Why Athens is worth studying

excerpted from The City in History by Lewis Mumford
pp 165-168

[chapter 6 part 3 begins by describing Athens as a cramped, dirty, unsanitary, labyrinthine, and materially poor city]

This seems like a sorry picture for a great city, until we remember that we are dealing with a people unfettered by many other standard requirements of civilization, freed in an unusual degree from the busy routines of getting and spending: not given to guzzling and over-drinking, not making undue effort to secure comforts and luxuries, furnishings and upholstery: living and athletic, indeed abstemious life, conducting all their affairs under the open sky. Beauty was cheap and the best goods of this life, above all the city itself, were there for the asking.

For all the crudeness of the urban setting... the Greek citizen has mastered Emerson's great secret: Save on the low levels and spend on the high ones. ... The Greek citizen was poor in comforts and convenience; but he was rich in a wide variety of experiences, precisely because he had succeeded in by-passing so many of the life-defeating routines and materialistic compulsions of civilization. Partly he had done this by throwing a large share of physical burden slaves; but even more by cutting down on his own purely physical demands, and expanding the province of his own mind. If he did not see the dirt around him, it was because beauty held his eye and charmed his ear.

Not least of Athens' achievements was it's establishment of a golden mean between public and private parts of life, and with this came a large-scale transfer of authority from paid officers, in the service of the King or the Tyrant, to the shoulders of the common citizen, taking his turn in office. He not merely performed military service at call, contributing his own equipment, but he served in the assembly and the law courts, and if he did not become a contestant in one or another of the games, if he did not act in the theater of sing in the chorus, he would at least have a place, in his turn, in the great Panathenais procession. ... Work now done by executives, permanent secretaries, inspectors, and magistrates, was done by ordinary Athenians, rotating in sections of fifty.

Participation in the arts was as much a part of the citizen's activities as service on the council or in the law courts, with six thousand judges. Each spring festival brought a contest between tragic dramatists: this called for twelve new plays annually, with the participation of one hundred and eighty choral singers and dancers; while each contest in comedies demanded sixteen new plays yearly and a hundred and forty-four choral singers and dancers.... Every year something like two thousand Athenians, it has been estimated, had to memorize the words and practice the music and dance figures of a lyric or dramatic chorus. This was an intellectual discipline as well as an aesthetic experience of the highest order; and as an incidental result no small part of the audience consisted of ex-performers, expert judges and critics as well as enthralled spectators.

Thus the public life of the Athenian citizen demanded his constant attention and participation, and these activities, so far from confining him to an office or a limited quarter, took him from the temple to the council chambers, from the agora to the theater, from the gymnasium to the harbor. Not merely by cold reflection and contemplation, as the philosophers erroneously counselled, by action and participation, spurred by strong emotions, but by close observation and direct face-to-face intercourse, did these Athenians conduct their lives.

That open, perpetually varied and animated world produced a correspondingly unfettered mind. Both in the arts and in politics, Athens had largely overcome the original vices of the city: its one-man rule, its segregation of activities, its occupational narrowness, and worse, its bureaucratization- and they had done this for at least a generation without forfeiting skill or lowering the standard of excellence. For a while, city and citizens were one, and no part of life seemed to lie outside of their formative, self-molding activities. This education of the whole man... ha never been equaled in another community so large.

Between the forthright Solon, who cast off, a if it were a soiled garment, the political power he had gathered into his hands, and the devious Pericles, who used words woven out of the deeds of free men to conceal a policy of 'colonial' exploitation, enslavement, and merciless extermination- between these polar opposites there was less than the span of a century. But in that brief period Athens was as rich in citizens as no city had ever been rich before. When this period was over, buildings began to take the place of men.