of all spaces in Greek city-states. Here, citizens could hear the daily news, buy groceries for their dinner, discuss politics or hear candidates exercise their rhetoric, and make social and business plans. One particular building associated with the agora of philosophical interest is the shop and house of Simon the cobbler. Many sources refer to Socrates spending a great deal of time at the house of a cobbler named Simon, and archeological digs have revealed cobbler nails and a piece of a cup engraved with the name Simonos in this location of the agora.
Socrates spent time here in dialogue with the Athenian people and with Simon. Simon not only wrote accounts of his own dialogues with Socrates, he would ask questions and hold dialogues with others as well. While he was a cobbler by trade, Socrates demonstrated that being a philosopher is a mindset and doing philosophy is an activity in which anyone can participate.
The Oracle of Delphi said that Socrates was the wisest man in all the world. Most people who care about wisdom would be honored to hear this. Not Socrates—he was frustrated by the news. He had so many questions. Everyone he asked questions to seemed to be confident they knew the answer, yet with further investigation, their knowledge was found to be built on unconscious assumptions. After a while, Socrates learned to accept that the Oracle may be right: although he did not know most things, at least he knew that he did not know them. So he continued to ask questions of everyone and anyone, to provoke them to think and to be engaged in the thinking process himself. Until a jury decided to give him the death penalty for corrupting the youth with all those questions. He had one request for the citizens of Athens: that they would ask his sons questions in his absence, so that they would be thinkers.
A few hundred jurymen voted to convict Socrates of corrupting the youth and not honoring the gods. The prosecution proposed the death penalty, while the defense would usually propose some lighter punishment, like a fine or exile. Instead, Socrates suggested for his guilty verdict that he should receive maintenance in the Prytaneum, where the great poets and athletes were honored and served fine meals as Athenian heroes. So the death penalty it was.
His friends bribed the guards to let him escape, but he had respect for the democratic laws of Athens, who had provided him with his education as a youth and formed him into who he was.
Socrates drank the hemlock, and the rest is history.
It is from Socrates’ prolific student Plato that we have much of the written account of Socrates’ words and activities. Plato took over the work of Socrates, leading dialogue with students in a city park in the northwest of Athens named the Academy. The reputation of Plato’s Academy grew so much that thinkers would come from greater Greece and beyond in order to study with the philosopher.
Plato wrote about ideas, the nature of the world, and important concepts such as Justice and Love. His work of giving the world an account of his teacher’s dialogues and articulating philosophical areas of study was so comprehensive, for many centuries it was said that all of philosophy is merely parsing or adding footnotes to the foundational work of Plato.
Plato’s student Aristotle later carried on taking students and building the discipline of philosophy. Aristotle claimed a public outdoor gymnasium in east Athens named the Lyceum. In this gymnasium, students would work on curating their mind and body as they discussed ideas and physically exercised. Aristotle believed these two were so mutually beneficial, that he would walk as he talked with his students. This style of teaching, dialogue while walking, became known as peripatetic, meaning “walking about”. Walking around Athens, it is easy to converse about the nature of the gods, the meaning of life, or humanity’s place in the world.
A bit later in the third century BCE, a new school of philosophy formed located just a few steps away from the House of Simon in the ancient Agora. Men gathered on a front porch in the middle of the city center in order to discuss ideas, ethics, and the good life. One can imagine what this porch sitting, wine sipping, philosophy discussing life is like—it sounds exactly like the conversations that happen at off campus house parties in youthful university years, or when philosophers gather for an international seminar in a small village that comes alive with late night discussions. This first renaissance movement of Socrates’ effort to bring philosophy to the public streets of Athens was named after the Painted Porch where they met, the Stoa Poikile, resulting in the name Stoicism.
Athens came to be conquered by various other nation states over the proceeding centuries. Yet something special about Athens demanded respect, not destruction. Alexander of Macedonia had been a student of Aristotle, so he honored Athens, the origin of the ideas he would put into practice in order to become the Great. Later Roman Emperor Hadrian would take a similar mindset, finishing the building project of the Temple of Olympian Zeus and constructing a great library north of the agora to house the wisdom of civilization and make Athens the cultural capital of his empire. So too did these honors uplift and spread the liberal arts, the acts of philosophical questioning and self reflection, and the schools of thought of Athens fame. Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius is a notable example of a Stoic philosopher whose writing and reputation glorify Athenian thinking.
Athens is saturated with its history, so much so that new building projects are commonly halted because new ruins have been unearthed. The ancient world exists amongst the modern. Take for instance the walking path constructed in the 1950s up the Hill of the Muses, just west of the acropolis. You can see the rocks used for the steps intermingled with marble ruins from long forgotten ancient ruins, as well as clay roof tiles salvaged from WWII bombings—mixed media, mixed millennia. When you speak to Athenians, they are aware of their heritage, accepting of their responsibility as curators of this sacred space, and ashamed that they have not learned more of their history. Yet some of the virtues that made Athens great are engrained in their being, such as philoxenia, hospitality, being a virtue of high regard just as it is demonstrated in The Odyssey.