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.