10. Plato and Greek History
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Outline
• 1) Relation to nature (last lecture)
– Geography
– Basic technology
– Consciousness: from anthropomorphic polytheism to
philosophical monotheism
• 2) Relation between people – continued
– Obstacles to freedom: inequality from within
– Important chronology
– Meaning of Solon’s reforms
• 3) Consciousness: from religion to philosophy: Plato
– continued
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Important Dates
• (1) 600
•
500 (d)
Solon
Cleisthenes
• (2) 490-465
Persian Wars
• 470
Naxos punished for leaving Delian League
• (3) 461-451; 431-404 Peloponnesian Wars
– 441
– 399
Sophocles’ Antigone
Death of Socrates
• (4) 334-323 Alexander’s conquests
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Social problems
• Time period: before Solon
• Individual farmers work on limited land
• Some are impoverished and sell their children as
slaves
• Two partial solutions to this impoverishment
– Flight (emigration)
– And Fight (Hoplite soldiers)
• Poorer peasants have iron weapons
• Can afford discipline from long training
• There is no state, no standing army, at this stage
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Solon’s Balancing Act
• Inequality: rich (aristocracy) control more and
more land
• Poor outnumber them, threaten to take land
back
• Solon’s legal reforms for a new State society:
– Share political power with small farmers
– Landowners keep economic rights to property
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Full solution: Solon’s Reforms
• Cancels debt servitude
• Outlaws enslavement of Athenians
• Political power to ordinary male farmer
– Two chamber government
• => Compromise, cross-class state
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Winners and Losers
• Enslavement of foreigners still allowed
• Women, foreigners, slaves do not participate
– They are the losers (5 out of 6 people)
• > Aristocracy survives, grows stronger
• Fate of small farmer?
– Did they win too?
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Rousseau on the victory of the rich over
the poor
• The outcome was “. . . the most thought-out
project that ever entered the human mind. It
was to use in his favor the very strength of
those who attacked him, to turn his
adversaries into his defenders… to give them
other institutions which were as favorable to
him as natural right was unfavorable to him.”
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Legal Right and Natural Right
• “to give them [the poor] other institutions
which were as favorable to him [Solon, the
aristocracy] as natural right was unfavorable
to him.”
• Legal rights of the new state replace natural
rights of ancient kinship
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Legal system replaces kinship
• Cleisthenes divides citizens by residence
(demes), not by clans (i.e., not by kinship)
• =>Law unites people of different kin groups,
overriding natural kinship ties by law-based
relations created by the state
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Two types of law,
and kinship
• Law
– 1) God-given (Hammurabi)
– 2) Man-made (Antigone, Greece)
• Local kinship traditions continues elsewhere:
– Egypt (no such law: kinship traditions persists)
– Kinship tradition goes underground in Greece
(Antigone defends kinship tradition against the
law of the state)
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Limits of Greek law
• 1) Rich maintain property rights: can continue to
keep slaves, but not from their own city-state
– Spartans enslave their neighbors (Helots: conquered
people of Laconia and its central city, Helos.)
• 2) Women excluded too
• 3) Original problem remains: 5 unfree people
against 1 free citizen
– Government or “State”?
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Context of Antigone
• Formation of Delian League led by Athens
– to fight Peloponnesian war against the Spartan coalition
• Athens becomes tyrannical
– brutally punishes Naxos (470 BCE) for leaving the League
– “Ironically, the city-state of Athens, having led the Greek
city-states in the struggle against the Persian Empire,
subsequently set out to construct an empire of its own.”
(Spodek, 150-1)
– Peloponnesian War begins (461)
– Treasury moved to Athens, used for city (454)
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Two-fold context of writing of Antigone
• General conflict between
– the old order of kinship
– and the new order of the State and its laws
• Particular conflict between
– Sparta (militarized aristocracy, slave-based control
of Helots) and
– Athens (limited, exclusive “democracy”)
• Sophocles’ message to Athens in Antigone:
“Don’t go to extremes.”
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Power of the Excluded
• Antigone: Old kinship order v. new legal order
• The old order of the family, of kinship, still has
force
• Antigone: Warns of the dangerous power of
the excluded
– Women, Slaves, foreigners
– Sophocles’ implicit message: Those left out of the
new Greek order will get revenge
• =Fate, Justice, Hegel’s “irony of history”
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3) From religion to philosophy
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Greek gods express human qualities
• The poets’ account of the gods: vivid,
naturalistic embodiments of human qualities
– Homer, Sophocles
• Conflicts among the gods express human
conflicts
• Hence appeal, power of Greek
anthropomorphic polytheism: people
implicitly learn about themselves
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Sophocles on the Power of Love
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Eros, undefeated in battle,
Eros, who falls upon possessions,
who, in the soft cheeks of a young girl,
stays the night vigil,
who traverses over seas 785
and among pastoral dwellings,
you none of the immortals can escape,
none of the day-long mortals, and
he who has you is maddened. 790
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Aphrodite rules
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You wrest the minds of even the just
aside to injustice, to their destruction.
You have incited this quarrel
among blood kin.
Desire radiant from the eyelids 795
of a well-bedded bride prevails,
companion in rule with the gods' great
ordinances. She against whom none may battle,
the goddess Aphrodite, plays her games.800
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“Classic” Pattern of Evolution
• 1) Animism of hunter-gatherers
• 2) Anthropomorphic polytheism of early
civilizations
– Egypt, Persia: mixed with animism
• 3) Monotheism (linked to empire)
– In Egypt, Persia
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Religious Evolution is Blocked
• 1) Beautiful anthropomorphic polytheism of
Homer
– Sophocles beautifully continues these themes
– Old poetry still has great power
– Further evolution of religion (to monotheism) is
blocked
• 2) Also: no need for a religion of empire
– The Greek city states remain divided
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Turn from Greek Religion to Philosophy
• See Athena (148)
– = symbol of Athens, the city-state—the polis
• New function of religion: Focus on the (free)
city-state
• => Worship ourselves!
• Oracle at Delphi: Know Yourself
• Philosophy: Think for yourself!
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History of Greek Consciousness
• 1) Animism (religion of mother Earth)
– Trampled on by Man, with iron plow, defended by Woman
(Antigone)
• 2) Anthropomorphic polytheism of Homer’s Iliad and
Odyssey
– Beauty of expression, psychological accuracy of the
anthropomorphic qualities of the gods
– Blocks further evolution of religious thought
– > Failure of Greek empire of Alexander
• 3) Philosophical monotheism: Think for yourself
– What do the gods themselves know?
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From Religion to Philosophy
• Socrates: Is something good because the gods
command it,
– E.g., is it wrong to kill innocent people only
because the gods say so?
• or do the gods command it because it is good
in itself? (Plato’s, Euthyphro)
– The gods say so because it really is wrong,
independently of what anyone says
– We too should think like the gods: as “lovers of
wisdom” or philosophers
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Socrates’ “crime”
• Socrates/Plato replace focus on religious
authority with philosophy: people can think
for themselves about what is good
– as the gods themselves must also do
• There is something higher than the gods:
– Truth, the Good, Beauty,
– and their unity: their Oneness
• Is this “impiety” to the gods? Atheism?
• Alleged crime of Socrates: “he denies the gods
and corrupts the youth”
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Turn to philosophy
• Philosophy: know (think for) yourself
• Reflects freedom of iron-age people
– Homer’s religion of anthropomorphic polytheism
reflects bronze age, aristocratic society
– Aristocrats rule peasants as gods rule humans
• In iron age this has to change
– Common people feel their own power
• With trade (reinforced by alphabet) thinking
must become independent and rational
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Reform, not replace old religion
• 1) Dominance of Homeric religion
• 2) Reinforced by poets
• 3) Reinforced by city-state patriotism
– Reject Athena = rejecting Athens
• 4) Socrates (Plato) puts old religion on new basis of
rational philosophy
– Criticizes the poets for their anthropomorphic view of the
gods
– Plato’s gods are higher spirits in touch with Truth,
Goodness, Beauty: we should imitate this
• 5) > Socrates is condemned to death
– Recall failure Akhenaton's reforms
– Greece, like Egypt, fails to become a world power
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