From the Beginning to Plato

THE POLIS AND ITS CULTURE 35
developed to run alongside the sacred calendar. 52 Cleisthenes’ aims in making
these changes may have been narrowly political—destroying existing power
bases in order to give himself more chance of lasting political influence—but the
effect was far from narrow: the citizen was effectively empowered as a rational
individual.
Athens’s cultural achievements were not, however, simply the product of
Cleisthenic social engineering; the success of Athenian democracy was also
dependent on social and economic factors, and prime among them, slavery. Just
as the precocious constitutional developments in Sparta are inseparable from her
exploitation of a subject population of helots who were responsible for all
agricultural production, so the democratic equality of citizens in Athens was
sustained only because it was possible to get ‘dirty jobs’, tasks which clearly
showed up the worker’s dependent status, performed by slaves. 53 Outstanding
among those jobs was the mining at Laurium of the silver; this silver enabled
Athens to build, in the first decades of the fifth century, the fleet by which the
Persian threat was repulsed, and that victory bolstered the self-confidence vital to
individual political participation, to a willingness to allow critical and
speculative thought, and to the maintenance of democracy itself.
The practice of democracy further stimulated critical thought. 54 One measure
of this is the way in which classical Greek political thought is dominated by
works critical of democracy. The process of turning issues over to a mass
meeting of some 6,000 or so people for debate and immediate decision raised
very sharply epistemological issues of the place of expertise and of how right
answers could be reached; it also raised more generally the question of natural
and acquired skills. The ways in which officials carried out their duties and the
reactions of the people to this raised questions about responsibility and the
relationship of individual and group interests. The importance of not simply
saying the right thing but saying it in the right way raised questions of rhetoric
and persuasion and the ethics of dressing up bad arguments well.
Critical reaction to, and exploitation of, the world in which they lived had been
characteristic of the Greeks of both archaic and classical periods. Both the natural
conditions of life in an area marginal for agriculture and the accident of contact
with sophisticated peoples in the eastern Mediterranean can be seen to stimulate
Greek cultural products from the eighth century onwards. Theological
speculation in Homer, Hesiod, and embodied in the sculptural presentation of
divinities, tries to make sense of the arbitrariness of human fortunes and the
nature of human experience in terms of the nature of the gods; ethical issues
concerning the place of the individual in the community and political issues
concerning the basis of and limits to authority in Iliad and Odyssey seem directly
related to cities’ concern with self-determination and constitutional
experimentation; those constitutional experiments themselves show a willingness
to tackle problems by emphasizing the question rather than the answer. It is in
this cultural milieu that western philosophy, that the conscious asking of ‘second
order questions’, is born and it is by the transformations of this milieu, as a result