Ancient and Modern – 13 June 2003

Chancellor Brown has identified our national genius with ‘enterprise and inventiveness, our tolerance and belief in liberty, fairness and public service – and our internationalism’. This last, meaningless aspect of our ‘genius’ is tossed in to help him argue that we should adopt the ‘you-row’, as that Welsh newscaster puts it, and change Europe to our way of doing things. It is not a logic that would have appealed to Pericles.

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The Athenian historian Thucydides tells us that Pericles devoted his Funeral Speech of 430 bc (commemorating those fallen in battle that year) to identifying the unique qualities that made up the ‘national genius’ of Athens. First, Pericles emphasises the extent to which citizens past and present have been prepared to sacrifice themselves for the common good: ‘By their courage and virtues they have handed our state on to us, a free country …so that it is perfectly able to look after itself in peace and war.’ He stresses how different Athens is from its neighbours, especially from regimented Sparta. Athens is a democracy, where all policy decisions are taken together and everyone is equal before the law, ‘free and tolerant in our private lives but law-abiding in public’; Athens is ‘accessible to all, not needing to expel foreigners to preserve our secrets, and relying not on preparations and deceptions to protect ourselves but on the courageous readiness for action inherent in all’; Athens is a festival society, where people enjoy public as well as private relaxations and do not gripe about their neighbours’ habits. As a result, he argues, citizens can fulfil themselves through the leisurely and gracious lifestyle which Athens encourages.

For Pericles, Athens was a society whose citizens were willing to die for it not out of compulsion but because it strove to sustain an individual’s freedom and achievement.