The eyes of Myrtis

If war is a "violent instructor", as Thucydides claimed, then humanity has learned next to nothing over the centuries. Kant sounded more optimistic in assuming that unsocial man at some point gets fed up with the beastliness of the Hobbesian war of all against all and turns towards cooperative modes of existence. But this is a somewhat spurious optimism, for the consummation of the social enterprise in which the hard, physical ego accepts a bounded freedom within its communal destiny and violence on all levels is renounced, is put off until an ever receding terminus of our historical itinerary. Meanwhile we have to make do with the brutishness of empirical life and hope that legal violence in the hands of a constitutional government will mitigate the general unpleasantness. Trusting in violence from above to keep in check the violence from below is a very precarious balancing act, in which all sides can very easily go berserk and the whole thing can descend into the hell of a Corcyra-type στάσις.

Myrtis found out the hard way about how the schemes of well-meaning, and even great, individuals, such as Pericles for instance, can mutate into raging carnage in which the citizens and their families -who are after all the content and the purpose of the legal democratic regime- are expended on the altar of some grandiose ideal that transcends their humdrum littleness. For, after all, all the inspiring rhetoric of the Epitaphios cannot disguise the fact that the great leader is pronouncing his oratorical masterpiece before a pile of mute and dumb corpses, and that most of his audience who are supposed to be comforted by his lofty thoughts would soon enough join that heap of lifeless limbs. Nay, even he himself in the space of a few months would become part of it. Might that not amount to fair retribution, if viewed from some higher metaphysical standpoint? For there is no way getting around it: the supreme democratic leader of all times was in fact the chief advocate and driving force of the warlike conduct of his Polis. He knew fully well, and he expressed it ably, that the Ἀρχὴ is the higher, compelling necessity. It is the Empire that dictates the urgencies and tendencies of political planning. And, if the citizens of Athens want to lord it over the rest of the Hellenes, then they must commit themselves to military action. The Epitaphios can be read not so much as a hymn to democracy, as is the usual -and useful- interpretation, but as as a paean to war. For Pericles' point is that despite its promotion of culture and private freedom (the pursuit of happiness, maybe?), the greatest testimonial to democracy is its ability also to fight, as bravely and as tenaciously as any militarist autocracy. The democratic warrior is just as fearsome as any Spartan muscleman blindly plunging into battle.

In all this his assumption is that Empire is indeed naturally desired by all men -and all Athenians. Maybe most of his audience did indeed -foolishly- share his assumption. But certainly Myrtis, who may very well have been part of it, did not. The reason is not just that she was only ten years old. She was probably there to mourn her father or her brother, or a neighbor. So even if she had been an adult, how do you put aside as an adult the grief and the pain of a very personal loss in order to elevate yourself to the empyrean of world-historical reflection? This is what Pericles was exhorting them to do. Shed your tears by all means, he told them, but then again do not let private feeling erase from your mind the Idea of Athens, that stupendous experiment in the refashioning of the principles of human social life.

Well, yes and no. For when Athens, or any other state, extinguishes the real existence of tangible individuals for no other purpose than to exalt some notion of collective destiny however admirable, then if you find yourself at the receiving end of this deal it is well-nigh inhuman to justify this eradication of life by means of some abstraction. If your fields have been ravaged and your crops burned by Archidamos, you are asked to disregard a loss striking at the very fundaments of humanity, i.e. the duty to nourish life in fusion with (ὁμολογουμένως) the eternal rhythms of the earth. You are asked to betray your gods. What does the majestic shape of the Parthenon, gleaming in the sunshine and presiding as it were over these morbid proceedings, mean to you whose ontological significance is expunged in the midst of this pageant? Political authority trumps existential self-worth. The exigencies of raw power drain the world of its vital juices. The price you pay for being a citizen is the shedding of (part of) your human substance. This is an insoluble mystery. This was Antigone's dilemma, and we know how that situation turned out. It is much easier to be high-minded about Athens at a distance of two and a half millennia. We do, and ought to, admire it. But this admiration should not blunt a keen and sober historical understanding. When you look into the eyes of Myrtis it is a dark reality of struggle and agony, of highhandedness and deceit, of callous calculation and mercilessness, of naked jostling for material advantage that comes flooding back. And, mind you, Melos has not yet happened....Myrtis is Thucydides made real and present. Her eyes accuse the centuries.

But who is this Myrtis? Myrtis is the most moving and eloquent remnant of antiquity to have come down to us in recent memory.She is the ens realissimum of classical times, the reconstructed face of an eleven year old girl who died during the plague in Athens in the first year of the Peloponnesian war. The emotion laden flesh of a being senselessly cut down has come alive again. And through her faint smile we can again be reminded that the stuff of history is not marvelously chiseled prose deposited among the covers of books, but the woes and sufferings of forgotten creatures very like ourselves. Her bones were found mixed up with those of many others in a mass grave near Kerameikos as they were digging for the new subway in Athens. They took her skull, they studied it and through it they refashioned her young head, now staring at us again timid and somewhat startled, but still full with the latent vigor that was squashed before it could bloom into the works of love of a fully fledged life. That skull is the first item in the exhibition currently housed in the Archaeological Museum here, a noble and gentle thing in the depths of which which you can still intuit the stirrings of a tender spirit. I couldn't bring myself to photograph it: it would have been such a violation.

Myrtis is the witness. And her presence is a balm in the midst of the gloom and decay of our present time. She has lived on.

The oracles of Delphi

Greek education has been moribund for quite some time now -and everybody knows and acknowledges it. For the umpteenth time in the past generation the present government claims to be embarking on a "radical reform" of higher education in order to make it competitive on the international level. The project, if this is what it is, was announced during a rather pompous gathering in Delphi last weekend, in the presence of various foreign personalities that are to function as advisors for the intended overhaul. These are all distinguished individuals no doubt, and their hiring replicates a favorite tactic of the current ruling team especially with regard to the economy where a variety of experts has been engaged to contribute their lights about what is to be done -as if what needs to be done were not clearer than sunlight in the first place. At least they will not collect fees for their services.

I do not mean to doubt the good intentions of anyone, but I am afraid that the whole show is just another exercise in futility. The "radical" proposals aired in the Delphi meeting basically came down to a change in the structure of university administration, which is the least significant aspect of higher education malaise. If the government or anyone else were serious about introducing meaningful reforms, all they need to do is to peruse the organizational and educational policy handbook of any internationally recognized school of higher learning from anywhere in the civilized world. It would take them at most a couple of hours to note the basic guidelines and another day to draft a legislative decree for their application here. But this they are not going to do, for what passes for a university here is completely at odds with universally accepted principles and criteria of what learning means at this level.

Instead of going from the bottom up (as is the usual method in this totalitarian-minded society), they should have started at the bottom, namely with goes on -or rather with what does not go on- in the classrooms. They should have instituted the obligation of the students to be present in the classroom and follow the lectures, their obligation to pass a given course at the end of the semester or else repeat it or take another one in order to complete the credits required for a degree, their obligation to fulfill the evaluation requirements demanded by the teachers (i.e. research papers, midterm and final exams etc.) and finally their obligation to successfully complete a lower level course before proceeding to the higher level one. It is quite astonishing and indeed incomprehensible to any person (expert or not) coming from a genuine educational environment to realize that none of the above criteria and procedures are in place here. The students are not required to attend classes and in fact most of them do not, they never write a single paper in their four-year career, they appear only at the end of the semester in order to write an exam in which cheating is rampant and is in fact considered a student "right" (!), and they do not give a damn if they fail for they can go on taking this wretched "exam" again and again for ever until the teacher becomes tired and/or disgusted and gives them a passing grade just to rid himself of their presence. Failure successfully to complete a lower level course does not prevent them going on to take a higher level one, where the aforementioned conditions also apply. If one as much as mentions the mot maudit "requirements" s/he will immediately face the ridicule, hostility -and more- of the student "unions", whose most recent demand is that teachers should not assign research papers in their courses because this constitutes class discrimination against working students.

The said "unions" are the branches of the various political parties, those represented in parliament as well as those of the extremist left, all of them united under two basic demands, firstly that degrees should be given to all with practically no learning effort involved, and secondly that all those with such worthless degrees should upon graduation be given jobs by the state. Most recently in some schools and departments, as I hear and I find easy to believe, these "unions" have put forward the demand that they have a say in writing up the questions to be put in exams. As for cheating, as I have already mentioned, it is not only established and widespread practice, but also declared a "right" under the protection of these champions of the working class. In all universities the rectors are elected as a result of deals with these groupings, given the fact that students participate in the election of the administration under a formula of weighted votes according to which even if one student votes as opposed to hundreds of others this one vote still counts for 40 percent of the total. This is the local idea of democracy in education, the like of which one would have to go to the other side of the universe to discover. It is no wonder that the so-called universities are basically factories for the mass production of illiterates, who also believe that it is their inalienable right to be supported for life by the society at large without them contributing anything to it. Needless to say, these despicable practices and attitudes are presented under the guise of communism, socialism, anarchism and what have you. This is not to say that in the universities one does not find brilliant, conscientious and committed individuals, both teachers and students. But these do not in any way set the tone or determine the direction of these rotten structures. I could add other graphic details about the way worthless individuals climb to the top without any academic credentials or by means of political connections, outright plagiarism, blackmail etc. etc., details that would make anyone coming from a proper university abroad cringe. These things are even beginning to be written in the press as of late.

Hence, what is to be done if there is to be education at all in this place is quite plain. You don't need armies of well-meaning experts from abroad coming here to prescribe solutions. The solutions are obvious and simple, and they are never going to be implemented. For one thing the very same political men and women shedding tears nowadays about the state of our schools and promising to be their saviors are the very ones who brought them to this horrific state of decomposition -one just cannot forget that the present prime minister was himself a minister of education for a number of years. Besides, the young people that under the direction of this corrupt and ignorant political class grew to believe that the world owes them and that they owe nothing to the world are not going to allow even the slightest movement in the direction of true Paideia. They would be ready and willing to shut down and even burn down (it's happened many times before) their schools, rather than see any real change.

The oracles of Delphi have always been deceptive.