Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to the Democracy Volunteers podcast. I'm your host, Joshua Paisley. It's fair to say today is a special episode. Instead of talking about a recent election, we are going back a little bit.
Speaker: When I say a little bit, I mean 2,500 years ago to 5th century BC Athens, widely acclaimed as the birthplace of democracy. In this episode, we will explore how true this statement is, as well as look in detail at the practicalities that sparked, helped maintain and ultimately collapsed Ophidian democracy.
Speaker: Helping me to answer these questions is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of political science and classics at Stanford University, Josiah Ober. How are you doing, Josiah?
Speaker: Very well. Thank you very much, Josh. Delighted to be here. I think it's worth us just getting straight into it. How true is this idea that Athens is the birthplace of democracy?
Speaker: Well, it depends on how we define that. yeah The idea that Athens was the first place where those who understood themselves as being, in a sense, citizens of a community aimed at some common purpose got together, deliberated, and then made a choice by something like a voting or consensus process. It's almost certain that Athens was not the first.
Speaker: We go back to early hunting-gathering societies. The evidence is that they're using something that we would recognize as democratic process. What Athens is, is the first well-documented case of a large scale that is well over face-to-face, tens of thousands of participants rather than dozens of participants.
Speaker: using formal institutional methods, formal rules that they themselves devised in order to make decisions on highly consequential matters, warranties, taxation, everything.
Speaker: using what was recognizably democratic methods, that is voting, lotteries, free speech, the whole process whereby a collectivity, a large collectivity, makes decisions for themselves rather than having decisions made for them by a ruler, a king, or some kind of an oligarchic gang.
Speaker: That's really interesting. we'll We'll get back to the institutions in just a second. But you talked to there about actually we need to define democracy first. And something which has come up in my research is actually really um interesting question is, can we even fully and understand what democracy meant to Athenians or even the word demos? I wonder if you can shed some light on our perceptions of Athenian democracy and whether actually that's grounded in truth.
Speaker: Right, so I define democracy, this is you what was often called an essentially contested term. So there are lots of different um definitions that are in use for democracy.
Speaker: I use it in a pretty basic sense. That is collective self-government by a self-defined body of citizens that is both large, that is well beyond face-to-face, and socially diverse, that is, not everybody is just the same. So that fits for Athens. What it doesn't include is a lot of the apparatus we now think is essential for democracy, for example, the a lot of the human rights that are associated with liberalism.
Speaker: And furthermore, lots of people in my definition of democracy may be excluded from citizenship that we would today think is is completely illegitimate to exclude. So a large socially diverse body of citizens might be all male as it was in Athens.
Speaker: And so I guess touching, as you said, that the voters were all male in Athenian democracy. Can you give us some practicalities of who was voting or those who were excluded?
Speaker: Right. So the citizen body, the Athenians called this the demos, standard Greek world word meaning pretty much the people or the citizenry.
Speaker: So the the demos was composed in Athens of all native adults who were male, and who were over age 18 and not otherwise excluded by, for example, having been ritually polluted. You kill somebody and you're not forgiven by their kin. You're ritually polluted and you're basically excluded from various things. and You can be excluded from citizenship by having proved to be a traitor or in various other ways so ah engaged in very serious forms of criminality. But the remarkable thing here is it It is all adult males over 18. There is no determination of citizenship by any kind of property or wealth qualification. Now, that doesn't happen in the modern Western world in large, complex political organizations until the 19th century.
Speaker: So that's really doing something that is quite unusual in human history. The Athenian democracy was not the only Greek democracy. We have lots of evidence for others, but it's by far the best documented.
Speaker: And it seems from that that Athenian democracy relies upon a member of each member of society to actually interact with their civic duties. Why were people so eager or encouraged in Athens to embrace democracy? And was that actually the case?
Speaker: I think it it was the case. I mean, clearly it's not the case that every single Athenian was motivated to participate actively as a citizen. We certainly know there are some who try to just stand outside of politics.
Speaker: But i think it was the norm that Athenians did this. um And in part, it's because the alternative was to be ruled by an oligarchy um or perhaps a tyrant. The Greeks imagined there really were only were three basic forms of government, that is, ruled by one individual, a king or a tyrant, rule by a relatively small group of individuals who might call themselves aristocrats, but the democrats would call them oligarchs, um or by a large and socially diverse body, that is a demos, and that is democracy. Of course, the word democracy is derived from the Greek word demokratia, demos and kratos, that is the power to rule.
Speaker: And so I guess we are an election podcast after all. It would be fantastic if you can kind of give us some insight into how the Deimos actually worked. How were people elected and but could anyone be elected out of this kind of group of adult male?
Speaker: Yeah. um So one of the things about being a citizen is that you have um the right, the permission of the whole of the citizenry to stand for any office.
Speaker: um And that might be through election. Indeed, the Athenians did elect a certain number of officials every year, and their elections were always ah year by year. For example, they elected 10 generals every year, the people who would be commanding their armies were chosen by the citizenry um in an open election.
Speaker: But most Athenian officials, most of the people who were responsible for important government operations, were chosen by lottery. So that is, any Athenian over age 18 who chooses to do this. In some cases, some of these positions require that you be over age 30. But any Athenian who was of the proper age and not otherwise excluded could put his name in um for lottery positions that included all kinds of ah various important official positions, including being a member of the Council of 500 Citizens annually chosen by lottery to set the agenda
Speaker: for the decision-making assembly of potentially any citizen who chooses to come to the assembly. So that's an extremely important decision. The Council of 500 is really the agenda setting and really the day-to-day government of the Athenian polis of the Athenian city-state.
Speaker: And that, once again, is just any citizen who chooses to put his name in the hat. We know that because of the rules about repetition of of office, there's probably at least a third, maybe more, of Athenians who got to age 30 would have spent a year as a member of this council with really very profound responsibilities for ah government. Even Athenians who probably didn't much love the idea of being participatory citizens. For example, we know that Socrates, who famously thought it was better to spend time working on his soul than it was doing politics, spent a year as a counselor in the latter part of the Peloponnesian War.
Speaker: That's so interesting that Athenian democracy had a kind of compulsory system. um I guess you see in Australia, but you don't see in the US or the UK. Kind of zooming in on the Council of 500, these people are elected by lottery, but how are the decisions actually made? Is it voting within this parliament or do they make speeches and there's a wider public that are voting on this like a referendum?
Speaker: Yeah, um the and within the council, um decisions are made first by deliberation. Speeches are given, considered, reconsidered, and then by an open vote among the 500 councillors.
Speaker: A lot of the day-to-day work is done by teams of 50 counselors. These teams were made up of Athenians from across Athens territory. So some Athenians, maybe a third or so of the Athenian population, lived in what we would think of the urban center, um the city of Athens or the immediate area around the city of Athens.
Speaker: But then the rest of Athenians lived across the countryside of Attica, the territory that was controlled by Athens, either in the agricultural center or along the coastal regions.
Speaker: And every one of these teams was, by design, chosen from Athenians who mixed yeah ah between Athenians who lived in the urban center, the kind the coastal areas, and the agricultural center. and And so these teams were made up of people who probably hadn't met each other before they were chosen to be a member of the council through an open lottery.
Speaker: But um they had to work together with people that they hadn't met, people who are, well, good heavens, Here I am, I'm a farmer. um I don't know anything about that kind of manufacturing stuff you people do in the city. Well, I'm a fisherman, you know, I'm on the coast. ah Farming is just sort of an odd thing that some of my cousins do who live inland. yeah And yet we have to all work together on basic public business. yeah And so... The Athenian system not only chose people, um ordinary citizens, by lottery to do important jobs, but it brought them together with other citizens and said, you know, work it out for yourselves. You've got to work this out as a team. And if you fail, a sense, our whole community fails. um There's a lot of weight on your shoulders.
Speaker: That's so interesting. So that there's such an emphasis on collaboration there. yeah I guess thinking about the the origins of Athenian democracy, why was this system even created in the first place?
Speaker: And so the origins of Athenian democracy go way back. We can go back to really the emergence of the city-state system, um ah which is, happens really as we begin to move out of the so-called dark ages, that that followed the collapse of the great Bronze Age civilization.
Speaker: ah ah So these early Greek city-states, back now in the 8th century BCE, were probably relatively more democratic um than most of the communities that we think about through the great civilizations of, say, Egypt or or Mesopotamia. But they were relatively small, they were probably dominated, um by people who had identified themselves or were accepted as aristocrats, the sort the leading people. So the rest of the adult men perhaps had some say, but the aristocrats are pretty much running things. yeah That's the way things tended to work in Greece for some time during what we sometimes call the archaic period of the 7th century into the 6th century.
Speaker: um But in some Greek city-states, especially some of the leading city-states, the aristocrats were in a sense pushed aside by one family um within, I given city-state. yeah And the leader of that family was then the tyrant. um He was the guy who was going to actually run things. um And sometimes these tyrannies lasted one generation, two generations, seldom into three generations. and But they tended to be relatively benevolent, um at least but insofar as the mass of ordinary people were concerned, but they could go bad.
Speaker: and And in the Athenian case, um a family of tyrants went bad um in the late 6th century. So, cut to the chase here. When they a tyrant went bad, yeah A number of the aristocratic families said, now, we've got to do something about this, and initially called in Sparta. Now, Sparta was a dominant city-state in the late 6th century. The Spartans came in, kicked out know of the tyrant. But ah the Spartans were not really capable of organizing things in their own interest. They didn't have the the spare of manpower to do that. And so they left things sort of chaotic in Athens after the expulsion of the tyrant. This led to the yeah basically a squabble, a fight between two leading aristocrats, One of them named Cleisthenes, who initially, not doing as well, he didn't have the support of the of the Spartans, um does this radical thing. um The historian Herodotus says um he brought the ordinary citizens who had previously been despised into his coalition.
Speaker: um And he did this by, apparently, say proposing some new constitutional forms of order, basically expanding what the rights of the citizens the ordinary citizens would be. And this led his opponent to panic, call back to Spartans. Spartans send a small army, and say, we've got to clean this thing up. you know We've got our supporters, this other guy. Kleisthenes, the guy who brought the people into his coalition, gets out of town. The Spartans are are are tough guys. They're going execute him if they if they catch him in Athens. So he he leaves, all of his major supporters leave. Spartans come Okay, now we're just going to reorganize this. We'll have a nice, tight oligarchy that will run things in Spartan interest. yeah
Speaker: But yeah at that point, Herodotus says, um the um the the the guy who came in, the Spartan leader who came in said, we're going to get rid of the council. now this this This council business is not doing well for us. You're just you're you're now dissolved. Go away, councilman.
Speaker: But says the Herodotus, the council refused. refused to be dissolved. And at that point, the rest of the Athenians, being of one mind about such things, rose up, besieged the Spartan army on the Acropolis. After three days, the Spartans surrendered. yeah They were allowed to leave. The Athenians called back Cleisones, you know, come on back. Remember those things, those constitutional reforms you said you were going to put in place? Do it. um And that's that was the origins of democracy. yeah It begins with a man who has a plan, but he's not the one who actually leads the insurrection, that gets rid of the Spartans.
Speaker: It's the Athenian people themselves who decide that we don't want to be run by their tyranny, we don't want to be run by an oligarchy, we want to be run in some other way that gives us the power. Okay, Cleisthenes, deliver on the plan. And that plan is the one that then establishes this new council of 500, expands the rights of the assembly to make its own decisions, and then basically gives us Athenian democracy.
Speaker: That's so fascinating. And so that refusal of the Spartans, something that I was going to speak about, speak about it now, about how democracies, they have to deal with what people term demagogues or two rival clans or troublemakers, was the way that the Council of 500 refused the Spartans. does that Is that how they deal with demagogues in the future over the the next century or so?
Speaker: Well, there's always the worry, right, that you'll get a clever speaker. I mean, a demagogue just means in Greek, leader of the people. the Demos, it's the same root, people leader. So a demagogue can be a good leader of the people. But it might be a bad one. um And in the case of the bad ones, the Athenians had various ways of dealing with it. yeah One was the famous system of ostracism.
Speaker: So once every year, the Athenian assembly, and now keep in mind, the assembly is as many Athenians who can crowd into the assembly space, at any case, at any given meeting. And they're doing this, at least by the time of Aristotle, they're doing this 40 times a year on very regular rotation. So it's usually 6,000 to 8,000 of them gather in a big area the size of, that it's basically organized like a Greek theater. It's a place called the Pnex, special purpose built for meetings of the assembly. Gather in the assembly once a year,
Speaker: by you know constitutional rule, they must decide, should we hold an ostracism this year? um And the if had like enough of them vote, you know, majority votes yes, we're going to have an ostracism. Then, at a certain period after that, all of the Athenians who choose, once again, all citizens who choose, come to the central Athenian square, the civic center, the agora, bringing a shirt of pottery in which they've inscribed the name of the individual that they think most deserves to be expelled for 10 years.
Speaker: Ostracism, if it is held, um is an unpopularity contest in which whoever gets the plurality of votes of whoever turns up at the city center with his shirt, his ostracon, that's why ostracism, whoever gets the plurality is then expelled from the city for 10 years.
Speaker: There's no formal trial. There's no charges. It's just whoever. it is least popular. You're out for 10 years. Now, your your relatives are not affected. Your property is not affected. And it's just a 10-year sentence of expulsion. And then you can come back and once again participate as a citizen.
Speaker: They only do this about... 15 times at the outside in the roughly 200 year history of Athenian democracy. right Every other time they decide in that preliminary meeting, no, we don't need to do it.
Speaker: So ostracism is always a threat, but it's relatively seldom actually carried out. And essentially what it is, is the Athenian people reminding their leaders, don't become so obstreperous that we need to kick one of you out. And you'll never know which one we're gonna kick out because you know that's gonna be our choice at the end of the day.
Speaker: I've got two follow-up questions on that, Josiah. mean, that sounds like an amazing system, but how did they, firstly, in the assembly, how do you make that decision? If you've got 6,000, 8,000 people, how do you say, look, haven't got anything against Clive's, but Clive, we're going have a vote about you. And secondly, how did they stumble across this idea that you need to enshrine this person's name onto a piece of pottery? It just seems, it just seems mad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's it's terrific. And once this is this is we are told by our sources, this is part of the original Kleissenes constitution, that they put this in the possibility of having an ostracism. So the assembly always works in the same way. um The council sets the agenda, um and some of the
Speaker: items on the agenda are mandatory for a given meeting of the council, right? You have to hold vote on auspices of once a year at a particularly designated meeting of the assembly.
Speaker: ah So there's ah there's a fit a fixed agenda. um And then on proposals of which there is, the council has a recommendation. So for for example, say the agenda is, well, war or peace with Sparta.
Speaker: um The council might say, we recommend that we go to war with Sparta, that we rally such and such a number of troops, and they muster at such and such a place, and so on. That proposal um is then put before the assemblyman And sometimes the proposal is just accepted without demure. Probably not war and peace with Sparta. There's going to be debate on that. But say it is, well, the yeah the pay for the war orphans has gotten really too low. We need to increase it.
Speaker: And is that done by a show of hands or pebbles or how... It is. ah Yeah, exactly. It's ah it's ah normally by show of hands. So sometimes, what at least what we're pretty sure is the procedure, is the council puts out the proposal. And if it's a non-controversial proposal, once again, maybe modestly raising the pay for the for the war orphans, um It's more or less the question is, does anyone oppose this?
Speaker: And if nobody raises their hand, then fine, that's just by consensus. And and there's probably a pretty strong norm that if this is a really obvious thing, we should do it. You don't be the jerk who holds up their hands saying, I demand a debate. yeah because you've got to get a lot of stuff done. And some things are just pretty obvious. And the council has come up with a good recommendation, and that's fine.
Speaker: But where there are controversial questions, war and peace, you know major changes to the tax code, whatever it may be, then um there will be debate. um And the individual chosen from among the counselors by lottery, once again, an internal lottery, to run the meeting that time. So you're president of the council and therefore president of the assembly for one day in your life. And then you ask through the herald, who guy with a big voice so everyone can hear, says, who of the Athenians has advice to give? And then the...
Speaker: People running the um the the meeting, the president and then some other a few others who were chosen to run the meeting, will have to decide who to recognize from among the 6,000 or so people at the assembly to come up to the speaker's platform and speak. right That individual will speak for exactly as long as the assembly is willing to listen to him.
Speaker: And as soon as the assembly is not willing to listen to them, remember, no microphones, no, so you know. ah So he's out there, quite big voice speaking, you know giving his advice, you know, yes, we should go to war, whatever it is. um As soon as the Athenians think, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about, they will en masse say, sit down.
Speaker: ah Get off the podium. You have 6,000 people yelling at you, get off the podium, you get off the podium. And then the next guy gets up and the same thing. yeah So there is free speech. Anyone who's recognized by the people running the meeting, once again chosen by lottery, gets to speak for as long as the rest of your so fellow citizens are willing to listen to you and not a moment longer.
Speaker: ah So you'd better know what you're you better know what you're talking about if you actually want to have a chance to get your your point out there.
Speaker: Sounds like an absolute baptism of fire for whoever steps up there. It is. It absolutely is. We know that it's really hard. yeah One of the greatest speakers of the period of Plato and Aristotle, Demosthenes, we know was a total failure in his first attempts to speak to the assembly. and He just crashes and burns, and gets hooted off right away. So it takes him a long time to really develop the skills, develop the... reputation before the Athenians are willing to listen to him for more than two minutes.
Speaker: I guess going back to, as we talked about earlier, the people who were in the demos are only adult males. This kind of begs the question, why why aren't women allowed in in the demos? What is the reason?
Speaker: Yeah, ah so I think ah here you have to look at background cultural assumptions. So the ah For women to be accepted as full citizens in a democratic system um does not happen in the Western world until the 19th and for the most part until the 20th century. and The background assumption that women are not citizens is sadly deeply built into their cultures that have sequentially the ones that yeah we think of as being the sort of most sophisticated, most democratic of Western society. So the Greeks were no exception. now It's true that um the Athenians considered or at least considered
Speaker: some Athenians considered the possibility that what if women were citizens? So we know that the comic poet Aristophanes wrote one of his ah comedies, which survives, is called The Assembly Women. um And it comes up with this comic vision of the women taking over the assembly. um ah Disguised as men, they outvote the men in the assembly and pass a measure that now women should should run everything. the The rest of the play goes on to consider what would happen in that case.
Speaker: The philosopher Plato writes in his famous dialogue, The Republic, that women should be full citizens, or at least members of the ruling class of the the sort of ideal state that he's imagining. So it's not impossible within Greek culture to conceive of the idea of women as citizens, but it was never possible.
Speaker: as far as we know, actually proposed. It was always a kind of either a comic fantasy or a philosophical speculation. So it really remains at that level. and It's in terms of practical politics until until modernity. Once again,
Speaker: This is a deeper question. Why is that the case? Why is a sort of patriarchal system so deeply standardized? um But it's not, you know, I think a peculiarity within Western culture of the Athenians to say men only. It's just a peculiarity from our point of view of most of Western history.
Speaker: it coming I guess coming towards the end of our podcast so today, looking at what lessons we can take from Athenian democracy and maybe modern views on Athenian democracy, could, for example, revising election by lottery lead to more effective democracies or do contemporary political office require such specialised knowledge that we need quote-unquote experts?
Speaker: There's been a lot of discussion, um in really though especially the last decade, on the question of whether using some Athenian style approaches to democracy might actually allow us to deal with some of the pathologies, as I think a lot of people, myself included, have thought of it, of of modern democracy, of the tendency of elites simply to dominate the system, the overemphasis on, well, the excessive power of the very wealthy to get their way, and so on. So, um lottery is at least one possibility. And the Athenians, interestingly, didn't think it was necessary for you to be an expert in order to take a role in governing. um That's an interesting question then to think about, is that is that is that plausible today? um It's not the case that the Athenians did without expertise. Those who addressed the assembly and presumably those who addressed the council, and the council could call in other people to address them. It's not only the sitting councillors. They could call in those that they wanted to hear from. So it's not that they don't have experts. They don't have people who are, it's not that they don't listen to people who are acknowledged as being particularly good at something, to know a great deal about something. In fact, Plato, who was actually quite hostile to a lot of aspects of denocracy, but does say in one of his dialogues that the Athenians only will listen in their assembly on technical matters to people who are technically expert or believed to be technically expert. And he uses the example of if you want to build new warships, you're only going to listen to people who know how to build warships. And if somebody gets up and says, well, I don't know anything about that, but I have opinions, they won't listen to him. They'll they'll shout him down, says Plato. And he thinks that that's actually what they should do, that they shouldn't be listening to people who are non-expert. Now, Plato thinks, well, but on really great, important things like...
Speaker: the truth and justice and so on, they'll listen to just anybody. So he's part of his criticism, but he says on technical matters, they listen to experts.
Speaker: So I think that's the that's the issue that we would have to think about. If you had, for example, lotteried officials dealing with important parts of a state business.
Speaker: How do you bring expertise um into the system? How do you decide what who is an expert, who can be trusted as an expert? But basically, we have the same problem today, right? um We elect people who aren't experts on whatever it might be, infectious diseases, nuclear power, um yeah a generation of energy. yeah now our elected ah Our elected officials don't know aren't expert in that, or they certainly aren't expert in that when they're ah when they're elected. Rather, they depend on listening to experts and making judgments based on the experts they listen to. So the question then one can ask is, would we do worse in choosing at least some of the decision makers, and some of the people running things, some of the people making decisions by lottery, um than we currently do by choosing them by election. Is election a way to choose people of great merit election?
Speaker: their capacity to listen to and make decisions based on expert testimony, or could ordinary citizens do as well or better, um once again, if we had mechanisms for bringing in experts and listening to expert testimony. It's worth thinking about.
Speaker: I mean, the Athenian system sounds, I mean, so experimental at that time as well. Looking, I guess, more broadly, there is a view of the story of history as a story of progress.
Speaker: And you seek towards democracy and as democracy will one day spread across the world. In the example of Athenian democracy, if this is such a great idea, why is Athenia the exception?
Speaker: And why did democracy not spread at that time? Yeah, I think the the the and in part it's fair to say that it did, um although it didn't spread across the entirety of the world. So in the we think of this sort of golden age of Greek democracy as being in the fifth century, yeah the time of Pericles, but then also in the fourth century, the time of Plato and and Aristotle.
Speaker: ah But in the two centuries that followed, the so-called Hellenistic period after the conquests of Alexander the Great, we now know that there were democracies in many Greek city-states and especially well-documented in the Greek city-states of what is now the western part of of Turkey, in western Anatolia. yeah There are many Greek city-states, some of them newly founded after the death of Alexander,
Speaker: which ah were run democratically. So the democratic experiment was actually quite widely spread across the Greek world. um But ah the problem is is that Greek democracy was always limited to um a city-state. and was always, in a sense, limited by the scale of the city-state. the Greeks didn't come up with a way to expand citizenship beyond the
Speaker: the city-states. There were experiments, and there were very interesting experiments with federated leagues in which you had sort of mixed citizenship within the league and within your city-state, but they never expanded out citizenship in an effective way that would allow them to deal with the really efficient forms of a social organization um that were manifest down by the expanding Roman Empire.
Speaker: So they hadn't figured out how to scale a up, um hadn't figured out how to get really big and stay democratic. And that's the great challenge of democracy. How can you get big enough to compete with efficient autocracies, which there have always been in human history, um and and yet remain fundamentally democratic? That really is our challenge today.
Speaker: And so going there, why did Athenian democracy not able, why was it not able to expand? Is there an element of practical elements just you can't have, you can't travel to Athens from miles and miles and miles away?
Speaker: Yeah, would say the core reason I think is because the Athenians really imagined that Democracy had to be done in a in in a world in which you really did have some reason to trust your fellow citizens. And you trusted your fellow citizens not because you knew all of them intimately, um but you knew all of them within you know a couple of ah degrees of separation. so no, i don't know that
Speaker: from the inland cause I'm on the coast, but, um, my uncle served, um, uh, uh, with his brother, um, uh, on the, on the, on the council. Um, so I have some reason to trust him. They, they, they didn't figure out a way to make citizenship work, um, at a, at a scale that would be beyond this kind of whatever it is, two or three, degrees of separation and the kind of trust that you can have, the kind of cultural cohesion, even in a socially diverse society, some rich, some poor, know, farmers and fishermen. So we have social diversity, but there is a kind of cultural sharedness that is possible within smaller societies, you know,
Speaker: tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, as opposed to tens or hundreds of millions. um That's very difficult to do to do at scale. I think this is one of the great challenges of contemporary democracy. How do we create a way in which we trust each other enough that we share enough sort of in terms of our political culture, if not in our religious beliefs and all other forms of culture, um that we can actually effectively act as a body of citizens when we're doing our citizens' work, um whether that's
Speaker: electing our representatives or going to demonstrations, protesting, petitioning, doing all of the work that one might suppose is actually part of the the the duty of ah of ah of a participating citizen.
Speaker: Thank you, Josiah. Just before we let you go, i do have to, as a classics professor, I have to ask your opinion on the recent Odyssey by Christopher Nolan. I actually very much enjoyed it. um i thought it was I thought it was really... Of course, every Odyssey... I mean, and there have been many, many adaptations of the Odyssey. yeah but Think about Joyce's Ulysses as one of the great, yeah most most famous adaptations.
Speaker: So, um you know, Nolan's Odyssey is not going to be exactly Homer's Odyssey. yeah And you don't expect that. yeah But I thought as an evocation um um of a world, a world that is you know understandably Homeric, um with values that are understandable to us, in a sense, and all of the discussion about the rule ought not to violate or be cruel to strangers. When a stranger comes to your house, you offer them food, you don't cut their throats.
Speaker: um So that's the law of Zeus. yeah that's That's understandable to us, I think. here We can grasp that, but it was very much, it was certainly and the Greek period, it was it was a very strong norm. um So I thought it played that well, but it also played the the foreignness of it all. Here is Odysseus. When he comes home, he's not just going to you know go to the local magistrates and say there's these guys, there's this home invasion and they have all these people who are know in my house and i want them I want them out and they're causing trouble for my wife. You're going to kill them all.
Speaker: I mean, I just assume that you're going to kill them all. And that's like, whoa It's kind of heavy. But know mean in the logic of the Homeric world, that is, yeah, it's an absolute assumption. Of course you're going to kill them all. now And you can kill them all because you're Odysseus, the great hero, and so on and so forth. So I thought that thought it both captured the things that we can identify fly with and yet gave us enough that sort of of the sort of really wild foreignness of this world to be a really engaging film. now I thought it was well acted. And there were some of the things that people have objected to about the casting that I thought was just fine. I didn't have any problem with it.
Speaker: Well, I think that's that's all we have time for, for the Democracy Volunteers podcast. A huge thank you to Professor Josiah Ober for taking us back to the very origins of democracy.
Speaker: I've been your host, Joshua Paisley, and thank you for listening. Thank
