Sphinx

Ancient Athens continues to be used as a big stick with which to beat modern Greece. “Once upon a time there was a model kingdom,” begins Roman Pletter’s article in Die Zeit this week (not yet on the website as far as I can see); yes, they had slaves, but they were democratic, the many has the power rather than the few, the people were equal before the law, appointments to public office were based on ability rather than patronage, and it could be taken for granted that everyone was free. “That sounds like a country that would fit very well in the European Union,” and of course it’s classical Athens. The punchline is signalled from miles away: “Of this model kingdom there isn’t much left.” Hey, Greeks, you invented the idea of strong social and political institutions as a means of ensuring the well-being of all the citizens, but you know what? These days you’re rubbish.

Most of Pletter’s article focused on the more recent past; the last two centuries of Greek history are presented as a uniform story of weak institutions, corruption, cronyism and inefficiency, with Athens popping up occasionally just to show that this isn’t a problem inherent to the region or to human nature, but a moral and cultural failing of these specific people. The last two paragraphs seem to be designed for the sole purpose of saying, hey, and your own people make the same point: it summarises an article by George Bitros and Anastassios Karayiannis on ‘Morality, institutions and the wealth of nations: some lessons from ancient Greece’ in The European Journal of Political Economy (26: 2010), which compares the fortunes and structures of Athens and Sparta in order to establish the importance of sound institutions as a basis for national well-being and economic performance. I can’t help feeling that there is some sleight of hand here: Bitros and Karayiannis don’t make any comments at all about modern Greece – their aim is to draw much more general conclusions from the ancient examples – but, while he doesn’t claim that they do, Pletter certainly gives that impression to the casual reader – it’s not just the “well-meaning” Germans being critical, it’s your own people, Greece…

The article by Bitros and Karayiannis is interesting in its own terms. Compared with some readings of ancient history by economists, the scholarship is often quite up to date (and they even cite Morley 2007…) – but it can also be rather eccentric. For example, they insist on the fundamental importance and absolute reliability of a 1964 work by Alfred French on The Growth of the Athenian Economy that I must admit to having only the dimmest recollection of skimming once – yes, maybe this is another mea maxima culpa, but I’d put money (or certainly a couple of pints) on French not being an absolutely central text in Athenian economic history for at least a couple of decades, but they’ve focused on it because it happens to suit their argument. More striking, however, is the fact that, although their whole argument is focused on the social and cultural frameworks that nurtured Athenian economic development, there is scarcely any engagement with scholarship on these themes, and certainly nothing to compare with their wide reading in Athenian economic history; rather, they build up their own picture of social institutions and cultural values on the basis of selective quotations from a variety of literary sources, treated as being equally straightforward and equally reliable – Pericles’ Funeral Oration plays a really big role in this, but so do philosophers and tragedians.

The results are…interesting, in the less good way. That is to say, I’m happy to go along with the general idea of the role of Athenian values and institutions in shaping economic behaviour (even if they stray at times a little close to the idea that this was the conscious intended purpose of those values and institutions), but some of the specifics… The thing is, it’s all stated with such confidence that I find myself nervously wondering whether it’s just that I know less about Greek history than I do about Roman. The agoge was basically a Spartan institution, wasn’t it? I’m sure that’s what I was taught… Here, it’s a general term for the education of the young; and, while the Spartan agoge focused on teaching children to steal and kill slaves (this is not the place to look for a sophisticated critique of the myths of Sparta), the Athenian agoge, in the hands of private tutors called pedagogues, was founded on the three pillars of general education, gymnastics and ethics, intended to turn every citizen into the sort of man described by Pericles. Every citizen had a private pedagogue? All education, even of the elite, was geared towards the service of the democracy? And this is before we get into the rise of extreme individualism at the end of the Peloponnesian War.

The basic problem of any interdisciplinary project tends to be the difficulty in staying up to date with what’s going on in the other discipline (it’s one reason why, in ancient economic history, New Institutional Economics is still the New Exciting Thing). It’s why interdisciplinary research really does need to be collaborative, rather than just involving one person reading around another area – even if that one person ends up writing something on his or her own, this needs to be based on lots of conversations with specialists in the other field, and a real immersion in it. What’s strange about this article, and why I feel torn between mockery and trying to defend it in general terms, is that it manages to develop some ideas that are well worth thinking about on the basis of a very shaky knowledge of key aspects of the subject; it seeks to bring the social and cultural side of Athenian life into discussions of its economy – but doesn’t see fit to engage with any of the scholarship on the social and cultural side. There is undoubtedly a basis for engagement between ancient historians and economists here, in theory, but it would need both sides to admit that the other might have something to offer; for the economists to accept that the historians’ “actually it’s a bit more complicated than that, and you can’t really take these sources at face value” might have some merit, and for the historians to recognise that their instinctive “we don’t do it like that” is not the universally devastating criticism they think it is, but applies to some parts of the article a lot more than others…