There are, Boris Johnson argued in a speech last night, two cities which qualify as the high point of western civilisation. One is Athens in the fifth century BC, under the great statesman Pericles: the other is London in the 21st century under, though he was (unusually) too modest to say so, its great mayor Boris Johnson.
As a classical scholar, Mr Johnson is a familiar champion of the idea of ancient Athens as the birthplace of government by the people, for the people.
Others argue that Athens was not quite the place we imagine: rather than a city of untrammelled virtue, it was brutal, discriminatory, sexist and riven with plague. As Bettany Hughes said in a documentary: “We’ve taken the world of ancient Greece, and we’ve whitewashed it.”
In a speech at the British Academy in which he calls for London to defend its character against the challenges to democratic freedom, Mr Johnson was expected to say: “For all its faults, Periclean Athens marked a high point of western civilisation — the dawn of a political culture of freedom, openness and tolerance, intellectual experimentation and democracy. Two and a half thousand years later there is one city that still incarnates and upholds those values better, perhaps, than any other.”
Many classical scholars are more critical. Dr Alastair Blanshard, from the University of Queensland, has argued that the success of Athens came at a price. He wrote: “In order to create all those triumphs that we now associate with Greek culture . . . Athens turned into a cold, calculating machine. It was so keen on giving benefits to its citizens that it became deaf to the complaints of those who fell outside its citizen group. Foreigners, women and allies all suffered under the Athenian yoke.”
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Mary Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge, wrote in the New Statesman how some modern historians have a “rose-tinted view” of Athenian democracy.
“There is a darker side to this democracy,” she stated. “Athens may have been a city in which every citizen was equal, but those equal citizens were a tiny minority of the population: perhaps 30,000 men out of 250,000 inhabitants. The vast majority — slaves, women and immigrants — were totally excluded from the political process. Ancient Athenian politics was more an exclusive gentleman’s club than a democracy in our terms.”
Bettany Hugheswrote of the attitude towards women: “Athenian women were less than second-class citizens. Aristotle considers them sub-standard. They were thought to pollute. Female bodies were porous: evil could come oozing from open orifices, their mouths and eyes. And for this reason they were kept not only covered, but veiled.”
For three decades Athens fought in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta and its allies, which saw atrocities on both sides, while its campaign to regain control of the island of Samos has been described by Mary Beard as “a brutal piece of imperial control”. In the fifth century, Athenians were afflicted by a plague which killed one in three, including Pericles. No one knows what it was, although symptoms included fever, vomiting, blisters and diarrhoea.
Apart from all that, ancient Athens was a great place to live.