Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

312 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
There are other errors in the passage. The phrase “In this land
of ours” refers, of course, to modern Greece. But modern Greece
has been a nation-state only since 1833, and it is questionable,
to say the least, whether the principles of democracy “remained
unchanged throughout the centuries.” For most of their history, the
people whom we call Greeks have been denied democracy; that
is, through the period of the Macedonian Empire (150 years), the
Roman Empire (500 years), the Byzantine Empire (1,100 years),
the Ottoman Empire (400 years), the Greek monarchy (on and off
about 100 years), the fascist dictatorship of General Metaxas (1936
to 1941), and the rule of the Colonels (1967 to 1974).
For more than a thousand years, in fact, democracy completely
died out, not only in Greece but throughout the whole of Europe.
The roots of modern democratic systems have much more to do
with feudalism and the medieval republics that directly preceded
them than they do with fifth-century b.c.e. Athens.
Problems of historical fact have not, however, deterred serious
scholars from seeking to establish an unbroken democratic chain
from antiquity to the present. In 1993, numerous celebrations were
held in both the United States and Britain to mark the twentyfive-hundredth
anniversary of the so-called birth of democracy—
twenty-five hundred years, that is, since Kleisthenes carried out
his reforms. These celebrations begged another important question
besides that of continuity: whether the origins of a process as complex
as democracy can legitimately be pinned down to a single year
and to a single historical personage. Situating the birth of democracy
in 507 b.c.e. is ignoring the fact that a democratic tendency
had been present in Athenian society long before Kleisthenes came
to power.
OUR SO-CALLED CLASSICAL ROOTS: THE
CONTROVERSY OVER BLACK ATHENA
The study of classical antiquity is also in the forefront of our current
concerns about racism, cultural imperialism, and the like. In
1987, Martin Bernal, a professor of Chinese political history, wrote
a highly controversial book called Black Athena, which investigated
the origins of Greek culture. Bernal came to the conclusion that there
had been a willful conspiracy of silence on the part of eighteenthand
nineteenth-century ancient historians, who ignored—or, at
best, minimized—the decisive contribution made to Greek culture
by the Afroasiatic (notably Egyptian) and Semitic (notably Phoe-