"I can't believe we are still talking about Greece after all this time", said Katty Kay, on a recent nightly newscast. A BBC America presenter, Kay did not mean "after all these 3400 years" but rather after a year and a half of the current Greek debt crisis. I winced. Now, mirroring the rage of Athenians, fires rage in the city. While Athenians may be furious with Germans and the EU and their own leaders, Athens remains the birthplace of democracy, the home of Homer, Sophocles, Plato, and Aristotle, Solon, Herodotus and Thucydides. I know this because my master's program would be nowhere with those Greeks. I can't believe even today's citizens of Athens read as much Greek history or as many Greek histories as I do. The reading list tells it all.
I am crazy about Herodotus and slightly confused by Aristotle's Physics. I count Solon as my friend because around 600 BC he is the man reputed to have done away with capital punishment, instituted people's courts and swept away Greek debt. There is a history of Greek debt. A long history. And, there was a solution in Solon's time -- so the histories say.
Solon lived in Athens when he wasn't in exile. Twenty-six centuries is a long time ago and records about his exact comings and goings are sketchy. There is a myth that says the goddess Athena gave Greeks the olive tree and so the city was named after her. But other tales, if one believes the stories, say that Solon led the Greeks to plant olive trees rather than to mine silver and got them all out of debt. A silver vein can run out but olive trees are forever. Not only do the trees bear fruit they also provide oil and wood and what else could grow on that rocky Greek soil? My daughter says that Solon is her hero. And Greece does need a hero for these times.
One of my required texts this last term was The Histories by Herodotus. Book Six of The Histories describes the 490 BC Battle of Marathon. The short form of that history-altering battle is that a small number of Greeks held off the invading Persian army. The subsequent 200-plus years were the Golden Age of Greece as we remember it in western history.
Of course, for some of us the only Greek hero that comes to mind is that fetching dance on the shore by Anthony Quinn in the movie Zorba the Greek. That movie opens in a café in Piraeus some 12 miles outside Athens. In Plato's Republic, Piraeus is also the direction Socrates was heading before he got into that extended dialogue that is now a classic study of justice and politics. Piraeus is the largest passenger port in Europe serving nearly 20 million passengers a year. Greece is a crossroads and now the crucible for debt, responsibility and the future of many peoples and nations.
The question a student at St. John's is always asked is: "What will you do with that degree?" meaning, "Who the heck wants to know about the Greeks?" The answer is, 'Right now, we all do.'