Searching for Ancient Greece - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 176

cipate in public life. Women were mostly hidden away, presiding over house and children,
rarely seen in public. Athens was the largest of the Greek city-states, with an estimated
total population of 275,000. In that population were layers of social classes: aristocrats with
inherited land, merchants, bankers, artisans, and slaves. And neither citizen nor slave was
a large group of resident aliens, the metics, who worked the full range of Athenian occu-
pations (and as many scholars say, they were the engines of enterprise that made Athens
prosperous).
For the framers of the American Constitution, Athens was admired for inventing
democracy, but its democracy was a warning against permitting all power to rest in a
single assembly. The memory still burned of the assembled Athenians putting Socrates to
death for his unpopular and unsettling teachings. One consequence of that memory was to
help justify the American framers' insistence that political power be shared among three
branches of government.
Sparta, Athens' chief rival, is not much admired by democratic societies. It was a polit-
ical system with tight control over its citizens, a society organized to produce a disciplined
army. Like Athens, its economy rested on slavery. But unlike Athens, its women enjoyed
great freedom in their personal lives and played important roles in the polity's public life.
The rivalry between Athens and Sparta eventually flared into a disastrous conflict. The
Peloponnesian War (432-404 BCE) brought ruin to Athens and crippled Sparta's military
might. The war ushered unscrupulous leaders into Athenian politics. It shut down the cre-
ative energies of Greece's golden age and sent that age spinning to its end.
For at least a millennium, the West has pondered the meaning of the war. Did it fore-
shadow World War I and the disastrous consequence of its peace? Does it parallel the Cold
War? Was it the West against the Muslim world? If so, should the Peloponnesian War be
seen as a warning to the democracies of the West? As a grim fingerpost for the United
States?
HOW DO WE REMEMBER THE GREEKS?
We remember the Greeks by their contributions to our own lives. Like the character in
the play by Moliere who delights in discovering that he speaks prose [148] , we speak Greek
words all our lives. Much of our vocabulary of science, love, and literature is Greek or
Greek-derived. Cosmos is Greek for order; phobia is fear; telephone and telegraph are com-
bined from Greek words for distance, sound, and sign. “Ologies” of every sort (zoology,
sociology) come from the Greek word meaning a branch of learning or body of know-
ledge. Lyric comes from the Greek harp, the lyre; museum comes from the muses, the nine
goddesses, patrons of the arts. Nostalgia comes from two words, home and pain; economy
from household management. And theory—the very center of knowledge and understand-
ing—comes by way of theater, meaning to behold. Theory explains; it sets out the connec-