The New York Review of Books

When Bernard Knox was chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities to give the 1992 Jefferson Lecture, the head of the Endowment at the time, Lynne Cheney, interviewed Knox for the Endowment’s magazine. Expressing her amazement that Knox had a good word for the Sophists, Cheney argued: “Is it possible that that is a bit of sophistry? Are you making the worse the better cause when you write about the sophists?”¹ Knox pointed out that the Sophists brought skills to the democracy. Cheney: “But the worse is still the worse cause.” Knox said the Greek for “worse” need not mean more than “weaker.” Cheney: “So it’s complete relativism, then.” When Knox said the study of the humanities—Cheney’s field of expertise—came from the Sophists, she tried to derive humane studies from Plato: “The Sophists had one approach to the humanities and the Platonists another, an approach that emphasized the idea of truth, as opposed to the extreme relativistic stance of the Sophists.”

There you have, in capsule form, the difference between “classicism” and classical learning. If the study of the classics were what Cheney takes it to be, that would be reason enough for getting rid of it. For her, the classics are a fixed thing that supports one’s own prior certitudes, fending off any ambiguity as “extreme relativism.” Since she knows (at second or third hand) what the classics must mean, she could lecture one of the leading scholars of our time rather than interview him (or learn from him). Such use of the classics impedes thought instead of promoting it. Even when Cheney thought she was reading Plato, she was really reading Allan Bloom or Leo Strauss, not Plato.

If Cheney thought, during the interview, that the Endowment might have chosen the wrong lecturer for her purposes, Knox’s new book will confirm her worst fears. The Oldest Dead White European Males prints that Jefferson Lecture and two other talks, in one of which we read:

It is often said that the importance of Socrates in the history of Western thought is that he brought theory down from the skies, from cosmological speculation, to the human world, to the moral and political problems of mankind. But this was in fact the achievement of the Sophists, who created an education designed for the first great democracy…. It was Plato, of course, who made the word “Sophists” into a term of abuse and also, though this aspect of his work is seldom mentioned, tried to suppress the new humanities. (Emphasis added.)

The old schema “Plato moral, Sophists immoral” can be reversed in certain matters, where Plato now stands for values we cannot honor. As Knox points out, the Sophists were unique in their time for questioning the superiority of Greeks to barbarians, men to women, free-born to slaves. No doubt that was “relativistic” to many Athenians, as well as to Lynne Cheney.

Knox argues that the Greeks have been the useful troublers, not the soothers, of mankind—in their day and ever after. Modern “classicism” argues that Athens, the first democracy, was a light to all later ages, offering an ideal of freedom preserved in “the classical tradition.” In fact, however, Athens was considered such a disorderly and short-lived experiment in “extreme relativism” that it discredited democracy for over two millennia. Only in the last century did Athens become admired for its form of government. Up to that point, Roman control of classical memory had made Sparta the ideal Greek polis.²

When Athens did become a modern ideal, a great part of the Athenian reality was suppressed—the city’s slavery, domination of women, and acceptance of homosexuality. Benjamin Jowett and others turned Plato into an upstanding Victorian gentleman, doing much of Allan Bloom’s work for him. As Moses Finley points out, there is not a single entry for “slaves” in the exhaustive indices to Werner Jaeger’s three-volume Paideia, a favorite text of recent “classicism.”³ This cult of antiquity was called “mystical classicizing” by Arnaldo Momigliano.⁴ It still exists, and can crop up in the oddest places. We expect Lynne Cheney to idealize what is clearly a vague memory to her. But even a fine troubler of our own democracy, I.F. Stone, could chide Socrates for being insufficiently reverential toward a faultless liberal like Pericles. If it is asked how a modern “gadfly” like Stone can demand conformity of Socrates, Stone announces that Athens gave little or no reason to oppose the democracy:

Athens had no Alien and Sedition Laws. Athens had no little Iron Curtain like the McCarran-Walter immigration act to bar visitors with suspect ideas…. Athens never had an un-Athenian Activities Investigating Committee…. If ever a city deserved the full energy and devotion of its citizens, that city was Athens.⁵

How, then, could this model city condemn Socrates? That is the question that puzzled Stone. He concluded that Socrates tricked the city into killing him—just as he “trapp[ed] Meletus into calling him an atheist.”⁶ Socrates refused to say the words that would have acquitted him “because his victory would also have been a victory for the democratic principles he scorned.” Socrates wanted to use his martyrdom to hurt his city: “An acquittal would have vindicated Athens.”⁷ What were the magic words that would have acquitted? “Free speech.” On that everyone in Athens, excepting only Socrates and his followers, was agreed. That is why “all the leading citizens of the city were lined up against Socrates.”⁸ Only he and his followers were “out of step with their time.”⁹

One would never suspect from Stone’s book that not only most Greek authors, but most surviving Athenian authors, were opposed to the Periclean democracy. Stone treats Aristotle as the champion of that democracy; but Aristotle was harshly critical of Pericles—he preferred Theramenes, a member of “the Thirty Tyrants,” a figure associated with Socrates in antiquity.¹⁰ Stone refers often to Pericles’ funeral oration, without any sense of its ironies—revealed in the next speech Thucydides gave to Pericles, a defense of empire at all costs.

It is true that Thucydides, a critic of the empire, thought that leaders like Pericles were necessary if one did have an empire—but he says the same thing of Alcibiades, another figure associated with Socrates.¹¹ Implicit misgivings about Periclean empire are traceable in the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides—Knox himself famously emphasized the Periclean aspect of Sophocles’ tragic Oedipus.¹² Of the extant dramatists only Aeschylus (in what remains of him) seems to have been a consistent celebrator of the democracy. This should give pause to the critics of an “adversary culture” in America—who are usually “mystical classicizers” on the subject of Athens. Poor Stone really does not belong in their company; but he ended up there once he accepted the mythical claim of Athens as an ideal democracy.

The idealization of Athens has blinded people to the realities of Greek slavery and female repression. Camille Paglia, a believer in “the luminous element of ritualized Apollonianism in ancient Athenian culture,” thinks that women had a soft time of it in Athens: “The portrait of Greek women as jailed and oppressed fails to acknowledge the historical fact that male law and order also provided protection, security, and physical sustenance to women and children.” ¹³ Paglia, despite her eccentricity, has been welcomed by some conservatives as a harpy conveniently fouling the banquet table of feminists and anticanonists. For their purposes, she is a Lynne Cheney with fangs. But her treatment of classical women resembles the defense of Athenian slavery as different from other cultures’ oppression, not only because of the Athenians’ “having on the whole treated their slaves liberally,” but because the slaves incidentally contributed to the great spiritual achievements of Hellas.¹⁴ Yet Gregory Vlastos has shown how slavery, far from being an incidental cost of spiritual achievements, fundamentally shaped and perverted the spiritual ideals themselves.¹⁵ The restrictions placed on slaves in Plato’s Laws were not only harsher than any in Athens, but were “less liberal than any known slave legislation of classical antiquity,” for reasons grounded in Plato’s metaphysics.¹⁶

Knox’s Jefferson Lecture demonstrates the way classical learning can rescue us from the nonsense purveyed by “classicism.” He describes the current rescue effort in four areas—in the studies of anthropology, psychology, women, and slaves. Greek anthropologists studying practices like ancient sacrifice have to draw on parallels in other societies, ancient or undeveloped. In the collection to which Knox contributes an essay, New Perspectives in Early Greek Art, Walter Burkert shows how certain ritual scenes in Homer make no sense in themselves, though they reveal their point when we see how they imitate Near Eastern ritual. It turns out that the oldest dead white European males were not entirely European after all.

In the realm of psychology, Knox’s contribution to New Perspectives dismantles Bruno Snell’s influential argument that the Homeric period had no concept of the living human body as a whole, since it had no word for it (only for the dead body, soma). Knox shows that some terms were used for the whole living body—demas, eidos, phye. Their use was restricted by the artificial nature of epic language; but the concept is revealed through the use of names, or of the voices that address the body’s parts, or of the descriptions and epithets applied to whole persons. The Jefferson Lecture adds a further point: if Snell’s argument from silence is to be used, then we anglophones have no experience or recognition of Schadenfreude, since we have no single word for it. The range and wit of Knox’s references here are typical of his graceful scholarship. ¹⁷

On the subject of women, Knox shows how modern feminism has changed our understanding of Greek culture. It used to be argued that the Athenians really did have a high regard for women, despite the way wives were muted and immobilized in real life—a regard that shows up in heroines of Greek tragedy, in Antigone or Alcestis. But Froma Zeitlin shows that women represent the generally menacing “other” in Greek tragedy, setting tests for male heroism (as monsters and foes also do), without upsetting the paternalism of the society.¹⁸

Knox says less about the new treatment of Greek slavery, perhaps because Moses Finley has said so much, forcing hard truths on the mystical devotees of Athens:

Buckland noted that “There is scarcely a problem” in Roman law “the solution of which may not be affected by the fact that one of the parties to the transaction is a slave.” That is too narrow. I should say that there was no action or belief or institution in Graeco-Roman antiquity that was not one way or other affected by the possibility that some one individual might be a slave.¹⁹

Those who draw a romantic picture of poor Socrates living free of material encumbrance resolutely overlook the fact that a person who could afford to study with the Sophist Prodicus, who lived as an intellectual inquirer without the need to work, and who qualified as a property-holding hoplite free to train and campaign in the wars, obviously had an estate of some sort that involved slaves.²⁰ Part of the hoplite’s equipage was not only his expensive and heavy armor but the “batman” slave (hypæretæs) who maintained that armor and scouted up provisions. Socrates no doubt went to war (at least four times) attended by a personal body servant—how that information would have delighted I.F. Stone!